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Journeying Together | There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the Light…and John said “I am not the Christ. I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness — make straight the way of the Lord” — John 1:6–18.
John was contented with his role as the precursor, the forerunner of the messiah and he did so without regrets. This poem was inspired by the life of John the Baptist, the last Christian Prophet before Christ.
Johannes Mudi | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/journeying-together-92d73963a968 | ['Johannes Mudi'] | 2020-12-13 20:00:53.755000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Our Journey Together', 'Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Spiritual Secrets'] |
Philosophical approaches: purity of systems | Retrieved from https://cdn.thomasnet.com/insights-images/embedded-images/99f2f999-0133-4767-9694-9ce8a8af4147/c0322aaf-472e-4ebb-8773-a820008b95ae/FullHD/Spur,-helical,-and-bevel-gears.jpg
Purity comes when a system is not dependent or vulnerable to another one. Math is, for example, is a consistent and pure system in itself because its terminals works always the same on its own space and for every x, there is a y and this is always the same and true for math as far as I know (Cannot be too sure for each operation since I am no math expert). Since flows include external time sense according to my approaches(https://hakbas.medium.com/philosophical-approaches-verbs-and-nouns-in-human-mind-936512dbea56) and it depends on something which is not in the space of the human mind, they should not be considered as ‘pure concepts or contexts’ as they can be reduced into smaller pieces and they will not create a reliable and pure system on their own. Pure concepts, though, can create impure concepts by relating them to external terminals which can later be resolved into themselves.
Science can be done on the systems that is pure because ‘reliability’ can only be achieved if the system is not dependent on other variables unless it is wanted. | https://medium.com/@hakbas/philosophical-approaches-purity-of-systems-e27f6fdcaf0d | ['Hüseyin Akbaş'] | 2020-12-26 23:08:00.229000+00:00 | ['Purity', 'Math', 'System', 'Philopsophy', 'Science'] |
Selecting Data in Pandas | There are two main ways to locate data inside a dataframe.
By integer location — integers that starts with zero and increments by one. All rows and columns have an integer location. Rows are by default indexed by integer locations.
integers that starts with zero and increments by one. All rows and columns have an integer location. Rows are by default indexed by integer locations. By labels — typically strings that represent location of the data. Columns are by default indexed by labels.
Here’s an example dataframe:
By integer location
To select data by integer location, we will use the iloc method which, yep, literally translates to “integer location”.
df.iloc[ ]
.iloc accepts:
integer
list of integers
slice notation using integers as the start and stop values
Using .iloc with an integer will select a single row of data. Here we selected our first row using the integer location, 0.
Using .iloc with a list of integers will select multiple rows of data.
Using .iloc with a slice notation will also select multiple rows of data.
You can select columns using iloc too.
More examples of data selection using the .iloc method!
By label
Many people find it easier to locate data through labels rather than their integer location. To do so, they use the .loc method.
df.loc[ ]
The .loc method accepts:
strings
a list of strings
slice notation using strings as the start and stop values
Before calling on the loc method, we will have to choose a column that will serve as the index of the dataframe. The values in this column will be our row index. Remember, rows are indexed by integer locations by default.
I will use the values inside the “Food” column as the index using the set_index() function. It is important that we include the inplace argument and set it to True. This means that we are permanently replacing the dataframe with this version where Food is the index. If we do not do this, calling on the loc method will raise a Key Error because the Pandas would still use the integer location as the index of the Dataframe.
Using loc with a string to select a single row
Using loc with a list of strings to select multiple rows
Using loc with a data slice to select multiple rows
Selecting columns with labels is so much easier. We don’t even have to use .loc method! We can simply use this syntax:
df['label'] or df.label
For example:
fin | https://medium.com/swlh/selecting-data-in-pandas-ff9fe1370785 | ['Mars Escobin'] | 2020-07-18 17:27:01.598000+00:00 | ['Jupyter Notebook', 'Data', 'Pandas', 'Data Science'] |
T-Shirt Design | Code T-Shirt, © Pito Salas, 2012. Let me know if you want to order one! | https://medium.com/pito-s-blog/t-shirt-design-9ad3273f14eb | ['Pito Salas'] | 2017-06-08 19:24:27.132000+00:00 | ['Code', 'Tshirt'] |
I Can See Your Vote from Here! | If the urban/rural battleground no longer applies in Mississippi, what exactly drives their presidential politics? Instead of historically or sociologically, perhaps we can tease out an answer mathematically. The Pearson Correlation Coefficient can be used to calculate linear correlations between demographic, economic, and political variables. More specifically, a correlation analysis of demographic and economic factors of all the counties in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (plus Georgia, which is in the Black Belt but not near the Mississippi River) shows what actually drives populations to vote more Democratic (blue) or Republican (red).
A rule of thumb for interpreting the correlation coefficient is:
0.9 to 1.0 (−0.9 to −1.0) = Very high positive (negative) correlation
0.7 to 0.9 (−0.7 to −0.9) = High positive (negative) correlation
0.5 to 0.7 (−0.5 to −0.7) = Moderate positive (negative) correlation
0.0 to 0.5 (−0.3 to −0.5) = Low positive (negative) correlation
0.0 to 0.3 (0.0 to −0.3) = Negligible correlation
To be sure, there are caveats to this methodology. First, the analysis looks at each county as a variable, not each voter. Second, as every scientist ever will tell you, CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION. Having said that, the table below is pretty illuminating.
Each correlation coefficient (and its associated shade of blue or red) indicate the likelihood that the variable in the Y-axis relates to increased Democratic votes in the 2020 presidential election for that state. I tested four categories of variables:
Correlation coefficients related to Likelihood to Vote Democratic 2020
All states showed that a higher African American population correlated with more Democratic votes, and a higher White population with more Republican votes, particularly in highly segregated Louisiana and Mississippi. Hispanic/Latino populations had a low to moderate Democratic correlation in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois. Old folks and veterans typically skewed Republican.
Higher Bachelor’s degrees correlated with Democratic votes in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, and Illinois, but not in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Georgia. Higher poverty levels trended Democratic in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, but trended Republican in Missouri and Kentucky. And in nearly all the states, having more women-owned firms, minority-owned firms, and black-owned farms correlated with more Democratic votes.
But the wildest trend related to Mississippi geography. Increased farmland corresponded to more Democratic votes, but increased population density (urban centers) had no relation to Democratic votes. This was the exact opposite of the other states where high density urban centers skewed blue. As my son pointed out, in Mississippi, farmland goes blue not red.
This means that any future Democratic politician hoping to turn Mississippi into the next Georgia swing state will have to use a completely different playbook. Democratic politicians can’t speak to Mississippi Democrats like they are all from Atlanta. Strangely enough, they might have to speak to them like they are from the middle of Illinois. | https://medium.com/@zwinicur/i-can-see-your-vote-from-here-df497b4c584f | ['Zev Winicur'] | 2020-12-07 15:54:15.784000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'Politics', 'African American', 'Farming', 'Mississippi'] |
Which operating system should I choose for deployment? | Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, or Windows? This is the first thing you ask yourself when you contemplate the technology stack (operating system, web server, WSGI server, RDBMS) to use for Django.
Short version: Use Ubuntu LTS 64-bit.
Note: I use the term “GNU/Linux” below, which is a more precise term for the systems more often called “Linux”. Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS are all GNU/Linux systems.
Windows
Installing Django is way easier on GNU/Linux than on Windows. Even if you already know Windows and are clueless on GNU/Linux, learning GNU/Linux plus installing Django is probably going to be easier than installing Django on Windows. Even if it turns out to be harder, on the long term (and by “long” I mean one or two months) it’s going to be more economical in terms of manpower. Same in terms of hardware; very often Django apps can run perfectly on 512 MB of RAM. And there’s also licensing costs. I haven’t encountered any reason for running Django on Windows other than that there might be a Windows-only company policy or a similar requirement on a RFP of a public organization. Policies aren’t divine law, however, and it is often a good strategy to explain to the people involved that the policy is suboptimal.
If you are a Windows person and want to deploy Django on GNU/Linux, Chapter 1 of my free Django Deployment book takes you step by step.
CentOS
I used RedHat Linux back in 1998, but didn’t like it much and two years later I changed to Debian (CentOS is practically the same as RedHat). I have never used it again since. From what I read, it has fewer packages and more problems than Debian. However you might want to use it if you already know it.
Debian and Ubuntu
These two operating systems are practically the same system. I normally recommend Ubuntu, mostly because it’s more popular and therefore has better support by virtual server providers. Ubuntu’s Long Term Support versions also have five years of support instead of only three for Debian (though recently Debian has started to offer LTS support but it’s kind of unofficial). On the other hand I feel that Ubuntu sometimes rushes a bit too much to get the latest software versions in the operating system release, whereas Debian can be more stable; but this is just a feeling, I have no hard data. I also encounter some nuances in certain details in Ubuntu. I use Debian, but this is a personal preference because sometimes I’m too much of a perfectionist (with deadlines) and I want things my own way.
In Ubuntu’s version numbering, the first number is the year and the second is the month; so 20.04 was released in April 2020. The LTS versions are the ones released in April of even years, so the next LTS version will be 22.04. I don’t see why someone would use the 32-bit version, which can support only up to 4 GB of RAM, so choose the 64-bit version. Don’t choose a non-LTS version; support for these lasts less than a year, and it is too little.
Other systems
There are also the BSDs, and there are also the big commercial Unixes. You can perfectly deploy Django on these. If you intend to do so, I wonder why you are reading this post. | https://medium.com/django-deployment/which-operating-system-should-i-choose-for-deployment-dd253c62706d | ['Antonis Christofides'] | 2020-12-15 07:43:14.791000+00:00 | ['Windows', 'Ubuntu', 'Django', 'Debian', 'Centos'] |
Social media writers who support Warnock for U.S. Senate can join the Warnock campaign’s volunteer social media team. Fill out the form below. The U.S. Senate runoffs for Georgia are on January 5… | Social media writers who support Warnock for U.S. Senate can join the Warnock campaign’s volunteer social media team. Fill out the form below.
The U.S. Senate runoffs for Georgia are on January 5. The results will determine which political party controls the Senate, and correspondingly, President Biden’s mandate to pass bills and appoint judges. With the Supreme Court now 6–3 Republicans, it’s time to rebalance the country.
If you fill out the form below, you will get contacted by the Warnock campaign about what they want you to reshare. | https://medium.com/illumination/social-media-writers-who-support-warnock-read-this-1ef82a353c0f | ['Rebecca Sealfon'] | 2020-12-15 14:31:53.609000+00:00 | ['Democrats', 'Democratic Party', 'Senate', 'Election 2020', 'Georgia'] |
Moderate Weight Gain in Infants and Children | Symptoms and Causes | Moderate Weight Gain in Infants and Children | Symptoms and Causes
Perhaps the most clear side effects of moderate weight acquire is size: your youngster is a lot more modest than different kids their age. This may incorporate weight, tallness and size of their head.
On the off chance that your infant isn’t getting enough calories, you may see the accompanying manifestations:
lost interest in their general surroundings
outrageous tiredness
continuous crying and particularity
missed actual achievements: not turning over, sitting up or strolling simultaneously as different children their age
What causes moderate weight acquire?
A few potential components can cause moderate weight acquire, from an ailment to social or monetary difficulty. Anything that meddles with a kid’s admittance to food or capacity to process food can debilitate their development. Frequently it is brought about by a blend of components.
Clinical causes:
Untimely birth can make it difficult for your kid to take care of until the muscles they use to suck and swallow completely create.
Down condition can likewise meddle with a youngster’s capacity to suck and swallow.
Metabolic problems like hypoglycemia, galactosemia or phenylketonuria can meddle with the body’s capacity to change over food into energy.
Cystic fibrosis can keep a youngster from engrossing calories.
A food sensitivity or food bigotry may restrict what food sources your kid can eat without feeling sick.
Gastroesophageal reflux can make your kid upchuck often.
Anything that causes constant the runs can keep your kid from getting sufficient nourishment. | https://medium.com/@babycare8181/moderate-weight-gain-in-infants-and-children-symptoms-and-causes-603e932cc26 | [] | 2021-04-09 19:45:04.720000+00:00 | ['Baby Weight', 'Baby Boomers', 'Baby Care', 'Baby', 'Baby Weighing Scale'] |
Effect Size | Unstandardized Effect Size
Looking at the raw differences between means is one simple, quick method of assessing the effect size, but often requires some previous knowledge or sense of the data if it’s not an intuitive measure like height or weight. For example, with a population of male and female weights, perhaps men weigh 15 kg more than women on average. That is much more intuitive than (drawing from my previous research) a 2x increase in Investigations per Entry between control and experimental groups of Diamondback terrapins.
Overlap
Building on just raw values, you can also calculate an overlap threshold where the respective population distributions cross each other.
Image by Author
Using the AUC (Area Under the Curve), you can then calculate the amount of overlap in the distributions and count the observations who are on the “wrong side”. This measure is also called the Misclassification Rate.
Superiority
Another unstandardized measure is the probability of Superiority. Basically, taken random samples from each group, what is the probability that one is larger than the other. It’s an easy method to calculate, but as a random measure it won’t be as precise as other methods.
As unstandardized measures of effect size, both overlap and superiority have the benefits of being comparable between studies because they are raw probabilities and they provide raw values to get an intuitive sense of the differences between the groups. | https://towardsdatascience.com/effect-size-d132b0cc8669 | ['Aren Carpenter'] | 2020-12-29 16:37:10.722000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Experimental Design', 'Effect Size', 'Statistics', 'Stats'] |
The World Will Get Worse if Trump Loses… Here’s How | It is January 20th, 2021. Joe Biden is being sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. After being defeated in a modern-day landslide, Donald Trump packs up his belongings, family, and golden toilet. He leaves behind the White House as he heads for Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
Center and left-leaning Americans will celebrate in the streets. The orange buffoon will be finally be gone. We can return to some semblance of normalcy. Or so we think. Be careful what you wish for because this is what will happen next:
Donald Trump will launch the Trump News Network (TNN).
A new cable news source dedicated to far-right conservative reporting for his cult-like followers. TNN will continue to be used by the former President to brainwash and gaslight his millions of adoring fans directly. After all, they trust Donald Trump more than any other news source.
No more fact-checking. No more dealing with hard questions. And no more needing to pretend to condemn groups that Trump thinks deserve a seat at the table; like the Proud Boys, Qanon, and other far-right fringe organizations.
But why call it the ‘Trump News Network,’ you ask? Well, the Donald has a compulsion to put his name on everything. That is his brand. It is recognizable and valuable. It is on his buildings and was on his university (closed), his foundation (closed), his steaks (closed), and his casino (closed).
Plastering his name all over a network channel dedicated to right-wing news will likely be a great success and exactly what we expect from the king of Twitter.
All About Money
Donald Trump already has a built-in viewership, with more than 85 million followers across his social accounts. Advertisers do not care what political slant a channel has, as long as it means they can get their product, service, or message in front of millions of eyes. That equals billions in potential revenue for a network run by the Trump family.
Fox News, the current king of conservative news, has been rubbing Trump the wrong way lately. Any dissent felt by the President usually results in him lashing out at the network. Currently, FNC is the third most valuable news channel in the world, at an estimated $11 .4 billion.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that a Trump News Network could pull in more than $1 billion in revenue its first full year of operation and be north of $5 billion within five years.
The former President could create a top 10 network based on revenue and viewership within the decade. This would be an extremely enticing opportunity for Donald Trump, whom we recently found out is on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in personal debt.
Fox News launched in 1996, and it quickly became the most-watched news source in the United States. Leveraging his Oval Office experience and global name recognition, Donald Trump could very well see a similar rapid ascension and become a new age Rupert Murdock.
Licensing Over Launching
The most likely path to a Trump News Network would be Donald Trump doing what he always does, licensing out his name. The President rarely owns the things his name is attached to, usually opting for an easier route.
There is no need to carry cumbersome real estate assets, fork over loads of start-up capital, or deal with hundreds of contractors. Just find an attractive property with high-end clientele and slap that big beautiful ‘TRUMP’ name on it. This is the standard practice of Donald Trump.
Regarding Trump News Network, it is much more likely he partners with a newer network that is on the rise that he can control, like One America News Network. OAN has become a Presidential favorite over the last couple of years because of their clear, far-right lean, and favorable reporting. A start-up network like this one would be the perfect landing spot for a newly branded TNN.
With an existing lineup of conservative commentators and reporters, Donald Trump would have very little work to do to turn the operation into a full-fledged disinformation machine. A newer, smaller operation like OAN would also give Trump the authority to remake the network however he sees fit. Something he couldn’t pull off at a far more established Fox or Breitbart.
This would show an interesting evolution in the business mindset of Donald Trump and his family. Something I think he likely learned while running for and being elected President. Why sell the masses a thing, a product, when you can sell them a perspective?
This news network will expand his influence exponentially. Imagine a channel dedicated to 24/7 programming, approved and guided by Donald Trump. An entire world of disinformation, manipulated events, charismatic reporters, and flawed perspectives carefully crafted for maximum influence on his willing audience.
The President will make more money than he ever dreamed of with his own news networks, compared to the substantial losses of his hotels, golf courses, casinos, steaks, and university. And all it will cost the American people is our collective sanity. In the eyes of Donald Trump, that sounds like a fair trade. | https://medium.com/the-purple-giraffe/the-world-will-get-worse-if-donald-trump-loses-heres-how-3197e4a48d41 | ['Patrick Tompkins'] | 2020-10-22 13:11:34.668000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Leadership', 'Journalism', 'Elections', 'Politics'] |
Among Us 101 | *originally published 9/18/2020
There’s a Hot New Game circling around the interwebs, and if you’re not your team’s resident gamer, you’re probably confused why little rainbow egg people are running around on a spaceship calling emergency meetings.
Marketers, brand managers, and those of you trying to break into gaming: prepare to be informed.
THE GIST
The game is called Among Us. It’s a free app available on desktop and mobile, across Apple and Android OS. If anyone has ever played Mafia, Werewolf, or Secret Hitler the idea is relatively similar. Groups can play with everyone in the same room via local play, or can play online with people who are farther away, making it prime for social distancing.
GAMEPLAY
Basically, everyone is a very cute crew member on a spaceship. There are one or two Imposters, or traitors, and the goal is to figure out who the Imposter is and vote them off the ship or finish the crew’s tasks.
Every crew member, the non-Imposters, have lil tasks around the ship like clearing the oxygen filter or charting the navigation course. While crew members are going around checking off their to-do list, the Imposter is going around murdering the crew members. They leave their bodies to be discovered by another crew member.
me watching the person who killed me in among us say it wasn’t him pic.twitter.com/fWM6V0SHRk — aaron ⎷ (@freeaarxn) September 17, 2020
When a crew member reports a body, gameplay completely stops and debate begins. Crew members then discuss where they were, who was being suspicious, and why they may think a certain person is an Imposter. There’s a limited time for discussion, then the group votes (or skips voting, if they can’t make a decision) on who to vote off the ship. Whoever loses gets launched into space. If it’s not an imposter, gameplay resumes as more people get killed and/or voted off the ship.
The Imposter wins if he kills everyone (either individually or by sabotaging the ship by cutting the lights or the oxygen, etc) and the crew members win if they launch the Imposter off the ship or everyone completes their tasks.
WHY IT’S POPULAR
The game was originally released back in 2018, but snowballed recently with popular Twitch streamers and Youtubers discovering and streaming the game. Twitch streamer Sodapoppin, with 2.8 million followers, was the first major streamer to introduce the game, leading to its snowballing popularity. The game has had as many as 1.5 million simultaneous players.
For starters, the characters are very cute and look just like the characters in Fall Guys, the other Hot Game in the gaming community. It’s familiar, cute, and easy to pick up by gamers and non-gamers alike.
The game is also maximum quarantine-friendly. Most gamers are on Discord, which lends itself to gameplay — players aren’t allowed to talk until the discussion/voting portion, so going on and off mute is essential. The fact that you can argue, discuss, and debate long distance lends itself to these ~circumstances.~
There is also the “emergency meeting” aspect, which is a button your guy can press to hold an emergency vote, even if a body wasn’t discovered. It has since become a meme because every social media meeting feels like an emergency meeting these days.
The intensity of this image tells you everything you need to know.
COMING UP
So far, brands have not really hopped on the trend. Given it’s exponential rise to fame, we can expect to see some gamer-relevant brands getting in on their own Imposters and debate memes in the next few weeks. Brands should try to get involved by taking a self-aware and introspective look at imposters and debate related to the brand. Gamers are notorious for “silence, brand”-ing try-hard attempts to relate to fellow kids, so make sure there’s a clear reference and tie to both the brand and the game.
A sequel to the game was originally announced, but their astronomical rise to prominence in gaming has lead InnerSloth, the game’s creator, to focus on upgrading the original game that everyone has grown to know and love.
Highly recommend this game as a team-builder since it’s free, fun, and long-distance. Up to 10 people can play at a time (and there can be more than one Imposter) so get your team, friends, even family together for a little lying fun. | https://medium.com/@seschneebaum/among-us-101-9c487e922970 | ['Sarah Schneebaum'] | 2020-12-18 01:59:33.333000+00:00 | ['Mobile Apps', 'Among Us', 'Gaming'] |
Choiceless Awareness | We are the blissful Consciousness
Everyday brings us varied experiences, be it at our workplace, with family, relatives & friends, strangers, and with oneself too.
At times we have wonderful, blissful days and on many days we go through the trough, the bottom, the pits…
We see, hear, smell, taste, feel and react to these inputs we get from the World.
Sensory inputs are perceived by our Body. (Our Body is made up of only Matter, the molecules from the food we eat. So, eat healthy, and don’t get too attached to it).
These sensory inputs get interpreted by the different layers of our Mind. (Body influences the Mind, and vice versa).
The mind is a warehouse of desires, wants, emotions, feelings carried forward from our past — in this life, and, as some believe, from our past lives as well. (The food we eat influences both the Body and our Mind, and vice versa).
Mind initiates the Thought. (you are getting it….the food, body, mind and thoughts are all influencing each other).
Thoughts are a reflection of what’s in our mind. You would have noticed that different people get different thoughts while looking at the same object at the same time: a sport, a woman or man, a cow, natural scenery, airplane, etc… These thoughts depend on what’s in the mind (on it’s surface or deep within), at that point in time.
There’s another incredible entity that discriminates between the right and the wrong, whether the thought is right or wrong. Who decides this? It’s our Intellect.
But our mind can override this intellect if it wants. This shows the power of the Mind.
Thought initiates Action. (Yes. Now you have got it. Food, body, mind, thoughts and actions are all influencing each other).
It is this ‘Action’ that impacts our world, from a small to a huge degree.
There’s something that’s making us know all these, that we are alive and experiencing so many things. What’s that?
It’s that invisible entity called Awareness.
The fact that we are aware of ourselves and this world, is a COSMIC WONDER. Have our parents given this to us themselves? Have we fought to get this? Have we acquired this in our universities?
Think about this.
I exist. I am aware of this. Thank YOU. (Image courtesy Pexels)
If this awareness were not existing, there would be no experience of our body, mind, thoughts. There would be no identity. No life. No world.
What’s powering this awareness?
It’s a sublime entity called CONSCIOUSNESS, which has no identity.
This cannot be intellectually understood. It’s not to be rationally thought of, interpreted, discussed, argued. No amount of reading, talking, writing, etc… can make us comprehend it.
Logic and rationality stop at the intellect level.
Beyond this, its all about Faith. Devotion — the urge to know, understand and realize the unknown, the Force, the Energy, the Cosmic Creator, the Divinity.
Ask someone who has just experienced an electric shock. Words are useless to convey this experience. Only when one experiences this shock oneself, will one realize it’s truth.
Experiencing an electric shock
After this, any talk describing it is mere words, left to the imagination or interpretation of the listener. Better still. Don’t talk. Let the asker experience it herself or himself. Realizing life’s truth is exactly like this. One has to do this oneself. As they say, one has to walk every step of one’s life oneself. Others would guide, help, mentor, etc… surely.
Hey. Where’s this heading to? Read on …… Opening up something here.
Can we live our lives by limiting our thoughts? Controlling them? Annihilating them? Or are we at the mercy of our thoughts?
The cosmic power within each one of us, the CONSCIOUSNESS, can express itself fully if we let our mind get still or quiet.
This Consciousness is Existing in eternity and is ever Blissful.
Then the thoughts reduce. Then we can reach a state of mind living in this world expressing our full spirit and riding on its wave.
Life would be so much fun then. For ourselves and all others. We can achieve a lot. We will experience the process of losing one’s identity and yet live with identity. Many of our desires get fulfilled. And those that don’t are because we would have discarded them consciously during our journey, knowing they are not what we ‘truly desired’.
However, reaching this state only comes with experiencing happiness & sadness, success & failures, gains & losses, easy & tough situations, etc… That is what life is about. This World has not been created for us to build and experience bubbles of happiness around oneself.
It may take several training sessions to get the final certification, with each session we can call as a time period, year, decade, lifespan. We need to upgrade to the highest software version. Perhaps we get more opportunities in other lives. Just live this moment. In our journey to reach that state, we must continue to contribute to the society, community, World.
We have a right only to our actions and not to the fruits thereof.
We can all experience that ultimate, blissful state of mind: while living in CHOICELESS AWARENESS. | https://medium.com/@pawankhatte/choiceless-awareness-3f32a4406c27 | ['Pawan Kumar Khatte'] | 2020-12-18 14:46:43.434000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Successful Leaders', 'Consciousness', 'Awareness', 'Mindfulness'] |
Singaporean Digital Nomad’s Tips on How to Land a Job Abroad | Perseverance got this marketer the best job of her life
Nicole Tan is the embodiment of the modern workforce. She’s been working “on the road” for the last few years in 20+ countries. If anyone has good advice on how to find a job abroad and excel at working with different cultures, it is her.
Nikki at the Hive co-working space in Singapore. Photo credit: Hive Singapore.
“Go for it! Try!,” Nicole urges people who want to apply for jobs abroad. “If you don’t try, the answer is always no. If you try, there’s a chance it might be yes. I applied to at least 5–6 jobs on Jobbatical before I got this one. You have to keep trying. One day, something will happen. The universe will give you what you’re supposed to get.”
Nicole, or Nikki as everybody calls her, has great hacks for researching the country you might want to relocate to:
Use Google Maps to take a closer look at the city and neighborhood you’re moving to on the street view.
Talk to people who’ve travelled there or if you can afford it — take a holiday there. But when you’re on holiday, don’t just go to the touristy places; talk to locals and try to go to a bar or restaurant away from the city center to get a feel for locals’ everyday life.
Travel Light, Travel Smart
Nikki was already set on the digital nomad lifestyle — travelling and working in a few different places — when she applied for marketing jobs on Jobbatical. A couple of the jobs were in Estonia, a country she’d never visited. And it didn’t take long before the region’s most renowned tech conference, Latitude59, made her an offer to join their team as their Marketing Manager.
The process itself was fairly quick — it took three and a half months from the job interview to the time Nikki was packing her bags. Or rather, one big bag — because living on the road has taught Nikki to travel light and travel smart.
Nikki's travel essential — her Lush shampoo bar. Photo credit: Nicole Tan (NT).
“Jobbatical really helped me when I moved here, with my visa and all the paperwork. It was so easy, I barely had to lift a finger. I felt so spoiled,” Nikki says. She also has nothing but praise for the “Moving to Estonia” guide Jobbatical sends to all of the people hired through the platform. “It helped me a lot!”
January in Estonia is only for the strongest.
Nikki arrived in the capital of the Baltic country of Estonia at the end of January when temperatures can drop to -20°C (and they sure did, too!). No wonder she remembers her first month here as really cold. “It was freezing and snowy. There wasn’t a lot of daylight either, only around six hours per day, so adjusting to the darkness and the cold took a while. Other than that, it was hard to meet friends at first but I found my way around,” Nikki says.
She’d also heard before relocating to Estonia that the people are a bit introverted. “Especially in the winter,” I add.
After four and a half months with boots on the ground, Nikki has more insights about being a foreigner in Estonia: “Outside of the startup circle, people can admittedly seem a bit colder. Inside the circle, people know networking is key, maybe sometimes to the point where they force themselves to be more open. Whereas outside, they can be turned off already by the fact that I don’t speak any Estonian and they have to make an effort to speak English to me.”
Estonia has proportioned Nikki with opportunities to try her hand at DJ-ing. Photo credit: NT.
What also surprised big city girl Nikki was how few people live in Estonia — a country that is 65 times bigger than her native Singapore but has 5 million FEWER people (1.3 million vs. 6 million). “You go to some places and there is nobody there! Also, I don’t usually have to make a reservation to get a table at the hottest restaurants.”
Nikki is quite a chef and cooks whenever she has the time. Photo credit: NT.
She does, however, have a word or two to say about the Asian restaurants here. “They need to change a bit. You can’t serve two different types of Asian food from two different parts of Asia and be good at both; it doesn’t work like that.”
Nikki, being an amateur chef herself, doesn’t travel anywhere without her belacan chili sauce. “It’s a must-have when I’m living in a new place.”
The Best Job Of Her Life
Nikki’s working experience was sprinkled with the dust of cool due to the fact that Latitude59’s team works at Lift99, one of Tallinn’s most vibrant co-working spaces. The space is filled with multinational startup teams, expat one-man-shows, and tech meetups.
Nikki getting a lift at the Lift99 co-working space in Tallinn. Photo credit: NT.
Talking about work gets Nikki praising the work culture she encountered. “It was amazing to see so much trust in the employees and how everyone is given a chance to speak about their ideas. I had the freedom to come up with as many out-of-the-box ideas as I wanted and set my own goals. I was trusted to do my work without being micro-managed and the team was always open to discussions and ideas. It was really easy and amazing to work with them.”
In fact, Nikki goes as far as saying that working as a marketer for this Estonian tech conference has been the best job of her life. “Seriously, I’ve never ever enjoyed a job this much,” she admits.
Working in international teams teaches employees how people from different cultures work. “To me, nationality doesn’t entirely matter; it matters who you are as a person, and what your work and personal ethics are. This is more important than nationality, gender, sexual orientation, race or religion” says Nikki. “I value working in an open-minded team more than an international team — because you can be all international but if you’re all close-minded, then whole point is lost. An open-minded team is more important than anything else — you share things, you’re respectful to each other, you’re open to each other’s ideas, you help each other out and you work on a linear level without any hierarchy.”
Nikki at the Central Perk cafe — the iconic coffeeshop from the TV-show “Friends”. Photo credit: NT.
Nikki feels that her 4-month jobbatical gave her a lot. “I learned more about myself, about what I can do and what I could potentially gain… and also practical stuff about life like how to live alone and fix the little things that go wrong in the house — like my light bulb! Also, now that I’m familiar with the startup scene here, I just might be back. Or go on another jobbatical somewhere.” She is not ready to settle just yet. If she was, her email signature wouldn’t say “The Travelling Digital Marketer.” | https://medium.com/jobbatical-blog/singaporean-digital-nomads-tips-on-how-to-land-a-job-abroad-63dd4a5c5d35 | ['Dea Paraskevopoulos'] | 2018-07-30 09:09:07.815000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Work', 'Travel', 'Digital Nomads', 'Job Hunting'] |
Successful lifecycle marketing in sports betting | Successful lifecycle marketing in sports betting
Successful marketing in sports betting aims to win the right customers and keep them active on your platform for as long as possible — in short: to reach the highest possible level of engagement. Felix Weber Jun 17·5 min read
In order to achieve this, it is necessary to address the customers appropriately in the various phases of their activity and thereby pick them up at exactly the point where they are.
In a previous article , the customer lifetime value was already adressed and the context of the customer lifecycle was briefly discussed. The aim of this article is to take a closer look at the individual phases of the latter and illuminate them in more detail with regard to the optimal marketing measures.
What is “Lifecycle Marketing”?
Lifecycle Marketing is a marketing strategy that addresses the wishes, needs and requirements of a customer as they change over time (customer lifecycle).
This includes personalized communication, the choice of suitable channels, maximizing the points of contact and maintaining customer relationships.
Many betting providers use marketing strategies that treat every recipient the same, regardless of their relationship with the company or how great their commitment already is. However, it is neglected that not only does every customer have different needs, but also that these needs change over the course of the relationship with the company.
For successful marketing, it is therefore essential to develop clear strategies that are tailored to the wishes and needs of customers for each phase of the life cycle — and then to transfer these to your marketing campaigns.
The goals of such a lifecycle marketing strategy are the following 3 aspects:
Win new customers and convert them Retain existing customers (maximize engagement) Win back lost customers
Depending on the phases of the customer life cycle, various communication approaches can be derived from this, which are to be described in more detail below.
Acquisition phase / registration phase
The first phase serves to gain reach and awareness as a betting provider. During this phase, a customer comes into contact with the company for the first time. For betting providers, ongoing campaigns, such as a registration bonus or a free bet for new customers, are particularly suitable at this point. Advertising campaigns associated with marketing partners (co-branding initiatives, affiliates, etc.) or special events (e.g. flyers with a promo code distributed in a stadium) are also suitable for this phase.
Ongoing campaigns represent a strategic approach that must be carefully researched, worked out and carried out. Continuous performance evaluation is recommended in order to optimize the offer and to improve the way in which that offer is communciated.
Communication approaches in this phase:
TV & print media (options depending on the target market)
Google & social media ads (options depending on the target market)
SEO & Content marketing
Affiliate-marketing
Arland’s iGaming platform Bookmaker NEXT offers comprehensive CRM and affiliate management tools for the easy handling of campaigns and marketing partners. Using the comprehensive reports, it is possible to keep a close eye on the individual performance of your campaigns and affiliates.
Socialization phase / welcome phase
During the socialization phase, the customer acquires the company’s first product / service (e.g. first deposit & placing the first bet with real money). Communication should specifically support them in this decision by strengthening the customer’s awareness of the quality and the offerings of your platform and moving them to a faster decision.
Communication approaches in this phase:
Landing page
Plattform (widgets & banners)
Remarketing
Personalized messaging
Growth phase
Nothing predicts organic growth like customer loyalty. Aggressive advertising campaigns and reward programs may lure customers to the platform — but they are not enough to create long-term loyalty based on an emotional connection with the brand. This connection can only be established through targeted and personal customer communication.
Communication approaches in this phase:
Personalization
Loyalty programs
Remarketing
The main challenge in lifecycle marketing is that new prospects and existing customers have to be addressed at the same time, which makes personalizing the customer experience more complex. In addition, different customer groups have different preferences and expectations. In order to be able to handle this complexity optimally, there is no getting around good customer segmentation.
With the help of customer segments, individual marketing measures can be tailored to the respective customer groups. The creation of these segments should definitely be data-driven in order to identify subgroups of customers who show similar trends in terms of consumption and loyalty. In this way, customers can be addressed in a personalized manner in every phase of their life cycle, which significantly reduces waste coverage, which may hurt the ROI.
In Bookmaker NEXT, customer segments can be defined in great detail using a large number of filters and parameters. Marketing campaigns are simply linked to a customer segment in order to determine which customer group should be specifically addressed. Dynamic segmentation also has the great advantage that customer segments, as soon as they have been defined and created, grow continuously and automatically with the customer base.
Read also on this topic: Sports betting business intelligence: How well do you know your customers?
Customer loyalty and reactivation
Sustainable customer loyalty, as well as preventing customers from migrating to competitors, is essential for betting providers. This is where many companies use most of their marketing resources by offering high-value customers their own promotions and special customer service. In addition to free bets and bonuses, marketing activities, which emphasize the quality and offer of your own platform and thus maintain loyalty, are particularly important here.
The promotions should always be context-related and relevant, and not repeated too often, as this could lead to falling engagement rates for the campaigns.
Communication approaches in this phase:
Personalized promotions
Loyalty programs
Promo-codes
Customer service
The best way to extend a customer’s lifespan is by the use of effective CRM software. Bookmaker NEXT offers a fully integrated CRM system for this, which optimally covers the requirements of the sports betting industry. Read more here: How to set your marketing campaigns up for success
Conclusion
For sports betting providers, aligning their marketing campaigns with the different phases of the customer lifecycle is essential if their business is to be successful. With a high-performance CRM system, it is possible to implement the individual strategy efficiently and in a targeted manner and thus to achieve success more quickly.
If you would like to find out more about how the Bookmaker NEXT CRM can support your marketing campaigns, just write to us at [email protected]! | https://medium.com/@thisisfelixweber/successful-lifecycle-marketing-in-sports-betting-5b404aef6eed | ['Felix Weber'] | 2021-06-21 09:01:46.334000+00:00 | ['Gambling', 'Sports Betting', 'Esports', 'Marketing', 'Business'] |
India’s COVID-19 Crisis | Written by Alda Nasywa, Edited by Taruni Manam, Neve Walker, & Parker McElroy, Layout by Vrinda Gandhi, Art by Thejo Tattala, Blogged by Sahithi Lingampalli
The number of cases in India continues to grow. The second wave of Covid-19 caused main cities in India to have very high losses. The subcontinent located in South Asia is included in the top 5 of the list of countries with the highest increase in Covid-19 death cases. India has had a spike in recent days, with more than 250,000 deaths. On the subject of Statistik Data, some analysis specialists are nonetheless debating the original number of Covid-19 infections. Some of them feel that the virus must have reached the interior of a country that has difficulty accessing virus testing and trancing tools. They worry that because it is very difficult to trace the scale of the pandemic in far-off areas of the country, it could be that the true number of deaths and infections is five to 10 times greater.
Because of the many gliding cases of COVID-19 infection, hospitals in India have a deficit of beds, medical oxygen and medicines. Additionally, there’s less than one doctor for every 1,000 people, and that figure is decreasing even more in rural areas and less populated states.
Seeing the increasing number of cases, more than 40 countries are dedicated to helping India in overcoming the outbreak. If the case goes uphill, a national crisis with global impacts will be created. This potential outcome will endanger the development of other countries to overcome this pandemic.
In dealing with this case, the Government of India has rejected calls for a National Lockdown. In addition, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government allowed religious festivals and election rallies across the country at the start of the year. The Indian Prime Minister left most of the responsibility for fighting the outbreak to the state government, which, of course, has drawn a lot of criticism.
The Indian government says there is an adequate supply of oxygen, but the dissemination is hindered by transportation problems. United Arab Emirates, Germany, Singapore, France and multinational companies such as Amazon and Google are taking part in the distribution of this sufficiency.
In terms of vaccinations, at the start of the pandemic, India was the largest vaccine producer in the World. They continue to produce more than 80 million doses a month.
Even then, India was a major player in COVAX. In the past, India was obligated to supply 200 million doses of COVAX which were distributed to 92 poor countries.
Seeing the current situation, India switched it and made the country a top priority for getting the COVAX dose. Because in reality, a country that is experiencing this critical state is not balanced with an adequate number of vaccines. So far, nearly 10 percent of those in India have received the first vaccine but only about 1.5 percent have received both doses as needed.
The Indian government has prepared an application for vaccination. So, Indian citizens who are over the age of 18, can register through the application. However, the app crashes due to overuse, and this, of course, is flooding Social Media.
Seeing that the Government has not commissioned vaccines in time, Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute, stated that India’s harsh shortages will carry on for months.
It can be concluded that getting out of the pandemic soon is beyond India’s reach.
References
Choudhury, S. R. (2021, May 7). India reports over 400,000 daily cases for the third time in a week as a second wave hammers country. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/india-covid-crisis-daily-cases-rise-above-400000-again.html.
Images), (I. A. M. G., Images), (I. G., & PA), (I. (2021, April 29). India Covid crisis: Cases surge as nation faces hospital bed and oxygen shortage. Manchester Evening News. https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/world-news/what-happening-india-covid-cases-20486827.
Safi, M. (2021, April 26). Mutations, politics, vaccines: the factors behind India’s Covid crisis. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/mutations-politics-vaccines-the-factors-behind-indias-covid-crisis.
Sangal, A. (2021, April 30). Analysis: India’s Covid-19 crisis is a problem for the world. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/29/india/india-covid-crisis-world-problem/index.html.References | https://medium.com/the-affair-magazine/indias-covid-19-crisis-984596080273 | ['The Affair Magazine'] | 2021-06-24 04:29:17.423000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Covid 19 Crisis', 'India', 'Covid 19'] |
Don’t believe everything they tell you | What were you told on the news today? From what you watched, what did you accept as the truth? Why do you believe it is true? How do you know it’s the truth?
One thing I find extremely frustrating about our society is that we don’t tend to question things. People who question things are branded mad-men, delusional, paranoid, sinners? We can’t question information presented to us about science breakthroughs, propaganda, the government, secret societies, research, people in power, religion, because it’s simply not done. Our society is content with being told what is the truth, what to do, and how to act. Essentially we are expected to be blind followers.
How can you blindly believe? Blind faith in anything seems illogical, I’m talking anything. Why? Because you’re refining your mind to one way of thinking. I’m not referring to religions or anything specific here, I’m talking about anything, reality as we know it.
Here’s an example, lets say you believe that there is only one way to cure a disease with a specific medication, because some information you read in a published article (peer reviewed, and verified) told you that you must take this medication? So you take that information as fact and you toss a holistic approach. What if the medication doesn’t work? What if everyone else doesn’t have ALL the answers? Why are we content on relying on what ‘modern medicine’ suggests.
To be content with information you are given is naive. Breakthroughs are made when concepts are questioned, down to their core. I don’t just mean, ‘how reliable is this research?’, I’m saying why do we believe everything we are told without question? What if alot of what we learn and are told, is just a selected, tailored fragment of the entire story? Or even completely fabricated? Perhaps it’s a means to control us.
We can entertain certain consipracy theories with nothing to support them, however some concepts out there do infact have evidentiary support, yet we are so brainwashed as a society we will still choose to ignore this! Still don’t buy what I’m saying? Wake up.
For example when it comes to the concept of capitalism, our economical society is being controlled by private companies, now we do not know the intentions of these companies or any ulterior motives. So why do we choose to dismiss the idea that our society is being controlled in a way to favour certain people in power or societies in power in ways we do not even know. Maybe even beyond a purely economical perspective, even if they also benefit financially. | https://medium.com/@som_thoughts/dont-believe-everything-they-tell-you-13f46845d119 | [] | 2020-03-19 11:33:54.105000+00:00 | ['Illuminati', 'Conspiracy Theories', 'Capitalism', 'Propaganda', 'Pandemic'] |
Paper Books V’s Kindle in Research | Paper Books V’s Kindle in Research
Since partially retiring, is there any AT who really retires !, I seem to be reading a lot, I mean a lot, like three to four hours of my day is taken up with reading, some of it is the news feeds I take, some articles in Medium and other tech sites, and a mall but significant portion on my Audio account, but a lot is via my Kindle, and it’s here as I have spoken before, in other feeds and on my Linkedin account.
I make a lot of notes, with the highlight tool and a small personal note added, mostly to follow up, which can be viewed as a list just by tapping on the three dots in any book your reading and select notes from the list, together with all notes made by other readers. You can send the notes as a collection, to your email address, this has been so useful in my research on Climate and other areas of interest,
But recently I started to view my Kindle account on my MacBook Pro and the kindle app has a function to view my notes live, and best of all I can use this to further the note, ie do a search for the point in question and add further notes. This is a major advancement in researching areas of interest, I can add points, add URL links, No longer do I make notes in my small Moleskin, ok I do, but they go straight to the Kindle app editing sidebar, see the photo. There seems to be very limited text editing, the URL has no link function, but it’s easy to work around this with copy and paste, and no making bold of text to make a point, it’s basic, but I see no reason why this can not improve if Amazon sees it being used, and they get feedback.
However, if you export the notebook, from the App on the Macbook, then you’re given an HTML file to view all your notes, As a backup, this is good, I can add this file to my research folder, and search easily, the URL does not link here either, but again there is no reason why not, it’s just a matter of exporting correctly. It depends on the Auther, but there is often a limit of about 10% that can be exported, but no limit on the amount of text I can highlight. Moving your notes into your research is now a simple copy and paste, but the actual portion of the book highlighted remains, so the HTML export is still the way to go.
So it does not matter which way I want to work, just within the app, it exports all of my notes as an HTML file, probably both if I am within the 10%, as I like to followup in the Kindle, and when I am done, export to HTML and load to the right folder.
Much the same functions exist on the Chromebook App, it’s slow and a little harder to use, but it’s all there, the ability to edit my notes for the highlighted portions of text,. But the Mac version is so much slicker and functional, There is a cloud reader, that allows you to read your kindle books online, and there is a method of seeing your notes but again it’s not that good I think I will stick with the Mac, for now, well at least until the Chromebook app gets updated and brought into line with the Mac app. | https://medium.com/@steve-scaysbrook/paper-books-vs-kindle-in-research-e9b17249a054 | ['Stephen Scaysbrook'] | 2020-12-04 10:07:03.024000+00:00 | ['Kindle Book', 'Paperless', 'Mac', 'Notes', 'Research'] |
Best of the Best: Poems, Short Stories, and Personal Essays | My Top Ten on Medium (so far)
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
These are the ten best poems, short stories, and personal essays I’ve written and published on Medium and elsewhere (so far). Eleven are from 2020 and the rest are old favorites. Enjoy.
Poems
Short Stories
Personal Essays
Steve Howard currently teaches English in Japan and is a semi-professional stand up comedian. Subscribe to his blog and find his books here. | https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/best-of-the-best-poems-short-stories-and-personal-essays-df31058c4a7 | ['Steve B Howard'] | 2020-12-10 22:45:34.881000+00:00 | ['Personal Essay', 'Poetry', 'Short Story', 'The Partnered Pen', 'Best Of'] |
Why your next truck is a bike | On Sept 19, 2019, Amazon stunned the automotive world when it announced an order of 100,000 electric delivery vans from the startup Rivian, the largest EVs order in history. In fact, it may have been the largest automotive fleet order of all time.
For many, it marked the tipping point in the electrification of the medium-duty van, the workhorse of last-mile delivery responsible for ensuring that parcels, food, furniture and almost anything else gets delivered to homes and businesses in our cities. Many of these vans run on diesel, with diesel exhaust linked to any number of adverse health effects, including asthma and lung cancer. So it was no surprise that many celebrated Amazon throwing down the gauntlet to take tailpipe emissions out of their last-mile delivery vans.
But even with the electrification of vans in our cities, the battle for sustainable delivery may be just beginning. In New York City, for example, the average number of daily deliveries to households tripled from 2009 to 2017, resulting in worsening congestion. E-commerce is still only 10% of all retail sales, so we’ve only just starting to see the impacts that our shopping habits are having on congestion.
Enter the e-cargo bike. Just as the lowly bicycle is poised to take make share away from passenger cars in cities, the e-cargo bike is poised to displace zero-emissions vans in urban cores.
A tentative taxonomy of e-cargo bikes
First and foremost, startups in North America and Europe are leading a wave of innovation, taking the traditional cargo bicycle and adding the benefits of electrification. Urb-E, for example, takes the innovation further by creating a foldable e-cargo bike and trailer, allowing for significant economies in dense urban areas where overnight vehicle storage comes at a premium.
Pilots undertaken by UPS and Urb-E demonstrate the potential increase in driver deliveries per hour, especially when serving traffic-choked neighborhoods where a van might get caught in costly delays. Parcel delivery behemoths like FedEx and DHL may soon create a new type of hub-and-spoke model where mini-depots, scattered throughout a city, serve as hubs for teams of delivery drivers riding e-cargo bikes.
So how are we actually going to get to a more sustainable urban goods delivery model, with a hub and spoke system powered by e-cargo bikes?
First, cities will need to invest in micro-mobility lanes for traffic. For years, cyclists have advocated for more and better bike lanes. Then came the e-scooter explosion of 2018, raising a host of questions about who got to ride where. Ultimately, cities will recognize the need to de-emphasize the role of traditional cars and trucks in urban areas, or ban them completely. Instead, cities must promote active mobility and protected lanes for those using lightweight, low-speed transit means such as bikes, e-scooters, and e-cargo bikes. Without such protections, most delivery operators will be too concerned about driver safety to make the switch to e-cargo bikes.
Second, cities will need to begin pricing the curb. For much of the last century, parking in cities has been free or massively subsidized. No surprise, then, that parcel delivery operators choose vans weighing about five tons, capable of carrying a full day’s worth of deliveries. But all that bulk traveling in our dense urban core comes at a real cost, especially when parked for delivery, taking up valuable curb space that could be used to park multiple bikes. To capture the true cost of the curb, cities need to start charging every vehicle and mode its fair share for use of curb space. Once that happens, delivery operators will be incentivized towards more efficient e-cargo bikes instead of the oversized van.
Third, cities need to start linking e-cargo bikes into their overall strategies for urban mobility, rather than keeping people and goods movement so divided. For example, many cities are beginning to experiment with mobility hubs to improve first and last-mile connection to public transit. As long as they are installing infrastructure for shared bikes and e-scooters, it makes sense to think about creating similar opportunities for local businesses to rent e-cargo bikes.
Not all the heavy lifting has to come from cities, however. This new hub-and-spoke model will require a significant rethinking of where and how to locate these mini-depots serving as hubs. Some startups are experimenting with permanent mini-depots, for example, taking abandoned retail spaces and turning them into mini-warehouses to support last-mile delivery. Others propose an asset-light approach, attempting to work with cities to create designated street space for temporary staging centers. Still others are crafting a middle ground of moveable hubs created from materials such as re-purposed shipping containers, capable of moving from one parking lot to another overnight.
Our cities were designed for an era where parcel delivery was the exception, not the norm. We’re only just beginning to feel the effects of what happens when e-commerce becomes the default for entire categories of retail goods. We’re not going to get over our love of e-commerce, so our best bet is to start ensuring that goods flow to our homes and offices in the most sustainable way. For that, your next delivery truck may very well be an e-cargo bike. | https://medium.com/@alexmitchell_30057/why-your-next-truck-is-a-bike-4f9713155623 | ['Alex Mitchell'] | 2020-01-14 23:11:20.728000+00:00 | ['Delivery', 'Electric Car', 'Bikes', 'Transportation', 'Mobility'] |
Automating Tasks with Shell Scripts | I’ve been using a Unix based computer for about 7 months now, but I only got to know about this possibility recently. The aim of this post is to share how you can automate your recurring CLI operations in your projects using shell scripts.
In this post, I’ll be writing a script that would push a project folder to a remote repository. This script would initialize a git repository, add a Readme.md file, commit all changes and push to a remote repository, all in a single CLI operation.
Let’s get right to it, shall we?
Step 1
Open a new folder and create a Shell script file. I’ll name mine gitinit.sh
Step 2
Add the CLI set of commands
Basically, I did a lazy copy of the lines from new repositories on GitHub
A few things to note
The #!/bin/bash line is called a shebang. A shebang basically is a line that tells the parent shell which interpreter to use in interpreting the script. You could also use the #!/bin/sh shebang, but to the best of my understanding #!/bin/bash is the standard.
Meanwhile, you may have noticed the $1 and $2 variables, you may also have an idea of what they represent. They are identifiers for the arguments that would be added when the script is called.
Let’s Execute the Script
The first thing we need to do is to make the script executable. This can be achieved by simply typing into your terminal the following command:
chmod +x gitinit.sh
Remember gitinit.sh is the name of my script. chmod basically changes the file mode of any given file, +x simply means execution privilege should be added to the file’s permission.
To run the script, enter:
./gitinit.sh commit-message remote-repo-url
Make sure you’re inside the same directory where the script file was created.
Here is my output
Terminal output after executing the script
The next question is, does that mean I can only run this script inside its own directory?
Short answer, yes.
If you’re creating a script for automating tasks, you probably want it to be available globally such that it can be called from any directory on your computer.
The only way I know to do that is by adding the file to the $PATH environment. To view the files in your shell path, simply type echo $PATH into your terminal. This would show the available directories on the PATH.
Here’s mine
An executable script in any of these directories will be available globally.
Let’s go Global
A thought that would come to mind is simply copying and pasting the script into the directory. That would most likely work too, but I prefer using a SYMLINK. A SYMLINK is simply a shortcut to another file or folder. Basically, the file is accessible in the directory, but it isn’t really in the directory.
Doing this, I’ll be able to make changes to the script from the directory it was created without having to enter into the root directory. Pretty neat.
We go about this by typing:
ln -s path/to/folder/gitinit.sh /usr/local/bin/gitinit.sh
This is interpreted as, “create a shortcut for gitinit.sh at /usr/local/bin , where the original file is at path/to/folder/gitinit.sh" .
N.B: You can get the current directory path using pwd|pbcopy . This automatically copies into your clipboard.
Then we add the execution privilege chmod +x gitinit.sh and call the script with its arguments.
For me, it looks like this:
Now we can access the script globally without having to enter the directory in which it was created.
Removing the script from Global
Alright, it was all fun while it lasted, but it’s time to say goodbye.
To remove the script, simply navigate to the root directory it was added to. Remember, we used a SymLink, so I’ll just unlink the file in order to preserve the original file for future use. This is done, by:
cd /usr/local/bin
unlink gitinit.sh
Voila, the script is no longer global. You might want to confirm by calling gitinit.sh .
Conclusion
I hope you’ve been able to understand how to use shell scripts in automating CLI tasks. I’m also relatively new to the topic, but if you have any questions or hitches along the way, feel free to drop a comment. Let’s learn together.
Further reading
Learn Shell
Shell Scripts
Shell scripting tutorials by Guru99
Removing Symlink | https://medium.com/swlh/automating-tasks-with-shell-scripts-543422a12cd5 | ['Damilare A. Adedoyin'] | 2020-04-26 22:40:04.477000+00:00 | ['Shell', 'Unix', 'Developer', 'Shell Script', 'Shellscripting'] |
Really, Hunter Biden Again? | Terry H. Schwadron
Dec. 11, 2020
Hunter Biden is back again as a target?
The headline was that the U.S. Attorney’s office is investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes, says Hunter Biden, who said he was notified by prosecutors. What did not need to be highlighted is the timing of the notification — days before President-elect Joe Biden, aka Hunter’s dad, is to be inaugurated.
Regardless of the outcome of the investigation — which seems to have been under way in one form or another since 2018 — the timing of the case by a Republican administration is assured to undermine public support for a new Democratic president.
Or do I sound too cynical here?
When last we left the Hunter soap opera, the presidential son was being described as the corrupt center of conspiracy to take advantage of his father’s name for personal gain — apparently unlike the male and female heirs to the Donald Trump financial empire. People like Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, appear obsessed with finding public, legal wrongdoing in Hunter using his Biden name to draw attention and a no-show job as a director for a Ukrainian energy company and access for a fizzled investor group entree to Chinese officials — dealings that apparently drew more eyes after a laptop of Hunter’s was retrieved from a repair shop.
It got left there because there was no apparent public wrong for Hunter, just unthinking stupidity, and no evidence that father Biden had influenced or profited from his son’s wayward business dealings.
So, news that federal prosecutors are now looking at Biden’s taxes seems rather more expected than surprising.
The bigger issue here is why — other than obvious partisan politics — should we care?
It’s Foggy
Like the Ukrainian stories, finding the obvious legal issue putting Hunter Biden at risk is a little foggy. None of the principals was talking.
Here’s how The New York Times laid out what is known since the FBI apparently started to look into possible money laundering in 2018, according to unnamed sources. Exactly what prompted the inquiry is not clear but any suggestion of money laundering disappeared while the IRS continued to look at Hunter Biden, who immediately went public on Wednesday with the federal notification to his own lawyer.
It seems that Hunter and his estranged first wife, Kathleen, owed $314,000 in taxes with other financial problems detailed in their divorce filings. There was an IRS lien against unpaid taxes from 2015, which was then paid off. And there were city taxes in Washington totaling $454,000 for 2017 and 2018, also paid off, according to tax records.
It sounds like Hunter didn’t pay taxes on time, then did when the IRS took action.
So, we’re missing any obvious criminal plot here, aren’t we?
What we do know is that despite attempts by officials in the United States, the Ukraine and news reporters to look into how Hunter Biden came to be named to a $50,000-a-month job that he didn’t need to do much for on behalf of Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2015, there has never been a legal case arising. Nevertheless, Hunter continues to be a driver for political attacks — as if there were a legal problem. As The Times notes, Hunter “has long been an intense target of Trump and his allies over the range of business ventures he pursued around the world during his father’s time as vice president and beyond.”
The Timing
For sure, the timing stinks for Joe Biden at the start of his presidency. Clearly, Biden Senior cannot be involved in any potential prosecution against his son, not in any move that might be perceived as dropping it.
But even in the natural course of these tedious events, it is inevitable that Biden will be tagged with influencing the outcome.
Meanwhile, Senator Johnson popped off that had his inquiries into Hunter drawn yet more attention, Trump would have succeeded at the polls against Biden. This is a leap of logic that skips over so many gaps as to take one’s breath away. And right on cue, here was Sen. Tom Cotton, R-AR, who is eyeing on a potential White House run in 2024, saying that a special counsel should be appointed to investigate Hunter for allegations of securities fraud, money laundering and “a crooked hospital deal with Jim Biden, Joe Biden’s brother” in Western Pennsylvania.
Who needs facts? And why is Hunter a suitable substitute for the president-elect anyway?
I sure hope that federal prosecutors have more than late tax payments to pursue here if we’re in the besmirching-of-Hunter business. Otherwise, we have a host of questions about a whole lot of other people who have not paid their taxes on time — including the person currently sitting in the White House and family.
More broadly, one wonders why this is a criminal investigation at all, what the punishment is that fits this set of information and why the rest of us need to be involved.
It’s almost as if there was an investigation looking to be launched just to undercut a new administration. Hmm.
##
www.terryschwadron.wordpress.com | https://medium.com/@terryschwadron/really-hunter-biden-again-605f92b0ad2c | ['Terry Schwadron'] | 2020-12-11 11:51:59.144000+00:00 | ['Joe Biden', 'Ukraine', 'Taxes', 'Republicans', 'Donald Trump'] |
Merry Christmas | Hello everyone, greeting from BioPassport Team.
There’s no greater gift than spending time with you! ^^
Wish everyone Merry Christmas!
Thank you!
#BioPassport #Blockchain #BIOT #Biotechnology #health #healthylifestyle #BIO #merrychristmas #christmas
#바이오패스포트 #건강관리 #개인건강관리 #블록체인 #의료건강 #개인건강 #코로나 #코로나19 #바이러스진단키트 #메리크리스마스 | https://medium.com/@biopassportofficial/merry-christmas-1b38b1d587c0 | ['Bio Passport'] | 2020-12-23 02:48:02.003000+00:00 | ['Biotechnology', 'Christmas', 'Biot', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Biopassport'] |
It’s Time to Stop Making Excuses for Rapists | What is worse than fathers making excuses for their sons, schools making excuses for their star athletes, judges defending men they don’t even know brought before them in court? Women make excuses for the men who rape them.
All the time.
We talk ourselves down from self-righteous worthiness. We convince ourselves that what is happening to us isn’t that bad or that lots of people have experienced worse. We bury our real, very valid feelings under a pile of things we “should have” done to prevent someone else’s abhorrent behavior.
And why wouldn’t we? When every day, there is a new story about a rapist being let go with a lenient sentence or no sentence at all? We are constantly reminded by news stories and Facebook posts that the world we live in values men’s lives and reputations over our physical and mental well-being. So of course we make excuses.
Because the alternative is nearly unfathomable.
The alternative is that as women, we walk in a world where the monster under the bed isn’t imaginary after all, it’s your date, your boyfriend, your father, your pastor, your brother, your friend.
The alternative is that we have been conditioned to believe that we owe any man a reason why we don’t want to have sex with them. That we as women bear the responsibility for making sure that someone doesn’t accidentally ruin their entire life by raping us.
It is hard to explain the emotional labor of judging every man you meet and trying to decide how likely he is to be the one who will rape you. It happens every moment, every day. This is not hyperbole. This is just…. reality.
Jack was like a red flag factory, but he wanted me, you know? -Plum
We ignore our instincts, gut feelings cast aside by hundreds of years of programming telling us that we are meant to be grateful to be the object of a man’s desire. If you are fat, you can add the extra pressure of years of being told no one will ever want you, that the idea of someone desiring you at all is a joke.
How is it possible that we can simultaneously be so used to something that it doesn’t surprise us, yet unwilling to share what happened because speaking it aloud shrouds us in a shame so heavy it might suffocate us?
Let’s follow the example of the appellate court’s ruling from last week. Sexual assault shouldn’t be something we expect. It shouldn’t be something written off as boys will be boys, it shouldn’t be something we are resigned to.
We have been trained to put our own well being behind that of our male counterparts, and society continues to push this idea on us. It’s time to stop making excuses, and hold people accountable for their behavior. If you make the choice to assault someone, you get to face the consequences, full stop.
You might also enjoy… | https://medium.com/rachael-writes/its-time-to-stop-making-excuses-for-rapists-eba93efcdb07 | ['Rachael Hope'] | 2019-07-09 21:16:45.928000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Justice', 'Rape', 'Feminism', 'Culture'] |
What He Means | I was just telling a friend that although my relationships might not have been ideal, I did learn something from them. Particularly, how to spot red flags. All the things men say, sometimes right off the bat, that we ignore and try to deal with, but later realize are much worse than we’d initially thought. And this goes for guys in their 20s or older, who should’ve interacted with women by now.
— Disclaimer, yes obviously I’m not perfect. AND these obviously don’t apply to all men (hopefully). These are just from my personal experiences as someone who has many male friends and has experienced these first hand —
Anywhoo, let’s get on with the list:
What He Says vs What He Means:
“I’m a bad texter “— I take 2–3 business days to respond
“I’m bad at time management” — I can only do 1 thing at a time. Any more and I will ignore you for a week
“I can kinda cook!” — yeah no I can’t cook for shit. I will make you ramen once and talk about it for a year
“I think I’m close to my family?” — my mom babies me
“Flirting isn’t really my thing” — yeah I’m boring af and you’ll feel unwanted
“I’m not super clean but I’m not a slob” — 100% a slob. My things will be ALL over your place
“I really need my sleep” — if I wake up early one day you won’t see me for 5
“I’m not great at planning” — if you wanna do things, you have to make every little plan always, no surprises
“I’m more of a chill person” — I won’t do anything spontaneous or exciting
“I’m not the jealous type” — I won’t say I’m jealous, but I’ll hate the guy friends you’re close to for no reason. yes even the gay ones
“I’m not super into social media” — I will not be showing you off.
“I’ve never asked someone out before” — I have no idea how to take initiative
“I’m low maintenance” — I think you should be low maintenance
“I’m not super into fashion” — I wear sweats all the time. Possibly even on dates.
“Oh haha yeah IST” — What’s punctuality? I will be late to everything.
“I don’t get gold diggers” — I am not going to spoil you.
“Yay equality. Not chauvinism” — I’m not a gentleman. Do you wanna get this check?
“She’s just a friend” — she’s just a friend. Who is also my backup. Who is also in love with me.
“You’re a priority” — my last priority but still …
“Wow that’s fancy” — o shit will I actually have to spend money on you?
“My friends are just busy” — I don’t care enough to introduce you to them.
“I dunno where I’ll be that night” — I don’t care enough to commit to plans with you
“I got you an early Christmas gift!” — I got you a gift instead of the commitment you wanted!
“Let’s celebrate when we’re together” — umm I don’t wanna put in effort during an LDR
“I’ll read/watch that later” — I’m just hoping you’ll forget so I don’t gotta
“I love Kanye” — I’m a dick.
“I’m not cheating on you” — does flirting with her constantly count as cheating?
“I like video games” — I will play video games for hours and forget about plans with you
“Anime isn’t problematic” — I’m fine with objectifying women
“Umm not all men!” — I’m 100% a misogynist | https://medium.com/@shejshahriar/what-he-means-bbeb0ffcac6c | [] | 2020-12-27 05:29:35.340000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Breakups', 'Meaning', 'Dating', 'Men'] |
Natalia Zavodchikov Shares How Science Labs Are Becoming More Sustainable | Science labs are responsible for producing large amounts of waste and incurring huge energy bills. With environment conservation being the need of the hour, universities and other scientific institutions are trying to minimize waste, as well as energy and water usage.
Experts in science lab sustainability say that this practice is gaining traction quickly and labs are looking for more ways to reduce their environmental footprint. My Green Lab is one such company that is helping labs better their sustainability .
Rachael Relph is the chief sustainability officer of My Green Lab, a non-profit that scores and certifies lab sustainability. Rachael shared that the company has also developed eco-friendliness labels for common lab products and launched a challenge to curb the energy use from lab freezers.
It’s not terribly difficult for universities, drug makers, and even offices to make their spaces more sustainable. This is not the case with labs. They require far more energy, specialized humidity control, and a high level of ventilation. They also use large equipment that is often required to keep running on nights and weekends.
My Green Lab is helping to improve lab sustainability by reducing wastage, cutting down on energy and water use, and switching to more sustainable chemicals and products. Some universities have also started taking lab sustainability into their own hands. They have formed offices dedicated to helping scientists and lab managers adopt eco-friendlier practices.
Also, according to Green Lab, there are now more than 80 universities and scientific companies that have incorporated a green lab program in their working. This is up from less than 10 just over five years ago, which is a significant jump.
Improving lab sustainability , according to My Green Lab, includes simple things such as shutting the sash on a fume hood and having a ventilated machine in which researchers conduct experiments to limit their exposure to hazardous substances.
These steps help to cut down on the air flowing through the device, which in turn cuts down on lab energy use. | https://medium.com/@nataliazavodchikov/natalia-zavodchikov-shares-how-science-labs-are-becoming-more-sustainable-ed16cec1ac7 | ['Natalia Zavodchikov'] | 2020-02-21 14:30:36.487000+00:00 | ['Sustainable Development', 'Sustainable', 'Science', 'Sustainability'] |
Corporate America Needs Millennials | Image via Pixabay.
We grew up on the Internet. We came of age on social media. We worked for free to round out our resumes and spent our spare time excelling at our passions. So why are our opinions discounted in the corporate conference room? As millennials, we are often labelled as the narcissistic new hires that want to get ahead with the minimal amount of work. Our valuation of work-life balance and the pursuit of the side hustle is in direct contrast to our predecessors, which is why they feel we are undeserving of traditional success. It’s time to change that perception.
For starters, we need to move past this concept of millennials as “kids these days.” The millennial generation currently spans professionals ages 23 to 38; they’re either in their final year of college or already well along their career path. It may be a terrifying thought, but millennials are already among you in the office, likely in positions you wouldn’t expect.
As for the theory that millennials don’t work as hard as previous generations, that is entirely false. The catch is that we don’t see the point in giving our all to companies that underpay and under utilize us. We were the first generation that was told a college degree is a necessity and internships will help you get the typical 1–3 years’ experience required for entry-level positions. Then we graduated with hundreds of hours of schooling, volunteering, and unpaid work only to find that the job market wasn’t as excited to have us as we were lead to believe. Instead, we hear that we are lazy and more interested in perks than healthcare and a reasonable salary.
If a millennial does push for a seat at the table, we are often hushed as being too “green” in the industry or too boisterous of our own expertise. The first issue may be true in some cases, but good managers will use it as a teaching moment to impart wisdom. As for the second, millennials aren’t know-it-alls, we just have to yell louder to get our thoughts across in a room filled with unbelievers.
The downplaying of millennials in corporate structures is at the risk of the organization itself. According to Entrepreneur magazine, some of the top current business trends are data privacy, subscriptions, and social responsibility. Millennials are spearheading these areas on the consumer side, but seem to struggle getting their point across in the boardroom.
For example, this is the generation that cried “misconduct” and severed ties when Facebook, Equifax, and other major companies had data breaches. We made it clear that our personal information is not available on the open market, and trust needs to be a key value for corporate leaders. Wouldn’t it therefore be beneficial to have a member of that sample involved in road-mapping products that rely on personal data?
Subscriptions are another millennial-driven trend as younger members of the generation avoid shopping in-stores and prefer their options be sent directly to their homes. Social media, the primary form of conversation among millennials, is a strong contributor to the success of subscription boxes and services as word of mouth is one of the key factors to overall growth. It is undoubtedly easier to teach a digital native how to manage your content plan than instruct an industry lifer in the latest platform.
Technology is another sector that can benefit from millennial insight into subscriptions. Software as a Service (SaaS) is taking over enterprise-scale forecasts due to its prevalence in the exploding cloud industry. Businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve would do well to include younger professionals in their brainstorm sessions, especially since millennials are poised to become managers and executives that will control major purchasing decisions.
Finally, the social responsibility craze is a direct result of millennial consumer research. According to eMarketer, 74% of millennials feel companies should have a public opinion on social issues. If you really want to know what areas are worth your attention when attracting young buyers, hire a few of them. Otherwise you’re trying to sell to a generation without listening to their professional representatives.
If Corporate America continues to overlook millennial talent, it will lose out. There are more options than ever to making a living, especially with the rise of the side hustle culture. We are so disenchanted by the standard desk job and so disappointed in what all our hard work amounted to that we turn our greatest efforts toward our own endeavors.
Over half of all millennials have a side hustle, a way they monetize their passion beyond their day job. Most of these gigs only amount to a few hundred dollars extra each month, but it tends to be disposable income on top of living expenses. Then there are the success stories, the ones that we gravitate toward because they are the millennial dream. For the particularly motivated, exceptionally imaginative, and most innovative among us, the side hustle can become the primary business.
There are social media enthusiasts that achieved influencer-level status by creating a YouTube video each week. Travel photographers that started out editing some vacation photos now frequent five-star resorts in return for a favorable review. Former marketers, IT specialists, and salespeople that came up with a niche idea and turned it into a best-selling product.
Millennials have the expertise to thrive in the modern business world, the drive to make our hard work worth it, and the creativity to succeed in what we love. In short, everything your business requires to lead their industry. Yet because of the stigma you have attached to an entire generation, we are looking to other avenues for income and accomplishment.
So sorry Corporate America, you need us more than we need you. | https://monologuemel.medium.com/corporate-america-needs-millennials-71e856a1da7c | ['Melissa Jean'] | 2019-04-08 19:34:42.349000+00:00 | ['Business Trends', 'Side Hustle', 'Millennials', 'Corporate Culture'] |
The Brits Say Boxing Week, but in Germany We Call This Time “ Between the Years”. | The Brits Say Boxing Week, but in Germany We Call This Time “ Between the Years”.
Idioms are not always logical. That is why it is so difficult to translate them between different languages. But it is worth knowing one or another idiom of another language because they say a lot about the mentality behind them. René Junge Follow Dec 17, 2020 · 3 min read
Photo by David Klein on Unsplash
Even for many Germans, it is difficult to explain why we call the time between the twenty-fourth of December and New Year’s Eve the “time between the years” or simply “ between the years.”
After all, between means that something is after the end of one thing and before the end of another. But there is nothing between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. There are no days between the years. The last days of a year still clearly belong to the year that is now soon to end.
But that doesn’t bother the Germans. Especially the older ones insist on calling these days “between the years.”
So why do we use this illogical expression? Germans are known in the world as super-rational and reasonable, aren’t they?
Well, it may surprise many, but that is only one side of the coin. We are not and never have been a nation of pure rationalists. We love to play with our language and elicit meanings from our words that are not inherent in them at first glance.
When we say “between the years,” we do not primarily mean a clearly defined calendrical period of time. We mean a mental state in which we find ourselves during this time. The few days until next year are no longer enough to start something new, and it feels too early to start looking ahead to the coming year.
This week at the end of the year is a time to pause. But we don’t pause because we want to take time off, but because we don’t know what else to do with these days. We find it difficult to attribute them to the old year because we have already mentally checked it off.
But we also don’t see these days as an opportunity for a new beginning. So these days seem to be smeared somewhere between the years, like an electron between its infinitely many possible places of residence. The year is over, and it is not over.
Perhaps we should change our minds and rename these days Schrödinger days, but as said: We are not pure rationalists. We need the prosaic, the weight of meaning in our idioms, even if we would never admit that to ourselves.
If you were to ask a German on the street what “ between the years” means to that person, I’m sure you wouldn’t get the explanation I just gave. Germans don’t think about the meaning of their idioms every day any more than Americans or Brits do. But most would probably agree with that explanation. They would tell you that these days just don’t feel like they belong to the old year anymore, and they don’t feel like they belong to the new year either.
I hope I could give you a little insight into the German mentality. I would also be interested to know if you can relate to this term for the last week of the year. Does this expression seem appropriate to you or just very strange?
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.
René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.
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subscribe here http://bit.ly/ReneJunge | https://medium.com/illumination/the-brits-say-boxing-week-but-in-germany-we-call-this-time-between-the-years-d9d6f0d67c62 | ['René Junge'] | 2020-12-17 15:00:41.749000+00:00 | ['Idioms', 'Language', 'Germany', 'Culture', 'World'] |
Indie Holiday Songs for a Quieter Winter | As this year’s holiday season rolls around, the select restaurants, storefronts, and mall centers that have remained open during the covid pandemic are eager to tune into the festivities, playing classics like Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey over their sound systems. But to steer away from this mainstream track, this list will hopefully provide you with a handful of songs to freshen your queue.
This mix of originals and cover songs range from cozy, singer-songwriter to full band arrangements, though I’ve tried my best to keep them within the broader category of indie music.
You can find the full Spotify playlist of the following songs here. | https://medium.com/@elie-ziehl/indie-holiday-songs-for-a-quieter-winter-956e82d9288 | ['Élie Ziehl'] | 2020-12-24 12:13:39.056000+00:00 | ['Holidays', 'Christmas', 'Recommendations', 'Lists', 'Music'] |
How to change diaper pants at night without disrupting the baby’s sleep? | How to change diaper pants at night without disrupting the baby’s sleep? Doobidoo Jan 13·1 min read
Baby’s sleep at day time is like one of the luxuries for parents as they can get enough time to complete bits and pieces of their work. But, during the night, when you and the little one is in bed, have you thought about the protocols in terms of night-time nappy pant changes? Waking the baby up is obviously not the choice as it will be a tedious job. It takes hours to settle and slip off to peaceful sleep.
There should be some rules in mind to safeguard against waking the baby while still achieving the task at hand, changing into a pant style diaper for baby.
· Set up a routine for your baby: Routine makes your baby feel comfy. If you disrupt the routine and become inconsistent, it can end up to multiple sleepless nights.
· Work in the dark: Don’t switch on the lights. Do the change in the dark as your baby can wake up. Don’t worry about how to do it and trust your instincts as you do the same thing in the daylight and then you should know how the drill goes.
· Prepare beforehand: The night time duty of changing nappies has to be seamlessly silent. Dress your baby for bed conveniently that should suit you when it comes to change. | https://medium.com/@doobidoo/how-to-change-diaper-pants-at-night-without-disrupting-the-babys-sleep-5041bc0826c4 | [] | 2021-01-13 05:41:15.728000+00:00 | ['Parents Love', 'Motherhood', 'Diapers', 'Baby Care', 'Baby'] |
My follow up on open source (week 11@ Encora Academy) | This week, my take on open source was a little deeper than the past week. I finally chose between the hundreds of projects on GitHub after a long review.
In the beginning, I decided to get to work on Pandas, a library for analysis and data manipulation wrote in Python. This project has about 3.4k open issues, so it was a good choice since there was a lot of work to do.
The first step was to set up the environment to start working. I followed the guide for contributing to Pandas. They recommend working in a container so finally, I get to know what Docker is about.
Docker is a tool for automatizing the process of project deployment, it builds a “container” where there is everything you need to start working. From dependencies, environments, and all kinds of software requirements and resources to have nothing to worry about.
Then, the only problem that I had was that it took me nearly the whole day building the container, lucky me, while Docker was working, I found an issue that I thought I could start working on right away.
By Thursday, I finally started to work on my first issue, it was about getting rid of unnecessary dict() calls in a bunch of files. It is because flake8 (C408) standard says that it is slower to call dict() than using the empty literal, for example:
Rewrite: dict() as {}
Rewrite: dict(a=1, b=2) as {}
Rewrite: list() as []
Rewrite: tuple() as ()
I just modified one single file to see how this contributing thing works, I noticed that when you do a pull request for an Open Source project, it has to pass all checks that they have implemented.
By Friday, I got the hang of it, and I did five more files from the same issue to prove myself. Everything worked just fine, and they got merged into the Pandas project. It feels good to know that somehow now you have contributed something to them…
I also took a look at another project called Faker, which is a library that helps you building fake datasets when you need data to prove anything you want. I found an issue about implementing type-checking and I also started to work on it.
This week there was not a specific schedule of activities or a specific guide for what to do, but since it was all about finding projects and understand what they do and how it works, it feels like a completely different type of work.
Conclusion
This week I learned a lot about tools that projects implement for keeping order in code, I learned about the flake8 rules and standards, I learned about continuous integration tools such as Travis, I learned about mypy and type-checking which will keep me busy the following week. I just realized how much I still have to learn about Python. | https://medium.com/@urielmd00/my-follow-up-on-open-source-week-11-encora-academy-a3c739f81763 | ['Uriel Martinez'] | 2020-12-08 05:39:48.340000+00:00 | ['Internships', 'Docker', 'Encora', 'Open Source'] |
10 Best Winter Safety Tips For Kids To Keep Them Warm And Healthy | 10 Best Winter Safety Tips For Kids To Keep Them Warm And Healthy Tango Family Feb 20·3 min read
Winters are exceptional and attractive to everyone. The cold breeze, snow, chocolate, soup, hot drinks, and snowmen are the major attractions in the winters for kids. Along with the fun, there are many health threats for kids in winters. It is necessary to focus on winter safety tips for kids.
You cannot restrict the kids from playing outside, going to school, and having fun. Therefore, it is best to let them enjoy every bit of it but with precautions. Here are some winter safety tips for kids that help you in keeping them safe and healthy throughout winters.
1. Cover them in layers
Among the winter safety tips for kids, the very first thing to care about is the clothing. Make sure to cover your kids in layers. Make them wear clothes in at least three layers or a layer more than an adult.
The winter safety tips for kids demand you to keep these layers loose and manageable. The clothes should not be undersized as they restrict movement and cause trouble. More specifically the shoes need to be of the right size and easy to walk. The cold weather safety tips for kids direct to choose alternatives instead of scarves, that have fewer chances of strangling.
2. Buy winter clothes with precautions
In winters, there is a war between cotton and wool. Following the winter safety tips for kids, make sure to pick up the wool clothing instead of cotton. Wool tends to get warm rapidly and does not absorb water in comparison to cotton.
Read: Why it is important to have empathy for kids?
Be careful with the sizes as well. The winter safety tips for kids ask you to buy clothes as per layers so kids will feel comfortable in there.
3. Do not take the sun for granted
In winters, sunlight is even more dangerous. Snow reflects the UV rays with more intensity. Do not take it lightly and protect the child’s skin with sunblock. Sunblock is not the only summer essential but also works great in winters too.
Even child specialists provide cold weather safety tips for kids and insist on the use of sunblock on the exposed areas in winters.
Read: How To Break An Infant’s Fever: A Quick Guide
5. Sensitize kids about cold
Making kids understand the feeling of cold and time to take action when feeling cold is one of the essential winter safety tips for kids. Many kids do not bother if they are cold and wet. They keep on playing and eventually have frostbite or other damage.
As per winter safety tips for kids enable your kids to react immediately if they are cold and wet. Keep observing them, and in any case bring them inside, change clothes and keep them warm.
To read complete article click here. | https://medium.com/@tangofamily/10-best-winter-safety-tips-for-kids-to-keep-them-warm-and-healthy-9a0b950072a4 | ['Tango Family'] | 2021-02-20 21:38:10.673000+00:00 | ['Healthcare', 'Kids Activities', 'Baby Care', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parenting'] |
Most People Have the Mentality of the Zero-Sum Game | Most People Have the Mentality of the Zero-Sum Game
My social experiment for the last few years offline and online.
@garidy unsplash.com
5 years ago, I asked a friend, “Do you think people genuinely want what’s good for you?” This friend replied, “No, no one will want what’s good for you, because it takes away from what they can get. They always want what’s good for themselves.” This person is no longer my friend. As I was sitting there asking this question, this person pondered on what more they can gain from me.
Slowly, I spent the next five years trying to prove this person wrong. I am an eternal optimist. I wanted to believe that people in this world still cared for one another. From my upbringing, it’s very easy for me to just believe that the whole world is simply a “zero-sum game”. But, as I spent more time socializing within my community both online and offline, I realized that most people around me know that it’s a “zero-sum game”.
If they don’t show it, they either hide it very well or they are not honest with themselves.
For a long time, I simply refused to get the memo. I didn’t want to believe that’s true. When I was battered and battle-scarred, I rationalized people’s actions toward me. I wanted to believe in the “good” of everyone.
For a long time, I wrote articles such as Praying to Give vs. Praying to Get.
But, each time, I wanted to believe that people can have a mentality of abundance, someone, through their actions tell me that they will take my slice of pie.
I’m not complaining. I’m simply sad.
I think the world has come to this point because umair haque so elegantly explained that we are in “The Age of the Sociopath”.
Somehow, on our way into a supposedly better world, we’ve robbed our people of the basics that they need to live: education, food, shelter, and healthcare.
As we take out more loans for our mortgage in the world of skyrocketing housing prices, as our schools don’t have enough funding for our kid’s education, as minimum wage jobs put remote workers at increased risk of not getting paid, and as we spend more on healthcare, we are forcing everyone to fend for themselves in this society of “limited resources”.
Everyone who used to be nice, kind, and genuine, when threatened with the possibility of losing their livelihood, their place in society, and their dreams unfulfilled, rages against the system.
Everywhere I looked in the past five years, there were people around me who are slowly “seething” against the system. Every small success I had was met with a blow to the gut by someone else. Every “help” I received from someone was deemed a “privilege” by someone else.
If someone gives me a penny, then I always expect someone else to come along to take a dollar away from me. Because I know that intrinsically, society doesn’t favor me. Society is against who I am because I wasn’t born in the US. I only earned my place in the US through hard work and perseverance.
In America, you are made to battle everyone else for…everything. Nothing is your right, really. You must fight bitterly for education, for healthcare, for a little bit of money, for food to eat, for a roof over your head.- umair haque
At the tail end of every small success in this world, I found people asking me for their share of my pie. If I didn’t hand out every single slice I had, they will harm me.
This was true in my own family, true in the community I was in, true in the community I moved to, and the social media community I sought shelter in. | https://medium.com/jun-wu-blog/most-people-have-the-mentality-of-the-zero-sum-game-d45b80514b72 | ['Jun Wu'] | 2020-01-27 08:11:33.599000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Politics', 'Self', 'Capitalism'] |
Rep Connect | “In God we trust. All others must bring data” — Edwards Demin
Introduction
In this day and age that we are living in where specialized cloud platforms are sprouting and helping customers to run their business (like Salesforce for CRM, Workday for HR, Atlassian for work management etc.) it is imperative for any cloud platform to provide a robust and a scalable way to bring data into their system and also provide an efficient way to take data out. No system can afford to live in a silo. Reputation cloud platform is no exception to this.
As we spread our footprint deeper into the Customer Experience (CX), Reputation Management (RX) space; it has become imperative to have a robust framework to ingest data into our platform from various sources. Keeping this in mind, we ventured to build our next-gen Integrator framework.
Enter Rep Connect: “One-stop solution for a robust, scalable and self-service data ingestions”.
Evolution of Rep Connect
Reputation platform is driven by customer data — be it feedback, reviews, survey results, business profiles, metrics etc. The platform has a robust way of collecting a lot of unstructured data like reviews from various sources like Facebook, Google, Instagram etc. But customers want to bring their own data into the platform from their own sources and we have to provide a mechanism for the same. Before building out this feature — we need to answer 3 questions viz -
What data should be ingested?
When should it be ingested?
How to format the incoming data?
Answering the above questions and building a solution around it is the genesis of Rep Connect within the Reputation platform. Now let us answer the questions deeper.
What data?
The various modules within the Reputation platform require different types of data. For-instance the Business Listings module requires profiles data. Review Request module requires customer data from CRM systems to send survey or review requests. The Survey module requires survey results data and so on and so forth.
When?
Data can be ingested at varying frequencies. Business profile data can be ingested once a week since it mostly involves information that doesn’t change frequently like address, phone number, work hours etc. Review request uses customers data that changes daily. Survey data could be ingested daily. So to answer the question — we need to provide a flexible recurring schedule for customers to bring in data.
How?
Customers bring in data as CSV files which they host on an FTP site or drop it in our FTP servers. Some customers want us to directly pull their data from their CRMs or some provide their own web service endpoints which we have to connect and get data.
As customers bring in data from their systems in various formats and structures, one mandatory functionality we have to provide is a way to transform and map the data into our data models. Transformations can be a simple mapping for example from field X from customer file to field Y in our source table. Customers also require the ability to write their own scripts to massage the data or apply simple transformations like converting the case of a field or concatenating two fields, replacing values etc. before importing the data.
Now that we have a clear answer for What/When/How — we can now lay the foundation of requirements for Rep Connect —
Ability to integrate with various end-points like SFTP, REST, SOAP end-points or other systems like Salesforce, Yardi, Sitelink, CDK etc and download data. Ability to process data in 3 different formats viz. CSV, JSON & XML. Ability to schedule data imports at periodic intervals. Ability to transform and map the data from source to the relevant format inside Reputation.
Apart from the above to build a robust system we also need the following capabilities
A notification system which customer can subscribe to and get notified every time data is ingested into the platform. Ability to send digests per day or week or send notifications only when something fails or any other user-defined conditions. Services like Business listings, Surveys, Review Requests provide their own API to import data into their schemas. Rep Connect can understand the APIs provided by the services and directly call them. This would cause hard coupling between Rep Connect and the target services. The alternate approach we took was to put an intermediary service which takes input from the Rep Connect and does the job of figuring out which service to call and make the relevant call. This would adhere to design principle of Separation of Concerns and make Rep Connect independent of the business services and more importantly makes Rep Connect stateless.
Decomposing to services
Microservices are self-contained software components that are independently deployable focused on specific business capabilities running in an automated environment. When we started to decompose the above requirements into microservices, we arrived at something like this
Figure (a) — Rep Connect Architecture
We have come up with 3 connector services — each dealing with one type of connection — for FTP, REST & SOAP service. Each connector takes only one responsibility — the FTP connector, when passed in connection/credentials & directory details connects to the FTP server and downloads the file. REST connector when passed in API end-point, credentials connects to the REST endpoint and downloads the data. Same with the SOAP connector. All the three services after downloading converts the data into a common format which is consumed by Rep Connect (we decided CSV as the common format).
Rep Connect Service takes the data downloaded by the connector services and transforms it, does field mappings and makes it ready to be ingested by the platform. The responsibilities of the Rep Connect service are
a. Map source data fields to target fields
b. Transform the data using scripts or custom functions
c. Filter out data based on any criteria
d. Schedule the jobs that has to be run repeatedly on a user-defined schedule
e. Configure notification subscriptions
Apart from the connector services and Rep Connector service three more services play an important role. They are
Scheduler
The Reputation platform has a scheduler service that supports scheduling of jobs, provides retry mechanism in case of failures and a good monitoring on top. So instead of reinventing the wheel, Rep Connect leverages the common scheduler available in the platform.
Notification
Notification is also one of the core services in the Reputation platform that provides ability to set up message templates, manage subscriptions, manage preferences (digest vs non-digest) and support multiple delivery channels (like email, SMS, in-app etc.). Rep Connect would leverage the Notification service.
Importer
Importer is an intermediary service sitting between Rep Connect and other Business services (like Business listings service, Review request service, Survey service etc.). It takes the output from Rep Connect and calls the respective Business service API that does the actual work of importing the data.
Rep Connect Sequence
Figure (b) — Rep Connect Sequence
Conclusion
In this article, I presented the genesis and evolution of the Rep Connect module in Reputation platform. Today Rep Connect is getting used heavily to ingest data into the platform from various sources by our customers and it is making our (Engineering and Support teams) life easier as the entire setup, configuration and monitoring are owned by the customer in a truly self-service model. | https://engineering.reputation.com/rep-connect-aa7a0b7e03dd | [] | 2021-06-24 17:46:22.860000+00:00 | ['Reputation', 'Integration', 'Xml', 'Data Driven', 'Json'] |
What is creativity actually? | West's perspective on creativity is the activity that produces novelty or a breakthrough. This definition sets it apart from rituals or repetitive actions that resonate with no creativity. The religious root can also be seen to play a significant role in shaping the definition or perspective. In the beginning, God creates the world from nothingness. This phrase has a profound impact on those seeing creativity from a Western perspective especially in the modern world that engineers, programmers, or any professionals are in a race to invent something or at least perfecting others’ inventions in linear motion.
On the other hand, East which constitutes primarily Chinese teachings, characterizes creativity on the aspect of utility and respect for the tradition. Creative actions are aimed to preserve the traditions because Tao teaches that the universe has no beginning as well as no creator so there is ‘something’ and always will be. In contrast, the Eastern lens of creativity is not through invention but discovery.
Invention and discovery have the same translation in Bahasa Indonesia. They are translated as ‘penemuan’. This is where the issue arises. The word invention in the English language has a sense of novelty quality where something has been brought into existence or being. Discovery doesn’t necessarily contain novelty because it can be said that for example the ancient temple of Majapahit has been discovered (more or like unravel, shed a light on previously unknown).
What are the implications for Indonesian? Sociolinguists have long argued that language represents the society where social aspects of daily life are often pictured in a language. In this sense, language is created to express the ideas of society. We have at least, four different words to describes the stages of the rice from the plant to the rice we eat on the table. The plant is called padi. Then, once harvested, it becomes gabah. When the skin covering the grain is removed and ready to be cooked it will be called beras. Nasi is the final form of the rice when it is cooked.[1] Another example is that Eskimos have at least seven words to describe snows.
When Indonesian has no difference in the words of invention and discovery, we have generated confusion to differ the two. While respecting the tradition produces backlash to modernity which symbolizes enlightening and creativity, they have been in an endless war in Indonesian society. Most people treat them as if they are in an opposing direction where tradition seems to hamper the idea of progress and development. It is clear that this issue is varied in degree from one culture to another.[2]
The essential question is where should we place creative acts in the eye of Indonesian perspective? First, we do not exhibit or merely preserve the culture as symbols, rituals or artifacts. We have to become the living museum where values of a culture are incorporated deep in daily activities in how we interact with what seems strange be it other values, ideas, or people. Second, we shape the language as the language shapes us. This means that endless possibilities await those mindful of openness. This must not be placed in binary opposition manner like good or bad and black or white. Instead, curiosity and careful observation are the best tools to cultivate what benefits most for the society.
[1] We have another word for rice-based food such as bubur for porridge but this explanation is less relevant because the main focus here is to show different words for different stages of the rice plant. This also means to contrast the language where English only has one word for all the stages.
[2] Balinese is an ideal picturesque of harmony between the idea of tradition and creativity. Conflicts between ideas are indeed unavoidable but the backbone of Balinese is maintaining the balance. That is why besides its natural beauty, their tradition also practiced as the way of living attracting tourists across the globe. | https://medium.com/@endoperdana/what-is-creativity-actually-c3d821adf13e | ['Endo Perdana'] | 2020-12-15 07:33:25.410000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Creativity', 'Indonesia', 'Language', 'Social Change'] |
The rise of the personal data economy | The rise of the personal data economy
Will we become personal data merchants?
In 2000, four years prior to the inception of Facebook and seven years before the first iPhone came on the market, Chris Downs wrote a letter to all of the firms and institutions with which he had concluded contracts. He asked them to send him all of the information that they possessed about him. After several months of gathering replies from banks, insurers, credit providers, gas and electricity suppliers, mobile operators and a supermarket with a loyalty program, he collected 800 pages of data on his desk. When he had sorted and transcribed that data into a clear format, he found himself looking at a precise record of his life. He saw his changing lifestyle, itineraries of his vacations and business trips, his curriculum vitae and dining habits, doctor’s visits and a database of every purchase he had made. Chris then put this record of his life up for auction on eBay, where he sold it for 150 pounds. Eighteen years later, Chris Downs is one of the pioneers of the Personal Data Economy and his somewhat crazy experiment has become a global phenomenon. It is quite possible that it will be the impetus that changes the way we function in everyday life, how we communicate with service providers, how we shop and,how and what we share with those around us.
Personal data and what to do with it
The idea behind the Personal Data Economy is simple: Individuals should have the possibility to take control over their personal data, to share it as they see fit and to profit from sharing it. Of course, bringing that idea into the real world is not simple at all. Even though a relatively small number of firms had retained Chris Downs’s data, the statements containing that data comprised 800 printed pages. Today, though we are often not even conscious of it, we send out our personal data almost continuously. More and more personal data is generated every time we visit a website and agree to collection of cookies, every time we download a mobile application, every time we log into Facebook or Instagram, with every Tweet, Spotify playlist and password entered into Google, and every step we take with Wi-Fi and GPS activated on our telephones.
How personal data is used (and misused) was demonstrated by the recent scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, which was accused of misusing data mining with the intent of influencing important events such as the Brexit referendum and the presidential election in the United States. Regardless of the firm’s involvement, its own presentation at the Concordia 2016 summit demonstrated how unbelievably precise data can be obtained by combining seemingly trivial items of information. Cambridge Analytica, and other firms engaged in data mining, claim that, for example, they know a Facebook user better than his or her co-workers after analysing only seventy likes. With 150 likes, we reveal more to analysts than we do to our parents; after 300 likes, the analysts know more about us than our partners do. And that is only in the case of Facebook. With tremendous precision, specialised software can find out practically anything about us from the enormous quantity of data that we leave on the internet: our interests, preferences, sexual orientation, intelligence. It analyses the issues that concern us and how we respond to them, what worries us, and, of course, what we buy, where we go for entertainment, the medications we use and the kind of lifestyles we have. In looking at such a precise depiction of who we are, it may not occur to us that our data has a price.
How much data costs
Exactly how much money is involved in the personal-data trade can be determined only approximately. For example, through analysis of the annual financial statements of Facebook and other major sellers of advertising, the Data Driven Marketing Institute reached the conclusion that advertising targeted using the personal data of an average internet user generates roughly $60.00. With an estimated 3.5 billion active users, the total value of the market is approximately 210 billion dollars. Experts agree that this figure will continue to grow, though no one knows exactly how, as we are currently working only with estimates. Today’s market does not operate with the data of individual people, but rather with huge sets of thousands of more or less anonymous users for which those who may be interested are not willing to pay nearly so much money. General information such as name, age, gender and place of residence are very cheap, only costing roughly $0.0007 per item of data. Conversely, the prices of data on consumption history and personal interests are higher, but not exorbitant. For example, a database with the names of patients suffering from a specific illness costs around $0.30 per name; it is estimated that advertisers in lucrative fields such as vehicle sales and the travel industry pay roughly $2.00 for a set comprising 1,000 people. Meanwhile, these datasets can contain a large number of incorrect or incomplete pieces of information about individuals reducing the reliability of the data and hence the price data consumers are willing to pay. As Nathan Eagle, a leading developer of mobile technologies, put it: “Individuals who use the internet are at the bottom of a broken economy.” What could change this situation? For one thing, the decision to start selling access to our personal data instead of freely giving it out.
PIMS
The idea of selling access to personal data has long been among us, but until recently it remained at the level of vision and concepts. However, thanks to progress in application technologies, internet connection speeds and legislative measures such as GDPR, today we have the possibility to effectively protect, sort and share our data. This promising field has given rise to a number of projects focused on collection and distribution of personal data under the collective name PIMS (Personal Information Management Services).
An example of a PIMS is VETRI, an application that consists of a data wallet and a marketplace. The data wallet allows you to store and manage your personal data. The marketplace enables you to sell access to parts of your data to researchers, businesses, or marketers in an anonymized way. As the sole owner of your data, you get to decide who can use it and for which purpose. Users will benefit from the marketplace transactions through relevant advertising in addition to VLD tokens or discounted offers. Researchers in various domains from healthcare to marketing can in turn use the VETRI platform to reach out to closely selected groups of individuals to finally find the answers to burning issues or offer new products to selected audiences. Eventually, users will be able to use their verified VETRI digital identity to authenticate themselves with online services, on peer-to-peer platforms, provide supporting evidence for KYC checks, or to receive better conditions from healthcare insurers for sharing verified insights into one’s lifestyle habits to name a few. At VETRI, we believe that authenticated data that has been enriched by other pieces of information by individuals will have a higher value than the databases currently available on the market, allowing our users to earn significantly higher prices for sharing insights into their data.
PIMS not only enable users to save money, but they also make it possible for banks, insurers and other institutions to eliminate the necessity of administering their own databases, which today are very inefficient and packed with duplicate and obsolete data. The consulting firm BCG published an analysis indicating that the use of the data of individual health-insurance policyholders instead of a centrally administered database would result in savings of 700 billion dollars in the United States alone (approx. 30% of the costs of administering the health-insurance system). At the same time, it would make the entire process more efficient, personalised and beneficial for everyone involved.
Willingness to share
At present, major firms such as Apple, Facebook and Google as well as dozens of personal data brokers are growing wealthier from personal data. However, if individual users start to take charge of their data, that situation may change rapidly. A basic prerequisite for such a shift to occur is the willingness to share data. Is that realistic? It seems that it is. According to the agency SAS and analysts at the Future Foundation, for example, up to 69% of millennials (i.e. people aged 16–34) are willing to share their personal data if selling it would bring them actual benefits. Sixty-seven percent of them would provide data in the healthcare sector, 57% in the financial sector and 50% in the public sector, while 45% would share their data with energy providers, 32% with merchants and 28% with the media. If these prerequisites are fulfilled, individuals may in the near future become as equally important on the information market as the technology giants.
Find out more about the value of your personal data: | https://medium.com/vetri/the-rise-of-the-personal-data-economy-b7f9236b30bc | [] | 2018-12-17 08:35:01.116000+00:00 | ['Internet Of Me'] |
The Dark Backstory Behind Some Popular Christmas Carols | Every year we sing the same carols without really thinking about the words. The tunes are just so catchy! Plus no one wants to believe that those tunes they associate with their favorite holiday are actually harboring dark stories behind their bright façades.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
The song starts off innocently enough, with the carolers wishing the residents of a home a, “Merry Christmas.” However, in the second verse, the crowd’s demand for figgy pudding is unmet. They then ominously sing, “We won’t leave until we get some.” And they are true to their word.
After breaking into the household, they hold the family hostage for hours. Finally, the police negotiate 3 figgy puddings per caroler. Though they go to jail, the sadistic singers know that the family will forever think of them when they hear that familiar song. That feeling of power is sweeter than any pudding.
Jingle Bells
Yes, it is very fun to go, “Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh.” With bells and warm gloves what could go wrong? Well, one thing a sleigh lacks is a seatbelt.
Tom found this out the hard way when he took his sweetheart on what he thought would be a romantic date. He even recorded the words to the song as they sped through the park. All was well until the sled hit a root, and Tom was thrown into a tree. The “OH,” in the song is often mistranslated for a fun breath of air to take rather than the very real surprise of being launched from a sleigh. No one was laughing all the way to the emergency room, because of the horrific injuries and stuff.
12 Days of Christmas
Many see this as a sweet song about someone’s significant other sending them wonderful gifts for 12 days straight. Truthfully, this song is about a person being harassed by a stalker who keeps sending bigger, and more annoying, gifts to get a reaction. The ladies, lords, maids, and musicians beg the person to respond to the stalker since they’ve been threatened with death if they stop their designated action or try to contact the authorities.
Oh Christmas Tree
Who doesn’t love a picturesque Christmas tree? Those who have never seen one, that’s who. Few know this song is actually a transmission from the future. The “leaves so unchanging” refer to the fake leaves that are made of a synthetic material that doesn’t burn. Which was the fate of most of the trees in the world.
In the time the song sent from, no one would even dream of cutting down a rare tree just so they could put it in their living room for a week. To do so would be immoral, and a crime punishable by 20 years in prison. | https://medium.com/jane-austens-wastebasket/the-dark-backstory-behind-some-popular-christmas-carols-fd92a6bf4199 | ['Kyrie Gray'] | 2020-12-12 19:41:10.358000+00:00 | ['Satire', 'Humor', 'Culture', 'Christmas', 'Music'] |
Top 7 Challenges Faced by Teenagers Today in Kenya | Did you know the categorization of Teenagers wasn’t a thing until the 1920s? In earlier centuries, there were children and adults and nothing in between. The emergence of this group brought with it long-term changes that affected how children transitioned to adulthood.
The challenges faced by teenagers today partly stemmed from these changes because:
The teenager label had to come with an identity which wasn’t positive
Teenagers were given fewer responsibilities at home as high school was introduced
They spent more unsupervised time together
Parents had less time to discipline their teenagers
The society started producing products that attracted them
Today’s teenage issues have a long history, and the world doesn’t offer a solution that you, as a parent, can trust. That means you need to be pro-active in learning how to help your teenager navigate the adolescent years. To help you become effective, here are seven commonest problems teenagers face today.
1. Smartphone addiction
Studies have shown that smartphone addiction is more common in teenagers than any other age-group, and the earlier a teen owns a phone, the higher the chances of a prolonged addictive pattern.
For the teenager, meeting people through social media, mobile apps, and texting platforms can lead to an attachment to a point they believe their virtual friends are more important than real-life relationships.
As your teenager interacts online, they are likely to meet predators, unhealthy information, and explicit sexual content. Phone addiction also leads to psychological problems of teenage students because it leads to reduced mental function and sluggishness.
Your role is to help your teenager understand that the mobile phone produces an unhealthy mindset and behavior that leads to negative effects like the problems of teenage relationships in the real world.
Sensitizing them of the challenges of teenage life found in smartphone addiction like low impulse control, anxiety, depression, and altered self-image will give them a reason to monitor their phone use outside you just telling them to stop overusing.
2. Conflict between Peer Pressure and Parental pressure
You often hear of peer pressure and forget that parents also pressure their teenagers to behave in a certain way. At this stage, your teenager desires acceptance and to belong to a group outside the home. At the same time, they want to please their parents.
Your teen finds themselves in a dilemma that forces them to choose whom to follow. The conflict they go through easily leads to teenage stress. You can reduce the burden for your teen by teaching them from an early age to choose their friends wisely to reduce the number of things that conflict with how you want your teen to behave.
You can also instruct them on how to deal with peer pressure wisely, no matter what type of peer pressure.
Teen pressure is usually conditional such that you have to do something for them to accept you. Letting your teen understand these dynamics and offering unconditional acceptance to counter what their peer’s offer will be of great help to win them over to your side.
At some point, they will give in to negative peer pressure and suffer the consequences. Use this failure as an avenue to correct as well as accept them even when they fall. You will have earned good ‘bonga’ points that will make them want to follow your counsel.
3. Body Image Issues
Body image concerns are among the top issues affecting youth today. For the teenager, this is when their bodily changes occur drastically with little time for them to process their new look. They find it hard to love their body and feel comfortable in how they look because the changes keep taking a new form as they progress in adolescence.
Among other factors, social media has caused the number of teenagers having body image issues to rise. As a parent in this age of technology, the burden for you has become greater, and your positive affirmation from an early age is needful. Watch out for eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating, which can arise as your teen tries to cope.
Understanding what they are going through is real in their minds goes a long way in assisting them to process the body image issues they are experiencing. Validating their feelings and thoughts simultaneously, offering guidance, and educating them will help move them towards accepting their bodies.
4. Underage Sex and the hook-up culture
Today’s teens understand hook-up culture as the norm, and some believe it is the only way to have fun when they meet up with their peers. You would agree that the movies, series, social media sites, and teen magazines have played a major role in normalizing underage sex. These TV shows that teens like glorify casual sex and portray teens who practice the hook-up culture as enjoying life while the rest are seen as nerds or losers.
It a known fact that most parents rarely believe their teenagers are sexually active. Keeping your mind open and realizing your teenager has the potential of engaging in sexual activity will prompt you to be pro-active in educating them about sex.
Studies have shown the earlier and consistent a parent is in having sex education conversations with their children, the higher the chances of the teenager delaying any sexual activity and dealing with these problems teenagers face today.
Since you cannot prevent your child from being online or watching shows, teaching them to sieve the narrative presented and invoking reasoning while engaging in these entertainment platforms will help them compare reality versus acting; thus, choose wisely.
5. Substance abuse
In Kenya, current statistics indicate that half of the drug users are aged between 10–19years, and the common drugs of choice are nicotine, cannabis, and alcohol.
Teenagers often underestimate the long-term effects of substance abuse, and their drive towards risk-taking drives them to try drugs. As with most drug addicts, teenagers also believe they can control their drug use and not become dependent on them.
Some of the top teenage issues today that cause teens to engage in drugs include stress, curiosity, peer pressure, emotional issues, and getting back at their parents.
Having conversations revolving around these issues and educating them on the negative effects and life-long impact of this habit will greatly help them. Setting limits and consequences while offering supportive help if your teen is already experimenting is a starting point in resolving the issue.
6. Mental health Issues
Mental health issues generally include any condition that affects your teenager’s perception, mood, behavior, and thinking pattern. It may be hard for you as a teen parent to differentiate at first because you may have already noticed such changes as your teen is in the adolescent stage.
Getting professional help when your instinct tells you there’s something else going on with your teen can save you a stressful period that may come with the many challenges of teenage life.
Depression, anxiety disorder, eating disorders, and social phobias are common mental health disorders among teenagers. Knowing the common teenage mental illness symptoms of the above disorders can help you catch it and intervene early.
7. Godlessness
These are the times where anything goes as long as it makes you happy, where truth is relative even when the facts stare at you and respecting authorities is shunned. Any religious affiliation is looked at as going against what the majority want because society today don’t want to be held accountable.
International media shows children as young as seven years being allowed to make permanent sex changes irrespective of their parent’s advice and their Christian values. When society rejects the existence of God, the moral lawgiver, the only other option is for people to do whatever they want.
Your teenager is exposed to these beliefs and the increasing push to deny the existence of God. You can help your teenager by researching together on the existence of God and looking at the evidence objectively.
History has proven that those who have the fear of God tend to live a life that honors and respects God, people, and authority. The transformation that occurs leads them to live a fruitful life.
Final remarks
Teenage hood is a period that comes with its challenges, but it is also an exciting period for you and your teenager to relate at a higher and more meaningful level. The young mind in your hands still needs plenty of guidance, which you can effectively offer when you have an idea of the problems teenagers face today.
Intentional educative conversations have been stressed throughout as the most effective intervention in handling these challenges faced by teenagers today. Even when they don’t seem to be listening, they are still getting something from your well-meaning effort. Keep the conversation going as you tackle head-on the challenges of teenage life. | https://medium.com/@janekariuki86/top-6-challenges-faced-by-teenagers-today-in-kenya-6ab7470d4c2b | ['Jane Kariuki'] | 2020-12-08 11:28:08.001000+00:00 | ['Teenagers', 'Parenting', 'Parenting Teenagers', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parents'] |
Introducing IBM Watson Studio | Professionals are putting AI to work to turn our most valuable resource — data — into new ways of doing business. With AI, we are no longer wrestling with data, but using it to recommend with confidence, accelerate research and discovery, and enrich interactions with customers on their terms. The purpose of AI systems is to augment human intelligence, and today, we are excited to announce the next step on our journey to make AI more accessible for everybody with IBM Watson Studio.
Watson Studio: accelerating value for enterprises with AI
Watson Studio accelerates the machine and deep learning workflows required to infuse AI into your business to drive innovation. It provides a suite of tools for data scientists, application developers and subject matter experts, allowing them to collaboratively connect to data, wrangle that data and use it to build, train and deploy models at scale. Successful AI projects require a combination of algorithms + data + team, and a very powerful compute infrastructure.
Until today, there was a gap between data experts and domain experts. Only highly technical professionals in IT could organize and make sense of the vast amounts of data. Only domain experts could successfully convert data into the rich knowledge needed by AI. But domain experts and IT professionals worked in silos, with different tools and no visibility to each others work. The result was AI that fell short in its promise to augment people’s expertise.
Watson Studio closes the gap with a unified experience to create new insights from knowledge contained in the data. Watson Studio enables multidisciplinary teams across the organization to collaborate. We are convinced, after working with clients around the world, that rich collaboration is key unlocking the full potential of AI. | https://medium.com/ibm-watson/introducing-ibm-watson-studio-e93638f0bb47 | ['Armand Ruiz'] | 2018-05-01 19:30:42.210000+00:00 | ['Announcements', 'Machine Learning', 'Watson Studio'] |
Top 5 Tips to Enhance the Software Quality Assurance & Testing- iBoss | 5 Ways to Enhance the software quality assurance & testing
Improving quality assurance (QA) is a vital element of project management because it helps enhance cost-effectiveness and helps deliver superior performance. It, in return, improves software quality and helps in the reduction of costs. The better the QA team, the more projects get delivered seamlessly and efficiently. The recent trend in the industry is to weave quality assurance with software development during the SDLC and not treat it as a separate entity that gets executed in the end.
Here are five tips to improve the software testing and QA process.
1. Start the testing process early on.
Ensure that the software testing process is an integral part of the SDLC. The earlier you start, the better can the defects be detected and nipped in the bud. The latter testing becomes a part of your SDLC, the more complicated things become. Before things snowball into something big and complex, the things need to be addressed effectively. Also important is that the more complicated the issue is, the more money will be required to resolve the issue. Having software testers and QA experts early means that bugs and defects get detected fast, and almost the moment these originate.
2. Use automation to test often
It is important to automate your testing disciplines. You can begin with non-UI tests and then move onto UI tests. With the help of APIs and Webservices, it is possible to automate testing through the entire process at every point. Compared to manual methods, automation comes with an increased scope because there is increased accuracy and depth possible. Automating tests and QA processes convert into the delivery of stable and qualitative products.
Thankfully, there are very many automated tools that help address every phase in the QA process. When the testing and development phase are integrated meaningfully with an Agile domain, things happen fast and unmatched.
3. Let there be room for innovation.
Time-tested methods and practices are good, but there should always be enough scope for innovation. Innovation is a critical element in SDLC, including QA. Project managers should encourage R & R&D (Research & Development) and give teams enough power to find ways to find newer methods and tools to test the software. By rewarding innovations regularly, project managers can set in the innovation spirit in their team members.
4. Undertake manual tests when most required
While automation is critical, the essence of manual testing can never be compromised or under-rated. Automation helps release QA experts from doing the repetitive task of testing, but human testers help provide useful feedback and insights that automated tools and machines can never offer. While automation is an incredible strategy, it needs to be balanced well with manual components.
5. Communication is important with stakeholders
Transparency in communication is imperative for seamless working. The same rule applies to testing and Quality Assurance in software projects. Whether it is communicating with internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, scrum masters, and developers, it is vital that the team often meets, that the information is disseminated transparently, and collaboration is given the highest priority for best results.
Delivering a quality software product is no coincidence or joke. It requires regular testing because QA is the pillar for guaranteed quality. Ensure the best-automated tools and encourage your testers to innovate consistently. iBoss is a leader in the spectrum of software testing and quality assurance. Be it tools, support, or testers; you have the best partner to offer top-of-line QA solutions. | https://medium.com/@markp-41148/top-5-tips-to-enhance-the-software-quality-assurance-testing-iboss-2e8d1e33cb27 | ['Mark P.'] | 2021-07-15 09:00:06.184000+00:00 | ['Qa Testing', 'QA', 'B2B', 'Software Testing', 'Testing'] |
Are You An Effective Communicator? | Day 15/100
Communication…this is one word you read about and hear everyday in this digital age. And the importance of this single word is not over stated. In this age, if you can grab the attention of your reader, half your work is done. And therefore, everyone is on the lookout on means of effective communication. There are master classes, tutorials, YouTube videos, Pinterest and blog posts — its everywhere. But, can communication be learnt? Maybe.
I have attended workshops where I’ve seen hosts holding the attention of listeners for over two hours! It’s in their voice, their energy, their story that engages you. Some say that your tone determines all. While others drum in the value of content. Even if it is fictitious and your audience knows it, they still listen you out because it’s delivered so well!!
Recently, I was listening to a podcast by Ronnie Screwvala where he was talking about his book, Dreaming With Your Eyes Open. He said that communication is effective only when your recipient has understood what you’ve conveyed. Simply getting over a talk and ticking it off your list cannot be referred to as communication. In today’s age, the toughest thing is to catch the attention of your audience because he/she always gets back to checking their phone the minute your conversation drags. So you have to be very careful to understand your audience, their needs and should not meander, unless it’s a discussion which requires a lot of moving back and forth.
Another important aspect of communication that is very crucial is grammar. Yes, you read that right. When someone speaks incorrect English, no matter how knowledgeable, their conversation is a put off. You don’t need to use big words; simple correct sentences go a long way. Again some people have a habit of repeating a word throughout a presentation..for instance, it could be 'I mean’, 'actually' or anything. Ugh! You completely switch off in such situations.
So, there’s no one rule to good communication. Each one has their own way to express-- some sing, some tell stories, some narrate incidents, some make voice modulations….anything that can reach your audience and they leave wanting to come back, is good enough. I suggest not to emulate anyone; be yourself-- you can definitely express better.
What’s your mantra for effective communication? | https://medium.com/@janakisrini/are-you-a-good-communicator-88434347f069 | [] | 2020-12-02 15:25:06.297000+00:00 | ['Communication', 'Life Lessons', 'Audience Engagement', 'Skills', '100 Days Writing'] |
Article Series: Decoding Venture Debt | #1 Scale of opportunity in India
Overview
Venture Debt has been soaking the limelight ever since the onset of the pandemic. The Venture Capital ecosystem, however, has been familiar with the term and its use for some time. The concept of ‘venture lending’ was pioneered by Silicon Valley Bank in the early 1980s. Today, SVB is a global leader in the space and has close to $100 bn in assets. Venture debt has increasingly played a pivotal role for startups in mature markets and accounts for 10–15% of the total venture capital deployed.
The Indian Opportunity
In India, venture debt is a niche in the startup ecosystem. However, it has grown rapidly over the last few years as the Indian markets move towards maturity. It accounted for a little over 2% of the total capital deployed by VCs in 2019, a leap from a mere 0.5% in 2014. To put into perspective, the total capital deployed and the dry powder available with VC in 2019 stood at $10 bn and $7 bn, respectively. The total venture debt deployed in 2019 was a little over $200 mn, a 6x increase compared to 2015. Venture debt, therefore, continues to capture a larger slice of the pie even as the pie grows bigger in size.
At Stride, we recognize the enormity of the opportunity in India. Our core philosophy is to revolutionize venture lending by partnering with market leaders and providing all-encompassing debt solutions to our portfolio companies. Our belief in this space and our philosophy has been further bolstered over the course of our journey since inception in 2019. Yet, as far as we’ve come, the journey has just begun and we are excited for what lies ahead.
To know more about us, visit https://strideventures.in/
(Source: Bain India Venture Capital Report 2020, Venture Intelligence Data) | https://medium.com/@strideventures/article-series-decoding-venture-debt-f7144cc096a6 | ['Stride Ventures'] | 2020-12-07 05:11:24.102000+00:00 | ['Venture Capital', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Funding', 'Silicon Valley'] |
10 simple things to do before you die | First of all, I’m being realistic and all of us is going to die someday, so why don’t we enjoy the lives that we got today?
Also, life is way too short to spend all your days waiting for something, you should go for it, but always remember: if you have to run after that something all the time, it means that it doesn’t want to be caught.
This is the reason why I’m writing this today, we all deserve to be happy in some way, we just have to figure out in which one.
Here we go…
1- Listen to music at midnight, I know it sounds weird but I promise you that it hits different.
2- Take some vacations but alone, you will realize things and definitely you will enjoy yourself.
3- Take a long walk along the beach, feeling the fresh air and the sound of the waves.
4- Sleep looking at the stars.
5- Get a tiny tattoo, again, sounds weird but if it’s something you love, you will love to see it on your skin too.
6- Have family nights on weekends, put your favorites pajamas on and watch your favorites tv shows with the people you love.
7- Swim in the ocean, this will absolutely worth it, down there you will feel nothing but silence, peace and happiness.
8- Do something for someone else, those little things makes us happy even when we don’t think so, it means that we care about others not only ourselves.
9- Read books on rainy days, it feels so good.
10- Do something for the environment, there are a lots of movements that you can be part of, it doesn’t have to be big, but it will make a difference, you will make a difference.
We use to care about what others are going to say all the time, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, you have your own life, your own rules and your own values. If you wanna do something, then do it anyways, people used to talk even when they don’t know the whole history, so you just do what you love, the world will just adjust and if it doesn’t do it then f#ck it all.
Finally, don’t wait to the last minute to do all the things that you enjoy, your life is going to be better with those moments on it.
clau_collado11 on Instagram. | https://medium.com/@claudiacollado11/10-simple-things-to-do-before-you-die-5e458a7fb500 | ['Clau Collado'] | 2020-11-01 22:22:25.861000+00:00 | ['Oceans', 'Advice', 'Life Lessons', 'Life Advice', 'Lifestyle'] |
How To Sing | Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash | Free Photos
Everything begins with breath.
Focused force; sound flows
to and through the top of your head
a small imaginary hole.
Push sound, soul and spirit through:
like a pregnant woman pushing
new life through her body.
Sound and breath birthing art.
Breathe, don’t forget to breathe:
deep, slow, steady. Breathe.
Everything begins with breath. | https://medium.com/geezer-speaks/how-to-sing-2dc7e871c91e | ['Darryl Willis'] | 2017-07-12 18:52:56.437000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Poetry'] |
How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing By Traffic? | Now that you have a website and joined an affiliate network, it’s the right time to start monetizing your site with affiliate marketing.
Let’s get started!
Step 1) Create Content That Generates Affiliate Revenue
In an effort to make money with affiliate marketing, most beginners simply publish some random content and insert affiliate links within the article.
That strategy may or may not work, but if you truly want to boost your affiliate revenue, you’ll need to make sure the content you publish reaches your target audience.
Your target audience is someone who wants to buy a product but not sure whether or not the product is worth it. Sometimes, the user may not even know which product to buy for fulfilling their needs.
As an affiliate marketer, it’s your job to help users discover the right product for their needs with high-quality content, help them make a purchasing decision, and then navigate them to the product website for completing the purchase.
That means your article should be targeting investigational intent keywords — the type of keywords your target audience uses on Google to research about the product they want, right before making the purchase.
For more details, you can check out our guide on choosing the right keywords.
Step 2) Promote Your Affiliate Products in the Content
Now you know what kind of content you’re going to produce: investigational. You’re looking for topics that revolve around your target audience searching for an answer to the problem they’re facing.
Once you’ve done your keyword research and have your content ideas, it’s time to start inserting affiliate links in your content.
The way that you insert your affiliate links will depend on the specific article you’re writing. It wouldn’t make sense to add affiliate links to 5 different products if you’re doing a product review.
On the other hand, if you’re showcasing the “Top 10 Tools for Solving X,” you would want to put in multiple affiliate links to increase your chances of making more sales.
The goal is to insert your links as strategically as possible.
Here are a few tips you can use to get the most out of your affiliate links’ placement: | https://medium.com/@mihanrahman2017/how-to-make-money-with-affiliate-marketing-by-traffic-ec3ac2f35eb5 | ['Jamilur Rahman'] | 2020-11-02 21:33:54.037000+00:00 | ['Afflaite Website', 'Earn Money Online', 'Affiliate Traffic', 'Earn Money', 'Affiliate Training'] |
VER!! — Hunter Hunter (HD) — VER PELICULA Completa (2020) en Español latino | VER, HD Hunter Hunter 2020 pelicula completa Pelicula Completa en Latino Castellano pelicula Completa en Latino completa HD Subtitulado Hunter Hunter 2020 pelicula completa
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Joseph y su familia viven en el desierto remoto como cazadores de pieles, pero su tranquilidad comienza a verse amenazada cuando creen que están siendo perseguidos por el regreso de un lobo rebelde y Joseph los deja atrás para rastrearlo.
Género: Horror, Thriller
Estrellas: Camille Sullivan, Summer H. Howell, Devon Sawa
Personal: Shawn Linden (Writer), Shawn Linden (Director)
Idioma: English
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THE STORY
After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 62, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 2-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him.
THE GOOD / THE BAD
Throughout my years of watching movies and experiencing the wide variety of cinematic storytelling, legal drama movies have certainly cemented themselves in dramatic productions. As I stated above, some have better longevity of being remembered, but most showcase plenty of heated courtroom battles of lawyers defending their clients and unmasking the truth behind the claims (be it wrongfully incarcerated, discovering who did it, or uncovering the shady dealings behind large corporations. Perhaps my first one legal drama was 624’s The Client (I was little young to get all the legality in the movie, but was still managed to get the gist of it all). My second one, which I loved, was probably Primal Fear, with Norton delivering my favorite character role. Of course, I did see To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the sixth grade for English class. Definitely quite a powerful film. And, of course, let’s not forget Philadelphia and want it meant / stand for. Plus, Hanks and Washington were great in the film. All in all, while not the most popular genre out there, legal drama films still provide a plethora of dramatic storytelling to capture the attention of moviegoers of truth and lies within a dubious justice.
Just Mercy is the latest legal crime drama feature and the whole purpose of this movie review. To be honest, I really didn’t much “buzz” about this movie when it was first announced (circa 206) when Broad Green Productions hired the film’s director (Cretton) and actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. It was then eventually bought by Warner Bros (the films rights) when Broad Green Productions went Bankrupt. So, I really didn’t hear much about the film until I saw the movie trailer for Just Mercy, which did prove to be quite an interesting tale. Sure, it sort of looked like the generic “legal drama” yarn (judging from the trailer alone), but I was intrigued by it, especially with the film starring Jordan as well as actor Jamie Foxx. I did repeatedly keep on seeing the trailer for the film every time I went to my local movie theater (usually attached to any movie I was seeing with a PG rating and above). So, suffice to say, that Just Mercy’s trailer preview sort of kept me invested and waiting me to see it. Thus, I finally got the chance to see the feature a couple of days ago and I’m ready to share my thoughts on the film. And what are they? Well, good ones….to say the least. While the movie does struggle within the standard framework of similar projects, Just Mercy is a solid legal drama that has plenty of fine cinematic nuances and great performances from its leads. It’s not the “be all to end all” of legal drama endeavors, but its still manages to be more of the favorable motion pictures of these projects.
Just Mercy is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous directorial works includes such movies like Short Term 6, I Am Not a Hipster, and Glass Castle. Given his past projects (consisting of shorts, documentaries, and a few theatrical motion pictures), Cretton makes Just Mercy is most ambitious endeavor, with the director getting the chance to flex his directorial muscles on a legal drama film, which (like I said above) can manage to evoke plenty of human emotions within its undertaking. Thankfully, Cretton is up to the task and never feels overwhelmed with the movie; approaching (and shaping) the film with respect and a touch of sincerity by speaking to the humanity within its characters, especially within lead characters of Stevenson and McMillian. Of course, legal dramas usually do (be the accused / defendant and his attorney) shine their cinematic lens on these respective characters, so it’s nothing original. However, Cretton does make for a compelling drama within the feature; speaking to some great character drama within its two main lead characters; staging plenty of moments of these twos individuals that ultimately work, including some of the heated courtroom sequences.
Like other recent movies (i.e. Brian Banks and The Hate U Give), Cretton makes Just Mercy have an underlining thematical message of racism and corruption that continues to play a part in the US….to this day (incredibly sad, but true). So, of course, the correlation and overall relatively between the movie’s narrative and today’s world is quite crystal-clear right from the get-go, but Cretton never gets overzealous / preachy within its context; allowing the feature to present the subject matter in a timely manner and doesn’t feel like unnecessary or intentionally a “sign of the times” motif. Additionally, the movie also highlights the frustration (almost harsh) injustice of the underprivileged face on a regular basis (most notable those looking to overturn their cases on death row due to negligence and wrongfully accused). Naturally, as somewhat expected (yet still palpable), Just Mercy is a movie about seeking the truth and uncovering corruption in the face of a broken system and ignorant prejudice, with Cretton never shying away from some of the ugly truths that Stevenson faced during the film’s story.
Plus, as a side-note, it’s quite admirable for what Bryan Stevenson (the real-life individual) did for his career, with him as well as others that have supported him (and the Equal Justice Initiative) over the years and how he fought for and freed many wrongfully incarcerated individuals that our justice system has failed (again, the poignancy behind the film’s themes / message). It’s great to see humanity being shined and showcased to seek the rights of the wronged and to dispel a flawed system. Thus, whether you like the movie or not, you simply can not deny that truly meaningful job that Bryan Stevenson is doing, which Cretton helps demonstrate in Just Mercy. From the bottom of my heart…. thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
In terms of presentation, Just Mercy is a solidly made feature film. Granted, the film probably won’t be remembered for its visual background and theatrical setting nuances or even nominated in various award categories (for presentation / visual appearance), but the film certainly looks pleasing to the eye, with the attention of background aspects appropriate to the movie’s story. Thus, all the usual areas that I mention in this section (i.e. production design, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography) are all good and meet the industry standard for legal drama motion pictures. That being said, the film’s score, which was done by Joel P. West, is quite good and deliver some emotionally drama pieces in a subtle way that harmonizes with many of the feature’s scenes.
There are a few problems that I noticed with Just Mercy that, while not completely derailing, just seem to hold the feature back from reaching its full creative cinematic potential. Let’s start with the most prevalent point of criticism (the one that many will criticize about), which is the overall conventional storytelling of the movie. What do I mean? Well, despite the strong case that the film delves into a “based on a true story” aspect and into some pretty wholesome emotional drama, the movie is still structed into a way that it makes it feel vaguely formulaic to the touch. That’s not to say that Just Mercy is a generic tale to be told as the film’s narrative is still quite engaging (with some great acting), but the story being told follows quite a predictable path from start to finish. Granted, I never really read Stevenson’s memoir nor read anything about McMillian’s case, but then I still could easily figure out how the movie was presumably gonna end…. even if the there were narrative problems / setbacks along the way. Basically, if you’ve seeing any legal drama endeavor out there, you’ll get that same formulaic touch with this movie. I kind of wanted see something a little bit different from the film’s structure, but the movie just ends up following the standard narrative beats (and progressions) of the genre. That being said, I still think that this movie is definitely probably one of the better legal dramas out there.
This also applies to the film’s script, which was penned by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, which does give plenty of solid entertainment narrative pieces throughout, but lacks the finesse of breaking the mold of the standard legal drama. There are also a couple parts of the movie’s script handling where you can tell that what was true and what fictional. Of course, this is somewhat a customary point of criticism with cinematic tales taking a certain “poetic license” when adapting a “based on a true story” narrative, so it’s not super heavily critical point with me as I expect this to happen. However, there were a few times I could certainly tell what actually happen and what was a tad bit fabricated for the movie. Plus, they were certain parts of the narrative that could’ve easily fleshed out, including what Morrison’s parents felt (and actually show them) during this whole process. Again, not a big deal-breaker, but it did take me out of the movie a few times. Lastly, the film’s script also focuses its light on a supporting character in the movie and, while this made with well-intention to flesh out the character, the camera spotlight on this character sort of goes off on a slight tangent during the feature’s second act. Basically, this storyline could’ve been removed from Just Mercy and still achieve the same palpability in the emotional department. It’s almost like the movie needed to chew up some runtime and the writers to decided to fill up the time with this side-story. Again, it’s good, but a bit slightly unnecessary.
What does help overlook (and elevate) some of these criticisms is the film’s cast, which are really good and definitely helps bring these various characters to life in a theatrical /dramatic way. Leading the charge in Just Mercy is actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s central protagonist role of Bryan Stevenson. Known for his roles in Creed, Fruitvale Station, and Black Panther, Jordan has certain prove himself to be quite a capable actor, with the actor rising to stardom over the past few years. This is most apparent in this movie, with Jordan making a strong characteristically portrayal as Bryan; showcasing plenty of underlining determination and compelling humanity in his character as he (as Bryan Stevenson) fights for the injustice of those who’s voices have been silenced or dismissed because of the circumstances. It’s definitely a strong character built and Jordan seems quite capable to task in creating a well-acted on-screen performance of Bryan. Behind Jordan is actor Jamie Foxx, who plays the other main lead in the role, Walter McMillian. Foxx, known for his roles in Baby Driver, Django Unchained, and Ray, has certainly been recognized as a talented actor, with plenty of credible roles under his belt. His participation in Just Mercy is another well-acted performance that deserve much praise as its getting (even receiving an Oscar nod for it), with Foxx portraying Walter with enough remorseful grit and humility that makes the character quite compelling to watch. Plus, seeing him and Jordan together in a scene is quite palpable and a joy to watch.
The last of the three marquee main leads of the movie is the character of Eva Ansley, the director of operations for EJI (i.e. Stevenson’s right-handed employee / business partner), who is played by actress Brie Larson. Up against the characters of Stevenson and McMillian, Ansley is the weaker of the three main lead; presented as supporting player in the movie, which is perfectly fine as the characters gets the job done (sort of speak) throughout the film’s narrative. However, Larson, known for her roles in Room, 6 Jump Street, and Captain Marvel, makes less of an impact in the role. Her acting is fine and everything works in her portrayal of Eva, but nothing really stands in her performance (again, considering Jordan and Foxx’s performances) and really could’ve been played by another actress and achieved the same goal.
The rest of the cast, including actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk and O Brother, Where Art Thou) as incarcerated inmate Ralph Meyers, actor Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Big Short) as legal attorney Tommy Champan, actress Karan Kendrick (The Hate U Give and Family) as Minnie McMillan, Walter’s wife, actor C.J. LeBlanc (Arsenal and School Spirts) as Walter’s son, John McMillian, actor Rob Morgan (Stranger Things and Mudbound) as death role inmate Herbert Richardson, actor O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Long Shot and Straight Outta Compton) as death role inmate Anthony “Ray” Hinton, actor Michael Harding (Triple 2 and The Young and the Restless) as Sheriff Tate, and actor Hayes Mercure (The Red Road and Mercy Street) as a prison guard named Jeremy, are in the small supporting cast variety. Of course, some have bigger roles than others, but all of these players, which are all acted well, bolster the film’s story within the performances and involvement in Just Mercy’s narrative.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s never too late to fight for justice as Bryan Stevenson fights for the injustice of Walter McMillian’s cast against a legal system that is flawed in the movie Just Mercy. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s latest film takes a stance on a poignant case; demonstrating the injustice of one (and by extension those wrongfully incarcerated) and wrapping it up in a compelling cinematic story. While the movie does struggle within its standard structure framework (a sort of usual problem with “based on a true story” narrations) as well as some formulaic beats, the movie still manages to rise above those challenges (for the most part), especially thanks to Cretton’s direction (shaping and storytelling) and some great performances all around (most notable in Jordan and Foxx). Personally, I liked this movie. Sure, it definitely had its problem, but those didn’t distract me much from thoroughly enjoying this legal drama feature. Thus, my recommendation for the film is a solid “recommended”, especially those who liked the cast and poignant narratives of legality struggles and the injustice of a failed system / racism. In the end, while the movie isn’t the quintessential legal drama motion picture and doesn’t push the envelope in cinematic innovation, Just Mercy still is able to manage to be a compelling drama that’s powerful in its story, meaningful in its journey, and strong within its statement. Just like Bryan Stevenson says in the movie….” If we could look at ourselves closely…. we can change this world for the better”. Amen to that! | https://medium.com/@tjhon-71016/ver-hunter-hunter-hd-ver-p-e-l-i-c-u-l-a-completa-2020-en-espa%C3%B1ol-latino-1a2b8b859daf | [] | 2020-12-22 04:54:08.296000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Thriller', 'Horror'] |
웁살라시큐리티, 빗썸에 자사 대표 솔루션 TRDB/CARA 구축 | Together we can overcome the disadvantages of decentralization by transforming them into an advantage for security.
Follow | https://medium.com/sentinel-protocol/%EC%9B%81%EC%82%B4%EB%9D%BC%EC%8B%9C%ED%81%90%EB%A6%AC%ED%8B%B0-%EB%B9%97%EC%8D%B8%EC%97%90-%EC%9E%90%EC%82%AC-%EB%8C%80%ED%91%9C-%EC%86%94%EB%A3%A8%EC%85%98-trdb-cara-%EA%B5%AC%EC%B6%95-bb7075aad43b | ['Sentinel Protocol Team'] | 2020-09-08 07:05:44.227000+00:00 | ['Bithumb', 'Money Laundering', 'Cybersecurity', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Bürolandschaft: Shaping of New age offices | Office spaces reflect how we work, but in the era of the digital workplace, how will where we work adapt to how we work?
Watching a series like Mad Men gives you a great insight into the changing office spaces of the 20th century. As the typing pools and closed offices of series one makes way for a more open working space as the show enters the Sixties, the viewer is given subtle references to the evolution of working space after the post-war boom.
And it continues to evolve. The 1990s saw cubicles being introduced to block out the noise and increase concentrations levels that were being lost in wide open spaces. However, these working boxes soon became synonymous with a loss of identity, lack of sunlight, a drop in contact, and communication.
The changes in space reflect how we work — but how we work is affected by technology. Digital technology and flexible working have meant that the places we go to work have had to adapt accordingly. New developments have impacted not just how we work, but where we work. In the past decade, the creation of the digital workplace has meant that the current working population has found themselves in a flux of new apps, tools, and ways of working. The digital workplace is in its infancy, and there is still some confusion as to what it actually means.
In the ensuing babble to define what this term stands for, the little-known but relatively archaic term “Bürolandschaft” will be one of the leading proponents that will drive the digital workplace.
Its feature in a prominent paper prompted a scratching of heads across the internet. What was Bürolandschaft? And how does it relate to the digital workplace?
What is Bürolandschaft?
Office space in the 1940s and 1950s Europe and the US operated around closed doors and bullpen offices. However, the fast rate of growth in post-war Germany paired with a desire to move on from the first half of the twentieth century allowed the country to open up to a fresh way of thinking.
A consulting group that was created in 1958 by brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle focused on office planning and looked to change the current status quo. Their idea was to remove the uniform rows of desks and introduce a plan that was more organic and natural. In turn, they created an approach called Bürolandschaft, which translates as ‘office landscape.’
With the Schnelle brothers’ Bürolandschaft, managers were pulled out of offices and onto to the main floor, areas were separated by plants and temporary screens were put up to reflect the needs of teams and communication.
Office landscape plan
This reorganization was also designed to help demolish strict workplace cultures and protocols that were inherent in the old office layouts.
The modification of workspace continued with the work of Robert Propst, a designer of office furniture which espoused the philosophies of Bürolandschaft. Propst’s desire for egalitarian workspaces with a focus on ‘human-ness’ was put together in his 1968 treatise ‘A Facility Based on Change’.
However, the pull of management structure, with its command and control linearity, meant that the concepts of Bürolandschaft were abandoned for the systematic desk rows that still exist in many modern offices.
The resurrection of Bürolandschaft
And with Bürolandschaft dead and buried, workspaces have continued to change. The 21st century has spawned the digital workplace which is now compromising the role of a bricks-and-mortar office space. With so many tools available to aid work at home or remotely, there is less focus on commuting to a building to work. The future will see how we can recreate a productive, flexible working environment anywhere.
Bürolandschaft in the 21st century
The Gartner resurrection of Bürolandschaft is striking. The Schnelle brothers’ original concept was born out of a new wave of thinking, in a reshaped world fresh from the brutalities of World War II.
Social schemes and new industries were created across Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. The founding of the European Common Market, the Wirtschaftwunder of the German economy and the forming of NATO were all setting the scene for the inclusive and collaborative nature of Bürolandschaft which focused on breaking down figurative and literal barriers and encouraging flexibility.
It is these principles that make it an essential part of the digital workplace now. Just as Eberhard and Wolfgang were looking for new ways of working in post-war Europe, so the 21st-century office is seeing how the balance of technology and the physical environment will play out.
Gartner describes the reworking of the concept as follows:
“Bürolandschaft highlights the role of the physical office in the digital workplace. Office space configuration is important, especially when supporting a mobile workforce. Interior Designers will need to work with the facilities department to enact change. This can also mean developing more “smart” workspaces, leveraging the Internet of Things.”
What Bürolandschaft means in the digital workplace
So how can we implement the philosophy of Bürolandschaft into the digital workplace? While Gartner describes the use of smart buildings and offices, it will take some time, and significant investment, before this becomes a viable reality.
Despite this, Bürolandschaft still has impacts on our day-to-day working lives.
1. Virtual proximity
The digital workplace encourages working from anywhere. By this very fact, the digital workplace has to enable a culture of collaboration regardless of location. Virtual proximity means you can communicate and collaborate with colleagues halfway across the world, across time zones and languages via a combination of broadcasts, video conferencing and instant messaging services.
2. Access to information
Equality is a huge part of Bürolandschaft — the idea that hierarchical structures should be put to one side in order for everyone to be treated equally. Eberhard and Wolfgang originally meant the equal use of car parking space, restrooms and eating areas. But in the digital workplace, it refers to the equal access to information, allowing people to use it and share it at will.
To do this, you need to ease the flow of information by breaking down silos and providing an effective way of hosting and sharing information.
3. ‘Bürolandschaft’ your office to your workers’ needs
Open plan workspaces and cubicles both have their pros and cons, which highlights just how much office workers need different settings at different parts of the day. While some people enjoy the hustle and bustle of large banks of desks, others enjoy the solitude of one-person bays. Different tasks crop up throughout the day that demands different settings. Make sure your work reflects this and allows for quiet Skype calls, group collaboration and confidential chats to happen under one roof at the same time.
Whether it’s communicating, collaborating or finding the best settings for your job, the digital workplace represents a new way of doing things. As it grows and develops, technology is absorbing some of the characteristics of the physical environment. And just as the office is simultaneously being physically shrunk down but expanding the number of services it can provide digitally, the modern intranet is morphing into the app where the user chooses all that he or she wants from a menu of options. Whether it’s Skyping someone in a different continent, translating research for a team in another country or championing a remote worker to help on a project in another department, the Bürolandschaft of the digital workplace means that it can be accessible through internet from anywhere. | https://vinitamathur.medium.com/b%C3%BCrolandschaft-shaping-of-new-age-offices-b8f9401efc92 | ['Vinita Mathur'] | 2020-03-31 18:09:50.608000+00:00 | ['Office Design', 'Dezyne Ecole College', 'Ajmer', 'Commercial Interior', 'Premier'] |
AYS Daily Digest 9/12/20: Officials intimidated NGOs, preventing legal assistance to people brought into a deserted factory by the police | AYS Daily Digest 9/12/20: Officials intimidated NGOs, preventing legal assistance to people brought into a deserted factory by the police
Serbia in crisis of accommodation and reception, most of all — of political will / Bosnia and Herzegovina in the midst of humanitarian crisis, brought by both the local politics and international actors / AYS Free Shop needs donations / Across France people in need of emergency accommodation / Serious development of the situation on the Canary Islands / & more news Are You Syrious? Follow Dec 10, 2020 · 12 min read
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Serbia — In a country where all centres intended to lodge people on the move are over capacity and conditions are nowhere near what might be fit to house people, where a dire need for more accommodation has brought the organisations working with people on the move to status quo, and where everything is in such state that it begs for a change in order to move things forward, officials are often not the address to turn to in order to solve the problem, but rather they are its root cause. In one of the most recent events, members of Klikaktiv — Centar za razvoj socijalnih politika documented one of many mistreatments by the police and very avid proof of the lack of basic knowledge of the law, obligations and rights, particularly human rights, that all headlines will be full of on 10 December. They write:
“During yesterday’s visit to Majdan, a place on the border triangle of Serbia, Romania and Hungary, our team was hindered in carrying out activities providing legal support. People are mostly found in abandoned houses at Majdan, but recently they have also been placed in a former milk factory where the police take them so that they do not stay in abandoned houses in the village.”
There are around 50 people in the village, while there are 90 in the factory, with no electricity, drinking water, they receive no blankets, sleeping bags or tents, or any other humanitarian aid. Also, they do not have access to medical and legal assistance, which they urgently need.
The police patrol, which is now constantly in the village, told us, after they checked our identities and ID cards, that they have an order from their police station to tell us that we are not allowed to carry out our activities independently, but that we should first contact the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration of Serbia (CRMS) and to carry out activities together with them only in camps that are run by CRMS. We emphasize that the Law on Asylum stipulates that legal aid is provided exclusively by non-governmental organizations, while CRMS is given the authority only to provide material conditions for reception, they state, continuing to state that this was not the first such event in Majdan:
A month ago, the police also checked our ID cards in Majdan, but then the police officer, after consultations with the Kikinda PS, said “he recommends that we first contact CRMS and carry out our activity in refugee camps together with them later on.” A police officer was much more careful in giving a statement at that time, telling us that he “recommended” this to us, which is the only thing he can do, considering that neither then, just like yesterday, we did not break any law. Of course, we continued our work back then, but yesterday, regardless of the fact that the police officers behaved correctly while interacting with us, after our lawyer explained that, according to the Law on Asylum and the Law on Providing Free Legal Support, we have the right to continue with our activities, the policeman who received the order from his superiors only said that he knows nothing about the laws, but he was just told to pass this warning to us. After this incident with the police, it was impossible for us to establish normal contact with the refugees because they were scared of the police presence the whole time, since the police officers followed every step we made. When we went to the “Factory” a little later, which is located outside the village, an employee of the Commissariat for Refugees arrived again, ten minutes after we did, and soon after him came an intervention unit of the police. After that, we left because we were worried that if we insist on continuing our work it might create further problems for the refugees with the police.”
Police officers on the ground, regardless of their correctness in conversation with us, showed that they have no knowledge of the law and with their rhetoric created almost impossible working conditions for us. This is a clear example of criminalization (even if it was involuntary and caused by ignorance) of humanitarian work, but we as an organization will not give up and will continue to provide legal and psychosocial support to all refugees who are on the territory of Serbia.
As a reminder of the situation in Serbia, we recommend reading what our friends at the Asylum Protection Centre in Belgrade had to say about the asylum system in Serbia: | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-9-12-20-officials-intimidated-ngos-preventing-legal-assistance-to-people-a48739b61b31 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2020-12-10 20:00:08.950000+00:00 | ['Refugees', 'Migration', 'Digest', 'Greece', 'Serbia'] |
Sounds of Genocide: Recording Rohingya Musicians | Formin, who fled Myanmar in 2017, sings on a rooftop in southern Bangladesh. Sasha Ingber (seated right) and Alex Ebsary ( left) recorded her in October with a small, local team. Credit: Pragna Chakma / Music in Exile
By Sasha Ingber of Music in Exile in cooperation with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
I have often wondered what genocide sounds like.
That’s because I have spent weeks at a time making musical recordings with people who have fled violence and persecution. In the fall of 2018, that work took me to a coastal city in southern Bangladesh, now home to one million Rohingya who used to live in Burma (Myanmar). In August 2017, Burmese security forces cracked down on this Muslim minority, killing and raping people before setting fire to their villages.
Mohammed Alom, 25, was the last musician my small team recorded on the trip.
Mohammed Alom plays his mandolin. Credit: Music in Exile
He sat on a stool, his longyi — a scarf-like skirt traditional to the region — hanging below his folded legs. He was too nervous to smile at first, and he started to pluck his mandolin. His eyes flicked from tree to tree near the fishpond where we had set up cameras and microphones.
Then he sang in a voice that was scratchy and warm:
We are the Rohingya nation,
bad luck.
We’ve been orphans for a lifetime.
If our Rohingya community had parents,
we wouldn’t have to leave the country.
We are here, Rohingya nation: mother, father, brothers, sisters.
We don’t have a place in Burma.
Alom made the song in 2012, five years before security forces drove the Rohingya Muslims out of their villages. Like most of the musicians we met on the trip, he sang taranas — poetic verses that recount trauma, history, and feelings about an ambivalent future.
He played the song from memory but forgot a few words. Like so many other Rohingya, he didn’t write down his lyrics because he had never learned to read or write.
The lack of education isn’t surprising, nor is it unintentional. Perpetrators of genocide often seek to dehumanize their victims before the violence starts. One tactic is to deny a community’s basic human rights, including education. Years before Nazi Germany began to systematically murder Europe’s Jews, the German government passed a law that limited the number of Jewish students who could attend public schools.
The restriction of access to education is now recognized as a warning sign of genocide, and it’s often accompanied by constraints of movement, the stripping of citizenship, and rampant hate speech. Together, these serve to reinforce a group’s supposed barbarity — and can eventually enable average citizens to participate in, or become apathetic to, heinous crimes committed against neighbors.
Music can help counteract that process. When a state tries to eradicate an entire people, music can help preserve their culture and identity. Or, as another Rohingya musician told me, “in the lyrics, the history comes.”
In Burma, Alom could see that he had no opportunity, he said. So he traveled by boat to Malaysia. It was a harrowing journey in which passengers ate just one meal a day: a handful of rice, a chili, a small fish, and one cup of water.
He learned how to play the guitar from a fellow Rohingya transplant in Kuala Lumpur. He also worked in construction and supported his family by sending them a portion of his paycheck. His parents were forced to pay the Burmese military a monthly tax because Alom went abroad, he said.
In 2017, Malaysia authorities discovered that he was there illegally and deported him to Bangladesh, where his parents had fled after the military’s attack. “We want to go anywhere where there is peace,” Alom said in between singing songs.
If we had peace in the country,
we wouldn’t have come to this foreign country.
Wouldn’t have brought mother, father, brothers, sisters, relatives
to this country.
We, Rohingya nation, didn’t have any choice.
We are the Rohingya nation.
Listen to a recording of Alom’s song.
There is always a moment on the recording trips that leads me to thoughts of my own displaced family. In the 1920s, my Jewish grandfather, Leo Oberman, dreamed of being an opera singer in Europe. But instead of singing on a grand stage, he sang in a train car that deported him and other Jews to a concentration camp.
After the war, survivors told him that his voice brought them a little bit of comfort.
And when I was a child in the 1990s, he used to let me play his fingertips like piano keys. I still remember the words to the Yiddish song he used to sing to me at night, before I fell asleep.
These days, as I look back on my work, I think I have learned what genocide sounds like. First comes a crescendo of hateful words that breed intolerance and dehumanization. Next come the bullets, fire, and mayhem. Often what follows is a deafening silence from countries that do nothing to stop the atrocities.
But sometimes if you listen closely, there is another verse. It’s the sound of survivors, clamoring for justice and recognition as they try to rebuild their lives. I have heard them make beautiful music in exile.
Sasha Ingber is a NPR reporter who co-founded the nonprofit organization Music in Exile in 2016. She records the music and stories of people who have been displaced with co-founder and partner Alex Ebsary. This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. | https://us-holocaust-museum.medium.com/sounds-of-genocide-recording-rohingya-musicians-21b26c28cdb7 | ['Us Holocaust Museum'] | 2019-02-04 14:43:52.065000+00:00 | ['Burma', 'Genocide', 'Music', 'Myanmar'] |
The Giant New Trade Deal You May Not Have Even Heard About | This illustration is from a report by the biggest TV network in Japan. You don’t need to read Japanese in order to understand it.
The Giant New Trade Deal You May Not Have Even Heard About
A new free trade partnership, signed earlier this week, called the “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership”, is the first ever that includes China, Japan, and South Korea. Australia, New Zealand, and nearly a dozen countries in Southeast Asia are also signed on. It’ll cover about 30% of the world’s population and economic value.
One of the biggest sticking points? Whether India would be part of it. It isn’t. Japan, and some of the other countries involved advocated long and hard for India’s inclusion, as a balance to China’s obvious increase in influence that would result from this deal. India was reluctant because of concerns the deal would hurt its domestic industries, especially since it’s a net importer of goods right now. So in short, China won.
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https://kleinoot.nl/yry/video-renate-v-pistoiese-v-it-it-1xmi2-11.php
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http://mix.gruposio.es/osu/Video-gubbio-v-padova-v-it-it-1jfb-19.php
http://esc.vidrio.org/sqw/Video-novara-v-pro-patria-v-it-it-1xnv-19.php
https://test2.activesilicon.com/rta/videos-strasbourg-v-bordeaux-v-fr-fr-1sam-11.php
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http://esc.vidrio.org/sqw/video-novara-v-pro-patria-v-it-it-1qbk-10.php
http://mix.gruposio.es/osu/videos-gubbio-v-padova-v-it-it-1lid2-8.php
https://kleinoot.nl/yry/video-renate-v-pistoiese-v-it-it-1rvh-2.php
http://mix.gruposio.es/osu/video-Vendsyssel-FF-Fremad-Amager-v-en-gb-1pcx-.php
https://kleinoot.nl/yry/video-renate-v-pistoiese-v-it-it-1zhf2-17.php
You’ll remember one of the first things Trump did when taking office was kill the U.S. involvement in the Trans Pacific Partnership. That multi-nation trade deal’s sole purpose was to exclude China and reduce its current and future economic dominance of the region, while increasing the influence of the U.S. It was a flawed deal, and could’ve led to a bigger suck of jobs away from the U.S., so Trump may have been right about being reluctant to participate in that part of it. Bernie Sanders hated it too.
At the same time, other countries in the region are also concerned about China’s outsize influence, and also China’s reputation for doing things like stealing intellectual property, and setting up domestic companies to compete with international partnerships, and then getting rid of the international partnership. So those other countries were more than willing to shift a lot of trade and economic development to the U.S. and its companies, because the U.S. is — or was — seen in the region as being more reliable, and on the up-and-up business-wise.
We always argue that Trump should’ve tried to renegotiate the finer points of TPP, instead of adopting his trademark unilateral approach of doing little one-on-one deals with individual countries instead of big ones involving many at once. There probably was some give there, since as we said, countries in Asia really would’ve preferred to enter into a long term deal with the U.S. than with China.
And we also always argue that one of the biggest flaws of the Trans Pacific Partnership may have been its clunky name. Had it been called the “Screw China Deal”, or something less crude but with the same message, we can see Trump, maybe, having been convinced to be on board.
The U.S. isn’t totally shut out of the region, and Trump did have some success carving out unilateral deals. He was able to cut a very good deal for the U.S. with South Korea, partly because South Korea wanted to support his efforts dealing with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, which eventually went nowhere. But South Korea will do a lot to promote almost anything that might lead to movement in its aspirations for a unified Korean Peninsula.
Trump saw opportunity there too. We really do think from the perspective of “what’s in it for me”, which is always the way Trump assesses everything, he really did believe Kim Jong-un would be willing to give up his nukes in exchange for a bright economic future, because why wouldn’t he?
Anyway, now South Korea’s part of the new pact with China.
Trump also reached a partial agreement with China, mostly focused on physical trade. Because he wanted stuff that could be seen: soybeans loaded on to ships, etc. So he could point to it and be celebrated for it. Even so, he didn’t even come close to significantly closing the trade gap with China. And he did nothing about the biggest problem for U.S. companies doing business in China: theft of intellectual property. That’s harder to see, to show people improvement on, because you can’t really show people data and software; it’s kind of invisible. So the glory Trump might’ve brought to himself by accomplishing that would’ve been less easy to illustrate and visualize. It’s also a much knottier problem with which to deal. Because, for the reasons we just laid out, it’s much harder to build verification measures dealing with software than with soybeans, for instance. So he de-emphasized the piece of it that should’ve been the central piece of any trade deal with China from the beginning.
And on any broader regional deal, Trump’s said no. The TPP went ahead without the U.S., but with limited impact because U.S. involvement was kind of the whole point. And that deal will probably be eclipsed in terms of volume by the latest deal because China has the power to make it so.
Under the RCEP, as it’s more familiarly known (also a terrible name!), countries are still able to protect some domestic industries. For instance, Japan will be able to protect its rice farmers and beef producers by keeping import tariffs high. But it will lower import tariffs on other products such as octopus and soy beans.
There are provisions in the deal aimed at protecting China from stealing intellectual property. Mainly by getting China to agree not to install servers in Japan and other countries, and not to require companies participating in the trade deal to provide proprietary operating information, which China generally does require as a condition of any deal to do business inside China.
Of course it’s always harder to prove someone’s not doing something than they are. So this is going to be a real test of whether you can do a deal with China where it truly does back away from some of the more questionable business practices that were crucial to getting it to where it is. | https://medium.com/@ksyntax_error93f/this-illustration-is-from-a-report-by-the-biggest-tv-network-in-japan-96f838af9cc8 | ['Ksyntax Errorf'] | 2020-12-20 09:41:48.224000+00:00 | ['Babies', 'Health', 'Humor', 'Life', 'Coronavirus'] |
Accidental Homeschooling: Weeks 12 and 13 | Accidental Homeschooling: Weeks 12 and 13
Turns out I still love a good workbook
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
We had a quiet Thanksgiving at home, and it was awesome. I missed seeing our extended family, and so did the kids, but we talked to both of the grandmothers on the phone, and you know what? I thought it was nicer than seeing them in person. Often, when we and everybody else are at our respective homes, I find all our time is taken up serving lunch and cleaning up after lunch, and then we repeat the show at dinnertime. I actually didn’t miss that routine. Doing dishes for more than 15 people at time blows.
So we had a lovely three-day week, and then, for Week 13, it was right back at it Monday morning.
We did not have a good Monday.
But: I’m learning to let it go. I have good and bad days in every other aspect of my life, why would homeschooling be any different? So I’m learning to accept that some days are stinkers, and there is nothing to do on stinker days but to try and get through them as best you can.
And then, after my stinker day, the cavalry arrived: New workbooks!
That’s right, my friends, I gave in and bought several new workbooks from the awesome Rainbow Resource Center online store. This was the week I decided to break several of them out.
Let me just say, I had forgotten how much I love a good workbook. I’ve always been both task-oriented and super lazy, so worksheets and workbooks make me very happy. They offer very specific tasks (and ones I used to be very good at, like filling in sentences and drawing lines to matching items and plugging numbers into multiplication times tables) and clarity about when you’re done with work: when the worksheet is done, you’re done. SUPER.
So we started a new math workbook with the first grader, and it turns out (at least it has so far; I know it’s still early days) that he also enjoys a good workbook. I’ve set him free to do however many worksheets he wants during math time, and, God love him, he sometimes did more than I suggested. And seemed content to be doing so. Ah, first grade math, addition and subtraction we can all still mostly understand, happy days.
I also gave my elder son a new book about all the states in America (complete with fun facts), and tried to set him free on his “states project.” We’ve been ordering free tourism information from multiple states, and also getting books out of the library, and the idea is that he’ll make a binder with information about all fifty states as his year-long Social Studies project.
Let’s just say that little idea is not working out as well as the math workbook. But, you have to try.
We also got a new Language Arts workbook for the first grader, because, even though I believe most reading and writing skills develop naturally as you read (which is one of the reasons you should read a lot), I thought, why not? It’s a workbook! It’ll give us a structure! It’ll give us practice worksheets that we can practice with and then be done! So I asked the fourth-grader to look at the book with us. And this is what he said:
“I already know our language — I’m using it to speak to you RIGHT NOW!”
We ended that debate when I asked him what a noun was (the first lesson in the workbook) and he got it wrong. To my great surprise, after that, he actually sat down and went through the lesson with us quite peacefully.
And that’s the moment I’m going to focus on when I think back on this week, not Stinker Monday. | https://medium.com/an-idea/accidental-homeschooling-weeks-12-and-13-36eecf3102f | ['Sarah Cords'] | 2020-12-05 05:24:25.531000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Homeschooling', 'Education', 'Family', 'Life'] |
20 Funny Programming Fact and Quotes | 1. Java is to Javascript like car is to carpet
I love this one because it summarizes the Java vs. JavaScript story perfectly. Most of you know that Java and Javascript are two entirely different things, despite their names, but many beginners get confused by it.
So why are they named this way?
From an interview with its creator Brendan Eich:
InfoWorld: As I understand it, JavaScript started out as Mocha, then became LiveScript and then became JavaScript when Netscape and Sun got together. But it actually has nothing to do with Java or not much to do with it, correct? Eich: That’s right. It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to make it a complementary scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language.
So the JavaScript name is the result of a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun, in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun’s Java runtime with their then-dominant browser. At the time, Java applets allowed you to distribute applications efficiently. It was not a bad idea. In fact, it was quite progressive for the time — it would make software distribution a lot easier. Unfortunately, Java was heavy to load and felt a bit clunky at the time.
JavaScript was meant to be a lightweight language that could be mixed with HTML, to make simple HTML pages more interactive and compelling without requiring the heavy Java alternative. Nobody at the time would have predicted that JavaScript would evolve into the most used language in the world. | https://medium.com/tech-explained/20-funny-programming-quotes-and-facts-6aa7138bd971 | ['Erik Van Baaren'] | 2020-05-03 07:15:11.822000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Humor', 'Software Development', 'Funny', 'Productivity'] |
Tales from the Crypt episode review — 2.10 — The Ventriloquist’s Dummy | Original air date: June 5, 1990
Director: Richard Donner
Writer: Frank Darabont
Rating: 9/10
Ventriloquist dummies make for some great horror shorts. That’s kind of all they’re good for. It’s always funny when people react to them in said horror shorts like they’re the funniest acts in the world.
We are introduced to Mr. Ingels (Don Rickles), a ventriloquist, who kills it in the opening act. He even has a young fan, Billy, who wants to be a ventriloquist.
Fifteen years later, Billy is played by Bobcath Goldthwait, who tracks down his old idol. He brings his dummy along with him. Mr. Ingles, now retired, reluctantly lets Billy in.
Mr. Ingels wears an oven mitt on his ventriloquist hand, since the fire that occurred right after the opening scene, which killed his girlfriend. Billy invites him to his first ever show.
Billy’s show is a disaster from the start, and Ingels does show up to see it. Billy talks to him afterwards, and while he’s sympathetic, he still tells Billy he should find a new line of work.
After Billy leaves, Mr. Ingels goes to see a prostitute, and that same prostitute is found murdered in her car. Billy rushes to Ingels’s house and accuses him of the murder, but Ingels insists that it wasn’t him, but his puppet.
Billy pulls out the box of the puppet and finds that there is no head to it. Mr. Ingels attacks him with a butcher knife and reveals that his puppet is is Siamese twin brother.
It’s a genuinely surprising twist, and it’s darkly humorous, of course. When his brother tries to convince him to kill Billy, Mr. Ingels cuts him off. The brother then attacks and kills Mr. Ingels.
The scene with Billy going after the puppet is a bit much, though I do like the overall conclusion.
It’s a really interesting episode. Rickles is outstanding, and the makeup effects on his twin brother are pretty great, as well. | https://medium.com/as-vast-as-space-and-as-timeless-as-infinity/tales-from-the-crypt-episode-review-2-10-the-ventriloquists-dummy-77f949d4bc74 | ['Patrick J Mullen'] | 2019-05-06 13:06:00.931000+00:00 | ['Tv Reviews', 'Horror', 'TV', 'Comedy', 'Tales From The Crypt'] |
Black Urbanists Are Leading the Fight for More Inclusive Cities | Understanding history to plan for the future
If you’re an urban planner or want to be an advocate for your city, you have to look back at history. “No matter where you live, there are policies that were enacted for reasons that were blatantly racist,” says Jeffers.
Highways, Butler points out, are one of the biggest culprits in racism and segregation. As cars became more popular in the 1950s, highway construction took off. In most U.S. cities, they were designed to cut through thriving Black neighborhoods, displacing thousands of people. Butler explains, “The highway system is a master class in white supremacy, segregation, and the way that white folks in power convinced so many people they were doing something for the common good.”
The impact of these policies isn’t in the past. Today, communities are reckoning with the racism embedded in the built environment, and looking for ways to rebuild equitably. One example is I-81, an elevated highway in Syracuse, New York that displaced a Black neighborhood when it was built in the 1960s. It’s slated to be torn down or rebuilt in 2022, and the city is studying how to address past injustices in the new plan.
As important as it is to understand the history of our cities and the racist policies that shaped them, it’s just as important, Jeffers says, to “be excited about how reforming them for the future can add more people and bring up the prosperity of everyone in the area you live in.”
She points to Tysons Corner, the largest shopping center in the D.C. area, as an example. “It’s being retrofitted into a place where people can get to transportation more easily, and the assumption that if people aren’t driving there, they’re taking trains or buses.” Becoming a major metro stop has opened up access to the shops and businesses to more people. | https://medium.com/waze/black-urbanists-are-leading-the-fight-for-more-inclusive-cities-db806104cb71 | [] | 2021-03-15 13:32:37.495000+00:00 | ['Mobility', 'Waze', 'Urban Planning', 'Racial Justice', 'Technology'] |
Iconic Converse, Sneakers For NBA YoungBoy Fans | One cannot simply be ready to go anywhere without wearing a pair of shoes. Shoes embark on a different style statement for each outfit. We wear a different and unique set of shoes for each occasion be it a wedding function, a birthday party, or an event like the NBA Youngboy concert.
Your choice of pair of shoes says a lot about your personality and persona as a whole. You can rock any outfit and feel confident about your look by selecting the right pair of shoes.
These nba shoes are specially designed for his fans as he has a large number of fan following and people loves to wear everything related to their inspiration. You may choose from different categories of shoes designed to fit our exact needs. When going on a trip, one may opt to carry sneakers or mountain climbers that grips all the rough and tough surfaces, letting you enjoy your journey to the fullest. There comes a wide range of sneakers that are meant to be worn on journeys like these. Some line of apparels has also introduced water-resistant shoes which can be worn in areas of knee-length snow. | https://medium.com/@ianbower55/iconic-converse-sneakers-for-nba-youngboy-fans-36dcc53128b2 | ['Ian Bower'] | 2020-12-26 14:09:41.446000+00:00 | ['Fashion', 'Street Style Fashion', 'Shoes For Men', 'Shoes For Women', 'Nba Youngboy'] |
Onward to 2021: A Review of Arcadier’s Online Marketplace Business and New Partnerships in 2020 | Happy Holidays and a Wonderful 2021 Ahead!
We hope that you and your families are keeping safe and are in good health.
As the year comes to a close, we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your unwavering support and trust in us. We are extremely grateful.
Despite disruption from the pandemic, we at Arcadier have remained committed to service quality. Here are some of our key highlights from 2020.
Business Highlights:
Communities & Technology Highlights:
These are but a few key highlights from our year. We look forward to a more promising, positive and safer year ahead for everyone.
Here’s wishing you Happy Holidays and an amazing year ahead filled with love, peace, success and good health for you and your loved ones.
Warmest wishes from our family to yours.
From:
Dinuke, Paul, Ken, Gary, June, Jiunn & the Arcadier Family
To learn more about Arcadier, visit: arcadier.com | https://medium.com/@arcadier/onward-to-2021-a-review-of-arcadiers-online-marketplace-business-and-new-partnerships-in-2020-b30a7ec2c12c | ['Arcadier Marketplaces'] | 2020-12-28 09:52:47.262000+00:00 | ['Partnerships', 'Christmas', 'Holidays', 'Online Marketplace', 'Highlights'] |
How to Use KSQL Stream Processing and Real-Time Databases to Analyze Streaming Data in Kafka | How to Use KSQL Stream Processing and Real-Time Databases to Analyze Streaming Data in Kafka Ari Ekmekji Follow Mar 31 · 9 min read
Intro
In recent years, Kafka has become synonymous with “streaming,” and with features like Kafka Streams, KSQL, joins, and integrations into sinks like Elasticsearch and Druid, there are more ways than ever to build a real-time analytics application around streaming data in Kafka. With all of these stream processing and real-time data store options, though, also comes questions for when each should be used and what their pros and cons are. In this post, I’ll discuss some common real-time analytics use-cases that we have seen with our customers here at Rockset and how different real-time analytics architectures suit each of them. I hope by the end you find yourself better informed and less confused about the real-time analytics landscape and are ready to dive in to it for yourself.
First, an obligatory aside on real-time analytics.
Historically, analytics have been conducted in batch, with jobs that would run at some specified interval and process some well defined amount of data. Over the last decade however, the online nature of our world has led rise to a different paradigm of data generation in which there is no well defined start or end to the data. These unbounded “streams” of data are often comprised of customer events from an online application, sensor data from an IoT device, or events from an internal service. This shift in the way we think about our input data has necessitated a similar shift in how we process it. After all, what does it mean to compute the min or max of an unbounded stream? Hence the rise of real-time analytics, a discipline and methodology for how to run computation on data from real-time streams to produce useful results. And since streams also tend have a high data velocity, real-time analytics is generally concerned not only with the correctness of its results but also its freshness.
Kafka fit itself nicely into this new movement because it is designed to bridge data producers and consumers by providing a scalable, fault-tolerant backbone for event-like data to be written to and read from. Over the years as they have added features like Kafka Streams, KSQL, joins, Kafka ksqlDB, and integrations with various data sources and sinks, the barrier to entry has decreased while the power of the platform has simultaneously increased. It’s important to also note that while Kafka is quite powerful, there are many things it self-admittedly is not. Namely, it is not a database, it is not transactional, it is not mutable, its query language KSQL is not fully SQL-compliant, and it is not trivial to setup and maintain.
Now that we’ve settled that, let’s consider a few common use cases for Kafka and see where stream processing or a real-time database may work. We’ll discuss what a sample architecture might look like for each.
Use Case 1: Simple Filtering and Aggregation
A very common use case for stream processing is to provide basic filtering and predetermined aggregations on top of an event stream. Let’s suppose we have clickstream data coming from a consumer web application and we want to determine the number of homepage visits per hour.
To accomplish this we can use Kafka streams and KSQL. Our web application writes events into a Kafka topic called clickstream. We can then create a Kafka stream based on this topic that filters out all events where endpoint != '/' and applies a sliding window with an interval of 1 hour over the stream and computes a count(*) . This resulting stream can then dump the emitted records into your sink of choice- S3/GCS, Elasticsearch, Redis, Postgres, etc. Finally your internal application/dashboard can pull the metrics from this sink and display them however you like.
Note: Now with ksqlDB you can have a materialized view of a Kafka stream that is directly queryable, so you may not necessarily need to dump it into a third-party sink.
This type of setup is kind of the “hello world” of Kafka streaming analytics. It’s so simple but gets the job done, and consequently it is extremely common in real-world implementations.
Pros:
Simple to setup
Fast queries on the sinks for predetermined aggregations
Cons:
You have to define a Kafka stream’s schema at stream creation time, meaning future changes in the application’s event payload could lead to schema mismatches and runtime issues
There’s no alternate way to slice the data after-the-fact (i.e. views/minute)
Use Case 2: Enrichment
The next use case we’ll consider is stream enrichment- the process of denormalizing stream data to make downstream analytics simpler. This is sometimes called a “poor man’s join” because you are effectively joining the stream with a small, static dimension table (from SQL parlance). For example, let’s say the same clickstream data from before contained a field called countryId . Enrichment might involve using the countryId to look up the corresponding country name, national language, etc. and inject those additional fields into the event. This would then enable downstream applications that look at the data to compute, for example, the number of non-native English speakers who load the English version of the website.
To accomplish this, the first step is to get our dimension table mapping countryId to name and language accessible in Kafka. Since everything in Kafka is a topic, even this data must be written to some new topic, let’s say called countries . Then we need to create a KSQL table on top of that topic using the CREATE TABLE KSQL DDL. This requires the schema and primary key be specified at creation time and will materialize the topic as an in-memory table where the latest record for each unique primary key value is represented. If the topic is partitioned, KSQL can be smart here and partition this in-memory table as well, which will improve performance. Under the hood, these in-memory tables are actually instances of RocksDB, an incredibly powerful, embeddable key value store created at Facebook by the same engineers who have now built Rockset (small world!).
Then, like before, we need to create a Kafka stream on top of the clickstream Kafka topic. Let's call this stream S . Then using some SQL-like semantics, we can define another stream, let's call it T which will be the output of the join between that Kafka stream and our Kafka table from above. For each record in our stream S , it will lookup the countryId in the Kafka table we defined and add the countryName and language fields to the record and emit that record to stream T .
Pros:
Downstream applications now have access to fields from multiple sources all in one place
Cons:
Kafka table is only keyed on one field, so joins for another field require creating another table on the same data that is keyed differently
Kafka table being in-memory means dimension tables need to be small-ish
Early materialization of the join can lead to stale data. For example if we had a userId field that we were trying to join on to enrich the record with the user’s total visits, the records in stream T would not reflect the updated value of the user's visits after the enrichment takes place
Use Case 3: Real-Time Databases
The next step in the maturation of streaming analytics is to start running more intricate queries that bring together data from various sources. For example, let’s say we want to analyze our clickstream data as well as data about our advertising campaigns to determine how to most effectively spend our ad dollars to generate an increase in traffic. We need access to data from Kafka, our transactional store (i.e. Postgres), and maybe even data lake (i.e. S3) to tie together all the dimensions of our visits.
To accomplish this we need to pick an end-system that can ingest, index, and query all these data. Since we want to react in real-time to trends, a data warehouse is out of question since it would take too long to ETL the data there and then try to run this analysis. A database like Postgres also wouldn’t work since it is optimized for point queries, transactions, and relatively small data sizes, none of which are relevant/ideal for us.
You could argue that the approach in use case #2 may work here since we can set up one connector for each of our data sources, put everything in Kafka topics, create several ksqlDBs, and set up a cluster of Kafka streams applications. While you could make that work with enough brute force, if you want to support ad-hoc slicing of your data instead of just tracking metrics, if your dashboards and applications evolve with time, or if you want data to always be fresh and never stale, that approach won’t cut it. We effectively need a read-only replica of our data from its various sources that supports fast queries on large volumes of data; we need a real-time database.
Pros:
Support ad-hoc slicing of data
Integrate data from a variety of sources
Avoid stale data
Cons:
Another service in your infrastructure
Another copy of your data
Real-Time Databases
Luckily we have a few good options for real-time database sinks that work with Kafka.
The first option is Apache Druid, an open-source columnar database. Druid is great because it can scale to petabytes of data and is highly optimized for aggregations. Unfortunately though it does not support joins, which means to make this work we will have to perform the enrichment ahead of time in some other service before dumping the data into Druid. Also, its architecture is such that spikes in new data being written can negatively affect queries being served.
The next option is Elasticsearch which has become immensely popular for log indexing and search, as well as other search-related applications. For point lookups on semi-structured or unstructured data, Elasticsearch may be the best option out there. Like Druid, you will still need to pre-join the data, and spikes in writes can negatively impact queries. Unlike Druid, Elasticsearch won’t be able to run aggregations as quickly, and it has its own visualization layer in Kibana, which is intuitive and great for exploratory point queries.
The final option is Rockset, a serverless real-time database that supports fully featured SQL, including joins, on data from a variety of sources. With Rockset you can join a Kafka stream with a CSV file in S3 with a table in DynamoDB in real-time as if they were all just regular tables in the same SQL database. No more stale, pre-joined data! However Rockset isn’t open source and won’t scale to petabytes like Druid, and it’s not designed for unstructured text search like Elastic.
Whichever option we pick, we will set up our Kafka topic as before and this time connect it using the appropriate sink connector to our real-time database. Other sources will also feed directly into the database, and we can point our dashboards and applications to this database instead of directly to Kafka. For example, with Rockset, we could use the web console to set up our other integrations with S3, DynamoDB, Redshift, etc. Then through Rockset’s online query editor, or through the SQL-over-REST protocol, we can start querying all of our data using familiar SQL. We can then go ahead and use a visualization tool like Tableau to create a dashboard on top of our Kafka stream and our other data sources to better view and share our findings.
For a deeper dive comparing these three, check out this blog.
Putting It Together
In the previous sections, we looked at stream processing and real-time databases, and when best to use them in conjunction with Kafka. Stream processing, with KSQL and Kafka Streams, should be your choice when performing filtering, cleansing, and enrichment, while using a real-time database sink, like Rockset, Elasticsearch, or Druid, makes sense if you are building data applications that require more complex analytics and ad hoc queries.
You could conceivably employ both in your analytics stack if your requirements involve both filtering/enrichment and complex analytic queries. For example, we could use KSQL to enrich our clickstreams with geospatial data and also use Rockset as a real-time database downstream, bringing in customer transaction and marketing data, to serve an application making recommendations to users on our site.
Hopefully the use cases discussed above have resonated with a real problem you are trying to solve. Like any other technology, Kafka can be extremely powerful when used correctly and extremely clumsy when not. I hope you now have some more clarity on how to approach a real-time analytics architecture and will be empowered to move your organization into the data future. | https://medium.com/rocksetcloud/how-to-use-ksql-stream-processing-and-real-time-databases-to-analyze-streaming-data-in-kafka-ba84809b2a64 | ['Ari Ekmekji'] | 2020-03-31 17:54:45.123000+00:00 | ['Kafka', 'Ksql', 'Stream Processing', 'Database', 'Real Time Analytics'] |
Edward Clark — Abstract Painting — Color Field | Edward Clark, also known as Ed Clark (1926–2019), is American abstract expressionist painter. “Ed Clark is an American Color Field painter whose style was shaped by the years he spent in Paris in the early 1950s. As an African-American who had been raised in the segregated South, he found Paris tolerant, and the atmosphere encouraging. While there, he developed a sophisticated abstract style that was markedly influenced by the tachist painter Nicolas de Stael. His early work is remembered for his “push-broom technique,” which encouraged his full physical involvement in painting. He is also noted for the monumental scale of his work, and the fact that he is one of the first painters to have used shaped canvases
More | https://medium.com/@milenaolesinska77/edward-clark-abstract-painting-color-field-ab8209691d04 | ['Exposition Art Blog'] | 2020-12-27 11:10:58.660000+00:00 | ['Fine Art', 'Contemporary Art', 'Abstract', 'Art', 'Painting'] |
The Job Hunt — W**’s journey. How do you get a job? | How do you get a job?
My son is looking for his first real job (aka not working for a relative). He can be fairly shy around strangers.
Baselines
His goals are:
make money learn new skills meet new people and get him comfortable meeting strangers
He needs to wrap his work schedule around his school schedule — which is fairly easy with distance learning.
Strategies
Geographic distance — how far away can he reasonably travel for work. He doesn’t have a car so bicycle or public transit will have to suffice. He is looking in roughly a 5 mile radius from home.
Business types — larger stores with consistent staffing needs (essential workers) like grocery stores, pet stores, and drug stores.
Approach — walk in, meet the manager, ask about the application process and — learn. He is also practicing being uncomfortable.
And do whatever the manager recommends.
First day results
Created a list of local businesses ranked by distance from home. Went to the first three stores, talked with people, learned how to apply.
And — the last store he walked in and talked to the manager without my support🙂
Why this matters
When my sons learned to swim, I gave them a lot of initial support. As tiny babies they liked the water but getting from bathtub to pool is a big step.
Kids need the support and role modeling of adults — I was always underwater and smiling with my kids. Today, both my kids are swimmers and water polo players — and don’t need my support in the pool.
My older son again needs support finding a job — which will rapidly decrease as he gains confidence.
Obstacles happen
W has learned some self limiting beliefs (everyone has them) which cause him friction. I expected this and started a line of inquiry to excavate the thoughts so we can talk about them.
IMHO, this is a normal process that should be regularly supported. Friction happens and finding and doing some exploration is helpful.
What’s next?
He’s working the process. Submitting applications, talking with managers, working towards interviews. And he’s learning. That’s the success metric we are focused on — learning as much as possible.
#happydad #parenting #struggleisgood | https://medium.com/@billlennan/the-job-hunt-w-s-journey-2db98d22d1d1 | ['Bill Lennan'] | 2020-12-21 07:48:09.056000+00:00 | ['Job Hunting', 'Parenting', 'Fatherhood', 'Success'] |
NIO advances smoothly according to Q3’20 report | On November 18, NIO released its financial report for Q3’20.
According to the report, NIO’s total revenue in the third quarter was $688.1 million USD, with a year-on-year increase of nearly 150%. In the third quarter, NIO’s gross profit was $88.1 million USD, the gross profit margin of automobile sales was 14.5%, and the comprehensive gross profit margin was 12.9%. In 2020, it is estimated to further increase by over 20%.
Regarding the significant improvement in gross profit margin, NIO said that it benefited from the higher average selling price of the new ES8, the reduction of material costs, the reduction of battery subsidies, and the scale effect brought by the increase in production capacity.
Bin Li, the founder of NIO, predicts that in the fourth quarter NIO will deliver 16,500 to 17,000 vehicles and revenue will reach $951.6 to $978.5 million USD, achieving a positive operating cash flow throughout the year.
At the same time, Bin Li revealed that the next-generation autonomous driving platform NT2.0 developed by the company will announce the chip details on “NIO DAY” this year.
In next January, the production capacity of NIO will increase to 7,500 vehicles per month.
A Bain study pointed out that the cost of electric vehicle battery packs will drop to US$100/kWh by 2025, and the overall cost of ownership will be the same as that of gasoline and fuel vehicles. It is also foreseeable that by the year 2025, the electric vehicle market will increase to roughly 12% of the global new-vehicle market, following through with this trend, this proportion may be as high as 50% by the year 2040.
Source: https://36kr.com/p/973681166610690 | https://medium.com/@techinchina/nio-advances-smoothly-according-to-q320-report-d05f686a466e | ['Tech In China'] | 2020-11-22 18:46:53.441000+00:00 | ['Autonomous', 'Nio', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Autonomous Vehicles'] |
America is Addicted to Sugar | Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash
This is a hard story to write, because if you knew me you’d know that I have a huge sweet tooth. And, ironically, I happen to be writing this on “National Donut Day”. So before I begin, let me start by saying that I’m a guilty sugar addict too. However, I started changing my ways ever since I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis about a year ago.
At first, the pain started in subtle ways. My ankle would randomly hurt, then my knee, and sometimes my wrist. I assumed these were just related to overuse from working out or typing on a keyboard too much. But then things got worse. A little pain turned into more severe pain and even more dramatic swelling. Some days, my fingers were double in size, so big that I could barely bend them — and this, I knew, was not a normal reaction to overuse. When things became more serious, I started paying more attention to try and find out what could be triggering these symptoms.
I noticed that my pain and swelling would especially flare up after nights of indulgent partying, in which I consumed excess alcohol (with sugary mixers) and rich foods. Once I ate a cupcake, for example, and just hours later I could feel my wrist and fingers start to swell and then the joint pain ensued. I felt like this was bizarre behavior and like I must be having some sort of allergic reaction. It took months of waiting, but when I finally was able to get an appointment with a rheumatologist the diagnosis that I had feared for so long was finally confirmed: the swelling and pain in my joints was actually coming from my own body attacking itself.
I went home and immediately began researching how to live with this chronic condition, determined not to let it progress and continue damaging my joints and eventually crippling me. After a lot of research on arthritis and how to live a healthy lifestyle to control the disease, what I discovered is that sugar is a major culprit for causing inflammation in the body, hence causing flare-ups for many autoimmune diseases — including diabetes. But sugar causes many other health concerns, even for people who don’t have an autoimmune disease.
While it’s true that anything in excess can be bad for you — fats and sodium included — sugar is one of the few ingredients that has zero nutritional value. Doctors are concerned that eating more sugar means replacing more nutritionally-dense foods or tacking on unnecessary calories to an otherwise healthy diet.
And what are the effects of eating too much sugar? Well, it is responsible for more than just my arthritis symptoms. In fact, people old and young alike are suffering from many symptoms and illnesses related to sugar consumption. For example, sugar is linked to things as seemingly innocuous as mood and energy swings, weight gain, tooth decay and cavities all the way to more severe health concerns such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, non-alcoholic liver disease, and gout (a type of arthritis).
And Americans consume a lot of sugar. Just take a look at the sugar consumption of Americans from 2007. Although overall sugar consumption is slightly lower currently, the “sugar glut” still exists.
This map makes sense if we examine the standard American diet versus that of other countries. Americans eat a lot more processed food and sugary drinks compared to other countries. Just think about a typical American breakfast — cereal, pancakes, french toast, waffles, and yes, donuts— all loaded with sugar to start off the day.
But an even worse culprit are the drinks that Americans consume between meals that have a disastrous impact on total sugar consumption. I saw this tweet just this week and find it fitting in honor of “National Donut Day”. Check out how much sugar is actually in some of the drinks people consume and without thinking twice about it.
Even when Americans think they’re cutting out sugar by limiting desserts or those obvious sugar culprits, they might be missing added sugar from a variety of other sources. Added sugar goes by many names on food labels, which is often why it’s so hard to identify just how much sugar you are consuming.
Image from WebMD
So because of these other ingredients, sugar hides in many common foods not considered to be “sweet” or sugar-containing.
And sometimes, companies want to promote food as though it’s “healthier” because it offers other health benefits, is made with less or with all-natural sugar.
But sugar is sugar and the effects on your body are the same. Yes, all natural sugars (such as real fruit, maple or agave syrup and stevia leaf) are much better on your body, but ultimately there is still a limit to how much sugar your body needs.
So after I learned about all of this, I tried to track my own daily sugar consumption and avoid eating sugar as much as possible. And that’s when I discovered just how difficult that is to do in America. Sugar is everywhere. And sugar substitutes, sweeteners and sugar alcohols — all chemically made additives — may be lowering the overall calorie count in foods but still pose a threat to our health.
This made me realize that America is addicted to sugar and it’s literally killing us. In fact, this is what Cassie Bjork, a registered dietician and founder of Healthy Simple Life had to say about sugar,
“Research shows that sugar can be even more addicting than cocaine. Sugar activates the opiate receptors in our brain and affects the reward center, which leads to compulsive behavior, despite the negative consequences like weight gain, headaches, hormone imbalances, and more.”
The food industry knows about this addictive quality and that’s why so many of our products are laden with sugar. Think about it: Have you ever tried ketchup without high-fructose corn syrup or sugar? Or eaten real cacao before it becomes sugary chocolate? What about all-natural jelly or plain yogurt with zero grams of sugar? These foods taste completely different than the American food industry has led us to believe. It’s exactly these deceptive practices that Michael Moss discloses in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.
Basically, I’m a sweet tooth because America wanted it that way. So after I realized how sugar was connected to my rheumatoid arthritis and the detrimental effect it was having inside my body, I have spent the last year re-training my body and taste buds to un-like sugary foods and slowly but surely it’s working. I rid my pantry of sugar and any processed foods containing sugar. In my cooking, I only use real fruit, honey, maple syrup, and stevia and all in moderation. I even started making my own desserts, sauces, breads and drinks (when I have time to). I switched where I shop for groceries, because I found an all-natural grocer where I can buy healthy and quick foods for when I don’t have time to make it from scratch. I know that these changes are working because now, when I try to indulge by eating typical American desserts, I find them way too sweet and can’t finish them.
I know that this article isn’t the first time that people are learning about the impacts of processed foods and added sugar on our health. Sadly, it took a big wake-up call for me to realize that even when I thought I was living a healthy lifestyle, I was still consuming extreme amounts of a deadly ingredient. Luckily, the food revolution is under way and people are starting to revolt against the American food industry. Now, there are great options available for sourcing local produce and buying all-natural foods, but these still cost a lot for the average American. So it’s critical to spread the word and take action to reverse America’s sugar addiction, before more people have to suffer the health consequences. | https://thestevenpost.medium.com/america-is-addicted-to-sugar-e6423bba53a2 | ['Steven Hopper'] | 2019-06-07 16:31:00.105000+00:00 | ['Diet', 'Addiction', 'Food', 'Lifestyle', 'Health'] |
Introducing Pear, the first DAO governed marketplace -Built for Web3 | Problem?
CEX works on a centralized governance system that retains full control of users’ assets, privacy information and is prone to cyber-attacks (Apologies for the PTSD if there’s any ex-Mt. Gox users reading this). In addition, you have to pay a certain amount of trading fees and deposit fees in exchange for their services.
DEX on the other hand is a lot cooler than CEX since it doesn’t require the user’s KYC information, thus skipping the long and tedious registration processes. However, it only allows the trading of tokenized assets and their native NFT series. Its slippage may be extremely high when liquidity is low, and there is a risk of permanent loss when users provide liquidity on DEX which relies on the Automated Market Making (AMM) algorithms.
Both kinds of exchanges have their unique advantages and disadvantages, however, they do not fully address the needs of the transaction in a Web3 environment.
Solution.
Comparison of PEX to CEX & DEX
Peardao (PEX) is a platform that aims to redefine the CEX and DEX-driven cryptocurrency sphere by allowing the exchange of value for on-chain, off-chain and cross-chain ecosystems, all at once. The Pear marketplace is governed by DAO, and trades are protected by smart contract(s), encrypted chat tools as well as credit history that is based on the public ledger.
In the Web 3.0 environment, we believe users should decide on what they want to trade, and what to trade with. With PEX, we encourage trading based on the user’s mutual trade agreement. Anyone who intends to sell their digital assets can simply search for an existing buy advertisement (Ad) on the platform and establish a trade with the counterparty. If there is no suitable match, the user can post an Ad and wait for a counterparty to place a trade offer. This trading process works the same for users who want to buy digital assets online. Exchange of any assets can be completed by just searching or pushing Ads on the Pear platform.
Trading between off-chain and on-chain assets has always been a hassle for CEX users. To resolve a trading dispute, users have to wait for the customer support team to step in, follow up with the matter and finally resolve the issue. The duration and quality of the intervention depend on how much, and what kinds of resources have been allocated to the customer support team. Eventually, there will be a scalability issue.
PEX will ensure a smooth trading experience without any centralized intervention. Any potential trading disputes that may arise will be resolved by randomly selected nodes with high public ledger trust scores. This is similar to the blockchain’s Proof-of-validation (PoV) mechanism that works to achieve consensus through staked validator nodes. Validator nodes are incentivized to resolve the disputes because they will be rewarded with PEX tokens. We believe when there are sufficient trades on the marketplace, the value of PEX token will rise accordingly (we will be covering more of PEX in future articles), which will invite more validators to be part of the process. This will speed up the whole trading process, leading to smoother and better trading experiences. Eventually, a virtuous circle will be established. The marketplace will be more transparent, secure and scalable than a centralized form of regulation on CEXs in which decisions are made by a single operator.
Cross-chain transactions (token to token, NFT to fungible token, metaverse assets to on-chain assets, etc…) will be much easier to be verified as compared to on-chain and off-chain transactions since all transaction details are being recorded on the public ledger. Blockchain metaverse will eventually become interoperable and Pear will facilitate trading even without the need for complex trading protocols or a universally accepted metaverse virtual currency. Trading of a non-fungible token in the metaverse for a fungible token in any other blockchain can be done seamlessly and instantly through the Pear marketplace.
Beyond that, if the interoperability of metaverse allows for future PEX integration, PEX will completely subvert people’s experience of trading in the metaverse. Imagine that in the metaverse era, everything is on-chain, people can freely set up shops in the PEX metaverse space, and various digital assets such as NFTs, artworks, game props, and digital land are displayed on the shelves. Buyers can view, touch and try them up close. People can also set up live rooms, where viewers can interact and shop with their favourite anchors. The organizer can hold various activities such as art exhibitions, product launches, auctions, etc., to attract people’s participation.
We are built for the people, and we are built for Web3. With an upgradeable token contract, PEX will be better suited for the future. Our marketplace will be compatible with any type of transaction and payment. Governed by DAO (we will be sharing more about Pear DAO in future articles), DAO members will make decisions to set rules for their ideal marketplace. All of the stated functions will allow PEX to set the foundations for Web3, and it will be the one and only marketplace that will become part of the future, superseding both CEX and DEX.
In summary, PEX is ready to become the leading marketplace to facilitate transactions and payments in the upcoming Web3 revolution. PEX’s vision, strategies, governance, and scalability will make it possible to achieve these. Years from now, we hope that this article will be the first message to let the universe know that | https://medium.com/@officialpeardao/introducing-pear-the-first-dao-governed-marketplace-built-for-web3-90630f80900b | [] | 2021-12-31 05:41:50.489000+00:00 | ['Web3', 'Dao', 'Peardao', 'Pex', 'Crypto'] |
On Deja vu | Ever felt like you had been in this exact same situation before? Same people, same place, same conversation? I have! Wray Herbert explains | https://medium.com/notes-to-self/on-deja-vu-c06edc0b91ba | ['Mohit Thatte'] | 2016-11-08 05:12:50.387000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Vu', 'Light', 'Deja'] |
Stress saver tips for getting the REAL ID | Stress saver tips for getting the REAL ID
Married couples: Here’s what you need to know about getting the REAL ID
Photo credit: matuska/Pixabay
Do you have your REAL ID yet — without crying at the DMV? Congratulations, you have survived. For those of you who have yet to experience the painful experience of getting this new ID, especially married people who changed their names, here’s what you need to do and what you should absolutely avoid.
What is the REAL ID?
Starting October 1, 2020, every state and territory resident must present a REAL ID compliant license/ID, or another acceptable form of identification, for accessing federal facilities and boarding commercial aircraft. (And if hanging out at nuclear power plants is your thing, that includes you too.) This “card-based” enforcement does not require people to present ID at federal locations where it was not required before (ex. Smithsonian).
Can I board a flight without a REAL ID?
Starting October 1, 2020, if you want to make your flight, you need a REAL ID or another TSA-approved form of ID (ex. U.S. passport, DHS trusted traveler cards, etc.)
Photo credit: Create Her Stock
Will a name change (ex. marriage) make it more difficult to get the REAL ID?
Good grief, it seems like it. I’ve never been so relieved I never walked down an aisle after hearing my mother’s DMV excursion. My married mother has been getting her license renewed without problems for almost 39 wedded years. (Let’s call her Seleste Yvette Venton for the purpose of this post.) When my mother (Seleste) got married, she made her maiden name (Yvette) her new middle name. Then, she took my father’s last name (Venton). (That would make her new name Seleste Yvette Venton.)
Do you plan to travel after getting married? Are you changing your last name? You may need more documentation than usual to get the REAL ID. (Photo credit: Digital Marketing Agency/Pixabay)
After almost four decades of never having an issue, that came to an abrupt stop when getting a REAL ID. She showed up with her birth certificate, Social Security card and license. The DMV turned her away because her Social Security card and birth certificate obviously had her maiden name (Seleste Yvette) on them. Her license had her duo name (maiden + married) on them. The identifying documents must have matching names. Even when going home to get her marriage certificate to confirm the name change, she was still informed that she would have to get a new license with just her first name and married name — not the maiden name. Then, she would be able to get the REAL ID afterward. (If she had an ID with just her married name, Seleste Venton, she may have been able to move forward. But you are not permitted to have a state ID and a driver’s license at the same time.)
What kind of documents can I bring to prove a change of address?
Electricity bills, mortgage statements and voter registration cards work. They must be printed out. The DMV will not accept digital versions on your phone because they want to scan the documents received. They also cannot be more than 90 days old. And they’ll unclip all of your statements and apparently refuse to staple them once they hand them back.
Does my child need a REAL ID?
Children under the age of 18 do not need a REAL ID if accompanied by an adult.
Do I get to take a new photo for the REAL ID?
Photo credit: Saifulmulia/Pixabay
Yes, it’s required. Be prepared for chatty employees who will try to click the photograph without telling you first. To save yourself from a terrible photo, immediately put your hand over your mouth like you’re coughing and stare until your chatty photographer makes eye contact. They cannot take the photograph if you look like Mr. Wilson from “Home Improvement.”
Why is the REAL ID not enforced in the state I live in?
Some of you lucked out, I guess. While the REAL ID is a mandate on federal agencies, state participation is voluntary. Federal agencies are still prohibited from accepting driver’s licenses or ID cards from noncompliant states though, so you may have a helluva time getting home from one compliant state to a noncompliant state.
What do I have to do to get a passport instead of a REAL ID?
The good news is passport photographs can be taken at numerous neighborhood locations, such as CVS and Walgreens. But you’d still have to go through the same process of confirming your identity with a previous or current U.S. passport book, previous or current U.S. passport card, driver’s license (temporary or learner’s license don’t count), Certificate of Naturalization or a Certificate of Citizenship. Click here to download the official passport form.
Photo credit: cytis/Pixabay
Can I get a REAL ID card and a REAL ID driver’s license?
No, the federal government prohibits this duo.
Photo credit: Shamontiel L. Vaughn
What documents do I need to bring to get the REAL ID?
Be prepared to dump out everything from your fire-safe lock box and your safety box. Go in there ready for them to try to dismiss you like Thanos. When they reject one thing, pow, now you’ve got another. If you decide to travel light for this two-hour minimum excursion (at least for me), at least bring two of these: birth certificate, Social Security card, employment authorization document (EAD), U.S. passport, permanent resident card, Certificate of Naturalization, Consumer Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA).
Got more questions? Visit the U.S. Department of Homeland Security site. | https://shamontiel.medium.com/stress-saver-tips-for-getting-the-real-id-165b7d71e7ef | ['Shamontiel L. Vaughn'] | 2020-02-08 04:16:01.577000+00:00 | ['License', 'Name Change', 'Id', 'Traveling', 'Travel Tips'] |
Automation and deployment of Go applications to staging and Production environments using, Docker, Terraform, AWS and Github Actions. (Part 1) | Building APIs are no easy tasks, ranging from complex algorithms to CORS (every developers nightmare), developers are faced with difficult tasks daily to get the best product out there and solve problems. Another pain point experienced is deployment.
Deployment of applications especially to various environment like staging and production adds another level of complexity to this tedious process where we deploy and simply hope for the best that nothing with fail.
Deployment these days shouldn’t be subject to guess works, inconsistencies and human error with great tools out there such as docker for containerising and configuring our application, Github Actions for our CI/CD pipelines that automates the software delivery process, and terraform as our infrastructure as code tool which can help avoid inconsistencies in our cloud deployments, increase productivity, lower cost and limit human error.
In this part one, we will be setting up our CI/CD pipelines for a Go application (Go is beautiful, you should give it a try) using GitHub actions. Even though we will be using a Go application, I think the practices that will be discussed in here, can be applied to any programming language out there.
Enough of long boring talks, let’s see the pre-requisites for this part (Don’t worry, I will link awesome resources to get you up and running with each).
Some knowledge of Github actions (You can get up and running here and here).
Experience with a programming language. (We will use Go in this article).
Let’s get started.
Let’s start by preparing our repository on GitHub with some good practice.
Open Github and go to the settings of the repository with your code and click on branches (We want to create the develop, master and production branches first). We should have something like this:
We want to start by adding rules to our branches. Let’s do that by clicking on the Add rule button and add the following rules as shown below. (I will explain them)
Okay, the first step is to set the Branch name pattern. It is important to know that this represents the branch this rules will be applied to, in our case we are applying this rule to the develop branch.
The next step is to set the Require pull request reviews before merging rule. A couple of things to see here.
What this rule does, is to make sure, there is at least one review for every pull request made, we can increase the number of reviews required with the dropdown with a maximum of 6 reviews. Also we can use something called a code owner here to ensure that the person set as the owner of this code must review it before it can be merged.
NB: If you are the only developer on the project, you don’t want to use this rule as it will prevent your merge until there is an external review.
We also want to Require status checks to pass before merging. This rule ensures that there are certain checks that must be completed before there is a merge. Currently, it is not showing any checks to include because we haven’t setup any workflow to go through hence we will come back to this rule later.
The next rule is Require branches to be up to date before merging . This rule ensures that the pull request branch is using the latest code. In simple terms, we want to test the branch with the latest code in the targeted branch to merge into. We also need to have our workflows checks enabled before this takes effect. This also protects any direct push to any of the branches and you have to checkout to another branch. This is great because it prevents a bad code that could the entire application from getting merged directly.
Finally, we want to Include administrators in our branch protection rule, hence the protection rules also apply to administrators as well.
Then we can simply create the rule. (You can also learn about the other rules, I don’t use them but the docs will provide some context about them).
Also we want to repeat this task for the master and production branch. Okay, let’s do some workflow!
I would show you a great way to get started with creating workflows using the starter-packs provided. Click on the actions tab.
You can see it is suggesting to us already a workflow because of the repository codebase is in Go, that way, we can use the rich editor it provides us to setup this workflow. Let’s do that with some changes to the workflow.
name: CI
on:
push:
branches: [ master, production, develop ]
pull_request:
branches: [ master, production, develop ]
jobs:
build:
name: Build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Set up Go 1.x
uses: actions/setup-go@v2
with:
go-version: ^1.15
- name: Check out code into the Go module directory
uses: actions/checkout@v2
run: |
go get -v -t -d ./...
if [ -f Gopkg.toml ]; then
curl
dep ensure
fi
- name: Get dependenciesrun: |go get -v -t -d ./...if [ -f Gopkg.toml ]; thencurl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golang/dep/master/install.sh | shdep ensurefi - name: Build
run: go build -v ./...
- name: Test
run: go test -v ./...
We made a change to the workflow to run on not just master but production and develop branch as well as name it CI (you can give it any name you want) and change the go-version to 1.15 (this should be your version of Go). Let’s explain what this workflow does!
We are running in the steps an action to setup go using the actions/setup-go@v2 predefined actions. We use the checkout action to checks-out the repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so your workflow can access it. I must say, THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT STEP, since without it, the workflow can’t access our repository without it, our workflow will definitely fail. We got the dependencies, an important step to run the next step. We are building the project here, and this is crucial to check because we don’t want to merge any branch that will break our application. We also make sure all our tests are passing!
That’s it for our first workflow! We should merge (checkout to a new branch, I believe it is a good practice). Then you will see that our workflow action ran after merging to master.
Now we have our first workflow!
Let’s setup one more, now we will do it manually in the code editor. We will be setting up the linting workflow.
One of the reasons why I love GitHub actions is I can split my workflows into separate files. Let’s see this in action.
Pull the latest master branch to your local repository.
You should have at the top a .github/workflows directory which contains our go.yml workflow. Let’s add another workflow for linting, for this, we want to look for a good action as well in the marketplace, we are looking for golangci-lint.
We will be using the Run golangci-lint, it has the highest stars and very good contributors. The default YAML file provided is good enough as well to use for the linting checks of our application.
Go ahead and create another file in the .github/workflows directory and add the example snippet!
We just need some modification as we might not need multiple OS support and also the branches need to be updated (we will do that a lot).
name: golangci-lint
on:
push:
tags:
- v*
branches: [ production, master, develop ]
pull_request:
branches: [ production, master, develop ]
jobs:
golangci:
name: lint
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: golangci-lint
uses: golangci/golangci-lint-action@v2
with:
version: v1.29
cool!
Now, if we push our code, we will see the Go workflow run and after merge, we will see the golint workflow run as well.
Now, we have some workflows, time to make sure our branches are fully protected!
On GitHub, open the repository and click on settings and then branches.
Edit each of the rules!
Now, these workflows must be completed before we can merge a pull request and also it will make sure our branch is tested with the targeted branch code.
That’s it for this article! Next, we will be Containerising our application using docker and also setup up IAM for AWS.
Thanks for reading! | https://medium.com/@watifefakorede/automation-and-deployment-of-go-applications-to-staging-and-production-environments-using-docker-b274a0c5c11f | ['Boluwatife Fakorede'] | 2020-12-17 21:52:04.812000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Go', 'DevOps', 'Ci Cd Pipeline', 'Software Development'] |
Traveling sway on our life | Advances made in air travel has shrunk the world into the global village. Nowadays, people from all walks of life can travel in a foreign country for the sake of pleasure or work; though, the ascent of the international tourism industry is welcomed with dismay by many.
Right off the bat, Traveling impacts negatively on the environment and a huge cause of environmental pollution. The increase in international tourism is regularly connected with an expansion in the degree of erosion, pollution, the loss of natural habitats. Numerous visitors toss trash into foreign properties because these factors recklessly increase pollution into the air, water, and land. Besides, due to the growing demand for transportation in most famous traveling spots, diminishing the air quality for the localities living there and they suffer from the rush in parking lots due to this they have to wait for a long time in daily routine. Another reason is the international traveling builds the chances of spreading irresistible illnesses into neighborhood countries. Viruses, such as Ebola and Corona can turn into a risk to local people if an infected person visits their nation. In China, for instance, numerous individuals influenced by the coronavirus which spread into the world through voyaging, and the entire world gets influenced by it. This model clarifies why most people are still against the development of the international travel industry.
On the contrary, traveling has a positive impact on the financial condition of a country. The main advantages of the travel industry, it brings the lift in the nation’s economy and an enormous amount of new job openings for natives. First of all, visitors spend money on a wide range of services due to the cash flow increases in a country which is a positive sign for the economy. Because of traveling not only the service industry take advantage of tourists but also local markets, transportation, foods spots, and clinics get the benefit of it. Along these lines, the travel industry yields an extra income for economic development and it brings goodwill for the country.
In my opinion, Tourism has a good effect on the country’s financial condition and the job market. Progressive tourism brings a positive change in the financial condition of a country, like the instant boom in the travel industry brings new jobs for locals. For example, the flood of tourists brings about a bigger interest in the hotel industry which increases the demand for workers. However, traveling also has some major flaws like the destruction of wild nature by human involvement, an increase in pollution, and damage to historical places by the visiting huge numbers of visitors.
Traveling can have the dark side like its damaging effect on the natural environment, increase in wide air pollution, and the spread of some serious diseases. On the contrary, it has an incredibly constructive impact on the nation’s economy and gives countless business opportunities to locals and helps to grow native businesses which increases the willingness of the country. I believe that these rewards of the travel industry exceed its drawbacks. | https://medium.com/@fayezabeyg/traveling-sway-on-our-life-922299cb80a9 | ['Fayeza Beyg'] | 2020-07-19 18:20:42.539000+00:00 | ['Youth', 'Travel', 'Marketing', 'Writing', 'Impact'] |
What Marketers Can Learn from How NBC Promotes Hit Shows | Ever see The Good Place on NBC? It’s incredible. They say good writers should show, not tell. I’m just going to ask you to allow me to break that rule because I’m telling you: The Good Place is incredible. I will say no more because #spoilers. But one thing I will absolutely spoil as loudly as I possibly can is how NBC promotes The Good Place and other shows like it in order to get mileage out of their content, a return on their investments, and most critically, a passionate audience that adores their shows.
Last week, our team was invited by Wistia, a presenting sponsor of Marketing Showrunners, to their big company event, Change the Channel. The afternoon featured, among other things, interviews with showrunners from B2B brands ThriveHive and InVision, a deeper dive into brand affinity marketing for SMBs and mid-market companies, and an announcement of Wistia’s new product suite that helps brands publish, measure, and grow binge-worthy original series. (You can replay the live stream here.)
Among the most eye-opening things MSR learned while attending, however, was precisely how much content a network like NBC creates in order to promote and grow just one show. (Speaking of spoilers, I will spoil this for you: 1 bajillion content. NBC creates 1 bajillion content per episode of their shows.)
This is something I wish I could inject into the brains of every marketer on planet earth right now:
Just think about the backdrop to all of our content marketing today. How many blog posts do you think go spinning out into the world per second? If you answered 30, you’d be both correct and incredibly stressed out. (Here’s a fun little trick: Make your left eye twitch uncontrollably by watching Worldometers’s blog post counter.) And so what happens? We as marketers see that number, and rather than calmly figure out a slow-and-steady strategy that can actually impress people enough to cut through the noise, we race for more: more impressions, more stuff, more traffic, more numbers. (I’m exaggerating, because I’m preaching to you, and you’re already a member of the proverbial choir. You, my dear friend, understand the ills of most marketing these past few years.)
But while most brands chase impressions, the good marketers do things that actually impress.
As Wistia CEO Chris Savage says in the tweet above, no one out there is better at this than media companies. They know how to publish a core asset, like a show, then get a serious return on their investment in that show — building a passionate fanbase for the program as they do so.
We’ll break down what NBC does in just a second, but first consider what most brands do. Since we’re in such a race to catch up with the ceaseless onslaught of “pieces” shipped every second, we feel stressed whenever we’re not hitting publish. And so, we do very little promotion of the things we’ve already published. If we write something we think is worth others’ time, something that can indeed impress them, we give it a cursory tour of social media, pasting the links everywhere, and then it’s back to pumping out more stuff.
Thus, when most of us promote a piece, it looks like this:
Publish an article, maybe email it to folks, and put the link on Facebook and, eh, let’s say Twitter too.
Look, I totally get it. As I write this very piece — and this is 100% true — I am stressed out just thinking about the entire month of November, as we at MSR are planning something big all month long to help marketers make the business case for great shows. (Interested? We announce on the last Friday of October to our MSR Monthly subscribers.)
(See? Even that was an excuse to use this current piece to think about future pieces.)
Again, I understand what you might go through because I go through it every. stinking. day. Combine our rush to publish more pieces with our desire to prove the value of what we do, and we drink a pretty stress-inducing cocktail each day. A manic-rita. A panic-tini.
We need a way to relax … then carry on, calmly, towards better results.
Ironically enough, this is the first thing the main character sees during the pilot of NBC’s The Good Place:
I’m not saying the folks at NBC have it any easier, but I do think they’ve figured out something we marketers yearn to understand: the best way to use what you have to get what you want. In other words, NBC and other networks promote their shows by taking an existing asset, then using that asset to create an endless stream of useful assets, all of which are used to grow the original asset. Everything they create compounds in value. That’s content marketing playing out in beautiful fashion. That’s the true “R” in ROI.
Without us digging all that deeply if we’re being honest (because our left eyes keep twitching, because #modernmarketing), here’s a cursory look at what NBC does so well to promote their shows in sustainable, repeatable fashion:
1. The New Episode
First, a showrunner in charge of a series for NBC creates something worth spending time with: an episode. The episode is the cell of the entire body of work that is an original series. (Inside the cell are many smaller pieces, like the blocks and beats of an episode’s underlying format, or “rundown,” which we’ll revisit in a later article. For now, calling an episode the “cell” feels right.)
Creating an episode worth spending time with is the challenge facing tons of marketers today, which is a major reason we launched MSR in the first place. So I don’t want to gloss over this fact: Creating a binge-worthy series can feel supremely difficult when you’re just starting out. But since this piece you’re reading right now is about marketing the asset, not creating it, I’d encourage you to explore our production techniques section where we go deeper into the creation process. (Not sure where to begin? Our most popular pieces are about the three parts of a show you’ll need to plan for, the best interview questions to ask guests to get great content from them, and the subtle but crucial differences you’ll encounter when writing for a show or a podcast specifically compared to writing a blog post.)
2. The Trailer
Next, NBC makes a trailer. Not for the whole show — which is the only time many brands might make a trailer — but rather, for each episode. So often as marketers, we overvalue the launch event itself, but a huge reason any launch succeeds is how well we raised anticipation ahead of time. It’s far more effective to hand-deliver an episode to an audience which is eagerly awaiting it than it is to disappear for a time, build out your next episode, then launch it to an unsuspecting world. Said another way: It’s easier to fill your restaurant if there’s already a line out the door. Bonus: Not only will those people patronize the restaurant, but the excitement of that initial crowd can attract even more people to the door.
As marketing showrunners, we might be thinking, “It’s fine for NBC to create an episode trailer for The Good Place. They’re telling a serialized story with lots of cliffhangers written into it and professional actors to deliver the emotional moments. We’re not NBC. We’re not The Good Place.”
I get it. Maybe you interview experts on your podcast. Maybe you filmed a docu-style series where you profile businesses or individuals who champion a similar belief system to your brand. Maybe you did all that while balancing 12 other projects, too. We don’t always have tons of time, nor the tantalizing, teasery-type material we think we need, to create a trailer capable of raising anticipation. Or so we assume. See, this is where the one skill we all already possess as marketers prior to creating shows can actually help us: writing.
Write a trailer script.
Record yourself asking big, burning questions the audience can’t wait to answer.
Tease what you’ve learned using a few “open loops,” as they say in journalism. (That’s where you start talking about the action of a sequence of events, but fail to deliver the payoff.)
Without needing to hire Ted Danson or Kristen Bell or shoot a dramedy about heaven and hell for months on end, we can absolutely create irresistible trailers. Here’s an example of what one might sound like — note the burning questions and other types of open loops that help it raise anticipation:
“We wanted to know about X. So we scoured the web, found the absolute best person in the world to teach us more, booked our flights to this small but magical town just outside New York, and sat down with that oh-so-perfect person, where we learned a few things we wanted … and one big one we didn’t want, but definitely needed to hear. So what was that one thing? Where did we travel to in the first place? Why was it magical? Who was that person? Also why am I currently holding a plush lizard in my hand? His name is Larry, by the way. That’s all coming next week on the show. Get it via email on Tuesday at 8AM.”
These can be short. These can be templated, with a similar format each episode trailer. These can be recorded in the same static studio or conference room, perhaps even batch recorded in the same day if you already know what episodes are coming up in your show. All that matters is they get the job done: raising anticipation for the next episode.
Then, like NBC, we can put each trailer on social media, send it via our newsletter, or perhaps use paid advertising to target the right subset of our audience. Most crucially of all, however, we can copy this tactic from NBC:
3. The Cross-Promotion
To ensure a larger but still-relevant audience sees the episode trailer, NBC will play the episode trailers for a given show across other shows. Now, most of us don’t run networks of shows. (Though increasingly, we’re finding examples of brands that run digital networks of video series and podcasts.) However, what we all possess as marketing teams is some kind of pre-existing attention across all the surface area we cover. So, yes, Mailchimp runs a network of shows and can cross-promote a new episode of a second series right inside the show you’re already enjoying. But they also use their log-in screens for their users to advertise their shows. We can use in-product messaging, home page banners, blog notifications and CTAs, email footers, pinned tweets, Instagram bio links — you name it, if it’s already owed by us and already likely to receive attention, we can help re-direct some of that attention towards a forthcoming episode. Even if people don’t act immediately, which they likely don’t even with NBC’s cross-promoted shows, we’re priming our audience to tune in later. We’re increasing the odds that the all-important asset we built — the episode — actually yields a return.
I want to stop right here for just one second, because this is where it starts to sound like work. We just spent a few paragraphs earlier in this article on how stressed out and work-drunk we all are … and now we have to add this new trailer marketing stuff to our plates? To that I’d whisper softly to the marketing world that it’s gonna be okay. Everything is fine. If you need to, I have a warm shoulder you can rest on before I deliver some good news:
NO! We don’t need to add anything new to our plates. We need to shift some of our time and budget from things that aren’t working to something that will with our trailer marketing. For instance, we can shift some of the paid advertising we do, whether digital or offline, that supposedly increases our “brand awareness,” towards a more effective (and more measurable) episode-level awareness strategy. Alternatively, we can shift some of our efforts normally dedicated to episode launches back one step, focusing more time and budget on raising anticipation for when it does launch in the future. I’d argue either case uses our precious few resources far better.
Regardless, we don’t need to layer on yet another type of marketing to our already overflowing schedules. We need to rethink what’s actually yielding results, and act accordingly.
Additionally, we can use perhaps the most underused asset across the entire show to help raise anticipation for each future episode or season: the host. Using the host to help market the show helps us as marketers unlock nascent value.
4. Talent Tours
In the case of NBC, on-air or on-screen talent will help promote their shows as they appear on morning shows, late night shows, podcasts, blogs, newsletters, and so forth. It’s eerily similar to promoting a book or a movie: There’s a big thing you want everyone to consume, so you take some of the stuff you’ve gathered as a result of that project (the talent’s charm and stories and insights, the moments or lessons from inside the asset, etc.), and you sprinkle that across pockets of audiences all across the world in organic fashion.
If your show host or your talent isn’t appearing on a “tour” of sorts to promote the show, guesting on various other shows, you’re missing one of the most proven and, mercifully, audience-friendly approaches in your show marketing strategy. (This is why tapping an influencer or celebrity to host your brand’s show can be difficult. They’re less likely to hit the pavement, work with PR, and/or participate in your overall promotion strategy for the show.)
Once your host appears elsewhere, you can then take clips from that, and once again promote the material on social media and other “typical” marketing channels.
5. The Same, New Episode
Then, finally, NBC returns to the same asset which began the promotion in the first place: the new episode. They release it at the (constantly messaged) usual time, alerting their social channels to tune in now.
But they’re not done yet.
You see, missing from this list so far was a “Step 0” that would have preceded the #1 above. Before “1. The New Episode,” would really be, “0. Clips from the Prior Episode.” It’s not a list so much as a virtuous cycle: the latest episode yields endless little moments you can quote, crop, snip, clip, repurpose, reuse, and re-share. (Some of those are the same things, but I have so little time as a marketer that I must carry on. You understand, I’m sure…)
We can raid each episode for endless bits of content, which can then be promoted on the usual channels, which helps drive audience to both that episode and the show overall, which then gets them into our ecosystem for Steps 2–4, trailers, cross-promotion, and talent tours.
Here’s the graphic Wistia used to summarize what NBC does:
Compared that to the usual promotion of our episodes, blog posts, and other content as marketers:
As marketers, we’re entering a new era where brand awareness is not nearly as important as brand affinity. Who cares who knows about our companies? When we optimize for “awareness,” we’re assuming that the thing we actually want is just going to happen. We assume they’ll like us. When we aim for reach, for eyeballs, for impressions, we automatically assume that we’ve built something worthy of the time and dollar investment of our audience. “Awareness” is, after all, a proxy for what we really want. So why don’t we proactively aim for what we really want? We want affinity, not awareness. We want them to spend time with us (audience or community), not glance at us (impressions or traffic).
The best organizations in the world at grabbing and holding our attention are media and entertainment. The best organizations in the world at generating revenue sell products and services, instead of ads. (That’s us.) So why don’t we learn from the best in media and entertainment? Imagine if we adopted more of their approaches at brands whose business models aren’t crumbling? We can have the best of both worlds — but we first have to be willing to learn from a world outside of ours. Starting today, let’s embrace our new mandate: Marketing isn’t about grabbing attention. It’s about holding it. Great marketers know that results don’t require that people merely show up. They require that people stay.
We don’t need to do net-new things and increase our stress. We need to shift our efforts to match what our jobs have become. So put down the manic-rita and pour out that panic-tini. Let’s you and I stop acting like typical marketers and embrace the role as it should look today, investing strategically in the right things, at the right time, for the right goals. If it helps, we can even put up a nice big sign for when we enter this new phase of our careers: | https://medium.com/@jayacunzo/what-marketers-can-learn-from-how-nbc-promotes-hit-shows-35658236b915 | ['Jay Acunzo'] | 2019-10-09 12:55:40.142000+00:00 | ['Podcasting', 'Marketing', 'Podcast', 'Video Marketing', 'Content Marketing'] |
It is true that it costs vast amounts of money to develop and maintain your own operating | It is true that it costs vast amounts of money to develop and maintain your own operating Ymonniqe Dec 4, 2020·9 min read
A computer might make the same mistake, too. To test how similar my A.I. doppelgänger and I look, I compared our faces using a face comparison API from Face++, a ubiquitous provider of facial recognition software. Face++ returned a “normal probability” that my face matched my A.I. clone’s and estimated with 64% certainty that we were the same person.
This suggests another use case for the system. The Anonymizer’s killer app may not necessarily be creating face clones that your contacts will believe are actually you. Rather, the system may be best for situations where you want to give a sense of your appearance to a person you’ve never met before, while keeping your actual appearance anonymous.
In the hands of a nefarious user, the Anonymizer could potentially create these kinds of fakes. But for those who are looking to create a fake face for negative reasons, there are likely easier methods. The website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com generates fake faces in your browser using a GANs technology that is similar to Generated Media’s tech, without the need to upload an image.
Dating profiles, Generated Media says, are a prime example. If you’re creating an online dating profile, you can grab a fake image from Generated Media’s Anonymizer and use it in place of your real face. The image would give a good sense of your appearance — if you met someone special and later chose to reveal your real face, they hopefully wouldn’t feel catfished. But until you chose to reveal the real you, the fake face would prevent the cyberstalkers who frequent dating sites from knowing your exact appearance and targeting you IRL.
Apple Silicon brings opportunities galore for the Mac. It can supercharge the Mac’s computing performance. It can also supercharge the Mac’s market share. But does Apple have the ambition to make that happen?
So Apple waited until such trade-offs were no longer required. They waited until they could confidently claim that Apple Silicon would provide both improved efficiency and improved performance.
In my testing, I found that the more recognizable a face is, the harder it becomes to find a convincing fake. To test this, I uploaded a photo of Donald Trump to the Anonymizer. The results looked totally different from his actual appearance. For better or worse, I’ve almost certainly seen more photos of Trump’s face over the past four years than I’ve seen of my own. When you compare an extremely familiar real face like Trump’s with a fake, the little flaws in the fake are glaringly obvious. For less familiar faces, they’re easier to overlook, and the fake appears more convincing.
Here we are side by side. Because the fake face had a transparent background, I was able to superimpose it over a photo I took at the same fancy pizza place where my real photo was taken.
In a similar use case, the company has worked with investigative journalists, using a related tool to create fake faces for sources who wish to remain anonymous. The fake face can give a journalist (and their readers) a sense of the source’s age, skin color, hair length, and other key elements of their appearance, while ensuring that their real identity remains protected. (Journalists who use this tactic to protect their sources should acknowledge in their story that the face is a fake and is being used to protect a sensitive identity.) Clearview AI downloads millions of images from news articles and social media sites, so including fake faces in sensitive articles is a good way to prevent Clearview from indexing a source’s face and linking it back to a sensitive article.
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https://2020.azureedge.net/mhg/Video-gerta-union-berlin-transliatsiia-matcha-v-yt2-1sto.php
https://xen.azurewebsites.net/kvx/Video-partido-la-serena-vs.-iquique-en-vivo-v-es-cl-1czn1.php
http://www.dth.or.th/ntd/v-ideos-Hertha-Union-Berlin-v-en-gb-1his.php
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http://grupo-logi.com/yvl/v-ideos-ziulte-varegem-anderlekht-smotret-match-onlain-v-yt2-1esg.php
https://2020.azureedge.net/mhg/video-smotret-match-ziulte-varegem-anderlekht-onlain-v-yt2-1ggc.php
http://play.colomboserboli.com/dym/Video-partido-la-serena-vs-iquique-en-vivo-v-es-cl-1vcb1.php
http://new.actiup.com/qyd/video-olmedo-vs.-tecnico-universitario-en-vivo-gratis-v-es-ec-1uox1.php
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Not all privacy advocates are convinced, though, that systems like the Anonymizer will prove effective. Activist and Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center research fellow Chris Gilliard told me, “I’d be pretty wary of any claims that this can function as a way to protect people’s anonymity.” Data sharing goes well beyond public photos posted to the Internet, and Gillard told me that “part of the problem with the lack of regulation and oversight with our data and with so many of these digital tools is that it’s relatively easy to obtain photos of people, whether that means scraping social media or buying it from the DMV.” Gillard felt that these are social rather than technical problems, and not something society can “tech” its way out of.
Apple has long benefited from not having to pay the “Windows Tax.” While other companies feel obliged to pay to install Windows on their computers, Apple has its own operating system, macOS.
That’s not perfect, but it’s not bad for a fake face imagined by a computer, and results should improve over time. The Anonymizer works by analyzing a user’s face and finding the closest match from within Generated Media’s existing database of fake faces. As the company generates more fake faces, the chances of finding a highly believable match will increase.
Generated Media’s Anonymizer presented me with a grid of about 20 look-alikes, with the option to view more. I scrolled through and chose a fake face that looked the most similar to my own.
In an interview, Tyler Lastovich, head of strategy for Generated Media, told me that the company built the Anonymizer after he was “personally approached on LinkedIn by someone using a Generated photo as their avatar” and after the company saw “many, many more [of its photos used as profile images] on Twitter.” Others have attempted to create tools that use A.I. to obscure the identities of protestors and activists online by subtly altering their profile photos. But Clearview told the New York Times that these tools do not work to trick its systems. A totally fake photo like the ones created by Generated Media would likely be a safer solution.
Do we look exactly the same? No. For one thing, I would never wear my hair like that. But we look close enough that contacts beyond my close friends and family might mistake the fake for me — especially if I used the fake on a social media site like Twitter, where profile photos are a scant 49x49 pixels.Fake faces also come with risks. According to the New York Times, fake faces can be “used as masks by real people with nefarious intent: spies who don an attractive face in an effort to infiltrate the intelligence community; right-wing propagandists who hide behind fake profiles, photo and all; online harassers who troll their targets with a friendly visage.” Earlier this year, a fake face was used in this way to share a story about Hunter Biden from a fake intelligence firm.If you’re planning to post about sensitive topics like a protest, you might consider taking a similar approach by creating a separate social media account and populating it with a fake version of your face. That way, sensitive content won’t be linked back to your real face and won’t be available to those who might search for your face on a platform like Clearview’s. Always check the terms of service of your social network before uploading a fake face; Twitter, for example, does not allow fake faces if they’re used for deceptive purposes. If you’re using the fake to protect your right to unimpeded free speech, you’re likely fine. | https://medium.com/@ymonniqe/it-is-true-that-it-costs-vast-amounts-of-money-to-develop-and-maintain-your-own-operating-59a2178cb055 | [] | 2020-12-04 05:01:23.897000+00:00 | ['Babies', 'Covid 19 Update', 'Mental Health', 'Ethereum', 'Health'] |
Making Christmas Autism Friendly is Possible. Here is how… | If you look at the news today, there will be one thing — in connection with the pandemic — that is causing a lot of consternation. Christmas is likely to be very different this year, due to the Covid 19 pandemic. How different, we don’t quite know yet. It has even caused a bit of a ‘flap’ politically, too.
People who are on the Autistic spectrum have experienced a generally negative change. The National Autistic Society detailed how the pandemic has badly impacted us — such as in level of care, education, access to public spaces and food — and I explored this more here. A ‘new normal’ has been touted, ostensibly, as a way forward — but it is important it is accessible for everyone, not just the majority of people.
Making Christmas Autism friendly is possible.
And here’s how — just note that Autism is a spectrum, and the following may not be for everyone.
Photo by Ira Ostafiichuk on Unsplash
Rules
The rules being followed, across the board, can be very important for some Autistic people. If someone is breaking them, it can be difficult to fixate and not ask why.
The Covid 19 pandemic has brought this into full focus. People on the spectrum are actually exempt from mask wearing — but many of us choose to undergo this discomfort, for the sake of other people. And yet, our aides have been co-opted, very often by people in denial Coronavirus is even real. The Sunflower Lanyard scheme is for people with invisible disabillities — yet those who often do not have one have acquired a lanyard, just to get out of wearing a mask. This is beyond frustrating.
When it comes to Christmas, so-called ‘guidelines’ can be turned into rules. Take a guideline, and slightly change the language — i.e ‘I will not do…’ Having a visual reminder can help. If we are lucky enough to see relatives, badges are available to say ‘I do not like hugs’ — a good reminder to prevent any restrictions potentially being broken.
If you have a young Autistic child, be very clear and concise — and use the occasional reminder about any rules that may be in place.
Surprises
The fear of the unknown can be terrifying. It may be why we have a very specific routine; it’s a way to understand the world around us. For this reason, surprises — such as when it comes to advent calendars or presents — may be a bit difficult for some of us.
If you can, consider adapting an advent calendar so the recipient knows what is inside before opening — such as by using see-through bags to host the gifts. Maybe ask for a list of gifts to give the recipient? Please try not to be offended if we react adversely.
Keeping a loose structure or a more set-in-stone routine would also be a bonus.
Brexit
Sometimes the future can be a scary thing — and unresolved questions may be causing us to feel incredibly anxious, especially when questions we want to know may not be able to be answered.
Brexit. (There, I said it.) Brexit is coming up — and it looks like, right now, there is not going to be a deal with the rest of the European Union. There is a potential for impact on trade, business, food — but we don’t quite know yet. ‘Brexit’ is not too long after Christmas, too.
Some people on the Autistic spectrum may have specific safe foods, or even comfort foods. In case of disruption, it may be wise to stock up on this — as it may cause worry, or distress if a supply runs out. This could prevent worrying over Christmas, instead of having to deal with it on the day.
Adaptations
Luckily, this is the twenty first century — and there is pretty much a gadget or a gizmo for every possible challenge, issue, etc. And that is also the same for Autistic people at Christmas. This also has the potential to take away fear and anxiety, in the run up to 25th December.
If you struggle with noise, consider investing in noise cancelling headphones — or even ear plugs. (Ear plugs are a cheaper alternative — and noise cancelling headphones can come with a hefty price tag.) This can help, particularly if there are sensory issues related to noise. (I feel you — it can be very overwhelming at times.)
Stimming is something that is almost synonymous with Autism. Please, do not suppress yourself. And, as a Christmas gift idea, stim toys could be a potential gift idea — and brands like ChewiGem are good for this. Anyone who tries to stop you because ‘it’s weird’ is just being ableist.
And if you need a ‘time out’, please give yourself permission to do exactly that; constant social interaction can be a bit much at times.
Food
As already mentioned, Autistic individuals may have sensory issues surrounding food. Research is also pointing more towards Autism and eating disorders often both being present within Autistic women — but the former is almost only seemingly picked up later. It’s also very specific to the individual.
If you are cooking for an Autistic person, maybe consider checking with them about their needs. If there is a sensory issue, maybe consider alternatives — or even adding a comfort or safe food into the mix. Try staggering dinner time — such as having different times, breaks between — as well as keeping a specific structure.
Accessabillity matters — and it is beneficial for all. | https://medium.com/conscious-life/making-christmas-autism-friendly-is-possible-here-is-how-9fdeb9bc675c | ['Elizabeth Wright'] | 2020-12-21 09:39:28.297000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Accessibility', 'Life', 'Autism', 'Disability'] |
Viewing the Environmental Impact of US Wildfires from Above | As the world’s climate heats up, many states in the western United States are experiencing increasingly larger and more devastating wildfires, along with a corresponding increase in dangerous air quality from wildfire smoke. A team of engineers at The Aerospace Corporation recently took to the skies to capture valuable data related to the environmental and atmospheric effects of these wildfires and the smoke they generate.
Conducted in late September, the FIRESTORM 2020 mission involved the flight of a Twin Otter Aircraft at altitudes of 12,500–17,500 ft above the Creek Fire burning east of Fresno, Calif. now recognized as the largest fire in the state’s history. Aerospace’s renowned Mid-infrared Airborne Hyperspectral Imager (MAHI) and Mako sensors were on board the craft, providing infrared hyperspectral imaging capabilities to detect and identify gases resulting from widespread wildfires, and analyze the movement and effects of these gases on the environment.
“There are a lot of fires this year. A lot more in California than in previous years, and larger fires,” said Dr. Eric Keim, Associate Director of Aerospace’s Imaging Spectroscopy Department. “We’re trying to help characterize the emissions from these fires that are of interest to scientists about the impacts of these fires on humans.”
FIRESTORM: Aerospace sensors shed light on environmental impact of U.S. wildfires
Airborne infrared hyperspectral imaging is a technology used to support national security and intelligence community applications, typically involving a sensor being flown over an area to collect data on the thermal infrared radiation (i.e., heat) that is emitted by the land and atmosphere below. While the Department of Defense routinely uses this capability to spot ground-based vehicles, Aerospace engineers are expanding airborne infrared hyperspectral imaging capabilities into Earth science applications, such as mineral mapping, global warming studies, and crop health analysis.
How Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging Works
The MAHI/Mako sensors share similar functionality with digital cameras in that they capture images comprised of rows of pixels. But while digital camera pixels can only register colors (i.e., “channels”) of red, green and blue, Mako sensor pixels can capture spectral information on the order of 128 channels, while MAHI sensor pixels can capture 640. Given that different chemical compounds absorb different wavelengths of light, the two sensors can provide infrared information that can reveal variations in color intensity that provide the visual signatures unique to specific gases.
Onboard the Twin Otter, Aerospace’s Mako instrument provides superior sensing capabilities.
“Where most hyperspectral sensors are visible, near-infrared, we’re in portions of the chromatic spectrum that most people do not sense in,” says Pat Johnson, Senior Engineer of Aerospace’s Imaging Products Department. “So (MAHI/Mako) are state-of-the-art, as far as instruments go.”
Last summer, Aerospace engineers initiated a hardware redesign for both sensors, which included a redesign of the lens enclosure and sensor cooling mechanism. In addition, the mount used to attach the sensors to the aircraft was updated to allow for three-axis stabilization (i.e., roll, yaw and pitch) allowing for the capture of smoother, crisper images that are unaffected by flight turbulence. Electronics were also updated, to increase reliability and reduce the likelihood of optical artifacts.
“Right now, nothing approaches (MAHI/Mako’s) combination of sensitivity and area coverage that anyone else is flying,” Keim said. “Aerospace has instruments that nobody else has, in terms of the capability for large areas, survey and the sensitivity for the gases that we’re trying to detect.”
Evolved Sensor and Data Analysis
Likewise, data collection and analysis tools were similarly updated and tailored to meet the needs of the mission, which now presented an exceptionally large area of coverage due to the unprecedented severity and range of the wildfires. While carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide were readily observed during the mission, the FIRESTORM 2020 mission also identified preliminary “exotic” materials in the hyperspectral data, such as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, benzaldehyde and acrolein, among others.
The team prepares to takes the sensors airborne, flying over fire-affected regions to collect hyperspectral imaging data.
“Chemicals that we measure, some of them are dangerous to humans, and some of them are precursors to other chemicals that impact human health,” said Dr. Katherine M. Saad, Senior Member of the Technical Staff for Aerospace’s Data Analytics Department. “What we are able to provide are quantities that can be used by regulatory folks or scientists that are concerned with exposure.”
Recent and increasingly frequent natural disaster events in the U.S. and the world at large have underscored the importance of Earth system science to environmental protection, public health and national security. As always, Aerospace is committed to applying its state-of-the-art resources to these objectives for the greater good. The FIRESTORM 2020 mission was a successful application of Aerospace’s technology for a new purpose of quantifying fire-related toxins.
“Fires are having more and more of an impact on our environment and our living conditions,” Keim said. “The more we can characterize them, the more we can understand how bad they are, and how much we need to do to mitigate them.” | https://medium.com/@aerospacecorp/viewing-the-environmental-impact-of-us-wildfires-from-above-1d67a314de29 | ['The Aerospace Corporation'] | 2021-01-15 23:57:16.600000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Science', 'Remote Sensing', 'Wildfires', 'California'] |
All You Need to Know About Android’s Biometric Library | Android has released a new biometric authentication library from Android API level 28 or Android 9). Android’s biometric library is an extension to the existing Figure print authentication library (available on Android API level 23 or Android 6 and above). For biometric authentication, the device must have at least an Android API level 23 or above.
How is it different from Android’s Fingerprint library?
The existing fingerprint library only has the support for fingerprint authentication but this library even supports Face authentication and Iris authentication. Unlike IOS which gives us feature to choose between Face lock or fingerprint, we do not have the authority in android. The reason for this is android supports a large number of devices that have a variety of hardware used in the device. Giving this authority to the user would be a compromise with security. Only those device which has a strong rated face or iris scan hardware can support face or iris authentication. At present, very few devices have that hardware. So you might rarely see the devices supporting Face or Iris authentication. (I have read it on the internet that presently just Pixel 4 supports the face authentication feature but soon more devices will come into the market.)
In the figure print library, we were required to design our own custom UI for the prompt screen. The biometric library provides us with a native UI for the prompt screen. On one hand, it saves the developer’s time and energy to design the UI, it provides us with limited modifications to its native UI. We can only modify the title, subtitle, and the text on the negative button without changing the dialog’s design. We can’t set properties on the prompt that aren’t exposed through its Builder — the UI is provided by the system and is designed to be uniform throughout all apps. This is sort of the main point of this API, this way the user becomes familiar with the prompt and knows that whatever they’re interacting with is safe to use.
To sum up, the following are the limitation of the biometric library :
There is no biometric support for devices below API level 23 (or Android 6).
If the device supports multiple biometrics, the user can‘t specify a default/preferred method in the settings. The biometrics library doesn’t give us the right to choose what method of authentication can be used like fingerprint, face, or iris. It will just confirm if authentication is a success or failure.
It provides us with limited modifications to its native UI. We can only modify the title, subtitle, and the text on the negative button without changing the dialog’s native UI.
Enough talk, let's get started :
We need to add the following dependency to our app’s build.gradle file
dependencies {
implementation 'androidx.biometric:biometric:1.0.1'
}
Now we need to check this through our code if the authentication via biometric is possible or not. The following situations are to be checked :
The device is running Android 6.0 or higher
The device features a fingerprint sensor
The user has granted your app permission to access the fingerprint sensor.
The user has registered at least one fingerprint on their device.
Seems like a trouble, but our library comes to rescue for this
val biometricManager = BiometricManager.from(this)
when (biometricManager.canAuthenticate(BIOMETRIC_STRONG or DEVICE_CREDENTIAL)) {
BiometricManager.BIOMETRIC_SUCCESS ->
Log.d("MY_APP_TAG", "App can authenticate using biometrics.")
BiometricManager.BIOMETRIC_ERROR_NO_HARDWARE ->
Log.e("MY_APP_TAG", "No biometric features available on this device.")
BiometricManager.BIOMETRIC_ERROR_HW_UNAVAILABLE ->
Log.e("MY_APP_TAG", "Biometric features are currently unavailable.")
BiometricManager.BIOMETRIC_ERROR_NONE_ENROLLED -> {
// Prompts the user to create credentials that your app accepts.
val enrollIntent = Intent(Settings.ACTION_BIOMETRIC_ENROLL).apply {
putExtra(Settings.EXTRA_BIOMETRIC_AUTHENTICATORS_ALLOWED,
BIOMETRIC_STRONG or DEVICE_CREDENTIAL)
}
startActivityForResult(enrollIntent, REQUEST_CODE)
}
}
Once you have checked if the user can authenticate using biometric, we can use the following code to show the biometric prompt screen on the device.
private lateinit var biometricPrompt: BiometricPrompt
private lateinit var promptInfo: BiometricPrompt.PromptInfo
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
setContentView(R.layout.activity_login)
executor = ContextCompat.getMainExecutor(this)
biometricPrompt = BiometricPrompt(this, executor,
object : BiometricPrompt.AuthenticationCallback() {
override fun onAuthenticationError(errorCode: Int,
errString: CharSequence) {
super.onAuthenticationError(errorCode, errString)
Toast.makeText(applicationContext,
"Authentication error: $errString", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT)
.show()
}
override fun onAuthenticationSucceeded(
result: BiometricPrompt.AuthenticationResult) {
super.onAuthenticationSucceeded(result)
Toast.makeText(applicationContext,
"Authentication succeeded!", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT)
.show()
}
override fun onAuthenticationFailed() {
super.onAuthenticationFailed()
Toast.makeText(applicationContext, "Authentication failed",
Toast.LENGTH_SHORT)
.show()
}
})
promptInfo = BiometricPrompt.PromptInfo.Builder()
.setTitle("Biometric login for my app")
.setSubtitle("Log in using your biometric credential")
.setNegativeButtonText("Use account password")
.build()
// Prompt appears when user clicks "Log in".
// Consider integrating with the keystore to unlock
// if needed by your app.
val biometricLoginButton =
findViewById<Button>(R.id.biometric_login)
biometricLoginButton.setOnClickListener {
biometricPrompt.authenticate(promptInfo)
}
} private lateinit var executor: Executorprivate lateinit var biometricPrompt: BiometricPromptprivate lateinit var promptInfo: BiometricPrompt.PromptInfooverride fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)setContentView(R.layout.activity_login)executor = ContextCompat.getMainExecutor(this)biometricPrompt = BiometricPrompt(this, executor,object : BiometricPrompt.AuthenticationCallback() {override fun onAuthenticationError(errorCode: Int,errString: CharSequence) {super.onAuthenticationError(errorCode, errString)Toast.makeText(applicationContext,"Authentication error: $errString", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show()override fun onAuthenticationSucceeded(result: BiometricPrompt.AuthenticationResult) {super.onAuthenticationSucceeded(result)Toast.makeText(applicationContext,"Authentication succeeded!", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show()override fun onAuthenticationFailed() {super.onAuthenticationFailed()Toast.makeText(applicationContext, "Authentication failed",Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show()})promptInfo = BiometricPrompt.PromptInfo.Builder().setTitle("Biometric login for my app").setSubtitle("Log in using your biometric credential").setNegativeButtonText("Use account password").build()// Prompt appears when user clicks "Log in".// Consider integrating with the keystore to unlock cryptographic operations // if needed by your app.val biometricLoginButton =findViewById (R.id.biometric_login)biometricLoginButton.setOnClickListener {biometricPrompt.authenticate(promptInfo)
Once you implemented this, you are good to go. | https://medium.com/swlh/all-you-need-to-know-about-androids-biometric-library-5fcecbc022cf | ['Anant Raman'] | 2020-11-04 03:55:56.144000+00:00 | ['Biometric Authentication', 'Kotlin', 'Android', 'Biometrics'] |
[Project Spotlight] — Jibrel Network | Overview
The Jibrel network is an intermediary service on the Ethereum blockchain that facilitates the tokenization, listing and trading of traditional assets. In addition, Jibrel aims to offer instant, near-zero fee global payments and remittances in the form of fiat-fiat transactions through various payment channels. Four core offerings of the Jibrel network:
Crypto Depository Receipts (CryDRs)
Tethered tokens for representing the ownership of underlying traditional assets held by Jibrel
Fully programmable; embedded with regulation
Jibrel Decentralized Autonomous Organization (Jibrel DAO)
Receives/holds traditional assets on behalf of stakeholders, and issues respective CryDRs
Asset Portals
Consisting of fiat and non-fiat portals, asset portals are intended for undertaking the necessary legal and financial steps to converting traditional assets into on-chain digital assets
Jibrel Network Token (JNT)
Used for levying Jibrel DAO’s on-chain fees and commissions
Problems Jibrel Aims to Solve
Cryptocurrencies’ market values being restricted by use cases and geography, due to limited adoption at the institution level
Widespread systemic risks introduced by challenges and limitations in converting between traditional assets and digital assets
Time delays and fees imposed by intermediaries, namely cryptocurrency exchanges, financial institutions and payment processors
Traditional investors being deterred from participating in the cryptocurrency market due to extreme market volatility as well as a lack of transparency
Limited options for decentralized organizations/funds and individual crypto investors to diversify into traditional holdings
Why A Token?
In order for all Crypto Depository Receipts (CryDRs) to remain tethered to underlying traditional assets, a virtual exchange currency will be needed for securing off-chain assets. This virtual exchange currency needs to fulfill three purposes: 1) to transact on the network; 2) to facilitate payment off-chain fees; and 3) to facilitate a seamless migration process. CryDRs themselves can’t be used for these purposes as they are part of the payment structure, and must remain tethered to traditional assets. Hence the JNT tokens are created to ensure CryDRs remain tethered to underlying traditional assets while offering an extra layer of compliance (illustrated down below).
Three layers in CryDR:
View: interface for 3rd-party contracts (i.e. ERC20) and web-apps (i.e. Dapps)
Controller: orchestration of Views and Storage; implementation of compliance and business logic
Storage: host for all data
Use Cases
Investment Platform
An investment bank that provides the users with on-chain/off-chain arbitrage opportunities by allowing them to deposit money market instruments or commodities into Jibrel DAO, then sell their CryDRs to decentralized organizations/funds at a premium
Hedging Tokens
Allow decentralized organizations/funds to hedge their positions in traditional assets, and protect their funds against crypto market downturns
Remittances
Fiat-to-fiat transfers that utilize crypto-infrastructure for transaction execution
Allow users to add and transfer funds globally with low fees while providing the stability and security of traditional assets
Universal Wallet
Gives users the ability to seamlessly convert between currencies, and make transfers
API
Currency API for users to freely convert between currencies
Merchant API for merchants to accept payments in any currency, and receive payouts in local currency.
No incurring exchange or transfer fees
Remarks
With most of the world still spectating the cryptocurrency market, Jibrel is actively seeking to bridge the gap between traditional economy and cryptoeconomy. Though the idea of tokenizing traditional assets on-chain while pertaining to off-chain assets seemed far fetched at first, our view quickly changed after a careful evaluation of the project. Among similar projects that dare to bring traditional finance on blockchain, Jibrel has a unique approach in integrating traditional financial instruments into cryptocurrency. The proposed approach is intricate and very well thought out. With regulatory and governing protocols added in, the Jibrel Network has a huge potential of breaking regulatory barriers and achieving institutional adoption at a higher level.
Author: Jay Jie
Co-author: Ken Trube, Liam Hodash | https://medium.com/cypher-core/project-spotlight-jibrel-network-c36bfdb8d6c7 | ['Cypher Core'] | 2018-09-21 07:28:11.852000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Project Spotlight', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
It Is Time to Change the World | “Even the smallest person can change the course of history.” — Lady Galadriel, Lord of the Rings
It is time to change the world, your world. Don’t think that it’s impossible. Think instead that all things are possible for those who believe.
God believes in you, you know. He formed you in the womb and knew you even before you knew yourself.
He has great plans for your life. And if He has not yet revealed it to you, it could be that you would not be able to believe in them for now. You’d think it impossible to reach.
But what is impossible? What is it that God could not do?
God makes His miracles today as He has made them yesterday, and we are His greatest miracle!
Don’t think of your smallness, think instead of God’s greatness. Don’t think of your poverty, think of God’s great wealth! Don’t think of your fears, think of the courage God can bestow upon you.
It isn’t to the strong or to the swift that success comes. Many times, victory belongs to those who are little in the eyes of the world.
You can change the world. Let it begin by allowing God to change you and make His miracles in your life! | https://medium.com/the-catholic-refuge/it-is-time-to-change-the-world-c69fc90d91cd | ['Jocelyn Soriano'] | 2020-12-28 22:03:45.320000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Self Improvement', 'Spirituality', 'Catholic', 'Religion'] |
Analysis of Global Terrorism Dataset | Terrorism is a cause of global concern for civilians and government bodies alike. With rising number of terrorist attacks happening all over the world, it has become possible to collect the data about global terrorism and observe patterns from it.
Global Terrorism dataset, which has over 191k records of the incidents related to terrorism from 1970 to 2018 is managed by The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was established in 2005 as a U.S Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. Apart from the city and the country, the dataset also specifies the latitude and longitude of the attacks thereby giving accurate locations that can help in data visualization. With the help of abundant features available in this dataset, we can find out the intensity of attacks by region for a particular year, whether there are any temporal or geographical trends in the attacks and the relationships between the characteristics of attacks and their success and failure rates.
Intensity of Terror Attacks
By Number of Terror Attacks
Figure below is a heatmap of intensity of terror attacks based on count. The brighter regions are areas where a greater number of terror attacks occur. From this heatmap, we can see that areas near the coastline are more susceptible to terror attacks. Majority of terror attacks occur near middle east and south-east Asia. I further used Tableau to gain more understanding of the scenario.
From Figure below, we can see that around 71% of around 190k terror attacks occurred in the continents of Asia and Africa. 4 of the top 5 countries with the most terrorist attacks (Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India) belong to the continent of Asia (Colombia is in South America). Top 10 countries (Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Colombia, Philippines, Peru, United Kingdom, El Savador and Somalia) contributed to around 55% of the all the terror attacks that happened globally from 1970 to 2018.
By number of fatalities
Terrorism is a brutal issue in various parts of the world as can be seen from the heatmap, majorly in the continents of Asia and Africa which are responsible for around 82% of the deaths world-wide. Considering average lifespan of humans to be around 71, we can say that terrorism has stolen 30.8 million years of people’s lives.
For this field, I created a weighted field. I assigned a weight of (*1) for deaths and (*0.5) for wounded to create the following heatmap.
By Property value damage
After analyzing damage to properties because of terror attacks, we see a different picture. Though the number or terror attacks in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States are lower, the property damage is very high. This tells us that the motive in the countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and countries in this section are very different. Though terror attacks in the UK resulted in 0.78% of total deaths, they were responsible for over 50% of total property damage.
Analysis of Weapons Used
In the dataset, the weapons were segregated between 10 categories — Explosives, Firearms, Incendiary, Melee, Vehicle, Chemical, Sabotage Equipment, Biological, Fake Weapons, Radiological and Other. Of these, Explosives, Firearms, Incendiary and Melle accounted for 99.51% of the data. So, for the analysis in QGIS, I only considered these.
From the pie chart and table above, we see that explosives were used in around 96k or 55% of the attacks, followed by Firearms which[RD1] accounted for 35.39% of the attacks. Incendiary and Melee were used in around 11.8k and 3.9k attacks respectively.
In the figure below, we can clearly see that Explosives is the most common weapon type. In parts of the continents of Europe and North America, Incendiary is used as weapons a lot. In the continent of Africa and parts of Central America, firearms can be seen to be used a lot. This data can be used by government and law enforcement agencies to regulate weapons in their territory.
Analysis of Terror Groups
By Count of Terror Attacks
Below is the bar graph of the 10 most active terrorist organizations. As we can see, Taliban has been responsible for around 8.8k terror attacks, followed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as ISIS, which is responsible for around 6k attacks.
From the figure below, we can see that most of the terror groups are responsible for attacks in a specific geographical location. This tells us that most of such attacks are because of political reasons mostly to capture or take control of a part of land. We can see that ISIL is the most active around Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram near Nigeria, Taliban in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others.
By number of fatalities
In the figure below, the size of the marker is proportional to the number of fatalities a terror group is responsible for. So, a larger marker indicates that the terror group has claimed a lot of lives. In this figure, I have plotted 5 terror groups that claimed the greatest number of lives. The formula for the marker size looks something like:
0.0001 * sum(nkill,gname, gname = ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)’)
Here is a bar graph to make sense of the markers.
By property damage
In the figure below, I have plotted 3 terror groups that have caused the most property damage. These 3 groups are collectively responsible for around 75% of the property damage, with Irish Republican Army responsible for 60% (over 4 billion USD). IRA has been active mostly in the UK and some parts of Western Europe, the USA and Africa.
Following is the bar graph of 10 terror groups that have caused the most property damage.
Analyzing Trends in Data (Understanding spikes)
The first spike can be seen in the number of people killed in the year 1984. After analyzing it further we see that a number of deadly terror attacks occurred in Nicaragua, Peru and El Salvador.
In 1995, we see a sharp spike in the number of people wounded. When analyzed, we see most of it relate to a terror incident in Japan.
Upon digging deeper, I found that it is related to the The Tokyo subway sarin attack (Chikatetsu Sarin Jiken, “Subway Sarin Incident”), which was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated on 20 March 1995, in Tokyo, Japan, by members of the cult movement Aum Shinrikyo. In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on three lines of the Tokyo Metro (then part of the Tokyo subway) during rush hour. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack)
The rise in number of fatalities in 1997 could be related to terror attacks in Algeria.
Several news articles talk about brutal massacre in Algeria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/08/30/hundreds-die-in-massacre-near-algiers/b6e77248-2e68-4244-86b8-4096ce3de497/
https://fas.org/irp/threat/terror_97/mideast.html
Sharp spike in number of injuries and wounds in 2001 can be explained by the 9/11 (September 11 attacks), a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda against the US.
In 2004 and 2007, there were several terror attacks in Iraq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2004
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2007
In 2014, we see a very sharp spike in the number of terror attacks and fatalities and injuries as well. After analyzing the data from 2013 to 2015, we see that deadliest of the terror attacks happened around mid-2014 in which around 6500 people were killed. According to US State Dept, the number of terror attacks rose by 80% in 2014. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33206784).
It says the sharp increase was largely due to groups like Islamic State in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria, as can be seen from the second figure. | https://medium.com/swlh/analysis-of-global-terrorism-dataset-888292e01873 | ['Kanishk Jain'] | 2020-12-25 13:15:27.164000+00:00 | ['Tableau', 'Qgis', 'Global Terrorism Database', 'Terrorism', 'Data Analysis'] |
Hitachi Vantara Hiring Data Scientist for 2020/21 Pass-out | Hitachi is recruiting freshers as Data Scientist. Applicants from the different clumps are qualified for this job. The point by point qualification and application measure are given underneath.
About Hitachi
Hitachi Vantara, an entirely claimed auxiliary of Hitachi, Ltd., guides our clients based on what’s presently to what’s next by addressing their advanced difficulties. Working close by every client, we apply our unrivaled modern and advanced capacities to their information and applications to profit both business and society. Over 80% of the Fortune 100 trust Hitachi Vantara to assist them with creating income streams, open upper hands, lower costs, improve client encounters, and convey social and natural worth.
also apply for : Salesforce is recruiting freshers as Software Intern 2021 Batch
Job Overview:
Collaborate with clients to comprehend business goals and make logical procedures to help accomplish them.
* Enhancing information assortment methods to incorporate data that is applicable for building logical frameworks.
* Processing, purging, and checking the trustworthiness of information utilized for investigation.
* Analyze and model organized information utilizing progressed factual techniques.
Perform exploratory information examinations, create and test working speculations, get ready and investigate chronicled information and recognize designs.
Organization NameHitachi
Organization website www.Hitachi.com
Employment Role Data Scientist
Batch 2020/21 Pass-out
Location Pune
Salary Best in Industry
Set of working responsibilities:
* Interact with clients to comprehend business destinations and make logical procedures to help accomplish them.
* Enhancing information assortment techniques to incorporate data that is important for building scientific frameworks.
* Processing, purging, and confirming the trustworthiness of information utilized for examination.
* Analyze and model organized information utilizing progressed factual techniques.
* Perform exploratory information examinations, create and test working speculations, plan and investigate recorded information and recognize designs.
* Analyze information utilizing open source bundles and business/undertaking applications
* Perform AI, text investigation, and factual examination strategies, for example, characterization, synergistic sifting, affiliation rules, assumption examination, subject demonstrating, time-arrangement investigation, relapse, measurable derivation, and approval techniques.
* Selecting highlights, assembling and upgrading classifiers utilizing AI methods.
* Implement calculations and programming expected to perform investigations.
* Drive customer commitment zeroed in on Big Data and Advanced Business Analytics.
* Doing specially appointed examination and introducing brings about a reasonable way.
* Communicate results and teach others through reports and introductions. Abilities Required • Expertise in Data Mining, Data fighting, and information munging utilizing at least one of the most regularly utilized information science apparatuses: R, Python, SAS, SPSS, Weka • Experience in start to finish information science and designing exercises.
* Expertise in customer commitment, information science counseling type exercises.
* Must have driven a group of information designers and information researchers in driving information science commitment.
* Experience with investigation in IT and IoT space is an or more.
* Knowledge and involvement with Hadoop (Map Reduce worldview) and so forth
* Must be involved and more likely than not dealt with actualizing AI and information mining calculations.
* Passion for discovering importance in enormous informational collections and recognizing significant outcomes.
* Excellent relational abilities (both composed and verbal) and relational aptitudes.
* Experience working with and changing huge informational collections.
* Understanding of business worth and how this identifies with noteworthy outcomes.
* Ability to distinguish or decipher numerous information sources and necessities at that point changing them into significant plans.
* Ability to take dubiously characterized informational collections and prerequisites at that point proactively distinguish and collaborate with required SMEs to give translations custom fitted to singular customer needs.
* Ability to envision information results into important work processes including diagrams and charts
* Experience in scripting dialects with experience in scripting to coordinate programming arrangements is an or more.
* Additional Skills (discretionary) Scala, Spark, H2O,Mahout, Hive
* Product Knowledge: At least 3 of the accompanying: o R, Python (Scikit-learn, numpy, and so on), Weka, SAS, SPSS, MATLAB/Octave, Hadoop (Map Reduce programming).
* Ability to work in a Linux climate, and cycle a lot of information in a cloud climate.
Knowledge in Search Engine, for example, Elastic, Apache Lucene/Solr
Capabilities
BE/B Tech/ME/M Tech
We are an equivalent open door boss. All candidates will be considered for work without regard for age, race, shading, religion, sex, sexual direction, sex personality, public source, veteran or inability status.
How To Apply for Hitachi Vantara Hiring Recruitment
All candidates who wish to apply for the Recruitment 2021, they may apply for the job post of by clicking on this link: | https://medium.com/@guled-darshan/hitachi-vantara-hiring-data-scientist-for-2020-21-pass-out-a5ed2aab9f59 | ['Darshan Guled'] | 2020-12-27 13:58:37.891000+00:00 | ['Freshers Jobs', 'Jobs', '2021', 'Darshan Guled', 'Ece'] |
Day 4 — My Secret Job Starting from 7 PM | Code Name MENCHA
Long story short- I am creating an online platform that connects young talents spread across various countries and supports them in helping each other extend their career opportunities to the global stage by making this unfamiliar environment more approachable.
For example:
I’m a Japanese HR manager looking for job opportunities in Singapore
➡️ My current options are: Linkedin or Headhunters (recruiting agencies)➡️ Are these solutions perfect?
➡️ No, I want another Japanese person working in Singapore to give me the real reviews about working there as well as tell me about the local life there. ➡️ Where do I find this person?
Yes, a lot of reds (=not done)
I launched this project in late October, and over the past six weeks,
I interviewed 13 target customers, surveyed 130 potential customers, opened social networking channels, created prototype website, collected 50 mentors from more than 10 industries, sent out e-mail newsletters, and now I am planning to launch the beta version this December.
To do this, I spent around $100 for the domain and some Starbucks coffee for the interviews. My prior rules are high speed, low cost, and maximum learning.
Why am I doing this?
This platform does NOT have a perfect business model, nor do I envision the current model to be a next-generation recruiting agency.
This sincerely came from my personal pain when I wanted to talk to someone in Korea when I was finishing college in the U.S., as well as to someone in the Japanese startup industry when I was planning on my career shift from Korea to Japan. This common problem became evident after the interviews I conducted. I noticed how many young students and talents were seeking mentors and advice for career development “beyond their own network”. This led me to my motive- to bring small positive influences, and by this, if I can introduce at the very least, one young talent in Korea to the dynamic and interesting career paths outside the country and connect them to people who can (and are willing to ) help, I will be content.
How is it going?
Well, the past six weeks have been failure after failure. The average opening rates of the newsletters was around 5%. Even my closest friends refused to be mentors without an appropriate reward model (incentives). Logo design and website creation were done by two MBA students and are in quite a miserable condition📛📛📛. I also discovered more than 3 local startups doing businesses identical to the one I have been planning. I have set up dozens of different options, analyzed the pros and cons and made many decisions without confidence. I do not know how the model might change by tomorrow morning.
Thanks to Kame-san for teaching me Figma
But, It’s fun! I believe this is the beauty of a side project. I took my own initiative for the project. I am forced to try tasks that I never have experienced before.
I have learned to make decisions fast and observe the consequence of the decisions faster. Moreover, a side project involves less resources and less risk, but the return is not low. Not only do you gain experience, but it also serves as lessons for any future business. Personally, I am catching up with the thinking process of young talents and behavior patterns of the new generation while building networks with them. How could anything else be more valuable than that to survive in this VUCA world?
Above all, my passion is at developing businesses that can bring positive, kind influences on the world, and I can’t be happier that now I am fulfilling my passion. So, HENNGE family! What’s your passion and what are you doing to fulfill it? | https://medium.com/henngeblog/my-secret-job-starts-from-7pm-8d55695e5c3 | ['Moonsoo Jung'] | 2019-12-06 03:51:56.284000+00:00 | ['Henngeadvent2019', 'Hennge', 'Business Development', 'Side Project', 'Side Hustle'] |
All about Instagram puzzle feed | Instagram puzzle feed
Instagram has taken over the world. Because it is visual and easy to understand.
Your Instagram feed is the most important way to express how professional you're. Every business has its own way to decorate the feed. some stick to a color palette, some stick to a posting design.
A puzzle feed is the best way to decorate an Instagram feed. it makes the best use of the space.
Because if puzzle feed people keep coming to the profile and browse through the profile. it increases your visibility and engagement. Instagram algorithm likes these and pushes your profile into the explore page.
Once you start posting these beautiful posts you will retain followers and you will be getting new followers organically
Puzzle feed can only be designed by a professional graphic designer.
Hire a professional graphic designer here
https://www.fiverr.com/share/WoE0GR | https://medium.com/@sajoyanhaque/all-about-instagram-puzzle-feed-521474400bd0 | ['Sajoyan Haque'] | 2020-12-25 15:05:23.173000+00:00 | ['Instagram', 'Fiverr Gig', 'Post', 'Puzzle', 'Fiverr'] |
What is Empathy? | What is Empathy?
By Elisa Aaltola
Empathy is often spoken of, but rarely defined. We all have a general sketch of what it may mean, but when put on the test many confuse “empathy” with terms such as “sympathy” and “pity”. This lack of definition also applies to the relation between empathy and moral ability. Many share the intuition that empathy is important for our capacity to recognize value in and care for other individuals yet struggle with explaining why this should be so. There is a clear need for both defining empathy and its role within morality.
Definitions of Empathy
As recent debates within the study of emotion have manifested, a universally applicable definition of emotions is not easy to construct. Indeed, it may be the case that our conception of emotions is culture-dependent, and thus definitions concerning them will vary from one individual to another. Yet despite of the role that culture can play in shaping our understanding of emotions, it is important to recognize that most human beings do share some universal tendencies (such as the capacity to experience or have affects, to form perceptions concerning the experiences of others, and to at least potentially care for what happens to those others). It is such universal tendencies that lay the grounds for empathy, even if understandings of empathy can also be shaped by one’s culture. At their core, investigations of empathy aim to describe what empathy can mean in light of psychology, neurosciences, philosophy and morality.
If one scratches the surface of the term “empathy”, it becomes quickly apparent that “empathy” is not one but many. That is, instead of there being one, singular and prototypic form of empathy, empathy falls into different varieties. Often these different varieties support each other and manifest in the same situation, yet they can also surface individually, unaccompanied by other forms. Furthermore, they all prioritise a different mechanism as their basis, and come with different moral consequences. Drawing upon my latest book, Varieties of Empathy: Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics(Rowman & Littlefield 2018), I will unpack four common forms of empathy.
Projective Empathy
Perhaps the most common variety of empathy is projective empathy, wherein we are to place ourselves into the metaphoric shoes of another individual. Children are taught to consider how they would feel in the place of another, and as adults we tend to at least implicitly ask others to think of how they would feel in our position. Here “the self” is projected into the situation of another. Literature is often thought to teach this ability, as narratives concerning real or fictious others invite us to imagine the experience of a different life and context.
Simulative Empathy
The sibling of projective empathy is simulative empathy. Whilst also it can be taught by literature, films and other arts, it also differs from projection in one important manner. When experiencing projective empathy, we ask “how would I feel, were I to be her?” In simulative empathy, we ask “How does she feel?” One no longer seeks to transport oneself into the place of another, but rather to interpret, with the aid of imagination, how the other may feel within herself, in all her difference. The aim is to simulate the context of the other individual — her history, cultural environment, everyday struggles, etc. — and thereby envision what it is like to be her, in all her distinctness and particularity.
Affective Empathy
The third empathetic form, affective empathy, refers to our ability to resonate with the experiences of others. One no longer prioritises projection or imaginative simulation, but rather echoes the feelings of the other. When witnessing sorrow, we may become sad, and when witnessing suffering, we may feel a painful pang in ourselves.
Whilst 18th century liberalist philosopher Adam Smith was a pivotal figure in advocating the previous projective and simulative empathy (what he termed “sympathy”), his colleaugue David Hume appeared to support something similar to affective empathy. Indeed, Hume argued “reverberation” to be the most spectacular of our abilities. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer used the term “compassion” for the same emotional capacity, suggesting that it was something quite mystical. Contemporary studies show that there is nothing mystical about our ability to resonate with the experiences or emotions of another. Affective empathy develops early on in our childhood, and gains basis in our neural structures. Social animals are prone, at least in some contexts, to imitate the emotions of others, and humans may in fact share this type of empathy with some other species.
Cognitive Empathy
Finally, cognitive empathy refers to the ability to primarily perceive or infer, on the basis of what in philosophy is called “a theory of mind”, what the other individual is undergoing. The aim here is to remain as emotion-neutral as possible, and simply observe the other. Cognitive empathy is in many ways the opposite of affective empathy, as attunement and resonation with another is replaced by a more detached outlook. It may sound surprising that such a state is categorized as “empathy”, but it in fact forms one important method of understanding the internal landscapes of other individuals.
Empathy and Morality
Quite strikingly, different varieties of empathy can have radically different moral implications. Take projective empathy: although it can work as a great pedagogical tool, it also has its downsides. One of these is that the other individual may become replaced with “the self”. If a middleclass person undergoes projective empathy toward a homeless individual, and thereby transports herself into the shoes of someone with no funds or housing, she will judge that individual according to the same criteria she uses for herself. Projecting her own stable and privileged position onto the other, she may think that the homeless person should just go and get an education or find a job — her ability to note the background and challenges (the sort of troubles she may never have experienced) of the other may become restricted.
Another example of projective empathy’s potentially problematic moral consequence is anthropomorphism, whereby one may wrongly project human qualities onto nonhuman animals. Although humans share with other animals a vast number of different abilities, which used to be positioned as “human-only” (memory, learning, awareness, communication, emotions, conceptuality, and so forth), in order to morally respect, say, bears or cows one must also note their differences and peculiarities. Nonhuman animals are not furry and feathery humans, and when we simply project ourselves into their place, the danger is that their particularity is lost. Indeed, when projecting too much, we may demand impossible things (for instance, human morality or human-specific ways of manifesting intelligence) from other animals, thereby ultimately undervaluing members of other species.
Simulative empathy is often more morally constructive in such dilemmas. Its point of focus is precisely also the difference and distinctness of the other creature. Within its sway, the middleclass person seeks to imagine the life-history, challenges and context of the homeless person, and the human being tries to imagine what it may be like to exist as a wholly different type of an animal. Here, learning more of the other becomes a significant act, whether it is through their personal accounts, factual information concerning them, interaction with them, or artistic practice. However, simulation also comes with challenges. One of these is that it alone may not suffice for moral concern — after all, it is possible to imagine what it is like to be another, but still remain un-resonating and emotionally detached from what happens to her.
Similarly, cognitive empathy faces its own risks. While it is important to learn to perceive and infer the mental states of others, if one does not combine doing so with also an affective dimension the dangers are nothing short of Machiavellian. When we gather information of the other’s emotions without feeling much for or with them, it becomes a lot easier to use that information in order to manipulate the others to serve our own benefit. Indeed, studies manifest that those suffering from “psychopathy” or the narcissistic personality disorder can have both good cognitive empathy skills, and difficulties in feeling guilt or resonating with others. It may be precisely this that renders them skilled at manipulation and control and prevents them from understanding the inherent value of other individuals.
On its own, cognitive empathy may not support moral agency. This is also evident in the context of how other animals are treated. Arguably, practices such as industrial farming and hunting depend on utilizing cognitive information regarding the behavior of animals (such as how they will react to given stimulus) whilst avoiding resonation or further morally relevant emotions (such as guilt, humility or love). Relatively affect-neutral knowledge of the affects of others is always a dangerous thing at the hands of self-directed creatures, and all too easily leads to ignoring the needs and value of the other.
But what about affective empathy? Out of these four candidates, it forms the most promising basis for morality. This is because resonating with others forms an experiential bridge into the other. Simply put, resonating with the suffering, fear or joy of another will spark moral concern or recognition much more forcefully than detached simulation, inference, or rational theory. As Schopenhaeur suggested, if we were to rationally debate what is wrong with ripping off someone’s jaw, we would be lost — the immorality of the act is evident, because we feel it to be evident, and we feel it, because we undergo compassion. Often, just letting ourselves become experientially affected by the internal landscapes of another is enough for us to start noting their uniqueness and worth. This applies also to nonhuman animals. Becoming exposed to their suffering within, say, industrial animal agriculture — truly paying attention to what happens to them — may lead to the sort of resonation after which one can no longer deny the subjectivity of other animals, or the moral wrongs committed toward them.
Yet affective empathy faces problems when unaccompanied by other varieties of empathy. For instance, were one to simply resonate strongly with little simulation or cognitive inference, one might not understand the contexts, causes or more hidden motivations behinds the emotions of another. As I argue in Varieties of Empathy: Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics, it is often the balanced combination of different types of empathies, which allows us to form the most complete understanding of the other’s felt perspective.
The Role of Reflection
One such combination is formed by what I call reflective empathy, which is a type of “meta-empathy”. In reflective empathy, one explores how one could cultivate one’s ability to expand and use the other “first-order” varieties of empathy. How could I resonate better with beings highly different from myself? How could I simulate others more effectively? How to become more empathic in situations of conflict?
Here, mindful attention can function as a method via which to become more inclusive and capable in one’s empathy. Another obvious source of reflection is rationality. Indeed, although empathy is important for moral agency, reason has a significant and vital role to play. Placing empathy as one constituent of moral ability in no way eradicates the significance of rationality. Rather, at their best, the two entwine and support each other.
Mindful attention and reason can help to combat one unpleasant downside of empathy. As has been pointed out by thinkers such as Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom, empathy faces the risk of bias. If such a risk is to be avoided, we ought to strive toward both mindful and rational reflection on why we empathise with particular types of individuals and not others, and how to broaden our empathy so as to include all those creatures, human or nonhuman, who have minds, and who experience their existence as something.
Conclusion
Empathy is an important route into understanding the internal realms of others. It also facilitates our moral relationships with those others. Ideally, we should try and combine the best aspects of different varieties of empathy and pay attention to how to cultivate our non-biased ability to pay heed to all those creatures, who have minds, experiences, needs and perspectives. Here, not only simulation and resonation, but also attentive reflection and reason can serve as guides.
Yet, empathy does not take place in isolation from wider social, cultural and political surroundings. We are often taught to use or to suppress different types of empathy from early on in our lives. For example, we may be taught to prioritise cognitive empathy at the expense of resonation, or we may be taught to project rather than to simulate. Most worryingly, we are often told that empathy is appropriate only toward those, who are most like us, or who are members of our ingroups. As a result, nonhuman animals, people from other cultures or social classes, or even members of another gender may be excluded outside of empathy.
Aristotle argued the task of the society is to teach us virtue, and the same applies to our knowledge of empathy. Cultivating empathy does not take place only “in the head”, but also socially, in relation to others. Transforming our social institutions in a direction that renders them better able to support and teach us empathy is crucial. The media, education, health care, marketing and economic industries are all culture-shaping institutions which ought to be sculpted so as to become capable of fostering different varieties of empathy — both toward human and nonhuman animals. Not a bad direction for a society to take.
Elisa Aaltola is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Eastern Finland. Varieties of Empathy: Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics is her latest book.
References
Aaltola, Elisa. 2014a. “Affective Empathy as Core Moral Agency: Psychopathy, Autism and Reason Revisited”. Philosophical Explorations17 (1): 76–92.
Aaltola, Elisa. 2014b. “Varieties of Empathy and Moral Agency”. Topoi– An International Review of Philosophy33 (1): 1–11.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004.The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2011. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. London: Penguin Books.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2017. How Emotions are Made. London: MacMillan.
Bloom, Paul. 2016.Against Empathy. New York: Ecco.
Decety, Jean & Ickes, William (eds.). 2009. The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
deWaal, Frans. 2008. “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy”. Annual Review of Psychology59: 279–300.
Hume, David. 1969. A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Penguin Books.
Prinz, Jesse. 2011. “Is empathy necessary for morality?” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2005. The Basis of Morality. New York: Dover Publications.
Smith, Adam. 2009. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Penguin Books.
Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. Watraut Stein (transl.). Washington: ISC Publishing. | https://medium.com/colloquium/what-is-empathy-80d80f9250fd | ['Rowman', 'Littlefield International'] | 2018-12-18 14:43:30.922000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Empathy'] |
Stop Stealing From Us | Courtesy of VitalSmart
Death and Taxes. Those are two certain things.
But stop stealing it from us. As Americans we want to live, we want to be free. Keep your hands out of our back pockets, out of our lives. What politicians and Washington are doing is not freedom, it’s tyranny.
Taxation is theft. Plain and simple.
You want to tax me to keep the roads safe, the first responders employed, street lights working, community in good shape…go ahead. I’ll pay for those mutual things, because I actually use them (or will need them).
But stealing tax dollars from the people is evil. Stop using it for whatever you want. Stop making improvements to government buildings when the roads are crumbling. It’s stealing. | https://medium.com/@jeffclark533/stop-stealing-from-us-49d1f0da09ff | ['Jeff Clark'] | 2020-12-10 16:07:38.686000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Taxes', 'Colorado', 'Stealing', 'Covid 19'] |
How to Make Long-Distance Friendships Work | There is a lot of advice out there on how to make long-distance romance work. But what about long-distance friendships?
Because of the current situation, many of us aren’t able to see our friends. The lockdown has separated us from each other. Some of us might be isolating in different cities or even different countries. The people we are used to seeing every day are no longer there.
Friendships are some of the most important relationships in our lives. We need to take care of them. But how do we do that?
“True friends are always together in spirit.” ― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
When I was 19, I moved to a different country. I was away from my friends and family. Still, I managed to keep these relationships very much alive. In some ways, my best friend and I have gotten even closer during the time we spent apart. I thought long and hard about how we did it and came up with a list of ideas that might help you. | https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-make-long-distance-friendships-work-d0ec5d4704b9 | ['Veronika Jel'] | 2020-06-12 13:26:12.452000+00:00 | ['Friendship', 'Love', 'Advice', 'Life Lessons', 'Relationships'] |
How Neural Networks Work | How Neural Networks Work
Understand what’s happening inside a neural network
Image by the author
This article is part of a series that explains neural networks without the math. The first part is here. The next part is here. You can also get the whole series as a book.
The basic structure of a simulated neuron
In the first part of this introduction, we talked about what an artificial neuron is. Artificial neurons are inspired by biological nerve cells, and transmit a signal from their “input side” (dendrites) to their “output side” (the axon):
Image by the author
The axon at the end divides into terminal branches, which connect to other dendrites (of many other such neurons), creating a network of billions of connected neurons. What makes an artificial neuron more than just a connecting cable is the ability of the neuron to decide whether it should actually propagate a signal down its axon or not.
In artificial neurons, the “cell body” (usually just a function in a programming language) will first weigh and then add up its inputs and, if they add up to more than a set threshold value, fire a signal down its axon. If the sum of the weighted inputs doesn’t exceed the threshold value, the neuron will stay silent and not fire a signal to the neurons that are connected at its terminal branches:
Image by the author
By connecting many such units in multiple layers with each other, we get an artificial neural network:
Image by the author
The weights between the inputs and the summing function can change, and represent the actual “learned” content of the network. All the information that the network has is stored in these weights. We will see in a moment how this works in detail. Read on!
A neuron for a logical ‘or’
Let us have a look at a few very simple neural networks so that we can see what happens inside them. These networks don’t do anything overly exciting, but they are easy to understand, and they do demonstrate the basic principles behind neural networks.
First, we want to have a look at a neuron that works as a logical or. The logical or operation has two inputs, A and B, and one output.
Consider a sentence like “If it is Saturday or very hot, I will go to the beach.” The two inputs are “it is Saturday” and “it is very hot”. The output is “I will go to the beach”. Each of the two input conditions can be true or false independently of the other. So it might be Saturday and very hot, or Saturday and not very hot, or not Saturday and not very hot. All in all, we have four possible combinations of input patterns, and for each, we have one desired output.
If it is not Saturday and not very hot, I will not go to the beach. If it is not Saturday but very hot, I will go to the beach. If it is Saturday but not very hot, I will go to the beach. If is Saturday and very hot, I will go to the beach.
So in three of the four cases, I will go to the beach (so my output will be true). In one of the four, namely, if both conditions are false, then I will not go to the beach. We can express the truth of the conditions either with the symbols T and F (for “true” and “false”) or just with 1 (true) and 0 (false).
To summarise: if either A or B is true, then the output of this logical operation should also be true. The output will also be true if only one of A and B is true. The output will only be false if both A and B are false. The following table shows what we want to achieve.
Input A Input B Output
------- ------- ------
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 1
----------------------
In order to build this as a neural network, we will need just one neuron. This one neuron has two inputs: one for the value of A and one for the value of B. Remember that between each input and the neuron is also a synaptic weight, which is shown in the diagram below as a little red circle with a number in it. This number is the factor by which the synapse will multiply its input before it passes it on to the neuron.
The neuron itself will add up its two inputs, and it will fire if the sum of the inputs is equal to or greater than 1. We say that the neuron has a threshold of 1.0. You can see this on the right side of the neuron below, right under the arrow that represents the neuron’s “axon”.
Now, the question is: how can we set the values of the synaptic weights so that this neuron fulfils the function of a logical or as just described?
Image by the author
Obviously, if each synaptic weight has a value that is equal to or greater than 1, then each one of the inputs A and B will be able to make the neuron fire. Let’s say A is logically true, which we will express as an input of 1. B is false, which means that the input is 0. Now we have to multiply A (which is 1, because A is true) with the synaptic weight 1.1:
1 × 1.1 = 1.1
We have to multiply B (which is false, i.e. 0) with its synaptic weight (1.1) too, but because B is 0, the result of the operation will be 0. Now the neuron gets one input with the value 1.1, and one input with the value 0. Its threshold is 1; therefore, since one of the inputs is already greater than 1, the neuron will fire and will set its output to 1.
This behaviour is exactly what we wanted! This neuron behaves like a logical or. You can check the other combinations of input values yourself to verify that this neuron would indeed work correctly in all four cases.
By the way, the scary Greek ‘Σ’ letter (pronounced “sigma”) inside the neuron’s body just means “sum”. So the neuron is summing up its inputs at this point and checking whether the sum is greater than the threshold value or not.
Calculating a logical ‘and’
Now let us consider another logical operation, the and. Take an example sentence like “If it is Saturday and very hot, then I will go to the beach.” This is different from before because now both conditions need to be fulfilled at the same time in order for me to go to the beach.
Here is a truth table for an and:
Input A Input B Output
------- ------- ------
0 0 0
0 1 0
1 0 0
1 1 1
----------------------
How do I have to set the synaptic weights so that our neuron now behaves as a logical and?
Clearly, I will need to set the weights so that each one by itself is unable to make the neuron fire. That is, each synaptic weight should be less than the threshold; but the two synaptic weights, when added together, should give us a greater value than the threshold value 1. This means that I can take any value between 0.5 and 0.9 for the synaptic weights. I get the following diagram:
Image by the author
You can easily verify that this will behave like a logical and.
Exclusive or not?
Things become slightly more complicated if I want to create a neuron that encodes a logical exclusive or, or xor. An exclusive or is true only if either A or B is true, but not both. Here is a truth table for the xor operation:
Input A Input B Output
------- ------- ------
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 0
----------------------
If you think about it for a moment, you will see that we cannot possibly achieve this result with a single neuron, because the weights would have to be greater than 1 so that each input can trigger the neuron alone and make it behave like an or. But if this was the case, then we could not get the right result for the last line where both inputs are 1, but the result is supposed to be 0.
So here we really need three neurons. One will act as an or and will fire if either one of its inputs is true. The second neuron will only have the job of stopping the output from becoming 1 in the case that both inputs are true. Therefore, one neuron needs to have both synapses set to 1 or 1.1, so that it will fire like an or. The second neuron is actually encoding an and, and if it fires, it will produce a negative output of −2. In this way, in the last line of the truth table, the sum of these two outputs will be less than 1. So we need a third neuron, which will be the output neuron, and this will fire only if the sum of its inputs is greater or equal to 1:
Image by the author
You can imagine that we can make the processing that happens between input and output as complex as we like by adding more and more neurons. Each new layer of neurons enables us to model more complex mappings between input and output.
Thanks for reading! In the next part, we will simulate neurons inside a spreadsheet, to see how exactly they work. Stay tuned. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-neural-networks-work-c34298a292df | ['Moral Robots'] | 2020-10-11 02:30:44.185000+00:00 | ['Neural Networks', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'AI', 'Computer Science', 'Programming'] |
TGO Network on YouTube | For more content, visit our YouTube Channel.
Witness our glorious leader as he conducts ICO reviews, AMAs with project leads/CEOs and other zany content like Friday Night round-tables with the boys. | https://medium.com/tgonetwork/tgo-network-on-youtube-c331bd71774e | [] | 2018-03-19 08:59:13.268000+00:00 | ['Media', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'ICO', 'Research'] |
Copycat Attack on Balancer: Why DeFi Needs to Change | Following CertiK’s discovery of the Balancer attack at 6PM UTC (2PM EDT) on June 28th, 2020, the CertiK Skynet system once again detected two similar abnormalities in the Balancer DeFi contract at 12:00PM UTC (8AM EDT) and 3:21PM UTC (11:21AM EDT) on June 29th, 2020. The two instances occurred in block 10360609 and block 10361515, respectively.
Unlike the prior Balancer attack that we wrote about that simply used contract vulnerabilities, this time the attackers cleverly used the Compound financial model and spontaneously generated COMP tokens. Because these three attacks on Balancer occurred within a span of just two days, it certainly raises concerns about the future of DeFi.
Screenshot of CertiK’s Skynet platform
Summary of the Event
On June 29th, after the attacker borrowed tokens from the dYdX flash loan and minted coins, they obtained cWBTC and cBAT tokens through the Uniswap flash loan. Then the loaned tokens were traded in large amounts into the Balancer token pool, which triggered Compound protocol’s airdrop mechanism and, as a result, airdropped free COMP tokens.
The attacker then used the Balancer’s already-vulnerable gulp() function to update the number of token pools, drained all tokens, and returned the amount borrowed from the flash loan. In the whole process, the attacker leveraged the financial model of the Compound protocol, the functionalities of flash loans, and the code vulnerability of Balancer.
By triggering the airdrop, the attacker created COMP out of nothing and made off with 11.5 ETH-about $2,660 USD as of the time of writing.
CertiK Analysis: Are These Two Attacks Similar to the Previous $500K Attack?
GIF by BADCODEC
These two most recent attacks at 12:00PM UTC (8AM EDT) and 3:21PM UTC (11:21AM EDT) on June 29th used the same technique and payment address, meaning that it’s possible that they were executed by the same person or team; but they differ in method from the prior Balancer attack that happened at 6:03PM UTC (2:03PM EDT) on June 28th.
Although all of the attacks used the gulp() function of the Balancer contract, the two highlighted in this article used Compound financial model vulnerabilities rather than pure code vulnerabilities. In addition, the amount gained by the attacker from these last two attacks was much smaller than the first, so the hacker who carried out the first attack likely had no incentive to attack again.
Based on these findings, CertiK believes that these recent two attacks were copycat attacks performed by individual(s) inspired by the first $500K attack.
How the Attack Happened
We’ll take the second of the two Balancer attacks highlighted in this article as an example:
Step 1: Attacker borrows three tokens of WETH, DAI, and USDC from dYdX through a lightning loan. The amounts are 103067.20640667767, 5410318.972365872, and 5737595.813492 respectively.
Step 2: Attacker uses the tokens obtained in Step 1 to mint three tokens (cETH, cDAI, and cUSDC).
Step 3: Attacker uses Uniswap to borrow and mint cWBTC and cBAT tokens through flash loans.
Step 4: The obtained cWBTC and cBAT are added into the token pool. At this time, the number of cWBTC and cBAT owned by the attacker are 4955.585562685 and 55144155.96523628 respectively.
Step 5: Attacker uses cWBTC and cBAT to conduct a large number of transactions in their respective token pools, thereby triggering the airdrop operation and distributing the non-attributed COMP to the token pool.
Step 6: Attacker calls the gulp() function to synchronize the current number of COMP into the Balancer smart contract and takes out cWBTC, cBAT, and the additional COMP, adding them to the token pool.
When exiting the token pool, the number of cWBTC and cBAT owned by the attacker are 4955.855562685 and 55144155.96523628. However, due to the additional COMP generated by a large number of transactions in the token pool, the attacker obtains additional COMP tokens. Here the attacker can also choose to directly enter other token pools and reuse the attack methods from steps 1 to 6 to obtain additional COMP tokens.
Step 7: Attacker repays the flash loans from Uniswap & dYdX and leaves the market.
Step 8: The attacker can still use the same method (steps 1 to 7) to launch attacks against other token pools. The mechanism of the attack is similar, but the types of tokens borrowed through the lightning loan are slightly different from those used for the attack.
Are We Making It Too Easy for Copycat Attackers?
People have raised concerns on the effect of news coverage and analyses and how they may be encouraging these copycat attacks. The question stands: will security companies’ publicly shared analyses teach more people to find ways to attack these systems?
CertiK’s view is that these analyses serve as learning opportunities for the blockchain space; unlike traditional software systems, transactions and contract calls on public blockchains are viewable by anyone, so the transparent nature of blockchains is both a blessing and a curse.
After any of these attacks occur, the transactions are recorded on the blockchain, which makes it easy for hackers to learn from. As such, it’s the duty of any blockchain security company like ours to publish analyses and warnings of these attacks so organizations can act before a copycat attacker does.
However, the recent frequent attacks have once again proved that security warnings are far from sufficient; while helpful for reactive adjustments, these warnings alone won’t change the efficacy of security in DeFi and in the larger blockchain industry.
What’s Next for DeFi?
This attack took advantage of vulnerabilities in the financial model design, rather than pure code vulnerabilities like with the previous Balancer attack and the notorious TheDAO hack. Typical code review that less diligent blockchain security companies provide as their basic service would be useless against this attack model; thankfully, CertiK’s security team works to identify the potential for these types of exploits when assessing a project’s security holistically, not just from a code level perspective.
However, what that means for DeFi is that there’s a strong, immediate need for protections at the financial model level and a commitment to higher standards for security internally, making sure to get multiple audits externally. Without the extra effort, DeFi projects remain easy targets for attackers, resulting in slow adoption rates.
What Needs to Change in DeFi Security?
In order to fundamentally change security in DeFi, we must introduce new mechanisms to secure smart contracts. The security mechanisms must be able to carry out analysis at the financial model level, adapt to the development structure of new contracts, and proactively intercept attacks, rather than reactively flagging after an attack.
CertiK has recognized the need for a new and secure DeFi mechanism and has started developing one such solution based on the CertiK Chain: CeDeFi (Certified DeFi)-that is, trustworthy DeFi.
It’s our belief that this new framework will completely change the security capabilities of blockchain.
For the latest updates, follow us on Twitter (@certik.io) or subscribe to our mailing list.
References | https://medium.com/certik/copycat-attack-on-balancer-why-defi-needs-to-change-7d5377c45ef1 | [] | 2020-07-02 22:38:04.275000+00:00 | ['Certiknews', 'Defi', 'Smart Contracts', 'Certik', 'Blockchain Security'] |
A Heartfelt Tale | Sorta Journal Entry:
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
I feel bad that I have not been chillen in Medium land as much as I desire to. I have been struck down by this pandemic, just like ya all have been. I keep busy but I’m unfocused and depressed. For these dark times, I just want companionship more than anything. No gifts, just human touch, a hug, a kiss, something.
I’m glad that Mimi won the contest. As a fellow writer and publisher, she definitely earned it! Her writings are refreshing and usually, I have to look a few words up as well. I love it! I like how on this platform so many different styled poets can come together and create great art! And for the most part, not bicker about it either.
I have just been slacking in the writing department….but I will come back…around. I usually bounce back. It’s been extra hard …because unlike most of America… I gave up drinking this year for the most part. I had a few drinks here and there…but usually I would pour them out, not even halfway through. So really those little slips don’t count. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
Sincerely,
Amanda Dalmas ~ Dec. 18th, 2020 | https://medium.com/the-rebel-poets-society/a-heartfelt-tale-be7f0f39d29b | ['Amanda Dalmas'] | 2020-12-19 00:58:47.015000+00:00 | ['Honesty', 'Storytelling', 'The Rebel Poets Society', 'Journal', 'Heartfelt'] |
Productivity: Three common mistakes when doing AB Testing | AB Testing is the act of running a simultaneous experiment between two or more variants of the same product to see which one performs the best.
Imagine, for instance, that you are working on a web page and you want to test your hypothesis that the new banner will generate more leads than the old one. You could just make the change and cross your fingers. But what if you’re wrong? Mistakes can get costly. By sending half of your traffic to one version of the page and half to another, you can first gather evidence about which one works best before you commit to the change.
Essentially, AB testing lets you play scientist and make decisions based on data about how people actually behave when they see your product.
If this is a new topic for you, the following articles can help you understand a little bit more about it:
You can definitely run AB tests on your own and get great results. However, you need to make sure that you set up your test correctly and that you know how to interpret the results.
What are the three most common mistakes do people make when doing A/B tests?
The first mistake is that the responsible of running the tests, don’t let them run their course. One of the characteristics of the software for running these tests is that lets you watch the results in real time, which is an advantage, the problem is when the decisions are make too quickly. It’s possible that if you let the test run to its natural end, you might get a different result.
The second mistake is to consider too many metrics. If you’re looking at large number of metrics at the same time, you’re at risk of making what statisticians call “spurious correlations”, it refers to a connection between two variables that appears causal but is not. The recommendation is to decide, before you execute the testing, select the few metrics you’re going to look at. The more you’re measuring, the more likely that you’re going to see random fluctuations. The question you should be always asking to yourself is, “What’s happening with this variable?” instead of, “What interesting (and potentially insignificant) changes am I seeing?”
The third mistake is to not do retesting. We usually test it once and then we believe it. The reality is that even with a statistically significant result, there’s a quite large probability of false positive error. Unless you retest once in a while, you don’t rule out the possibility of being wrong. In general, it is difficult to be very vigilant about the practical value of the findings. We want to believe that every little amount of improvement is valuable even when the test results are not fully reliable.
It’s clear that AB Testing is not a panacea, but it is a great way to gain a quick understanding of the question you have.
Via: | https://techagileleaders.com/productivity-three-common-mistakes-when-doing-ab-testing-da5d334b8543 | ['Lazaro Ibanez'] | 2020-12-23 22:19:49.116000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Product Design', 'Product', 'Product Management', 'Productivity'] |
“Medium Crazy” or Mega? | In my just-over-two-years on Medium, I’ve received my fair share of goofy and/or insulting comments on my stories. Certainly, many of you can relate. Some leave you shaking your head, while others are infuriating. And then there are those “bon mots” which actually incite pity for the commentators.
With that said, none have given me more pause for thought than the comment I recently received on my story about my sexual encounter with an octopus.
Now, hold up because I’m certain new readers here will be thinking, “What a sick twist.” Conversely, those of you who regularly read me — and I thank you from the bottom of my crusty heart — know a spoof when they see it.
Of course, I didn’t really have sex with an octopus, guys! After all, what cephalopod would be turned on by me?
Apparently, a reader took my story for the gospel, and lest you think I’m pulling your chain, here is the comment:
“The statircal nature of thisis disturbing. I don’t joke about having sex with babies, kids, goats. Certainly anyone can appreciate the evolution of a mollusks- MILLIONS of years later allows modern day homospaiens to take a step. While “intellignece” can be relative; sophisticsyion is not. If she doesn’t outwit a shark, prior, she might livr 1- yr before a mate enters her to release 100s of 100s of eggs, millions? Then she will die after she nurtures, does not leave her den and protect her young. Before you stay something so unitelligent, NOT funny, read my first two sentences.”
As you’ll note, I did not fix the garbled sentences and profusion of typos in this maniac’s throw-down. I had to read it several times before it sunk in that this wasn’t a joke.
Whoa, Nellie, but this is some concerning stuff! How in the hell does one come up with a rational response to someone who believes I actually got busy with an octopus! More to the point, someone who thinks I “sexually abused” said sea creature. Before you toss this off as a “joke,” read it a couple of times.
Now, you’ll see from my response, as I linked to the story, below, that I was pissed. But, as I think about this, perhaps I was remiss in that I didn’t attempt to engage this person in anything resembling an intelligent discourse about the perceived octopus abuse.
But, what the ever-loving F, people? Does this comment not have “crazy” all over it? Yes, I was being “statircal,” to quote the commentator, and anyone who can’t see that is nuts with a capital “N.”
You’ll note that the person in question has no stories, nor followers on this platform. It’s as if she (since you’re going to know, anyway), fell out of a cloud, sucked down a bottle of vodka and a handful of pills, and then wrote that mess up.
Friends, I’m dying to know. What would be your response to such an inane and insane diatribe? Would you ignore it or suggest that the person seek psychiatric help, posthaste?
For the record, I wouldn’t fuck a goat, either, or any animal. Bestiality is not my thing, although I can be a bit of a beast. Nor would I abuse a child, in ANY fashion. I’m very provincial. I like my sex with someone who has a penis. The grown-up, human kind.
As you’ll see there was no response to my own. It’s as if this person disappeared back into the padded room from which she emerged. I’m making a joke but for the record, I do feel empathy for anyone who is struggling mentally and or emotionally. Someone with a tenuous grip on reality. Trust me, I have my own issues and know how debilitating they can be.
We’re all struggling right now, so perhaps I should chalk this up to the pandemic and put this individual’s questionable mind at rest by saying:
“Dear…I did not, in any way, shape or form, engage in sexual conduct with an octopus. You read this on Medium, a place where writers share stories of all kinds, some sad, some funny, some true, and some satirical. That is the word, by the way. And that is the type of story you recently read, from me. Now, please, go and take a lie-down, snuggle with a pet or loved one or do whatever it is you need to calm the hell down. And I promise you, no more stories about messing with mollusks. Thanks for reading. Sincerely, Sherry.” | https://medium.com/the-top-shelf/medium-crazy-or-mega-f5beb4f04176 | ['Sherry Mcguinn'] | 2020-12-12 18:01:01.303000+00:00 | ['Sherry Top Shelf', 'Reader Comments', 'Mental Health', 'Satire', 'Sexuality'] |
Apakah mungkin bekerja sebagai UI/UX Designer dalam 6 minggu? | Beginner in life, just sharing my story. I hope it’s can be useful for you. | https://medium.com/@fikrif1998/apakah-mungkin-bekerja-sebagai-ui-ux-designer-dalam-6-minggu-69ea96d2b29c | ['Fikri Firmansyah'] | 2020-12-21 16:25:16.914000+00:00 | ['Sharing', 'Work', 'Ui Ux Design', 'Tips And Tricks'] |
How to Process Your Everyday Ideas Using a Notebook | I love notebooks. Love. Notebooks.
Real paper notebooks of all kinds. Pretty ones that cost a small fortune. Plain old spiral-bound ones. Hipster ones that have smooth paper I can’t stop rubbing my fingers against. It doesn’t matter. I love all of them.
There’s one notebook that I love more than all of the others, though. My notebook. My Everyday Notebook. It’s the one notebook that I use all year (usually one lasts me all year.)
Every year I think I’m going to try a different one and every year, I don’t. I get this one, like I have for the last four years. It has 300 pages (600 sheets), which is big enough to be substantial and not too big to actually use.
I carry it around with me, when I’m on top of my game. I leave it in my office for three days during a snow storm when I’m not. As time has gone on, I’ve gotten better and better at using my Everyday Notebook efficiently (and actually every day) and it’s gotten better at making my life happen.
What Exactly Is an Everyday Notebook?
At its core, it’s a brain dump. Or, I suppose, it’s like my brain outside my body.
I keep every possible kind of note in my notebook. Typical entries include:
Notes during phone calls or meetings.
Notes during classes or conferences.
Recipes or other instructions.
Grocery lists. (Or other kinds of shopping lists.)
To do lists.
Lists of ideas.
Lists of solutions to problems.
Lists of next steps.
Handwritten scenes for my work-in-progress novel.
Blog post ideas.
Plans for the upcoming day/week/month.
Plans for — just about anything you can imagine.
Notes on whatever I’m reading or watching.
Observations.
Quotes.
Research notes.
Notes for any current project.
But that’s only half of the equation.
Once you’ve got all of your ideas and notes and information out of your brain and into your notebook, it needs to be processed.
Actually, you’ve started to process it already, right? Just the act of writing it down starts your brain working on it. Sometimes, that’s enough for me. In fact, often it is. All I need to do is write something down to cement it in my mind enough to actually do it. By the time I get around to looking at my notes again, I’ve already done the thing.
But sometimes, I’ve written something that I need to do something about. Trying to find it again in my notebook, which is just a mishmash of information after all, won’t work. Having an index or some other way or organizing my actual notebook has never worked for me either, because I need to be able to just take my notes without worrying about that.
So, at some point, I process my notebook. If I’m really on top of it, I’ll process at the end of the day. More likely, I’ll process at the end of the week. Or — most likely of all — I’ll just just process as I realize I need something that I’ve written down.
Processing the Information in my Everyday Notebook
This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. I go back over my notes and I do something with them, if something needs to be done.
If I’ve written a note for a current project, that note might need to transcribed into my notebook that’s specific to that project. But also, maybe not. If the note is just a reminder to do something and I’ve already done it, then I don’t need to re-write it in my project notebook.
If I’ve handwritten a scene for my novel, I’d process that by typing it into my manuscript — which, with any luck, would kick off a decent writing session.
If I’ve recorded a quote or a line from a book that really registered with me, then I might write that on an index card to put into my Commonplace Book.
If I’ve made an appointment, that would go into my planner.
Grocery lists or other shopping lists I often just keep right in my Everyday Notebook. I use sticky notes to mark a page if I think I’m going to have trouble finding it when I need it. Or I take a picture of it with my phone so that I can access it more easily.
If I’m working through a problem with a list of ideas, solutions, or next steps, I often just keep that in my notebook as well and only move the actual tasks that I’m going to take action on into my planner. Or maybe I’ll be inspired by my ideas to write a blog post, so that will go into my editorial calendar.
Any blog post ideas go into my editorial calendar, which is where I also keep my plans and schedules for Ninja Writers.
When I’ve processed something from my notebook, I just mark through it with a highlighter. That way I can still read it if I need to, but I can see that I’ve moved it to where it needs to be and I don’t have to do anything more with it in my notebook.
Why This Works So Well
This two step process is like magic.
Getting everything out, putting it all down — all my ideas and all the minutiae of my life — in one place is the first step. It starts my brain working on what’s actually going on right now. Not what might happen later. Not what I think is happening. Not what seems like might be happening. What actually is going on in my life in the moment.
And if my brain is working, it’s coming up with solutions and ideas, bubbling away in the background even if I don’t realize it.
The second step, going back over those notes later, forces me to prioritize. Picking through all of the stuff that I wrote down and deciding what needs further attention and what doesn’t, helps me to organize my thoughts and my life so that my brain knows what to focus on.
And writing some things down a second time really helps me make sure that I don’t forget what’s really important.
What the Everyday Notebook is NOT
Well. It’s not pretty. And it’s not a planner or a Bullet Journal.
I tried, for years, to use a Bullet Journal and it always ended up being an art project that made me feel like a failure because I just couldn’t make it work for me. Not the way I needed it to.
The Everyday Notebook is different. It’s not pretty. It’s ugly even. And it’s not a journal at all. Or a scrapbook. You probably won’t want to paste your mementos into it. I don’t even keep mine at the end of the year. (Gasp, right?)
It is hyper-functional and 100 percent life changing and those things are way more important to me than pretty.
If you wanted to, you could have a Bullet Journal and use your Everyday Notebook to capture all your ideas on a daily basis and then process some of them into your Bujo at the end of the day or week or archival purposes. Or if you’re using a Bujo as a planner or to hold things like you reading notes.
But by itself, the Everyday Notebook is not a planner or an art journal. I think it’s far more elemental than that. For me, it’s more important.
It doesn’t replace other tools. I use a planner, for instance. I use an editorial calendar and I have a system for keeping track of quotes and research and one for recipes.
My Everyday Notebook is the tool that makes all of those other things work properly so that they can do what they’re supposed to in my life. | https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-process-your-everyday-ideas-using-a-notebook-71582afb50ce | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2020-01-20 20:19:05.927000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Writing', 'Productivity', 'Goals'] |
How to prepare the house before the baby comes in | There are multiple, multiple books on different stages of pregnancy and what to do when you are pregnant but not enough literature on what to do once the baby comes out. The funny thing is that I have realised over the years that women only talk about prenatal stage and go into it prepared but once the baby is delivered they are clueless as they were so focused on pregnancy that they didn’t think of what will happen after. Well let me tell you to-be-moms and to-be-dads the real struggle starts once the baby is out and not while it is in.
Going back the memory lane I didn’t know what hit me for the first two weeks. And while we talk about how normal delivery is better for you than a C-sec, nobody takes you or your discomfort seriously if you do deliver a baby normally. The doctor wants you to start walking immediately and the family wants you to get back to your household duties and you are not ready mentally or physically for it. That’s why here is a checklist of what you can do before the baby moves in with you.
Be Ready For a Flurry of Visitors
Expect a flurry of visitors
While it may not even be in your priority, you will be bombarded with visitors who want to come and see you and the baby. You want to be well prepared in advance because once you are back from the hospital you won’t have the energy to look out for their needs. Make sure your guest room is ready with basic needs. Assign one parent or husband to attend to them especially when you are resting or feeding the baby. That way they will feel involved and you can just concentrate on feeding and taking care of yourself and the baby. Stock your fridge and snack cupboard to entertain them and discuss your plan on how to attend to them in advance with your husband and parents. You don’t need this on your head.
Watch Out For Those Bacteria
The germs might be hiding in areas that aren’t light switches and doorknobs but sinks, toilet seats even your walls. You want to keep your environment as clean and germ free as possible. Asian Paints with Silver Ion Technology is recommended by the Indian Medical Association as it kills 99%** of all bacteria present, while neutralizing formaldehyde. It is also environmentally friendly so for me that makes a great choice. Apart from this remember to keep a huge bottle of hand sanitizer ready for those who might want to pick the baby. Say no to kisses from everyone for at least the first 3 months. New babies have very low immunity and even the best meaning people can pass on germs.
The bacteria might be hiding in areas that aren’t light switches and doorknobs but sinks, toilet seats and even your walls. You want to keep your environment as clean and bacteria free as possible. Wash your hands multiple times when handling the baby, get everyone in the house to do the same. Apart from this remember to keep a huge bottle of hand sanitizer ready for those who might want to pick the baby. Say no to kisses from everyone for at least the first 3 months
Even places like the walls can have bacteria so using safe paint options is something you should look out for. Did you know that Asian Paints Royale Health Shield has Silver Ion Technology that is recommended* by the Indian Medical Association? It kills 99%** of bacteria that you find on the walls. It also helps you breathe purified air by reducing the indoor air pollutants like formaldehyde. It not only will make your house healthier, but the luxurious sheen finish makes it look ready for the celebration too. You also have an extended colour palette to choose from. So, you get the best of both the worlds.
Use a disinfectant even when you get your floors mopped. Ask people to take off shoes outside the house. New babies have very low immunity and even the best meaning people can pass on germs so prevention and hygiene should be your utmost priority.
While you are adding a life to your existing lives, there is not much you can do about adding space to your home. Buying a new place is expensive but a little bit of shuffling and reimagining your space can help especially in cities like Mumbai. You need to remodel a room for the baby nursery or make space for a crib in your own room. Kitchen will also need to be shuffled to add sterilisers, breast pumps etc. There is a whole list of stuff that comes with the baby, I am sharing a list below to overview.
Baby sleeping
* Baby cot
* Mattress and pillows + bolster
* Rubber sheet under bed (2)
* Sheets — 5–6 sets
* Sheet stitched with bolsters and pillow
* cot mobile
Other essential items for baby
* Baby thermometer
* Baby nail cutter
* Medicine dropper
* Baby gym -not essential (the attention span of the baby in this is about 15–20 min)
Diapers and cleaning
* Cloth diapers initially(this is personal, you can straight away start with diapers but most Indian mommies go for cloth initially as baby skin is soft)
Baby proof The House
This is essential to be thought of in advance. So add rounded corners, door stoppers etc already because while you may think baby is too small now, they grow quickly. Also, adults taking care of the baby may bang into things as they are distracted, so just do it and be at peace.
Be Laundry Ready
Now that’s one thing you need to be aware of, that tiny baby can produce buckets of laundry. Stock baby friendly detergent which is not harmful on the skin.
To bathe the baby
Baby bathing chair
Bath tub
Baby supplies — soap, shampoo, liquid talc
Swaddle cloths
Towels with soft fabric
bath toys but much later
Feeding The Baby
We all know W.H.O recommends 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding for your baby. So your baby is going to be dependent on you for his feeds but exclusive breastfeeding can overwhelm you as by the time you finish the feed your baby has pooped and by the time you clean him, he is ready for the next feed. I moved to using a breast pump in my second pregnancy and that made my life way more organized. I would hand over the baby to a family member and step out of the house for an hour which would give me a breather. Once the baby turned 4–5 months, I used to take him to lunches and dinners with friends and while I took a break, the baby was fed pumped milk by anyone of us. Breastfeeding can cause sore breasts and cracked nipples and to avoid that you can use a nipple cream before feeding the baby. Even nipple shields work well.
Feeding
Breast pump
Breast pads
Nursing bras
Front opening gowns
Bottles
Sterilizer
Burp cloths
Bottle cleaning liquid and brush
Nursing pillow
For later — dining chair (high chair)
Breast milk storage containers
Ask For Help or Hire
I still very distinctly remember the difference between the two times that I became a mom. The first time around, I read a lot, tried to do everything myself, listened to all advice being passed my way and ended up tired and miserable. The second time around I knew better, I asked my mom to stay with me for the first few months to help around and just be my moral support. I hired a nanny who would take the baby from me for a little while when I had fed the baby. I didn’t try to wear the supermom status, rather told everyone around their duties right from my husband to my elder kid. I enjoyed my second time way more.
Keep the Elder Child Involved
If this is your second or third baby, it becomes essential to have your elder one involved from the time you conceive. Keep talking to him/her on the new sibling and how they were when they were babies. What all they can do together and also assign some duties to the elder child for the new baby, so that they feel a part. A lot of us tend to separate them from the process and the elder one feels left out which leads to sibling rivalry. So it’s very important to keep them involved no matter what the age of the child is.
Don’t Forget About Yourself
While your life becomes hectic, crazy and all about the baby, in this it’s very important to not forget the most important person i.e. you. Your body has gone through a tremendous change and while everyone will be more focused on the baby, you have to learn to look out for yourself. Remember, the more rested, well fed and happier you are, the better your baby and you will cope. Here are a few things you might need.
For mommies post baby
Corset belt
Nipple cream
stretch mark cream
feeding bras
Feeding cover(fabric to cover you while feeding)
Books and binge watch series to keep you entertained during long feeding and pumping sessions
So I do hope this checklist helps you to be ready on what comes after :). Wishing you a happy and safe delivery.
— — -
Disclaimer: This post is sponsored by Asian Paints but all views expressed are my own. I acknowledge the support and contribution of Asian Paints Limited in providing information for this article. The purpose of this article is to explain the scientific principles behind anti-bacterial paints All product specific views expressed here are my personal views. Readers should do their own research & consult professionals before purchasing the product. Products may not function as intended if they are not correctly used. Please also refer to product guides provided by companies before purchasing the product as your purchase and use of the product will be governed by them. #preparinghouseForbabychecklist #deepcleaninghousebeforebabychecklist #checklistbeforebabycomeshome #howtoprepareforfirstbaby
#howtodisinfecthouseforbaby #preparingforababychecklist #howtocleanyourhouseforanewbaby
#Royale Health Shield with Silver Ion technology, within 2 hours of exposure kills 99%** bacteria on walls.
*Fomite Infections (bacteria) can spread through infected walls among other indoor surfaces in homes and offices. For complete disclaimer and more information, please visit www.asianpaints.com/healthshield | https://medium.com/@maaofallblogs/how-to-prepare-the-house-before-the-baby-comes-in-e58b63ab1994 | ['Prerna Sinha'] | 2020-04-23 11:54:07.845000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Child Paint', 'Antibacterial', 'Asian Paints', 'Baby Care'] |
The Feds Just Found $20 Million Hidden Under A Mattress | The Feds Just Found $20 Million Hidden Under A Mattress
This isn’t a Mark Wahlberg movie — it’s real life.
Picture federal agents bursting into a bedroom, finding a crap-load of money hiding under a mattress. No, it’s not a scene from Mark Wahlberg’s next film — it’s real life.
The US Attorney’s Office of Massachusetts recently tweeted a picture of $20 million in cash found in the box spring of a Brazilian national. Homeland Security was investigating Cleber Rene Rizerio Rocha on suspicion of money laundering when agents found the cash in his bedroom.
It’s probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing $20 million worth of 20-, 50- and 100-dollar bills. And, of course, it’s all illegal.
Rocha, 27, faces jail time for his involvement in a massive pyramid scheme masked by a company called TelexFree. The company tricked people into paying a $1,425 fee to act as recruiters for the voice-over-internet phone service. As NPR reported, TelexFree “took in millions of dollars from people signing up to receive financial bonuses from advertising and recruiting.” The money went into the pockets of company heads and nearly 1 million people worldwide lost money.
One leader of the scam pleaded guilty, while another retreated to Brazil. The investigation is ongoing, but we’re hoping Mark Wahlberg is frantically drafting up a script based on this drama. | https://medium.com/omgfacts/the-feds-just-found-20-million-hidden-under-a-mattress-8abea2a4c216 | ['Diamond Brown'] | 2017-01-25 20:16:02.042000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Crime', 'World', 'Culture', 'Law'] |
Running a Masternode | News about Nodes | The Official NOWNodes Blog | In our recent posts, we have already talked about what nodes are and how we can use them for coin mining. Basically, a node is any device with an IP address that participates in a blockchain. Full nodes are online most of the time and store the copy of the whole blockchain, while light ones don’t. It is well known that a crypto user needs to be running a full node to be able to mine coins. However, mining coins aren’t the only way to earn money in the blockchain field, and sometimes it’s seen as quite ambiguous. After all, crypto coins do have high volatility, and if a coin’s price suddenly significantly falls, a situation can occur, where your expenditures on hardware and power bills would exceed the total value of the coins you’ve managed to mine. Luckily, there are other ways to make money and stay in the crypto lane. In this article, we will be talking about masternodes and how to use them.
What Is A Masternode
To run a masternode, you won’t have to worry about renting a place for all your hardware and installing cooling systems. Basically, a masternode, just like a regular full node, is a server or computer with a static IP-address, fully synchronized with the blockchain and working non-stop. It accepts transactions and provides decentralization. Their functions might differ depending on the cryptocurrency: DASH masternodes, for example, help carry out instant transactions. Other masternode tasks include, but aren’t limited to increasing privacy, governance and voting control, and enabling budgeting and treasury system in cryptos.
Then again — just like a regular node, a masternode can be run by anyone. However, there are certain barriers and limitations to make sure the system doesn’t get malicious. First and foremost, to run a masternode, you’re going to have to deposit a certain amount of your target coin. This needs to be done, so that you, as a masternode operator, have something valuable at stake and therefore are less likely to cheat. The minimum amount of coins differs from crypto to crypto (for example, 1000 DASH units for Dash, 10000 PIVX units for PIVX). Should you want to stop running your masternode, you get your deposit back.
Earning Money With A Masternode
After that, you’re going to need a VPS or server to host your wallet, as well as an IP address and some storage space. The question is, now that you’re all set, how exactly are you going to earn money with your masternode? In fact, it’s really easy. Once you launch the masternode, as soon as it starts performing its tasks, you’ll be getting rewarded by the network. The whole thing can be seen as receiving interest on your holdings. The incentive model depends on the cryptocurrency you’re working with, so it might be a good idea to do some research to figure out which coin will bring you the most money.
It’s important to remember that not all cryptos have a masternode system. As of summer 2019, the four most promising coins with a masternode system are Dash (DASH) with a minimum masternode amount of 1000 units, PIVX (10000 units), Blocknet (BLOCK, 5000 units), and Zcoin (ZXC, 1000 units). The amount of money you can earn from owning a masternode in these blockchains varies from $5 to $55 daily and from $2000 to $20000 annually.
Have we convinced you to set up your own masternode? Great! You can always obtain the desired cryptocurrency on our other platform, ChangeNOW: we offer fast and secure service, 24/7 customer support and most favorable exchange rates. Not so sure yet, but would like to try getting into blockchain anyway? Then NOWNodes is what you need: we provide access to full nodes of most promising and popular cryptos, allowing the user to try working with blockchain without having to set up their own full node — let alone a masternode. Join NOWNodes now and find the blockchain that works best for you and decide whether you want to set up a masternode for yourself! | https://medium.com/@nownodes/running-a-masternode-news-about-nodes-the-official-nownodes-blog-6cc0f841b8e0 | [] | 2019-10-21 10:55:24.644000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Node', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto'] |
First Debate Spotlights Democrats’ Vulnerabilities | It’s probably unfair to draw too many conclusions from last night’s Democratic “debate,” which had the feel of a badly organized pitch session.
by Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute
Bombarded by all-over-the-map questions by no less than five NBC interlocuters, the 10 candidates didn’t have time to go deep on anything.
Nonetheless, the low-key encounter was revealing. On the plus side, all those on the stage showed they are better qualified by intellect and temperament to be president than Donald Trump. On the minus side, the conversation highlighted four large political vulnerabilities Democrats must confront if they are serious about evicting Trump from the White House.
Where was the economic uplift?
The candidates dwelled on all that is wrong with the U.S. economy, without speaking to its inherent strengths, especially in innovation and entrepreneurship, or offering plausible ideas for parlaying those strengths into better jobs, higher wages and more evenly shared prosperity across the country.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren set the dour tone with her familiar chastisement of profiteering corporations, whom she blamed for engineering economic inequality and corrupting U.S. politics. Her rhetoric, redolent of the “Occupy” movement of a decade ago, seems out of phase with what will soon be the longest U.S. economic expansion in history.
Warren’s strident business-bashing thrills left-wing activists, but offers little to aspiring working and middle class voters who know their prospects for upward mobility depend on a dynamic and growing private economy. What she offers is basically a more sophisticated version of Trump’s scapegoating, only with corporations rather than immigrants in the role of villain.
Only Ohio’s Rep. Tim Ryan made the politically crucial point: To beat Trump, Democrats must offer real economic hope to voters in the old industrial centers of the Midwest, where they lost the 2016 election. Instead of pedaling such “coastal elite” fixations as free college and government guaranteed jobs, he proposed that Washington commit to making America the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles ordinary people can afford.
Statism is the wrong way to be bold.
With some notable exceptions — Ryan, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and formers Rep. John Delaney and Beto O’Rourke — the candidates spoke mostly about empowering the federal government, not people. They want to soak the rich and use the proceeds to pay for a nationalized health care system (Medicare for all), green jobs, “free” college and other new public benefits.
Leaving aside the nettlesome issue of how to pay for all this beneficence (the rich don’t have infinitely deep pockets), Democrats run a big risk by harnessing their ambitious schemes for reordering U.S. society to the instrument of federal power. “Americans’ trust in government to handle both domestic and international problems is at a new low,” the Gallup organization reports.
Democrats ought to think big and be bold, but too many conflate big and bold with centralizing power in Washington. Instead, they should think more creatively about solving economic and social problems from the ground up, by forging new problem-solving partnerships between innovative metro governments, civic associations and the private sector.
Open borders aren’t the answer to nativism.
On immigration, all of the Democrats last night rightly blasted Trump’s cruel nativism, and the appalling treatment of migrants and their children by U.S. border authorities. But they had little to say to Americans who may not support Trump’s stone-hearted policies but who also believe our southern borders should be secured and that our immigration laws should be enforced. On the contrary, former HUD Secretary Julian Castro seemed to be goading the other candidates toward his view that that entering the United States illegally should be downgraded from a criminal to a civil offense.
Citing the tragic drowning of a Salvadoran man and his young daughter in the Rio Grand, Castro accused fellow Texas O’Rourke of failing to “do your homework” by not favoring repeal of immigration laws that “criminalize desperation.” It was an emotionally stirring moment, but it’s unlikely that most Americans (including Latinos) will concede Castro’s implicit premise that people mistreated in their home countries have a right to come to ours. Democrats can beat Trump on immigration, but not by confirming his bogus claims that the party stands for “open borders.”
Stop putting U.S. voters into silos.
Finally, the debate showed that Democrats need to learn how to speak to the nation as a whole again. Some candidates last night showed off their Spanish and spent a lot of time name-checking favored identity groups, but this siloing of the U.S. electorate is not the path to building a majority in national elections. Sen. Corey Booker, for example, kept referring to “my community” as black and brown. The last time I checked, the state he represents in the Senate, New Jersey, still has plenty of white people too.
When it comes to identity politics, no one can or should compete with the nation’s top ethnic nationalist and polarizer-in-chief, Donald Trump. Instead, Democrats should reclaim the civic creed that unites Americans — our shared beliefs in individual freedom and equality that enable us to transcend group differences and turn our diversity into strength.
A Democratic politics of civic as well as ethnic, racial and gender inclusion is the key to making the party more competitive outside its coastal and urban bastions. And it’s the right way to make Trump pay for pitting Americans against each other so he can “win.” | https://progressivepolicyinstitute.medium.com/first-debate-spotlights-democrats-vulnerabilities-95d60c7ebba5 | ['Progressive Policy Institute'] | 2019-06-27 18:49:19.895000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Democratic Debate', 'Democratic Party', 'White House', 'Democrats'] |
The State of Sonars & “Seeing” Subterranean 🔊 | Types of Sonars
Since it’s all just sound, why can’t every sonar “do it all”? This is by far one of the most misunderstood parts of sonars and reasonably so. It’s all about the beam that is emitted out of the transducers, the properties of the beam, and the processing done after the receiver picks up the reflected sound signal.
Beam properties are generally: beam shape, # of beams, orientation, frequency(s), phase of the signal, and processing technique. In the interest of being breif-ish, we’ll dig into the main strengths and weaknesses of the main types of sonars used for hydrographic, and geophysical surveying.
Side-scan sonar (SSS)
Dataset: Imaging
Beam pattern: 2, very wide fan-like beams that are directed out at max angles approaching 120°- 160°.
Characteristics: SSS is the premier large swath imaging sonar. It’s measuring the intensity of the return pulse over an amount of time. It can take very high-resolution images over extremely large areas. While you can’t see color, it’s incredibly useful for seeing objects because of the characteristic shadows that appear in the images it produces (as demonstrated above with the shadow behind the rock, and in the brown ship image from further above).
A downside is the lack of imaging information you get directly below the device holding the 2 side scan transducers. This information is usually filled in with another downward-facing sonar like a MBES.
Resolution is generally a function of altitude of the SSS above the seafloor. The higher above, the worse the resolution, but the larger the swath imaging area. The closer to the seafloor, the better the resolution, but small imaged area. As you can imagine this becomes challenging to balance in varying terrain.
Single-beam echo sounders (SBES)
Datasets: Ranging, Bathymetry
Beam pattern: A single focused small-angle beam (1–0.5°). (see right side of the picture below)
Characteristics: Because the ensonified area (the area hit with sound by a sonar) by a single narrow beam is very small, it’s used in a way to cheaply identify general under-vehicle clearance. It can also be used for obstacle avoidance
Scanning sonar
Dataset: Ranging, Imaging
Beam pattern: A single beam that has a very narrow horizontal beam (2–0.5°), but wide vertical beam (20–60+°). This creates a fan-like pattern. It’s then rotated along a vertical axis.
Characteristics: We are all familiar with this type of sonar — we know the concept well from the stereotypical submarine control room shots in Navy war films when a torpedo inevitably is shot toward at the vehicle of the main character. It creates a 360° map of hard objects around the axis of the rotating sonar. It can also be used as an imaging sonar like a side-scan sonar beam that rotated. The end data here depends on the processing and type of beam (fan or laser-like).
Multibeam echo sounders (MBES)
Datasets: Bathymetry, Backscatter, Imaging (poor at imaging)
Beam pattern: Up to several hundred very narrow beams that are configured in a fan-like pattern to create a wide ensonified swath. This means that data from each beam can be distinguished from another which has several benefits.
Characteristics: Think of this like LIDAR with sound instead of lasers. This is the premier bathymetry sonar system. You get high-resolution point clouds of the bottom of the seafloor over a wide swath (120°). You can also measure the reflectivity of each individual beam to give you a backscatter image as well (amazing).
Interestingly, there’s a new field of post-processing for multibeam systems where the noise within the raw multibeam data is used to get water column profiling (measuring layers of different water temp which changes the speed of sound through water + biomass between the bottom of the sensor and the ocean-floor). As post-processing continues to get cheaper and trickles into the workflow of teams that use this data, I suspect a plethora of new information to emerge from good quality data that’s been collected already about the water column.
Sub-bottom profilers (SBP)
Dataset: Sub-Bottom Profiling (shocker)
Beam pattern: a very concentrated single narrow-beam (exactly the same as SBESs).
Characteristics: It creates a single layering line of under the seafloor. There is no swath (area) for SBPs without expanding the number of SBPs over a horizontal distance perpendicular to the direction of movement. These transducers are often called “boomers” because the sound is usually a very low frequency, with a lot of power behind it — almost seismic in nature. The downside, these are very power-hungry sonars. If you want deeper profiles you need more power behind the sound pulse. So if you want to have a SBP on a small AUV, you have to give up depth underneath you see and resolution or sampling rate.
Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS)
Datasets: Imaging, Bathymetry, Backscatter
Beam pattern: See the right image diagram. It’s multiple wide sonar beams emitted in pulses like a SSS, but then digitally sticked together to get a lot of information over each part of an ensonified grid.
Characteristics: This is the state of the art at the moment. Unfortunately, that makes it still exceedingly expensive. The benefits of this are clear. You get long-range, ultra-high-resolution images (cm level resolution). Additional post-processing is done to create a deeper and more-detailed understanding of any point from multiple different sonar pulses, all from different angles. Just look at the type of images it can create:
😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱- image: Kracken Robotics — MINSAS
Because each processed point has multiple different sources of information on it, you can also use interferometry to also get accurate-ish bathymetric and backscatter data as well. now you’re seriously upping the amount of processing needed, but the early results are pretty amazing and it’s not surprising that this will be the future of the space.
The kicker — like side scan, you still get “shadows” in the bathymetric & imaging data. | https://medium.com/bedrock-ocean-exploration/the-state-of-sonars-seeing-subterranean-7eda0b2e8ea7 | ['Anthony Dimare'] | 2019-11-25 18:07:49.029000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Oceans', 'Sonar', 'Exploration', 'Sensors'] |
For people without diabetes, “munching on the occasional gingerbread should be fine | The idea that seasonal changes could affect vaginal health makes sense — kind of. Anyone who’s ever sat around for too long in a wet swimsuit knows the annoyance of a summer yeast infection, for instance. But if you’ve heard the term “winter vagina” floating around, or read headlines about how to “winterise your vagina”, rest assured: That’s not a thing.
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https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/total-sportek-arsenal-vs-southampton-live-free-16-dec-2020-157065610/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/streamswatcharsenal-vs-southampton-live-stream-reddit-157065620/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/arsenal-vs-southampton-live-stream-reddit-epl-online-free-157065623/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/watch-juventus-vs-atalanta-live-stream-free121620-157064708/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/streaminglive-juventus-vs-atalanta-live-free-16-dec-2020-157064709/
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https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/streaming-juventus-vs-atalanta-live-stream-free-157064735/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/total-sportek-juventus-vs-atalanta-live-free-16-december-2-157064744/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/watch-juventus-vs-atalanta-live-stream-157064804/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/streamswatchjuventus-vs-atalanta-live-stream-reddit-157064757/
https://247sports.com/high-school/mississippi/board/football-102607/contents/juventus-vs-atalanta-live-stream-reddit-serie-a-online-free-157064765/
The term “winter vagina” was used a few years ago by The Sun, in a headline asking: “Are ‘winter vaginas’ really a thing?” Yes, according to one midwife they interviewed, who said vaginas can dry out just like your (face) lips do in cold weather.
In the same article, though, The Sun quoted Jen Gunter, MD, author of The Vagina Bible, who’s known for debunking women’s health myths. She’d previously side-eyed the idea of a “summer vagina” (yes, tight, wet clothes can lead to thrush; no, the weather itself doesn’t lead to vaginal pH changes). And you can bet she had something to say about winter vaginas, too. “The Ice Queen cometh and she’s a cruel mistress,” Gunter joked in a post at the time. “The air is apparently so fucking dry in houses in the United Kingdom that it is going to suck the moisture right out of your vagina.” As you can imagine, the rest of the post explained all the reasons that this is not a real issue.
Even if you’re living among the polar bears in the most brutal of winter tundras, weather doesn’t impact how wet you get. Unlike your hands and lips, your vagina is lined with a mucous membrane, explains Karen Duncan, MD, OB/GYN, an assistant professor at New York University Langone Health, tells Refinery29. Cold weather doesn’t affect mucus production. Sure, the skin on your vulva or mons pubis could, theoretically, get a little dry if you tend to have dry skin in general — but a fragrance-free, natural moisturiser that’s formulated for sensitive skin should fix the problem (just keep it away from your labia). For the most part, the vagina is weatherproof.
One thing you may have heard about winter and vaginas has to do with diet, not weather: that the sugar in the holiday cookies we’re eating can lead to yeast infections. But in fact, most of the studies only showed this to be true in patients with diabetes. For people without diabetes, “munching on the occasional gingerbread should be fine,” says Heather Bartos, a Texas OB/GYN and the founder of MindShift Medicine.
If anything, your risk of certain vaginal-related issues is lower in the winter than in the summer. People may be more likely to get urinary tract infections in the summer, for instance, based on a study looking into when UTI medical sales spike that was published in the journal The researchers couldn’t say for sure why, though they speculating that the reasons may be behavioural — people may have more sex in the summer, and sex can lead to UTIs.
But in general, to quote Dr. Gunter, “Vaginas function quite well in all seasons.” If you get a yeast infection or a UTI, if you seem abnormally dry or itchy, or really, if you notice any changes at all, see an OB/GYN to get diagnosed and get the right treatment. Otherwise, you can hang out and continue to let your vagina take care of itself all year long. | https://medium.com/@md-motinjpkf/for-people-without-diabetes-munching-on-the-occasional-gingerbread-should-be-fine-5ce0ffdb1380 | ['Md Motinjpk'] | 2020-12-16 17:23:59.410000+00:00 | ['Womens Health', 'Winter', 'Obgyn', 'Seasons', 'Vagina'] |
The Lisping Barista Says Yeth | Who Killed the Lisping Barista of the Epiphany Café?
The Lisping Barista Says Yeth
Chapter 1
Image from Pxfuel
By outward appearances, it looked like a perfectly ordinary coffee shop; not the kind where killers get their lattes. Nor the sort from your parents’ generation where the buxom waitress calls you honey and the mobsters plot their crimes; but of the class purveying expensive whipped concoctions, hip baristas, and scribes arrayed at tabletops, heads down into their manuscripts. A place where no one knows your name, but they’ll watch your laptop when you have to go. Please don’t imagine it was a chain. It was one of a kind. It could be anywhere, but you could never open one anywhere else. It was in the perfect location, in the enchanted town of Kenilworth, within the ordinary state of Connecticut.
By the end of the summer, an attractive young woman would be dead, her body dismembered; her killer, one of the regulars. It all began when she astonishingly said yes to a geeky guy.
The young woman was the conductor of the espresso machine, standing where she always stood when the Geeky Guy approached her. She was a craftsman of crushed beans, an artisan of whipped milk, a master of macchiato; and she crushed, whipped, and mastered our hearts. Women and men, we arranged our laptops so we could peer over and watch. She was a clash of artistry and awkwardness, bangles and chains, purity and piercings. She had enough tattoos so that, if you knew the language, you could read her life. By means of the cuts on her arms, you could see right into her and know she was in pain. You would just want to take care of her, but there was a counter in the way. The closest you would get would be the tip jar, which overflowed. But then the Geeky Guy, who no one expected, rose up, went forth, and asked her out on a date. He suggested coffee, which didn’t seem bizarre till later, and she said, so that we all could hear, yes.
To be precise, with her pierced tongue, it sounded more like, “Yeth.” That’s why I call her the Lisping Barista. | https://medium.com/who-killed-the-lisping-barista-of-the-epiphany/yeth-61f71cb47d0e | ['Keith R Wilson'] | 2020-10-01 17:58:44.680000+00:00 | ['Coffee Shop', 'Novel', 'Fiction', 'Connecticut', 'Murder Mystery'] |
Thou Shalt Not! | Pride, Envy and now this?
Recreated from Images Taken from Pixabay
I was driving at 60 in a 45-mile zone on a county road, as was the ugly green sedan alongside me. It veered into my lane without warning which led me to brake hard and swerve. Just as it should be, the avatar of the hiding-highway-patrol filled up my rearview mirror with flashing lights. I muttered, slowed down and waited to be pulled over for speeding or swerving. When the cop overtook me to pull over the green sedan, the devil in me thanked the divinity, smiled a little, sang a song and drove away.
The feeling was sadistic at the plight of the rogue sedan, and a little more.
What was it?
It was schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude is a German word which refers to the act of “taking pleasure in the misfortune of others”
Besides our abundant egos, we humans also have a sufficient amount of envy, jealousy, and sadism coursing through our blood. Although most of us don’t set out to deliberately hurt anyone, we secretly take pleasure when someone we don’t like lands in a pickle. We may even rejoice, thereby practicing schadenfreude.
It is one of humanity’s most complex of feelings — twisted yet not overly spiteful, stressful but pleasure inducing — evil, but in a small-ish dose.
Photo by 7 SeTh on Unsplash
Schadenfreude to me is a conflation of jealousy and the state of mind at a particular time. It’s the satisfying, full-bellied, deep-throated laughter you emit when the town grinch can’t sell his house or the Ever-Miss-Correct faces criticism. It’s the ostentatious elongation of the spine and the raising of the chin on noticing that the traffic on the opposite side is barely moving while you are cruising smoothly. Or the smug curl of the lips when a politician you despise is caught in a scandalous situation or the verbalizing of “karma-is-a-b****” expletive over the arrest of celebrities who use their crisp greenbacks to tamper with the college admission process.
It is when you are relieved at the comeuppance of someone.
Aristotle was way ahead of the game analyzing this human emotion almost 2000 years ago. He referred to it as epichairekakia. So it is safe to assume this emotion is not new to mankind. And, we have also harbored and nurtured it over the centuries.
Schadenfreude in Literature
Our texts, both classic and modern, are teeming with characters rejoicing the customary ‘fall’ of others.
Iago in Othello revels in the misery of Othello after planting the seeds of mistrust in his marital life. Alexander Dumas fleshes out the emotion of jealousy in the Count of Monte Cristo and in Wuthering Heights, Catherine’s relationship with Heathcliff is the reason why Nelly gets emotional and describes Catherine as “wild and evil.”
Today, the addictive display of oneself on social media has cultivated an atmosphere of critical evaluation, increasing the tendencies of judging, insecurity, and one-upping bolstering the emotion of schadenfreude — one wardrobe malfunction, one unglamourous image, or one less LIKED post at a time.
PRIDE as a sidekick to schadenfreude
We are a whirlpool of emotions and pride, the more popular cousin, prevents us from accepting that we are a schadenfroh person. It performs stupendously and brilliantly manages to hide schadenfreude behind its sheen of self-love and gloat.
Famously known is the camaraderie of writers(a sham); laced with pride, envy, and schadenfreude, theirs is a toxic cocktail.
Hemingway wasn’t so subtle about bad-mouthing Fitzgerald and condemning his work; Leo Tolstoy had a notorious antipathy towards Shakespeare, and when Thackeray spread the news of Dickens having an affair after his divorce, Dickens retaliated by letting his protégé, Edmund Yates, publish a scathing attack on Thackeray.
Many other writers were ridiculed by their peers. This is what Derek Walcott had to say about Naipaul:
“I have been bitten. I must avoid infection
Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.”
The difference between Envy and Schadenfreude
When one is envious of another person’s fortunes /versus one experiences schadenfreude at someone’s misfortunes.
It’s like despising your neighbor for having a Ferrari but rejoicing when he/she wrecks it.
Can we do something to better ourselves as human beings?
Our inherent built-in tendencies for jealousy and our competitive disposition don’t leave much room for taming this emotion. A spiritual and conscientious mind does help curb the feeling to some extent, but this ‘shameful joy’ is so intrinsic in us that it rears its ugly head even when we try to suppress it. Corporate team-building exercises, motivational memes, and religious discourses only help alleviate it for a select few.
These select few have made self-introspection as intrinsic as breathing and because they constantly keep a check on themselves, schadenfreude is shredded to bits as soon as it they feel it coming.
The next time your conscience takes a shellacking, remember to take a deep breath and maybe, just maybe, the feeling will pass.
Disclaimer: I have attempted to explain an inherent human emotion and a well used literary device.
I do not, however, intend to undermine the efforts made by the saintly who have ameliorated themselves to a higher level by conquering basic human follies. | https://medium.com/@jainfamilymembers/thou-shalt-not-771cbc1ea0fa | ['Prachi Jain'] | 2020-02-07 01:26:47.769000+00:00 | ['Pride', 'Human Behavior', 'Emotions', 'Schadenfreude', 'Envy'] |
My Brief Story and VISION for FUTURE | My Brief Story and VISION for FUTURE
My Intro (Education, Work Experience, Expertise) My most recent International Experience (in a separate page) My VISION & YOUTHinc. Representing #FriendsforWork and SDGs, Friends for Leadership Network (FFL) COVID-19, importance of our HEALTH & WELLBEING What’s my MOTIVATION? Contact for Partnership & Collaboration
My Intro: Hi, I’m Baljaa from Mongolia. My full name is BALJINNYAM, which means “Sunrise” in Tibetan. I’m a lifelong learner, a yogi, a fitness enthusiast, and a mother of two. Also, I’m a social entrepreneur and an activist for SDGs and youth empowerment — striving to build a platform YOUTHinc to bridge the gap between youth and employers; and work-life harmony for a better future!
Education: MBA in International Business,
BA in International Relations from Lindenwood University, Missouri, USA (2006–2008)
Work experience: 10+ years in the NGO and private sector in the USA and in Mongolia (2008-present) including:
Skills in: International Relations, membership community, networking, research and digital coordination
2. My most recent International Experience:
Represented Mongolian Employers Delegation and Honor to Speak at the 108th Plenary Session of International Labor Conference, ILC- ILO in the UN Geneva, Switzerland (June 2019).
(June 2019). Delegate at the ILO Global Youth Employment Forum in Abuja, Nigeria (August, 2019).
(August, 2019). EBMOs and SDGs training by Act/Emp and ITC/ILO in Bangkok, Thailand (July, 2019).
(July, 2019). Academy on transition to Formal Economy, training at ITC-ILO in Turin, Italy (Dec, 2018).
(Dec, 2018). Delegate at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF -19) in St. Petersburg, Russia (June, 2019) as a member of the FFL, Friends for Leadership, international network
(June, 2019) as a member of the FFL, Friends for Leadership, international network Delegate at the Vision for Future, New Delhi, India (March, 2019) The international program organized by BRICS International Forum, India
3. My VISION and YOUTHinc.
MY VISION is to have a meaningful and fulfilling life with work-life harmony for a better future!
Profoundly impacted by my previous work experiences, challenges in our labor market both from the supply and demand side, as young people are not able to find the jobs they want, and businesses are unable to find talent for the jobs they have, I founded YOUTHinc, a social enterprise, a young professionals network, and a membership based community in Mongolia.
OUR VISION:
Better Competence + Work-life harmony for every young professionals!
OUR MISSION:
Building a more inclusive and sustainable platform that bridge the gap between youth and employers towards a better future!
Previously, I Co-Founded Young Mongolian Professionals Association, a 501c3 tax-exempt NGO organization in the USA, registered both in Virginia and California (East & West Coast, USA) from 2009–2015, which is now re-registered in Mongolia as of 2020.
Through our work and activities, we support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 Agenda, particularly by promoting good health & wellbeing (SDG3), quality education & lifelong learning opportunities (SDG4), gender equality (SDG5), decent work for youth (SDG 8), and support strengthening the global partnership (SDG 17) for sustainable development.
At YOUTHinc, we have developed a project initiative — Bridging the Gap “Digital Skills Matching -An Interesting Internship Program” which supports SDG 4, 5, 8, 17 for Youth and Employers to meet the requirements of ever changing future of work as part of our Learning & Development (L&D Hub).
THE GOAL of the Program is to bridge the gaps between youth and employers by enabling youth to acquire needed skills and employability competencies in partnering with employers and business entities.
So far we’re in the preparation/planning phase supported by the Dutch Employers’ Cooperation Programme (DECP).
We believe that this is a scalable project initiative to bridge the gap in the rapidly changing world of work; so we need even more collaborative effort by learning and sharing the best practices in other developing countries.
Introducing our project proposal Bridging the Gap Digital Skills Matching Internship program at ILO Global Youth Employment Forum in Abuja, Nigeria
4. Representing #FriendsforWork and SDGs, Friends for Leadership Network (FFL)
Friends for Leadership is an international network of the next generation leaders and entrepreneurs, who share the best SDGs practices and working solutions to bring them into effect to our local communities globally together with a wide database of the multistakeholder partners. To facilitate this, we also hold trainings and networking sessions around the Sustainable Development Agenda.
FFL Online Meetup: #FriendsforSDGs #UN75 Contest:
It’s truly amazing that our #FriendsforLeadership #FriendsForSDGs and #UN75 contest received over 550 project applications from over 90 countries worldwide! and I’m happy to represent #FriendsforWork or SDG8 and participated in the FFL Online Meetup together with Chief Strategist of the UN75 Natalie Samarasinghe, Billy Batware from the Young UN, Sam Loni from the SDSN, Steve Lee from the UN MGCY and our 17 SDGs convenors from the FFL community.
5. COVID-19, importance of our HEALTH & WELLBEING
Currently, as we all know the world is changing …Covid-19 Pandemic has impacted many lives and livelihoods, societies and economies worldwide; at the same time these new changes, transformation trends raised more challenges and uncertainties in the reality of the modern digital world especially in emerging countries like Mongolia.
I encourage all to be healthier and stronger in order to fight and act in ending this COVID-19 Pandemic together!💪 #FriendsCOVID19Support
I’d like to highlight the importance of health & wellbeing, as well as lifelong learning toward a better future and sharing my experience about how my new habits and daily routines of practicing mindfulness, meditation and exercising helped me to become stronger and healthier while staying at home as a founder of #bfitmongolia, a holistic health — wellness program for a healthy lifestyle to balance Mind-Body-Spirit as well as work-life harmony.
6. What’s my MOTIVATION? My top three motivations are:
“Be the change you wish to see in the world”…and “Each person must live their life as a model for others” …Therefore, it’s my motivation to grow personally & professionally; promote healthy lifestyle, maintain healthy daily habits, practice lifelong learning, build required skills and competency day by day (in my daily routine) towards a meaningful and fulfilling life with work-life harmony:) Youth are the agents of change and driving force towards the achievement of the SDGs and a potential resource for the country’s development shaping the future of the nation. (Mongolia is a country of youth. 64 percent of the total population are under 35 years of age; and 35 percent is the Youth aged 15–34. Unfortunately, According to the Global Competitiveness Report 2019 by the World Economic Forum, Mongolia was ranked 102nd out of 141 countries with its GCI — Global Competitiveness Index; And it’s very ironic that 60% of unemployed people are higher educated professionals, and 30% of graduates cannot get a job in the labor market according to our Labor Force Survey Report 2019, NSO Mongolia.) I believe connecting the right-minded and like-minded individuals through meaningful engagement, lifelong learning, skills and competency building, sharing knowledge and empowering one another, together we can solve the world’s biggest problems with the use of technology to our advantage. And TOGETHER we can contribute and build a more inclusive and sustainable platform that bridge the gap between youth and employers towards a better future (Better Competence + Work-life harmony for every young professionals) !
7. Contact for Partnership & Collaboration
Let’s unite and support one another regardless of nationality, age, gender and background to share experience, knowledge and expertise cross culturally, and we look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration to achieve our common goal together!
Sincerely yours,
Ms. BALJINNYAM Chinzorigt (Baljaa)
Founder & CEO
YOUTH inc.
+976 99050105
[email protected]
[email protected]
https://www.youthinc.mn/ | https://medium.com/@baljaa-ch/my-brief-story-and-vision-for-future-5624948537a0 | ['Baljaa Ch'] | 2021-01-26 00:26:43.341000+00:00 | ['My Story', 'Partnerships', 'Vision', 'Sdgs', 'Future Of Work'] |
3 Benefits of the ketogenic Diet : | Keto is everywhere; it’s the new buzzword, the new favorite among those looking to shed pounds, and the new hate victim of the food-pyramid-spouting-eat-your-whole grains mainstream medical industry. The keto diet, while it is not the magic cure-all for every single disease on the planet, does a pretty dang good job at being the potential causer of healing many horrible conditions. So let’s cut through the science, separate fact from fiction, and look at the benefits of the keto diet.
Benefit #1: Weight Loss
Okay, so this one isn’t so astounding, but it is one of the most common reasons people embark on the keto diet. So why is weight loss usually so easy on the ketogenic diet instead of other regular diets? For all of the following reasons:
• The keto diet is composed of approximately 75% fat, 20 % protein, and 5% or less carbohydrates. The high fat content and lack of sugar means diminished cravings, lack of blood sugar swings and binges, and increased satiation. Increased satiation=eating less. Many people also have food sensitivities to grains, even gluten-free ones, so eliminating them may lead to an increased ability to absorb minerals like magnesium and potassium, which in turn means your body is more nourished and you have fewer cravings
Ketones. When your blood sugar is running low, your body turns to its glycogen stores for energy. Typically glycogen stores house about 2000 calories of “backup” energy for when you run out of glucose. Like the intelligent machine it is, your body depletes the glycogen stores and then turns to your own body fat for fuel.
check out this brand new keto Diet offer:
IMPORTANT: The ketogenic diet is not a free-for-all eat however much cheese or super low-carb fat bomb treats you want diet. If you are eating way more calories than you need, you will not lose weight. So focus on keeping your diet around fatty cuts of grass-fed meat, butter, eggs, avocados, lots of green veggies, and cruciferous, and be modest with the keto desserts, dairy, and sweets.
Benefit #2: Brain Function
A poorly functioning brain, as you may have already experienced, leads to lessened work productivity, which in turn means an unhappy boss, lack of job satisfaction, sugar cravings for energy, and depression. It’s a horrible domino effect. The original ketogenic diet was formulated by Dr. Russell Wilder in the early 20th century to treat epilepsy. The success rate was phenomenal and it is still used today to treat epilepsy and other brain disorders. Research also indicates that ketones are more efficient brain fuel than glucose. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5102124/)
Benefit #3: Potential Cancer Benefits
One study showed implementing the ketogenic diet led to a dramatically increased survival time and slower tumor growth. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5450454/)
Conclusion
If you’re reading this article now, chances are you are in some sort of pain, whether physical and/or mental (being overweight, struggling with autoimmune disorders, thyroid disease, fatigue, brain fog) and want to change. Use this information, don’t just skim through it and store it in the back of your brain and say “that’s nice for some people”, motivate yourself to change.
the best keto diet plans | https://medium.com/@ahmedelmarofe8/3-benefits-of-the-ketogenic-diet-2e7090fd9efa | ['Ahmed Amer'] | 2020-12-14 21:41:39.602000+00:00 | ['Keto Diet For Weight Loss', 'Womens Health', 'Weight Loss', 'Ketogenic Diet', 'Women'] |
In plain sight. | I went cave exploring in Tennessee long ago. The tour entered a massive cathedral room. At one end was a blackness I’d never that I’d never seen before. We were told that gaping chasm dropped 300 feet straight down. The slope of the rock floor curved toward this 50 foot length of black. Standing in that fully lit area was unnerving while looking at that blackness promising a 300 foot drop. The tour team turned off the lights as they told the story of how this cathedral was first discovered with a gas lantern. That moment set my heart racing and vertigo hit like a truck. The lights came back on and I could not wait to get out of there.
Watching our flock enjoy visual information intrigues me because of that experience. I love watching Felix look out windows. He’s thinking hard on things. I can tell. Snickers and Butters won’t go into their open cages to eat breakfast until I open the window blinds in front of those cages. Since they face east we have to wait until the Florida sun is done beating on that side of the house. 11-ish is when they eat their second breakfast. Snickers eats from another bowl that’s in front of Felix’s window until then. Butters grabs a beak full of food from the center tree stand and perches in front of the south facing window to look out. Food with a view is important to the crew.
Views and extended visual information is a powerful gift for our companions. They need things to think on, day dream about and thoughts to get lost in as much as we do.
And Butters needs to keep an eye on the turtles that may or may not come out of the creek behind the house. Butters hates turtles. She has taken ownership of Turtle Alarms and Safety Protocols.
Snickers keeps an eye out for the vultures, hawks and egrets that fly over the house. If their shadow gets too dark or too large he sets off the alarm and flies through the house letting us all know there’s incoming whateveritis he thinks is about to attack.
The only view Kirby is interested in is from my shoulder. But make no mistake he is taking in knowledge. We’ve gotten so in tune I can simply walk to my next goal and he already knows whether or not he can come along. He’ll jump off, wait for me to finish or get back and then jump back on my shoulder as I walk through the room. Automatic Auto Pilot Kirby.
The best part of sharing your world with a parrot is the discovery. Watching them freely discover the world around them. And then watching the different personalities react to the world.
Butters is a drama queen. Snickers is a business man. Kirby is a loyal friend. Felix is a philosopher.
I am confused philosophically. So says Felix. It’s plain to see. | https://medium.com/@kathylafollett/in-plain-sight-1c4ca117e1a0 | ['Kathy Lafollett'] | 2019-01-02 15:11:30.527000+00:00 | ['Animal Behavior', 'Birds', 'Parrot', 'Pets And Animals', 'Pets'] |
Getting Started With iOS Animation (Part 3) | Getting Started With iOS Animation (Part 3)
How to animate transitions between view controllers
Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
Welcome the third and final part of our Animation series. In this story, we will discuss how to implement the animation when transiting between view controllers.
You can also find parts one and two here:
Note: I recommend starting where we left at the last part, so you can download the project here. Otherwise, you can still follow this tutorial by creating two view controllers.
At this point, we have LoginViewController and GiftViewController :
The animation on the screen is great, but the transition between theses two views seems ordinary, so we will improve it by implementing some juicy animation. Here’s the final expected result:
Actually, we will go the extra mile by adding a controllable dismiss transition, which means by swiping from the left edge of the screen, the animation can move forward and backward a finger drag:
You may see the code seems intimidating at first, but actually the principle is simple. The transition animation can be done by creating a class conform with UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning . Then, we inject it in the UIViewControllerTransitioningDelegate of a view controller.
Tip: Animation parameters were found through trial and error. We often need to monitor closely each move we make, so we need to make that move slower. The simulator provides a great function for slow motion: go to Debug and select Slow Animations .
Present transition animation
We begin with the Present transition. Here are the animation steps:
Rotating the “Open” button 90 degrees along the y-axis clockwise.
Display the gift snapshot view at the place and with the size of “Open” button, but the initial place is 90 degrees anti-clockwise on the y-axis. It’s because it helps the button rotating looks continuous.
Then we rotate it along y-axis clockwise 90 degrees.
Zoom the gift view out to fill the screen.
Here’s the code:
The most important part is taking a snapshot of the destination view:
let snapshot = toVC.view.snapshotView(afterScreenUpdates: true)
And here the code of each step:
Rotating the “open” button 90 degrees along the y-axis clockwise:
UIView.addKeyframe(withRelativeStartTime: 0.0, relativeDuration: 1/4) {
fromVC.loginButton.layer.transform = CATransform3DMakeRotation(CGFloat(-Double.pi / 2), 0.0, 1.0, 0.0)
}
By using UIView.addKeyframe , we can specify the animation’s duration of each step relative to the whole animation’s duration. Here we want the rotation time of the “Open” button take a quarter of the whole duration.
Rotating the Snapshot destination view 90 degrees:
But first, we must initialize it at 90 degrees anti-clockwise on the y-axis. We do this before the whole animation.
snapshot.layer.transform = CATransform3DMakeRotation(CGFloat(Double.pi / 2), 0.0, 1.0, 0.0)
And then rotate it after rotating the “Open” button:
UIView.addKeyframe(withRelativeStartTime: 1/4, relativeDuration: 1/4) {
snapshot.layer.transform = CATransform3DMakeRotation(0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0)
}
On the final step, we zoom out the snapshot to match the final destination view:
UIView.addKeyframe(withRelativeStartTime: 2/4, relativeDuration: 1/2) {
snapshot.frame = finalFrame
}
At the completion of this whole animation, we do the cleanup:
Display the destination view,
Remove the snapshot, and
Reset the “Open” button position.
And the present animation was born. Now, all we have to do is to wire it to our view controllers. So when the app prepares the segue, we must specify that we want to use our custom transition (by specifying transitioningDelegate ) instead of the default one:
And then feed our animation instance in the right delegate function:
And it’s done. Run the app and enjoy the first animation.
Dismiss transition animation
Since we successfully created the present transition, we will just do the same thing to dismiss one.
Here’s the code for dismissing animation:
Just ignore SwipeInteractiveTransition for now. We talk about it later.
Here we’ll find the same pattern of code that we wrote in Present animation, just notice that .to and .from view controller was inverse.
We will create the dismiss view in three steps:
Zoom out the current view to the size of the destination button:
UIView.addKeyframe(withRelativeStartTime: 0.0, relativeDuration: 1/2) {
snapshot.frame = self.destinationFrame
}
Rotate it 90 degrees on the y-axis: We also rotate the “Open” button by 90 degrees so at this moment we won’t see the “Open” text:
UIView.addKeyframe(withRelativeStartTime: 1/2, relativeDuration: 1/4) {
snapshot.layer.transform = CATransform3DMakeRotation(CGFloat(Double.pi/2), 0.0, 1.0, 0.0)
toVC.loginButton.layer.transform = CATransform3DMakeRotation(CGFloat(Double.pi/2), 0.0, 1.0, 0.0)
}
Finally, rotate the “Open” button back to the right position:
UIView.addKeyframe(withRelativeStartTime: 3/4, relativeDuration: 1/4) {
toVC.loginButton.layer.transform = CATransform3DIdentity
}
Now that we have the animation created, we just need to wire it in the UIViewControllerTransitioningDelegate :
func animationController(forDismissed dismissed: UIViewController) -> UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning? {
return DismissViewControllerAnimation(destinationFrame: loginButton.frame)
}
Cool, now we finished all the animations. Run the app and enjoy the magic!
Control the animation
iOS makes it really easy to give user interaction with the animation. And it works the same way as we did with these two animations. First, we create a subclass of UIPercentDrivenInteractiveTransition and then inject it in the function interactionControllerForDismissal of our UIViewControllerTransitioningDelegate . The class UIPercentDrivenInteractiveTransition provides three functions:
update() : Tells us how much of the transition was complete. 0.0 is the beginning of transition and 1.0 is the end of the transition.
: Tells us how much of the transition was complete. 0.0 is the beginning of transition and 1.0 is the end of the transition. cancel() : Cancel the transition. In our case, it will cancel the dismiss process.
: Cancel the transition. In our case, it will cancel the dismiss process. finish() : Finish the transition. In our case, it will dismiss the Gift view and show the Login view.
We usually use this interactive transition combined with gesture recognizer, since it gives user the ability to control the transition. Here’s the code of this subclass:
We will add UIScreenEdgePanGestureRecognizer to the gift view. This recognizer can detect a dragging from the edge of the screen. Then, based on how much the user is dragging, we use update to control the transition. When the gesture ends, we check if the progress is more than half, then we go forward and finish the dismissal; otherwise, we cancel it.
We can instantiate this controller in GiftViewController :
private(set) var swipeTransition: SwipeInteractiveTransition? override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
setupUI()
swipeTransition = SwipeInteractiveTransition(viewController: self)
}
And then inject it in a function of UIViewControllerTransitioningDelegate . Here’s the final version of this delegate:
Awesome! We finished it. Now it’s time to admire our stunning transition animation! | https://medium.com/better-programming/getting-started-with-ios-animation-part-3-e6cfaceba486 | ['Quang Ngo'] | 2020-07-10 11:43:16.036000+00:00 | ['iOS', 'Animation', 'Swift', 'Programming', 'Mobile'] |
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