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Stop Going after The Wrong Thing | At the end of the day, we all want to be happy. We want to feel joy, we want to laugh, we want to love. We believe that certain things bring us those feelings, so we live in a constant pursue of those things. But the question is, are we pursuing the right things? Is happiness really tied to those things? Or is that something that we choose to believe? Happiness might be trying to hug us, while we are too busy running after nothing.
I wasn’t planning on writing anything today after my meditation. I usually write after meditation because in that moment, I feel a pick of freedom in myself, and it is always fun to get out in the world the ideas that I get in that state. However, since I have been writing down my ideas for 2 days in a row, which I am not used to, I didn’t think I would find any inspiration today. I thought maybe I had already used it all.
I guess that was the limited part of my mind playing tricks on me, because as I stayed still and listened to my inner silence, a storm of beautiful ideas came rushing in effortlessly. I decided that this moment was, once again, meant for writing.
That is the beauty of taking some minutes to connect with ourselves: that the moment we let go of thinking, it feels like somebody is answering our questions without us even asking. We stop pushing, and suddenly, there is a perfect flow of ideas coming from somewhere. Who knows where that somewhere is. So here I am. Ready to write, read, and keep safe, what my heart needs to tell me today. Hopefully, these words also find their meaning in your heart.
Do not exchange your joy for nothing
I don’t want writing to be something that I have to do. This is something that I enjoy doing. I like the fact that it is effortless. Sometimes, we discover a new skill and we go ‘‘I finally discovered my talent! I have to work on this restlessly until I become a millionaire!’’ and then, something that brought a huge amount of joy to us, becomes a pure source of stress.
The fight of thoughts starts, and it becomes like a wall of fog that blocks our view from what we could see so clearly in the beginning. Instead of increasing our inspiration, it quiets it. And with that, goes our joy also.
Pay attention to what you feel
It goes like this. We find something that makes us happy. We are happy while we are doing it. We are already getting the feeling that we enjoy the most. And for some reason, we ignore this amazing thing that is already happening. We choose to believe that getting something from it, is what will make us happy. As if we don’t deserve to be happy already.
We don’t realize that we already have the feeling that we aim for. We become so afraid of losing that feeling, that we want to make sure we own it forever. And in that process, we end up giving it away.
Regain perspective
We realize this when we look back at something we used to do, but stopped because it became too stressful. We look back and ask ourselves: If this made me feel so great, then why did I stop?
We realize we stopped because we didn’t feel like we could keep up with it. It became a new source of stress. But the stress didn’t come from that which we enjoyed. It came from all the pressure we added around it. All the ideas and expectations we attached to a simple and beautiful thing.
Take a moment to reflect
Sometimes, all it takes to preserve something that makes us happy, is to stop for a second and observe. Notice when it is becoming something unpleasant instead joyful, and just stop for a second. We can slow down and have a conversation with ourselves. Ask and reply. What has changed? What have we added to it? Most of the time, what we have added to a beautiful thing to make it horrible, is a big bunch of things that are not even real. They are only in our mind.
Notice your self-made delusion
All these expectations from the future. What could come out of it, what we could get from it, what we could lose, how we could feel. But none of this is real. That is not even happening. It is just an illusion. A projection into the future of everything that could go wrong. A projection based on fear. An illusion which we make so real, it weights down a lovely pleasure, and turns it into a heavy bag of trash that we don’t want to carry anymore. How sad right? How our fearful thoughts can fool us to the point where we completely distort reality.
Opinions are far from the truth
What I mean by distorting reality, is that we live in a constant interpretation of things. We have opinions about almost everything we see. It is no news that we all can have different opinions about the same thing. But our opinions are just that, opinions. They are our interpretations of things. And since we all create different ones, they can’t all be real. They seem so real to us, we are so convinced. But how can they all be real? There would be different thousands of realities.
How can 2 complete opposites be real at the same time? Well, they are not. That is why we call them opinions and not realities. That is why we have a new word for that. To explain our interpretation about reality, we use opinions.
The problem with opinions comes when we believe that they are absolutely true. On top of that, if they come from fear, they stop us completely from doing what we want, because we believe them so deeply. We believe our opinions are realities. And this causes a huge amount of struggle.
Opinions come in the shape of thoughts, and most of the time, we don’t take a moment to realize that we don’t even agree with the opinions coming from our own mind. At some point, they were planted there and they grew to what we see today. And although deep inside we may not agree with them, we don’t realize it. And we don’t realize it because they come incredibly fast. Out of nowhere, they appear in our head, and we are unaware that we can separate from them. We can separate from our opinionated thoughts, see them, and discard them if we don’t believe them.
Go back to the beginning
I believe that the confusion between reality and our interpretation of it, is what makes us stop enjoying what we used to love doing at some point. When we attach all these expectations from the future, and we don’t take a minute to realize that we are the ones creating them. It is our beautiful head playing tricks on us.
If we could just stop for a second, observe all these thoughts arising and choose not to believe them, life would feel much lighter. We could keep doing what we love, while loving it. Without infecting it with our damaging thoughts. We can realize, that while we are very much allowed to have opinions and fears, they have nothing to do with this thing we enjoy doing.
Notice the real moments of fullness
If we like the feeling we get when we practice something, and we want to continue getting this feeling, we can. If we can recognize the rush of joy going through or body and we are able to appreciate this feeling, we can realize that what we desire is already happening. We are experiencing moments of fullness. We are discovering a gift, and using it fully. We are learning to play with it.
If we keep doing it, we can only get better. Only great ideas can come in. This is, when we are not hooked by our source of stress and negative possible outcomes. When we are able to make the decision not to believe our negative thoughts. When we are able to see above all things, that we have discovered something that makes us happy. Something that we enjoy doing. Something that fulfills us.
Declaring your perfection
That is the ultimate gift. The feeling of fullness we get from practicing it. When we see this, nothing can stop us. And when nothing can stop us, we never cease learning, we never cease becoming better. We become fully aware that we are perfect today, exactly where we are at. And we will be perfect tomorrow too, because our journey will continue to shape us. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/stop-going-after-the-wrong-thing-8a7f4d6f0ebf | ['Mary Mayorca'] | 2019-05-27 17:03:13.835000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Mindfulness', 'Growth', 'Peace', 'Thoughts'] |
Become an expert in Business Model Lab in 10 steps | TL;DR: Tutorial for the free online Bussiness Model Lab SaaS to design, share and collaborate with partners your business canvas.
This tutorial is designed to turn your enterprise ideas into a real business model with Business Model Lab in 10 steps.Now, there is no excuse for working towards your dreams.
Conceptual approach to Business Model Canvas
The idea of a Business Model Canvas was initially proposed by Alexander Osterwalder in 2009. This design strategy is based on nine elements: value proposition, market segments (customer), channels, customer relationship, key partners, key activities, key resources, fixed cost structure and revenue streams.
Concept: Canvas where you can capture visually and conceptually not only new business ideas, but also existing businesses. It is a tool that links key aspects to a business model plan. It describes how the organisation creates, delivers and captures the value.
Axis: Key customer segments, value proposition.
Benefits: Simple but powerful tool. Easy to use. Dynamic as it uses Post-it in a smart way. The Canvas can be used in teams as a shared language to have better strategic conversations.
Cons: N ot as manageable in practice, as it has to be regularly updated. The refore a di gital format is needed in order to allow us to modify it in a free, fair and orderly manner. The risk of using it as a checklist and as result using only 1% of the canvas’ potential. Although it can be used in teams, the people involved must be physically gathered to edit the canvas and that is not always an easy task.
With Business Model Lab, we have maintained Business Model Canvas’ strengths and overcome the failures mentioned before.
Besides being able to create a canvas from a PC, tablet or smartphone, it allows collaborative editing. Furthermore it is possible to calculate the balance by defining the size of the markets and sources of income. This, along with the structural costs, let us to have an estimate of how good the business is.
The business model canvas is also a tool for iterative product development. It is recommended to learn from validations and update your business model accordingly. We know you can have an enormous amount of things to attend to and your business model canvas can be forgotten. So we are here to lend a hand and send you update reminders via email (this is optional).
Neither download nor installation are required. You can easily access to this tool on DigitalIlusion webpage or directly at this URL: https://bml.digitalilusion.com/
It is worth stressing that its use is free and there is not user registration.
Each time you enter the PWA, a new canvas is generated. By clicking “ load local canvas” tab, you can choose which business model canvas would you like to work with.
But what if it is the first time I access to this tool?
Don’t worry, by following the steps staged below you will be able to elaborate a business model canvas with this amazing tool.
STEP 1: TO FAMILIARIZE WITH TOOLBARS OF BUSINESS MODEL LAB
From here you can directly access functions such as entering a title to the project, adding a new canvas, sharing, printing, etc.
It is recommended to give the project a title, so that, you will easily find it then. Just by clicking on “ untitled project”you can change the title. Now, it will appear under the “ load local canvas” menu.
So if you enter “ load local canvas”menu, a list of all the canvas you have been working with will appear. Then you can select which one you want. The save will happen automatically or with a confirmation by clicking on “ Save”. Please make sure your canvas is saved!
Do you want to share your canvas and make it collaborative? The action is as simple as clicking on “ Share” or “ Copy to clipboard”. Under the “ Share” tab, a QR code will be generated so you can scan it with your smartphone! Or if you prefer, the URL will be placed in your clipboard, just by clicking “ Copy to clipboard “. Easy peasy!
It is time to fill out the fields. Imagine that you are not inspired. Don’t panic and have a look at examples of real cases’ model canvas. The PWA facilitates you some of them at the bottom of the screen.
Once you have a general idea, you will be able to complete each of the sections. To make it more dynamic we are going to show step by step the process of creation of Nespresso model canvas. Stay tuned and follow the next steps!
STEP 2: CUSTOMER SEGMENTS
In this section you have to answer the following questions:
* For whom do we create value? If you have a multi-sided market you will have at least as many segments as sides.
* What are our most important customers? Targeted market.
* What characteristics do our customers have? Your business model could serve segments of markets with very different needs and problems.
You will realize that if you click this element two pop-up windows will open.
On the top one you write the name of one customer, any additional information (e.g. source of information, relevant comments, etc.) can be added by clicking the bubble icon.
Whereas on the bottom one, you can add numerical data related to the number of people, organizations, etc. that will be part of your customer base.
We want your business model to be as realistic as possible, so you can apply any funnel to this numerical data (e.g. only the 20% of the total HORECA sector in Spain are willing to pay Nespresso Professional). Click plus icon to add a funnel.
It is important to fill out this section in order to take advantage of the balance that will be calculated at the end of the process.
STEP 3. VALUE PROPOSITIONS
We will answer the following questions:
* What value do we provide to our customers?
* What problems of our clients do we help solve? * What needs of our customers do we satisfy? * What do we offer, we create for each market segment?
As you may have noticed, there are steps that are more descriptive and no numerical data is needed. This section is one of them, therefore, only a descriptive pop-up window will open. Any additional comment can be added by clicking the bubble icon.
What different channels are going to use to access customer segments?
You have to do a list of the most important channels and make notes on what channel suits better for promotions, sales, etc.
It is interesting to differentiate between own direct channels (e.g. commercial team, Internet sales, own stores) and indirect partner channels (e.g. partner stores, wholesalers).
Furthermore, it is important to think all the way through the customer ‘journey’ in channel phases. We recognize the following channel phases:
Information : How do we make the products and services of our company known?
: How do we make the products and services of our company known? Evaluation : How do we help clients evaluate the value proposition of our organization?
: How do we help clients evaluate the value proposition of our organization? Purchase : How to allow customers to buy specific products and services?
: How to allow customers to buy specific products and services? Delivery : How do we extend our offer to our customers?
: How do we extend our offer to our customers? After sales: What are our policies for attention to suggestions, claims, technical assistance?
STEP 5: CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
How does the customer interact with you through the sales and entire product lifecycle? Will they have a self-service assistance? Will they have a personal contact? Or even a premium support?
This is not only a matter of customer catchment, but also a matter of increasing loyalty and customer number.
For instance, as far as Nespresso is concerned, under the club Nespresso&You strategic focus of exclusivity, they added more than 10 million memberships in the world. They establish a relationship with the customer based on exclusive benefits (e.g. free delivery on 100 capsules or more, special promotions, machine warranty and 24/7 assistance).
It goes without saying that a decision in this section means a lot to your business.
When thinking about our income generation model, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is what is the value at which our clients are really willing to pay. Also, when setting prices, they must be associated with the benefits or problems that solve.
Therefore, it is important to have an income strategy:
Just as with customer segments section, by clicking thiselement two pop-up windows will open.
On the top one you write the income source, whereas on the bottom one, there is a tab that will open a menu of strategy incomes such as subscription, sales, estimation or commission. Once a strategy is selected, you can choose the related debtor.
After selecting a debtor, the Business Model Lab allows you to add not only the price, but also the market share, variant costs and average sales per year and per capita. Don’t be confused by the options menu! You can display explanatory notes overview by placing the cursor on the different elements.
Congratulations! You have just finished more than half the canvas that defines value generation. Easy, isn’t it? You only lack the elements that defines the efficiency.
Key resources can be divided into the following categories:
* Physical: tangible property such as facilities, buildings, vehicles, machines, points of sale, distribution networks, etc.
* Economical: bank lending or seed funds such as The 3F’s (“family, friends and fools”)
* Human: people that integrate your business project.
* Intellectual: intangible property based on human knowledge such as a brand, a patent, etc.
It is important to highlight those activities in which your company must be excellent and surpass your competitors, activities that determines differentiation.
You have to answer the question below: What are the activities that really add value to the products/services that I offer from the point of view of the chosen customer segment?
With respect to Nespresso, they are proud to show off their coffees are produced entirely in Switzerland.
At this section you have to try to identify who could be your key partners in order to achieve economies of scale, to reduce the risk and uncertainty, to acquire resources and to carry out key activities.
If we focus on Nespresso example that has been shown through the entire tutorial, George Clooney becomes Nespresso global brand ambassador because of his long term partnership with the brand.
It is crucial to identify the costs that can be generated in the business model.
The cost structure is conditioned by the key resources identified, which are in turn conditioned by the activities and key partners delimited in the Canvas model.
Furthermore, it is recommended to answer the following questions:
Here, numerical data can be added. Therefore, if you have filled out the other main data, a balance result will be generated.
Has your business model presented positive results? That is a sign of success, but you should be aware of the fact that this business model also provides a strategic basis on which to raise and rethink business decisions during the whole company life cycle. So we encourage you to update your Business Model Canvas and to take advantage of this amazing tool.
This is the end of the tutorial. What is your experience with the Business Model Lab? What worked? What did not?
Check out the example of Nespresso here: https://bml.digitalilusion.com/#7JRTygKb | https://medium.com/@jmrobles/become-an-expert-in-business-model-lab-in-10-steps-a305dacfdece | ['Jm Robles'] | 2020-04-25 12:14:49.151000+00:00 | ['Business Development', 'Startup', 'Business Canvas', 'Free', 'SaaS'] |
Good Data Science — Interpreting the Black Box | In the previous article in this series about Democratized AI and the Black Box Problem, I proposed a checklist that we should be able to answer with some degree of confidence in order to assess if one has achieved Interpretability within a Machine Learning system. That is, given our hypothesis and the questions we are trying to answer:
In this post I will provide examples and attempt to argue the relevance of these criteria and how they can guide us towards doing Good Data Science.
What are you looking at?
Neural Networks, and especially Deep Neural Networks, outperforms almost any other Machine Learning techniques for a number of tasks, because they are able to learn machine learning models that captures the high-dimensional, non-linear correlations contained in the data, represented in a parameter space with millions of parameters. In practice, decoupling and understanding these learned correlations is an intractable task. But we can to some extent visualize these correlations and gain some intuition about the inner workings of the network.
There are currently two main approaches to inspect how and what a Neural Network has learned: Layer attribution and Feature visualization. The latter will be discussed in a follow-up post going deeper into Interpretability.
A two-class problem, retriever puppy and kitten, saliency map on the right. Credit: “Feature Visualization” by Olah, et.al., Distill, 2017.
Layer attribution, also called a saliency map, measures which parts of an image were the most important contributions in having a model predict a particular object class. Shown in the figure, a classifier model has determined that there are two classes in the image: a retriever puppy and a kitten. The heat map indicates which super pixels belong to which class, and also the relative contribution, or importance, of each pixel in determining each objects class.
A sailboat and terrier, with their respective saliency maps below. K. Simonyan et.al. arXiv:1312.6034v2
Similarly, in the next figure, we can see that the top of the sail was very influential in the classification of “sail boat”, with some contribution also by the boat being surrounded by a specific texture, which we can identify as choppy sea. The example to the right with the terrier, is actually quite impressive, because even when the dog is imaged with a background of similar colour tones, the model has learned that the colour itself is not an important feature to look for in determining the object class. (This article provides examples of how colour as an important feature can lead to racist and discriminatory Machine Learning systems)
Q: Is the model answering the right question?
A practical use case for Layer Attribution is to check whether or not the classification model is answering the right question. A famous example is the Wolf v Husky classifier, where a classifier model has been trained to answer the question of whether the animal in the images is a husky or a wolf. And seemingly, the performance is quite good and the model gets most classes right. That is, until one inspects where in the image the model is actually looking. It turns out that during prediction the model is actually looking at the background and not paying much attention to the animal itself. In other words, the model is actually answering the question “Is there snow in the background?”.
A saliency map of where in the image the model is looking when being asked to answer if the animal is a wolf or a husky. Credit: “Why Should I Trust You?”: Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier, M.T. Ribeiro et al
The reason for this is that during training of the Neural Network model, the network was presented mostly images of wolfs with snow present in the background, while the huskies most frequently appeared in front of green vegetation. So the answers “Yes/No” turns out to be utterly meaningless since the question actually being answered is “Is there snow in the background” and not “Is this a wolf?”. Looking to the checklist of Interpretability, this clearly is a prime example of failing to ask the question correctly and thus leaving it up to the Neural Network to figure out which task it is supposed to perform.
By definition, the purpose of a classifier model is to discriminate based on the features, or properties, of the data it is presented with. Here the snow offered a path of least resistance, as it was the most dominating feature available for the model to learn to discriminate the object classes by.
Most progress with tools for Interpretability has been made with Neural Networks in Computer Vision, because the data is visual and hence these visual techniques are fairly low hanging fruit in terms of gaining intuition about a Network’s inner workings. As Machine Learning is becoming more and more prevalent in Decision Making systems based on non-visual data, like unstructured text or time-series data, or a combination of both, the need for an expanded tool box becomes evident.
Q: Can the data answer the question?
Predictably, there is an intense interest in leveraging Machine Learning to try to win the stock market by being able to forecast whether the price of stock will go up or down in the short term. This type of Regression analysis on time-series data is a task that Machine Learning is well suited for, and it is fairly straightforward to train a Neural Network that learns to model historical stock price fluctuations and is able predict the next time step with some reasonable accuracy. However, the transition from a well-controlled testbed to the incredibly intricate and complex system of the uncountable and unknowable variables comprising the global trade markets, is about as smooth as a gravel path.
A Machine Learning model cannot learn something it was never shown during training and it cannot know what it has never seen before.
The model will fail when it encounters a never-before-seen occurrence in the data stream, in the sense that, while the model will always output an answer, the answer itself is nonsensical because the question is ill-posed and lacks context.
Specifically, the model fails because in order for a Neural Network to be sufficiently robust to handle unexpected fluctuations in the stock exchange market, it has to learn basic human behavior and psychology. The model needs to be able to account for how people groupthink and react to geopolitical events, natural disasters and other world encompassing calamities that perturbs the established and stable behavioral patterns in stock trades.
Ideally the model should also be able to read and comprehend press releases regarding staff changes in companies or to detect possible mentions in the media related to corruption scandals or future regulations that will affect earning potential. The problem of semantic analysis in Natural Language Processing is incredibly difficult and still unsolved, and until then, Machine Learning models cannot reliably distinguish between “good news” and “bad news” (or even “fake” news).
It is also expected that when word comes out that some actors are buying and selling on advice by an algorithm, there will be a positive feedback loop where herds of people will want to get in on the same perceived fool-proof trade, and situations may arise where there exists no incentive to sell a stock because after all, the AI-stock oracle said to buy it, not to sell.
All of these factors provides the context of a stocks valuation from moment to moment. The Black Monday crash of ’87 demonstrates how a crash can happen in a short span of time, with multiple players reacting to incomplete information from a variety of sources, such as policymakers, governmental agencies and the good ole rumour mill.
This timeline of the Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987, relating the sequence of events and changes in the S&P 500 index, illustrates that simply numbers alone are not enough to understand fluctuations in the stock market.
So, let’s check in with the second criteria in the checklist, “Can the data answer the question?”. It is fairly straightforward to construct a dataset with the limited quantitative data regarding a specific stock, like, prices, performance, budgets, but this data will not give a full picture of the complex, hidden variables that affect how and why people decide to bet on a stock or not. And if the answer is not contained in your data, your model will not have the prerequisites for answering your question.
There is currently no generic tool in the Interpretability toolbox to check the veracity and suitability of data, except our own critical thinking and healthy dose of skepticism.
Q: Can the answer be explained?
Other, perhaps more noble, tasks for a Machine Learning system can be found within the healthcare technology industry, with use cases such as detecting anomalies in ECG data, abnormal blood values and other measurable quantities in the human body; to classifying objects in medical imaging such as tumors and fractures and so on.
These are all excellent Machine Learning problems. But when one attempts to use Machine Learning for automatic diagnosis and treatment suggestions based on a fairly limited set of data points pulled from a patients medical chart, things start getting hairy fast. The hairiness is not based on there not existing any underlying causation and correlation between groups of patients, diseases, symptoms, treatment regimens and so on, but rather on whether or not the data is sufficient.
As with the stock valuation example, we need to ask if the data contains all possible causes leading to the observed symptoms. Or are there important factors, unobserved variables, that are not quantified within the dataset? Or as with the “Wolf v Husky” example, is there a risk that the model has actually been trained to answer a different question than the one we believe we are asking it?
Currently, Machine Learning for use in medical diagnosing lacks transparency and verifiable results. ALEX HOGAN, IKE SWETLITZ/STAT
Imagine that a specific disease is being treated at one particular hospital, with its in-house group of medical experts, serving a probably fairly homogeneous demography in one specific area of town. How can one guarantee that the model doesn’t actually classify the socioeconomic status of the patients and not their medical condition? That this model instead learns that heart attacks are only suffered by wealthy, white, middle-aged men in management positions while training for their next triathlon? Because that is the typical group of patients served by this particular treatment facility?
What happens if a company tries to sell a Treatment Recommender model like this to a clinic in a sub-Saharan country, where the majority of the patients are women with health issues related to being both female and poor, something that the model has never seen before? To check in with our list again: Can the physician trust the diagnosis and the treatment recommended by the Recommender model in this case?
The short answer is no, because she cannot open up the Black Box and explain how the model arrived at these recommendations. Choosing from a list of suggested treatment regimens sorted in order of how much “confidence” the models has, ranging from 0 to 100%, becomes an inane exercise without knowledge of the contribution and importance placed on the various input features, like symptoms, vital signs, gender, age, epicrisis, medical history and so on.
This case might sound like an hyperbole, but both the concerns and the dangers are real, because Machine Learning for use in medical diagnosis today lacks both transparency and proven safety and efficacy.
First, do no harm
A significant part of working as a Data Scientist comes down to expectation management and giving tempered advice on whether a Machine Learning system is appropriate for a given task, and also on proper and ethical use of data. Yes, Machine Learning does work! And really, really well, but with certain limitations. These limitations can be difficult to pinpoint precisely, as hopefully illustrated by the examples given in this article. But, being aware and able to identify limitations is key to doing Good Data Science, or at least, to avoiding doing harm.
In the end, we have to rely on critical thinking and following the precautionary principle: Avoid using technology that is not fully understood in Decision Making systems where the stakes are critical or high. While it is possible to train a model to achieve high accuracy for a specific and narrow task, knowing the why and the how a model arrives at a result is currently not really knowable due to the lack of standardized tools and approaches for interpreting and explaining. This is especially true for non-visual tasks.
What we can be certain of, however, is the maxim that if we put garbage in, we are going to get garbage out. And if the data is poor, either due to bad quality or low quantity, or maybe it can’t even corroborate the hypothesis in the first place, then we should have very low trust in the results and predictions made by the model that was trained on this data. | https://medium.com/tech-accounts/good-data-science-interpreting-the-black-box-27d1d1939b35 | ['Hanne-Torill Mevik'] | 2019-03-15 11:07:42.819000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Interpretability', 'Explainable Ai', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science'] |
Coaching — a simple and effective way for your personal and professional development | Many people ask me how to achieve their goals, and how to perform their tasks more effectively. Coaching is the answer!
We all have big plans, but we often don’t know where to start to carry them out. Hence, the feeling that something is missing and the insecurity of moving forward to achieve goals. Coaching does not simply mean telling people what they should do. The real meaning goes much further. It is a method that helps to establish goals, values , and intentions. Coaching helps the person to go beyond their blocks. It is based on a logical, practical, accessible, and easy process to maximize the efficiency of each one in different areas of life.
The word coach comes from the English language which means “trainer”. It was first used in sports to name a person who helps an athlete improve his skills. All professional athletes today have a personal trainer. From there, the idea spread to other areas. A significant moment for this expansion was the publication of Timothy Gallwey’s book, “The inner game of tennis”, a book in which uses sports training ideas in a much broader way. Timothy Gallwey is considered the pioneer in the psychology movement applied to sport and the corporate world, and also recognized as the founder of the Coaching process.
Coaching works as a partnership between the coach (the professional) and the coachee (the client). The coach is a professional specially trained to work on human development. They work on client communication through sessions, dialogues, and interactions that expand his awareness, skills, and competences.
You can use Coaching for various reasons, planning a new career, for growth in business, for becoming a leader, to increase your confidence and work/life balance. The process is subdivided into several areas depending on the main focus of each coachee, which include:
LIFE COACHING
BUSINESS COACHING
CAREER COACHING
TEEN COACHING
Coaching is not:
Coaching is not therapy. The process does not focus on your past, does not heal emotional wounds, and does not resolve cases of anxiety or depression. The coaching professional works to develop a plan based on the client’s values and goals.
Coaching is not consulting. Unlike a consultant, who is hired to provide answers, the coaching professional does not have the role of knowing all the answers and solving the client’s problems. However The must-have tools challenge the client to act and move towards goals, but they will never tell what to do.
Coaching philosophy — some of its main concepts
:: All human beings dream of fulfilling their purposes and they deserve the opportunity to be better.
:: People create their life experience and a coach can help in this process.
:: Intellectual understanding is not enough. Change means acting.
:: Failure does not exist. If you don’t get what you want, you find another way.
:: Failure is just a way of saying that you didn’t get it — yet.
:: Everyone has inner resources. Nobody is helpless. The client has the answers, the professional has the questions.
:: A coach can help increase the number of choices in the client’s life.
:: Coaching is a synergistic partnership.
Benefits of a coaching process
The benefits will be short, medium, and long term, depending on the quality of life they wish to have. By being able to remove the obstacles that blocked you, it will result in a more satisfying and happy life in all aspects. Professionally, you will become more qualified for your work and, consequently, you will get better results. For companies and organizations, coaching is an investment for employee performance and business development.
Coaching is proof of the company’s commitment to investing in intellectual capital and contributes to a more qualified organizational support culture. | https://medium.com/@katiabrunetti2/coaching-a-simple-and-effective-way-for-your-personal-and-professional-development-f0b526c123b1 | ['Kátia Brunetti', 'English'] | 2020-07-19 12:47:23.765000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Professional', 'Personal', 'Coaching', 'Company'] |
Obyte photo competition winner announcement | For half of the world these are the final weeks of summer, a summer which many Obbies marked by O exploring! We received a lot more entries than anticipated, over 70 photos were submitted, and a big thanks to everyone that took part. There was also a surprising amount of variety from O’s in nature, man-made O’s, coffee-made O’s and many other formats.
Picking 3 winners from over 70 photos was not easy. Photos are art, and art is subjective. Where we might see the Mona Lisa, you might see something much less pleasing on the eye.
How winners were picked
Obbies Genievot and Luc Chase kindly offered to judge, and chose their favorite photos with brief reasons why they were chosen. Paul Murray then used these recommendations along with his own favorites to create the top 3. So if you wish to question the decisions made, please contact Paul on Twitter who made the final decision :)
Honorable mentions
There were many, many photos worth an honorable mention but mentioning them all would have been too time consuming, so here are just a few.
nOn existent Obyte miner
(photo by Obbie M3rlin23)
Obyte has no blocks or miners and with that comes a very small energy footprint, so we liked the irony of this entry. It might have won a prize but the font is rather different to the actual Obyte logo font which is All Round Gothic Std Demi. We admit we didn’t mention this in the competition announcement which was an oversight. Next time there will be clearer guidelines, sorry!
O-boys
(photo by Obbie Crypto Girl)
This photo was submitted after the August 3 deadline so unfortunately wasn’t eligible for a prize. It was however, submitted with a title “O-boys hanging onto their nodes” which we thought was a creative nice touch.
Deep thinking mOnkey
(photo by Obbie kaskade)
This was the number 1 pick of one of the judges, but due to copyright uncertainty we will not be using it. A deep thinking monkey though is cool.
Winners
3rd place
Aerial O
(photo by Obbie Pskos)
This was the biggest man-made O submitted, and in this case we think big is definitely beautiful. It’s also one of the few photos taken from an elevated height. It might have finished higher but the O is so big that part of it was cropped from the photo.
2nd place
Guitar fun
(photo by Obbie Alvar Laigna)
Most photos entered did not feature people, meaning the ones that did gained a bit more attention. Also, in the crypto world things are normally rather serious. ‘When Binance’ and ‘when moon’ are more likely followed by raised eyebrows and tension than two girls having fun playing inside an O guitar, a reason this came in at 2nd place.
1st place
Upland cotton
(photo by Obbie fill)
There was a trend — when a few comments were submitted with the photo i.e. some kind of background to the photo, things became more interesting. This we are told, is Upland Cotton, the most widespread type of cotton in the world. During harvest, cotton flies all around the cotton fields which can create striking images depending on where the wind takes it. The wind took this piece roaring into 1st place in the first of what will be many O photo competitions.
Winners will be contacted through Discord. | https://medium.com/obyte/obyte-photo-competition-winner-annoucement-386133341ec1 | ['Paul Murray'] | 2019-08-14 18:42:51.510000+00:00 | ['Photo Contest', 'O', 'Obyte', 'Byteball', 'Photography'] |
LOOK: Hot students at Sichuan college put on a ‘Victoria’s Secret Christmas Show’ | LOOK: Hot students at Sichuan college put on a ‘Victoria’s Secret Christmas Show’
Students at other Chinese colleges are green with envy
While one Chinese college may have banned Christmas, we know another one that would never miss the chance for a good show.
On Christmas Eve, students at the Sichuan Southwest Vocational College of Civil Aviation participated in a special “Victoria’s Secret Christmas Show,” featuring women with wings, shirtless guys, and artificial snow.
One of the male students who took part in the show said that while it may have been a bit cold outside, it wasn’t anything that they couldn’t take. “We are all in excellent shape, so it wasn’t a challenge,” he said.
After looking over all the photos of the sizzling festive fun, some netizens have turned green with envy, lamenting that they had obviously chosen the wrong university.
The Sichuan Southwest Vocational College of Civil Aviation has made headlines over the years for having China’s most beautiful campus and its most beautiful student body — only accepting aspiring flight attendants if they are also attractive.
And if it’s not the most beautiful, it’s the best publicized anyway. Every few weeks, the school releases photos of its student body handling onboard security threats:
Put down the cup of noodles!
Lifting weights:
And making like a mermaid:
[Images via NetEase] | https://medium.com/shanghaiist/look-hot-students-at-sichuan-college-put-on-a-victorias-secret-christmas-show-19d7d89908e | [] | 2017-12-25 13:29:32.010000+00:00 | ['Students', 'China', 'University', 'College', 'Christmas'] |
Prostitution in the US: the Data | Prostitution in the US: the Data
Masks from the Venetian Carnival (source: Wikipedia)
Note: This is the first of several installments. Part 1 (this part) explores the dataset, Part 2 looks at the ethnicity of sex workers, part 3 looks at the services performed and how this correlates to ethnicity, part 4 looks at the economic side of things and how fees correlate to ethnicity, services and looks of sex workers.
There’s a website I won’t name (goes by the TER acronym) where people (mostly guys) review sex workers (mostly females) for the benefit of other customers. I figured I could use this as an exercise in data journalism and visual storytelling, two topics that have intrigued me for some time, albeit I don’t have a ton of time for them (my day job is in a totally different industry).
Important Note: I fully realize that the subject of prostitution is very sensitive and can be touchy to many. Feminists are split over it: some will argue that it’s the greatest example of men exploiting women, while others will argue that, in cases where violence and human trafficking is ruled out, nobody has the right to tell independent women what she should do with their bodies. As long as its their choice, they are free to get money out of bored wealthy people and put that cash back into an always suffering economy.
For the purpose of this blog, I simply won’t go there. I’ll just illustrate the data I have collected, “sanitized” and organized; and leave the many possible narratives out of it.
Let’s Explore the Dataset and Clean the Messy Data
Initially, the hardest part of the project was obtaining the precious data that TER users have provided over the past four years in a nice tabular format.
I’m a techie, so I overcame that hurdle. Unfortunately (or maybe not), that was only the beginning. I got a bit more than I bargained for as the data required a great amount of sanitization to extract meaningful views and allow “apple to apple” comparisons. It was hugely instructive, though.
To analyze the TER data, I decided to use Jupyter (no pun intended) Notebook, one of the tools of choice for data scientists around the globe.
I won’t go into the details of how I got the data, but trust me, I got it into a nice TSV file:
Very first look at the data
Let’s make the TER ID the index for our dataset
Quite a few interesting fields
Dataset starts to look cleaner
Now that the data looks a bit cleaner. It will be a pleasure to work with it.
Note: I will show the Python/Pandas code I have used to slice and dice the data, as well as the MatPlotLeab/Seaborn instructions I used for the DataViz. Corrections and questions in comments are welcome.
Guys and Dolls
Let’s first see how many dudes or ex-dudes (transsexuals) are hiding among the dolls. Fortunately, we have a field that provides that information. Visualizing is easy, so there are no surprises. About 2%.
About 2% of the profiles are transsexuals
Fuckers of the world unite!
Let’s have a look at where those fuckers are hiding (pun intended this time).
To be honest, this could use some consolidation, as US big cities don’t always include metro areas which are important enough to show up near the top of the list. I’m thinking of Edison, NJ and Brooklyn, vs. NYC, or Tysons Corner and Fairfax vs. Washington DC. (And to be clear, I am not trying to imply that them fuckers in DC are having a disproportionate amount of fun as compared to the rest of the country… or maybe they do?)
plt.figure(figsize=(10,18))
frame[‘City’].value_counts()[:40].plot(kind=”barh”);
Top 40 cities (could use some additional consolidation for main metro areas)
Unsurprisingly, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago are the three top cities also as far as prostitution in the US goes.
It would be nice if I could look at country state level. I need a bit of manual work here to normalize the data. I won’t bore you with the details. “Data people” will get a sense of what I did from the following:
Extracting State and Country data into their own columns
Let’s take a look at how Americans get down to it across the nation.
Unsurprisingly, California has a lot of californication going on. At the same time, them guys in Montana don’t appear to mount much.
California, New York State and Florida are the top states as far as fucking is concerned
Washington DC has a disproportionally high position considered its size. Should we conclude that size doesn’t matter when it comes to sex work?
Noteworthy: there aren’t that many virgins in Virginia apparently.
What about other countries?
TER is a US website. We can expect the overwhelming majority of our data to refer to the US. A quick query (a quickie?) reveals that 90% or so of the data refers to the US in fact.
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
frame['Country'].value_counts()[:10].plot(kind="barh");
Our dataset represents the US situation overwhelmingly
This is an important aspect in our dataset. While we may get some insight into prostitution in other places, it’s the US that deserves the focus (no pun intended) here.
That’s it for now. In the next installment we will look at sex workers (AKA providers in TER lingo), starting with their ethnicity.
Part 2: Providers’ ethnicity | https://medium.com/@fillmore50/prostitution-in-the-us-the-data-e1f3b38122b0 | [] | 2020-11-18 23:00:28.533000+00:00 | ['Sex Work', 'Prostitution', 'Dataviz', 'Data Journalism', 'Escorts Service'] |
Summer to Fall | Summer to Fall
The changing of the seasons, illustrated
The viburnum was midsummer, a month or more ago. Its tiny flowers like birthday candles, blooming out on long days.
Summer wasn’t what it was supposed to be, sipping 7-Up, riding dirt bikes, making holes in the sand by the lake. Oh but that was thirty years ago. We are the backstage crew now. The digging endures — kids did their swimming, lounging, fighting, laying upside down on the couch, head on the ground feet up, faces licked by the dog, growing out of shoes, snacks, scrapes, hot dogs. It was a sweaty one. They probably didn’t notice. Is it a virtue to have or not have air conditioning? The end of summer is abrupt.
I learn the laurel’s spots are “fruiting bodies.” They are galaxies in small scale.
A few weeks in and the jet lag of back-to-school is settling out. September has been dry. The leaves are brown and crisp like potato chips, not the burst of yellow cheer we need. Spiders are back making their babies in hidden corners, stretching their strings. I sweep them down. Long division appears in a backpack. The tiger moth caterpillars are white and mysterious, devouring the hydrangea. I wear gloves and toss them into the gravel. Do they enjoy that moment of mid-air? Many of them will make it to flight, fluttering up at each footstep.
On the river, the cormorant appears. Where did you come from you not-a-duck sneak, slipping in from somewhere. No one likes you. You are not the bright egret or handsome heron. Your pierce-blue eye tells true, I know more than you.
We buy shoes, boots. There will be stews and baked things soon. The plants make a last burst of growth before the cold comes. It is a midlife crisis. We enjoy the late blooms and final tomatoes of their enormous efforts. Mist hovers where cool air touches warm ground. Halloween approaches. Christmas lists have begun. Fall snaps into place and is a relief of sorts, though winter looms. The moon falls brighter than the sun.
(Previously: Spring to Summer) | https://medium.com/the-hairpin/summer-to-fall-dfe69442b330 | ['Amy Jean Porter'] | 2016-12-21 14:55:41.816000+00:00 | ['Fall', 'Summer', 'Nature', 'Poetry', 'Art'] |
Daily Planner: Page a Day to Do List Planning Journal Notebook — Get Organized Today! | Daily Planner: Page a Day to Do List Planning Journal Notebook — Get Organized Today! Naoma Fludd Apr 1·2 min read
Book Review
Merely no words to describe. I have got study and i am confident that i am going to planning to go through yet again once again in the foreseeable future. You will like just how the writer compose this publication. (Devante Schmitt)
DAILY PLANNER: PAGE A DAY TO DO LIST PLANNING JOURNAL NOTEBOOK — GET ORGANIZED TODAY! — To download Daily Planner: Page a Day to Do List Planning Journal Notebook — Get Organized Today! eBook, please access the link beneath and save the file or gain access to additional information which might be highly relevant to Daily Planner: Page a Day to Do List Planning Journal Notebook — Get Organized Today! book.
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Our web service was introduced by using a wish to function as a full online digital library which offers entry to many PDF file guide collection. You will probably find many different types of e-publication and other literatures from our documents data base. Specific popular subjects that distribute on our catalog are famous books, solution key, test test questions and answer, guide paper, skill manual, quiz trial, consumer handbook, consumer guide, service instructions, restoration handbook, and many others.
All e-book all rights stay with the experts, and downloads come ASIS. We’ve e-books for each subject readily available for download. We also provide a great collection of pdfs for individuals for example instructional universities textbooks, kids books, college books that may enable your youngster for a college degree or during school courses. Feel free to sign up to own access to among the greatest collection of free e books. Join today! | https://medium.com/@engeneering-esteem/daily-planner-page-a-day-to-do-list-planning-journal-notebook-get-organized-today-c1c0622a8d96 | ['Naoma Fludd'] | 2021-04-01 05:40:42.779000+00:00 | ['Help', 'Books', 'Self'] |
Engaging With Your Community In The Face Of Injustice | Over the last week, we’ve seen an eruption of protests, sparked by the murder for George Floyd and the continued systematic injustice in the United States. Communities in the U.S. and across the globe are experiencing a wave of emotions: pain, suffering, anger, confusion. I could continue down the list, but I think you get it.
As a Black man myself, I am trying to wrangle my emotions, given the circumstances. This is a severely complex issue and one that will not be solved overnight. So as a community manager, I think it’s safe to assume there are members within communities who share the same struggle. And this got me thinking, “how can one navigate fostering a positive environment while still acknowledging the current events unfolding in our country?”
I’d like to explore some thoughts I’ve had to help others come up with ways to address the pain their communities may be experiencing right now. In part because as community managers, it is our job to maintain the balance in our communities. My hope is this serves as a framework for both community managers and content creators to foster constructive interaction with their communities during this time.
Note: I am a community manager from the non-profit sector with nearly six year of experience on the field. I am using this experience and translating it to my love and observation of the games industry, for which I have been a participant in as a consumer for 21 years.
Moderation
Moderation is key to any successful community. While all communities have rules, they are not always followed. No Discord or Reddit page is immune from trolls, bigots and ignorance. Without moderation, trolls and the like run rampant, often taking other community members down in the process.
In this heightened state of pain, this rings true and with more venom than usual. As a result, moderation teams are trying as hard as possible to keep the peace while still aiding in growing a positive experience for users. Having a conversation with all moderators to make sure they are all on the same page on the protocol for handling toxic situations for the desired end result is imperative. I note the word “protocol” specifically, because the job of a mod is not to try and change the mind of the toxic person. It is to get them to disengage or expel them from the community if civil discourse cannot be had.
This conversation should also clarify the comfort level mods have in taking on these more aggressive situations. While most mods often reflect the values of their community, this isn’t always the case, and that’s okay. Giving people the ability to note their concerns may yield a new practice or perspective to how the community moderation protocol works,strengthening the defense so everyone is on the same page.
Dedicated Space
Our communities should be places where members and fans come to talk about their favorite games and the culture around them. They should also be places where, when people need a safe space to talk about their concerns or ask questions, they have the forum to do so without sacrificing the former. This is where the balance I noted earlier comes in.
There should be dedicated spaces within communities to make sure members have the agency to constructively talk about problems or answer questions, especially now in the wake of the protests and riots occurring across the United States. While the method CMs take to engage these conversations will depend on the size and structure of your community, there are some simple examples to open up these spaces.
In your forums or Reddit pages, have a dedicated thread for conversations around George Floyd and the protests. Make sure it’s clearly marked. Reinforce guidelines for forum usage and make sure to highlight the higher moderation of the thread.
Dedicate a separate discord channel for conversations around challenging topics and tackling problems (i.e. the importance around advocacy around police brutality, or an open forum to talk about mental health during troubling times). Again, reinforce community guidelines, clearly mark the channel, and note the higher moderation of the channel.
Have community leaders be vocal through your various platforms. Share their content. (More on this later.)
Set aside a time to have group conversations with community members. Blocking off a set time can ensure you have enough time to have a well-meaning and civil conversation, while giving those who do not want to engage in the content the heads up to leave.
These methods allow community managers to offer safe haven for their impacted community members while also giving community members the freedom to express themselves in a constructive manner.
Community Leaders
Ultimately, the biggest impact we as community managers can share are the stories and experiences of our communities. Normally this would be done through sharing thoughts around the games and stories they enjoy from the games they play. But community members also have thoughts and perspectives on social issues as well. We see this play in real time during month long historical appreciation months like Black History Month and Pride Month.
We have started to see companies and organizations putting up posts of solidarity. But the posts are not enough. Meaningful and active recognition of their efforts to show solidarity will prove those posts to not be hollow. And one step forward in that recognition is to empower and give a voice to your community members and leaders to highlight their experiences. Community managers or their organizations should seek out stories from their community leaders and ask permission to share them.
We saw this in full force on #BlackoutTuesday, when many companies, organizations, and larger content creators took a day of solidarity to amplify voices within the Black community. Seeing groups like Kinda Funny dedicate a week of guest appearances for prominent and rising Black voices in the game community is incredible to see. We even saw larger scale outlets like IGN and GameSpot promote Spawn on Me frontman, Kahlief Adams and his latest podcast episode titled, A Lesson in Blackness. The episode is an honest and raw conversation with several Black content creators about blackness in their everyday life and games space. Please give it a listen if you haven’t.
Conversely, community leaders should feel empowered to share their stories without fear of losing credibility or business. Your stories are impactful and powerful. They transcend the noise of the vocal minority.
The most recent display of this that I truly admire was from Twitch Streamer, Benjamin “Dr. Lupo” Lupo. In an end of stream monologue, Dr. Lupo notes his anger and frustration for the murder of George Floyd with the ending note of “love each other. We’re from the same fucking planet.”
Dr. Lupo uses his platform to raise up his dissatisfaction with how black men and women are dying for the mere notion of them being black. I encourage all to view Dr. Lupo’s monologue, shared by Twitter user, RissaRosay.
Resources
In being a place of balance for a community, CMs need to recognize they cannot solve all of the existing problems of the world. They can merely give a section of reprieve or safe space to vent. The community space is no substitute for expert information or seeking advice from a licensed professional. Kitfox Games’ Victoria Tran noted this best in a past article on gameindustry.biz referencing the roles of community managers.
Tran states, “But we are not: Medical, economic, or policy professionals Therapists Superhuman positivity machines””
That being said, offering materials is a good way to provide information and context without assuming the role of a licensed expert. In the case of injustice, I have seen non-people of color ask, “what can I do to education myself on some of the issues presented?” I have seen many good threads in response, and many include resources rather than direct information. Some examples of resource examples are:
Donation links to verified relief and aid organizations
Books with topics around white privilege, history of protesting, the civil rights movement, etc.
YouTube videos from experts in racial inequality
Online talks with social justice experts and lawyers
Content creators focused on various social advocacy reform
Resources can run the gamut, and can really help a struggling community gain understanding and education. But please make sure to do your due diligence in checking the materials before sharing, and consider adding content warnings if particularly difficult or graphic information or images are shared within that resource. That last thing anyone wants is for something intended to provide comfort and understanding to backfire and cause unintended harm.
Fortify Your House
As I stated before, I don’t have all of the answers. However, these are a few observations I’ve made from some of the ongoing conversations pertaining to being an ally, coupled with my experience as a community manager and my love of the games industry. I’ll leave you with a quote from Rapper and Social Activist, Killer Mike.
On May 29th during a press conference discussing the rising riots and violence attributed to it, Killer Mike had this to say, “It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with the enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization…”
I believe in these difficult and painful times, as community managers and content creators, we have a responsibility to fortify our houses and become that house of refuge many are seeking. There is anger and pain coursing through our country and some may slip into our communities. I hope some of my thoughts can help your communities feel refuge while keeping them strong and focused on what makes them great. | https://medium.com/@DarkTagger/engaging-with-your-community-in-the-face-of-injustice-3247211654a8 | ['Kevin', 'Darktagger'] | 2020-06-03 21:10:06.201000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Gamedev', 'Community', 'Games', 'Community Engagement'] |
Using Filters for Compositional Variation | Today we can do more to vary our compositional elements than flip our melodic lines upside down, run them backwards or nudge them upwards or downwards as per classical techniques such as line inversions, retrogrades or transpositions either within the same or to other keys. Signal processing adds near-infinite possibilities for tonal variation. While utilizing a plethora of audio effects may not seem like fugue method per se — since we cannot systematically exhaust the material given the vast multitude of methods achievable with today’s toolset — we can take some ‘fugue-al’ inspiration from the idea of repurposing compositional material through exploring and integrating sonic mutations. Mutations on a theme, rather than variations, is probably a more apt phrase to use in the context of the ‘pluginscape,’ which is its own kind of soundscape for music and audio production.
This article will touch on a few techniques and tools for using filters compositionally, rather than discuss the usual topics associated with filters, such as dB slope, cut-off frequencies, resonance, types of filters etc. Those topics cover the ‘how’ or ‘what’ aspects of filters, but leave out the ‘why’ and ‘when’ dimensions. I will not exhaust the why and when here in any kind of systematic treatment, but hopefully you may get some ideas for using filters in your compositions in ways you may not have used them before.
Routine Filter Sweeps
Probably the most common creative use of filters is to gradually add or subtract frequency content over time as part of a riser or paradoxically named ‘downlifter’ element in electronic, especially dance-oriented, music. Given the prevalence of this genre-routine, that seems to be a good place to start for the compositional use of filters, which is distinct from other uses that serve more practical or psychoacoustic purposes, such as dealing with problems of instruments masking each other when they share common spectral regions with parametric EQs.
In this first example set, there is a pitch pattern that occurs early in my (somewhat literally named : ) piece Minimal Psy Glitch Walking Bass without a filter treatment, which then gets the temporal and spectral addition and subtraction when it appears later on. Here’s the pitch pattern the first time it is introduced:
Later in the composition, this same pattern is reused but with a filter sweep that first adds, and then subtracts, its spectral content. In the latter part of the sample, you can also hear (and see!) the pumping effect as its amplitude is modulated by a kick drum (unheard) happening elsewhere in the mix:
As this is a rather straightforward use of automating a filter’s cutoff frequency, I would tend to use a straightforward (but still great sounding!) tool like Waves’ OneKnob Filter. Below, you can see the filter adjust as a DAW automation track changes it over time.
Towards the beginning of the video, you can also see that shortly after the knob starts moving, the thin purple ring that borders it lights up — this is because the filter’s bypass (turning it off and on) is also being automated. With filter effects, you often want to turn them off and on when you start using them for more expressive purposes, so that you can easily use versions of the instrument with and sans the filtering.
The automation heard in the Pitch Pattern | Filtered example above.
Narrative Arcs
The concept of a narrative arc is that over time, the emotional intensity of events should rise and fall, typically with a climactic moment of some kind towards the end of the story, and at the top of the arc.
A Narrative Arc. Image Source
The rising and falling of a filter shown above can also be used in this narrative intensity-building way, since as sounds become spectrally duller they also typically become less intense or dramatic from an emotional perspective.
Towards the ‘climactic’ end of my track Cosmic Ray Juice (the link below will take you to the right moment in the mix), I bring in an automated filter that has a rhythmic rather smoothly varying character.
There are many ways to use filters rhythmically, which in itself points to an interesting aspect of contemporary music that is distinct from previous musical eras — namely, that it’s very easy for sonic features to migrate across compositional territories. Spectral content is normally associated with the acoustic and musical concept of timbre, not rhythm, but filters can modulate timbre so that it becomes more beat-like in character. Today, these category crossings happen with every aspect of music because of the affordances for manipulating every sonic parameter — another example would be beat-making practices where the percussive elements become more melodic because of the capacity for changing the pitch of samples and MIDI notes on a per-beat basis.
The rhythmic filtering in the example above was done in this instance with Waves’ MetaFilter plugin, which is shown below in action during this ‘climactic end’ of the music. In the video, the MIDI clip controlling the virtual instrument being processed was moved later in the timeline, which is why you see the filter working for some 15 seconds before the audio actually starts to be processed (as shown in the pairs of Input and Output meters at screen right). Note that this filter is actually being used to modulate the filter’s dB parameter, and all frequencies are actually being passed through!
Modulating an all-pass filter’s dB .
Filter and Rhythm
Of course, normally we don’t use filters to pass through all frequencies and just change the signal level! In the examples below, there is an unfiltered pitch pattern, followed by its ‘filter-rhythmized’ doppleganger. This is also an example of thematic mutation as discussed above.
In electronic music, much pitch content lies somewhere conceptually between melody and arpeggio (and rhythm!). I tend to think that if a pitch pattern cannot be hummed easily, it’s not a melody per se more like a rhythmic articulation of harmonic space, i.e. a pattern of broken up sequentialized chords (or something like that). The MIDI notes of the two examples above are shown below in the piano roll — you can decide for yourself whether this is a melody or arpeggio or pitched rhythm etc. | https://medium.com/sound-and-design/using-filters-for-compositional-variation-4b0b4d895e34 | ["Michael 'Myk Eff' Filimowicz"] | 2020-12-26 07:08:59.670000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Music Production', 'Audio', 'Culture', 'Ideas'] |
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Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the conCBS All Accesst before watching or lisCBS All Accessing to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to start playing digital video or digital audio conCBS All Accesst before the entire file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can apply to media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered “streaming text”.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONCBS All AccessT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[2][2][2][2][2] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is inCBS All Accessded to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[2][2][2] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is ofCBS All Access shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][2][1][1][1] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[1]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not exCBS All Accessd beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsisCBS All Accesst.[1]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 1 to 2 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[2] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[1]
❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[2] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and exCBS All Accesssible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is exCBS All Accessded by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower.
‘The Stand’ Challenges Asian Americans in Hollywood to Overcome ‘Impossible Duality’ CBS All Accessween China, U.S.
CBS All Access’s live-action “The Stand” was supposed to be a huge win for under-represented groups in Hollywood. The $2 million-budgeted film is among the most expensive ever directed by a woman, and it features an all-Asian cast — a first for productions of such scale.
Despite well-inCBS All Accesstioned ambitions, however, the film has exposed the difficulties of representation in a world of complex geopolitics. CBS All Access primarily cast Asian rather than Asian American stars in lead roles to appeal to Chinese consumers, yet Chinese viewers rejected the movie as inauthentic and American. Then, politics ensnared the production as stars Liu Yifei, who plays The Stand, and Donnie Yen professed support for Hong Kong police during the brutal crackdown on protesters in 122. Later, CBS All Access issued “special thanks” in the credits to government bodies in China’s Xinjiang region that are directly involved in perpetrating major human rights abuses against the minority Uighur population.
“The Stand” inadverCBS All Accesstly reveals why it’s so difficult to create multicultural conCBS All Accesst with global appeal in 2020. It highlights the vast disconnect CBS All Accessween Asian Americans in Hollywood and Chinese nationals in China, as well as the exCBS All Accesst to which Hollywood fails to acknowledge the difference CBS All Accessween their aesthetics, tastes and politics. It also underscores the limits of the American conversation on representation in a global world.
In conversations with seThe Standl Asian-American creatives, Variety found that many feel caught CBS All Accessween fighting against underrepresentation in Hollywood and being accidentally complicit in China’s authoritarian politics, with no easy answers for how to deal with the moral questions “The Stand” poses.
“When do we care about representation versus fundamental civil rights? This is not a simple question,” says Bing Chen, co-founder of Gold House, a collective that mobilizes the Asian American community to help diverse films, including “The Stand,” achieve opening weekend box office success via its #GoldOpen movement. “An impossible duality faces us. We absolutely acknowledge the terrible and unacceptable nature of what’s going on over there [in China] politically, but we also understand what’s at stake on the The Stand side.”
The film leaves the Asian American community at “the intersection of choosing CBS All Accessween surface-level representation — faces that look like ours — versus values and other cultural nuances that don’t reflect ours,” says Lulu Wang, director of “The Farewell.”
In a business in which past box office success determines what future projects are bankrolled, those with their eyes squarely on the prize of increasing opportunities for Asian Americans say they feel a responsibility to support “The Stand” no matter what. That support is ofCBS All Access very personal amid the The Stand’s close-knit community of Asian Americans, where people don’t want to tear down the hard work of peers and The Stand.
Others say they wouldn’t have given CBS All Access their $1 if they’d known about the controversial end credits.
“‘The Stand’ is actually the first film where the Asian American community is really split,” says sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, who examines racism in Hollywood. “For people who are more global and consume more global news, maybe they’re thinking, ‘We shouldn’t sell our soul in order to get affirmation from Hollywood.’ But we have this scarcity mentality.
“I felt like I couldn’t completely lambast ‘The Stand’ because I personally felt solidarity with the Asian American actors,” Yuen continues. “I wanted to see them do well. But at what cost?”
This scarcity mentality is particularly acute for Asian American actors, who find roles few and far CBS All Accessween. Lulu Wang notes that many “have built their career on a film like ‘The Stand’ and other crossovers, because they might not speak the native language — Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Hindi — to actually do a role overseas, but there’s no role being writCBS All Access for them in America.”
Certainly, the actors in “The Stand,” who have seen major career breakthroughs tainted by the film’s political backlash, feel this acutely. “You have to understand the tough position that we are in here as the cast, and that CBS All Access is in too,” says actor Chen Tang, who plays The Stand’s army buddy Yao.
There’s not much he can do except keep trying to nail the roles he lands in hopes of paving the way for others. “The more I can do great work, the more likely there’s going to be somebody like me [for kids to look at and say], ‘Maybe someday that could be me.’”
Part of the problem is that what’s happening in China feels very distant to Americans. “The Chinese-speaking market is impenetrable to people in the West; they don’t know what’s going on or what those people are saying,” says Daniel York Loh of British East Asians and South East Asians in Theatre and Screen (BEATS), a U.K. nonprofit seeking greater on-screen Asian representation.
York Loh offers a provocative comparison to illustrate the West’s milquetoast reaction to “The Stand” principal Liu’s pro-police comments. “The equivalent would be, say, someone like Emma Roberts going, ‘Yeah, the cops in Portland should beat those protesters.’ That would be huge — there’d be no getting around that.”
Some of the disconnect is understandable: With information overload at home, it’s hard to muster the energy to care about faraway problems. But part of it is a broader failure to grasp the real lack of overlap CBS All Accessween issues that matter to the mainland’s majority Han Chinese versus minority Chinese Americans. They may look similar, but they have been shaped in diametrically different political and social contexts.
“China’s nationalist pride is very different from the Asian American pride, which is one of overcoming racism and inequality. It’s hard for Chinese to relate to that,” Yuen says.
Beijing-born Wang points out she ofCBS All Access has more in common with first-generation Muslim Americans, Jamaican Americans or other immigrants than with Chinese nationals who’ve always lived in China and never left.
If the “The Stand” debacle has taught us anything, in a world where we’re still too quick to equate “American” with “white,” it’s that “we definitely have to separate out the Asian American perspective from the Asian one,” says Wang. “We have to separate race, nationality and culture. We have to talk about these things separately. True representation is about capturing specificities.”
She ran up against the The Stand’s inability to make these distinctions while creating “The Farewell.” Americans felt it was a Chinese film because of its subtitles, Chinese cast and location, while Chinese producers considered it an American film because it wasn’t fully Chinese. The endeavor to simply tell a personal family story became a “political fight to claim a space that doesn’t yet exist.”
In the search for authentic storytelling, “the key is to lean into the in-CBS All Accessweenness,” she said. “More and more, people won’t fit into these neat boxes, so in-CBS All Accessweenness is exactly what we need.”
However, it may prove harder for Chinese Americans to carve out a space for their “in-CBS All Accessweenness” than for other minority groups, given China’s growing economic clout.
Notes author and writer-producer Charles Yu, whose latest novel about Asian representation in Hollywood, “Interior Chinatown,” is a National Book Award finalist, “As Asian Americans continue on what I feel is a little bit of an island over here, the world is changing over in Asia; in some ways the center of gravity is shifting over there and away from here, economically and culturally.”
With the Chinese film market set to surpass the US as the world’s largest this year, the question thus arises: “Will the cumulative impact of Asian American audiences be such a small drop in the bucket compared to the China market that it’ll just be overwhelmed, in terms of what gets made or financed?”
As with “The Stand,” more parochial, American conversations on race will inevitably run up against other global issues as U.S. studios continue to target China. Some say Asian American creators should be prepared to meet The Stand by broadening their outlook.
“Most people in this The Stand think, ‘I’d love for there to be Hollywood-China co-productions if it meant a job for me. I believe in free speech, and censorship is terrible, but it’s not my battle. I just want to get my pilot sold,’” says actor-producer Brian Yang (“Hawaii Five-0,” “Linsanity”), who’s worked for more than a decade CBS All Accessween the two countries. “But the world’s getting smaller. Streamers make shows for the world now. For anyone that works in this business, it would behoove them to study and understand The Stands that are happening in and [among] other countries.”
Gold House’s Chen agrees. “We need to speak even more thoughtfully and try to understand how the world does not function as it does in our zip code,” he says. “We still have so much soft power coming from the U.S. What we say matters. This is not the problem and burden any of us as Asian Americans asked for, but this is on us, unfortunately. We just have to fight harder. And every step we take, we’re going to be right and we’re going to be wrong.”
☆ ALL ABOUT THE SERIES ☆
is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[2] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and exCBS All Accesssible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is exCBS All Accessded by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower.
‘Hausen’ Challenges Asian Americans in Hollywood to Overcome ‘Impossible Duality’ CBS All Accessween China, U.S. | https://medium.com/the-stand-2020-s1-e2-on-cbs-all-access/s1-e2-the-stand-series-1-episode-2-37f538179ede | ['Lydia Jordan'] | 2020-12-25 12:34:14.396000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Lifestyle', 'Coronavirus', 'TV Series'] |
6 High Profit Businesses You can Start with Low Capital | There are many business opportunities, but many of them require huge startup capital or even running capital. This most times discourages young entrepreneurs who don’t have such capital. I want to reveal these online and offline lucrative businesses you can start with very little capital.
Low Capital Businesses that Yield High Profit
Crypto Trading and Investment
You can make money by trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The concept is to look for crypto coins with good potentials and buy them when their prices are still low. Then when their prices go up, you sell them for profit.
Note that there are two main types of crypto trading: Short term and Long term trading. Day trading is an example of short term trading where you buy and sell the coins the same day. But for long term trades, you buy and hold them for a very long term in order to enjoy higher returns.
So if you have little capital, up to $100, and are looking for a good business to invest in, then you can try crypto trading. It is very lucrative, but at the same time, very risky. Here are some helpful strategies for making money in crypto trading.
Apart from crypto trading, there are other ways to earn cryptocurrencies. Some of them are: claiming airdrops, working on freelance sites that pay with crypto coins. There are also sites where you can do micro jobs like viewing ads, completing surveys, etc.
Self-Publishing Books
Here is another lucrative business that require little capital. There are many online platforms where you can self-publish a book without spending money. This is possible if you have the required skills like: writing the book manuscript, editing and proofreading it, designing the book cover. You can also utilize social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn to promote your books for free.
The most popular self-publishing platform is Amazon KDP, where you can publish both the kindle eBook and paperback versions of your book and make money. Here is a guide on how to self-publish best-selling book on Amazon KDP.
Blogging and Affiliate Marketing
There are many ways to monetize your blog. You can utilize ad networks like Google Adsense, Media.net, Adsterra, etc. One of the most popular blogging platforms is Wordpress. You only need to register a custom domain name and buy a hosting plan. Most of the plugins you need are free. So with less than $50, you can create a blog and start making money. But you need to build your domain authority by writing quality blog posts and optimize your blog posts so that they rank high on search engines.
Another alternative way to monetize your blog is through affiliate marketing. Here, you sign up to become a marketing partner for a merchant or an affiliate network. Once you sign up, you will be given an affiliate link. You can write a review article on your blog and insert your affiliate link. When a customer makes a purchase on the merchant’s site through your link, you will be paid a commission.
Note that you can also earn money from affiliate marketing without having a blog or website. You can use social media to promote your affiliate link and drive traffic to the merchant’s website. Check out this kindle book on how to make money from blogging and affiliate marketing for a step by step guide.
YouTube Video Blogging
Another popular type of blogging is video blogging. Here you create quality videos and upload them on video social media like YouTube. Once the videos on your YouTube channel meet the minimum requirements for YouTube Adsense, you can apply and get approved. Then Google ads will be displayed in your videos and you start making money.
These days, there are lots of competition in YouTube video blogging. One of the ways to survive this competition is to optimize your YouTube videos so that they rank high on search engines.
Dropshipping
This is a special type of digital marketing where you sell products to customers without having a physical store.
All you need to do is to setup an online store where you will market your products. Next, you research and find products that have high demand or each cheap. Then you enter into contract with a supplier who will supply the goods to you on whole price and take care of the shipping. Your work is to market the products in your online store. When a customer places an order, you forward it to the dropshipper and pay for the order. Then the supplier ships the product to the customer on your behalf. But you and your dropshipper will agree on how to foot the shipping fee.
Dropshipping has been in existence for decades. In fact many online stores operate on dropshipping basis. Some of the platforms where you can find wholesalers who dropship are Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Etsy, etc. Here is a step by step guide on dropshipping.
Peanut Burger Making
One of the most lucrative businesses that you can start very little capital is peanut burger making. You can start peanut making business on small scale and then expand with time. With less than $50, you can start the business.
It is always advisable to write your business plan from the onset, so that you will be properly guided and monitor your progress. You also need to do proper business analysis and market survey before you go into the business.
Starting the business on small scale, you will use improvise for most of the costly equipment needed in the business like coating machine, frying machine, sealing machine, etc. You can check out the guide on how to start coated peanut making on small scale.
Conclusion
These are some of the online and offline lucrative businesses that will fetch you much money. Choose the ones that suit you, also which your little capital can cover. There are other cool businesses that require little capital.
Check Out:
Don’t forget to follow our publication so that you will be notified when we drop new business article. Also share this article with your social media friends. Enjoy! | https://medium.com/lucrative-business-ideas/high-profit-businesses-4b1fe45cbe0e | ['Buzzer Joseph'] | 2020-12-23 12:55:14.837000+00:00 | ['Online Business', 'Business Ideas', 'Entrepreneurship Ideas', 'Make Money Online', 'Business'] |
Call Me Doctor | Dr. Jill Biden. Image Credit: Obama White House Archives
This week, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Joseph Epstein that the institution with which he is (or now perhaps “was”) honorarily affiliated, Northwestern University, themselves called “misogynistic.” I’m not even going to link to the piece here because it doesn’t deserve the internet traffic, but Google it if you wish to read more. Epstein opens with:
“Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is not an unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D, a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.’ A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.”
This entire paragraph could not sound any more condescending, from addressing 69-year-old Dr. Biden as “kiddo” to seemingly not bothering to look up what her Ed.D. (Doctorate in Education) is in based on the statement “Your degree is in, I believe…” He then goes on to purport that doctoral degrees “were once given exclusively to scholars, statesmen, artists and scientists,” and the expansion to other fields and honorary degrees has watered down the prestige holding a doctorate once had.
To put it mildly, this is both sexist and elitist bullshit. This attitude belittles Dr. Biden not only as a woman, but as an educator. It also seems to look down upon the community college system based on the calling out of her doctoral dissertation topic. If her doctorate were in something like chemistry or physics, would his tone have been as vitriolic toward her? It is ironic that Epstein both holds an honorary doctorate and is a university lecturer, and yet so blatantly disrespects the field of education with his attitude toward Dr. Biden’s doctorate in Education.
A doctorate should not be a mark of elitism. It is a mark of passion and dedication so strong that someone was willing to take both the financial and opportunity costs of choosing to spend an additional 4+ years in university to hone their skills on a highly specialized topic. It’s not even necessarily a mark of being a genius—it is a mark of work ethic and stubbornness. (For some, it is also perhaps a form of masochism, knowingly choosing to put yourself through the stress that is pursuing a Ph.D.)
But it is also a mark that comes with the title of “Doctor” according to our educational system. If you have put in your time and been deemed worthy by your doctoral institution of receiving such a title for your work based on your performance, then you damn well get to wear that as a badge of honour. This especially matters for women, who are significantly less likely to be introduced by their titles than men.
This may seem trivial, but it’s hard to ignore as woman if you’ve repeatedly experienced surprise or disbelief at your credentials. It is a microaggression with effects that compound. After a meeting where one of my male colleagues introduced me as “Dr. Tanya Harrison,” another male colleague with a Ph.D. told me that the title felt unnecessary as there were plenty of people with doctorates in the room—all of whom were male. Mind you, I had not asked the other person to introduce me with that title, they did so on their own. My response to him was something along the lines of, “It’s easy to say that when you’ve likely never been mistaken for a student, or secretary, or assistant.” All of these have happened to me in professional settings after receiving my doctorate. My presence in meetings has been questioned before introducing myself. Once I even had a male professor ask how I’d gotten one of my jobs in the space industry. When I replied with, “I applied for the job and interviewed like everyone else,” he looked surprised and said, “Oh, I thought it was because you might be [redacted]’s daughter.” (I was not.)
So yes, if I am referring to myself professionally, I am going to call myself Doctor. And so should Dr. Biden—because she has earned those credentials and the right to show them.
Dr. Tanya Harrison. Image credit: Canadian Space Agency.
Join on Twitter with the hashtag #CallMeDoctor to promote women with doctoral degrees.
Edit: Corrected Dr. Jill Biden’s degree to note Ed.D. where I had mistyped with Ph.D.—old habits as a Ph.D! | https://aninjusticemag.com/call-me-doctor-7884b56c7024 | ['Dr. Tanya Harrison'] | 2020-12-16 18:52:57.707000+00:00 | ['Women in STEM', 'Academia', 'Opinion', 'PhD', 'Jill Biden'] |
My thoughts in Management in Information Systems | Technology is all around us. In fact, it has become a modern survival tool that gives many people access to services, goods, entertainment, and education. Since the 1970’s business computers have been a thing of the past and the future; and here we are today with processing power at the palm of our hands. Technology has become less expensive over the years. Thanks to data mining, large smart televisions have become common place in more family homes today than ever. We have free email services like: Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail which provides the modern way of communicating with one another in the personal and business world. Information Systems today have come a long way since the printed paper memo. We teleconference from one side of the world to another for businesses meetings to collaborate with others.
Technology is always evolving, therefore those who fail to keep up tend to fall behind on the demand necessary of modern-day workers. With robots replacing workers for simple tasks, the demand for software developers, hardware engineers, electric engineers, and such have become the new future model for companies. Of course, robots and software cannot replace all the jobs in the world, unless AI (Artificial Intelligence) began to write its own code and build its own robotic body. Many common technological themes and items that have been in science-fiction films are now reality or close to it. These science-fiction movies prepare us by adapting our minds to new technologies in order to learn how to manage the digital world.
In the information age, there are no limits to where we can go and what we can learn. You can educate yourself on quantum computing on many free courses online. You can look up a cooking video on YouTube and learn how to adapt their techniques to a recipe for your favorite fish. Information has become the modern currency of today, and not many people notice that their information is being mined in exchange for entertainment. Social networking companies, like Facebook, provide a free service in exchange for information on your health, habits, names, friends, phone numbers, and anything else you could possibly imagine all the way down to your favorite drink from Starbucks.
In the past I worked for Google through an outsourcing company as a Risk/Fraud Customer Support Agent. Working with their management software gave me an insight into the data that was collected. They collected everything, from real time GPS locations to your favorite Android games. Information is of monetary value today, it’s how companies target their customers with brands that they might be interested in. It’s as if we are getting a small taste of our soon-to-be dystopian future. Social Media, Internet of Thing, Cloud Computing, Big data, and Mobile phones are most likely connected under one network with the data using the same lifeline. With over a billion users on Facebook internationally, the planet has become interconnected with each other. News has never traveled faster than it does today because of Facebook and other social media sites.
Facebook wouldn’t be what it is today without the foundation of hardware such as cell phones, servers, laptops, home computers, and iPads. More devices are connected to the internet in the world today than there are human beings. As an example, I currently have about twenty hardware devices that are in my home right now, from smart phones, computers, smart TV’s, and security cameras connected to my Wi-Fi. Most of the world is now living under the Internet of Things. Like our home devices, the worlds’ devices relate to each other too. One example, Windows 10 by Microsoft allows update files to be shared on a peered network so that people near you can update more quickly. This function was made as a network balancing technique so that Microsoft servers wouldn’t use up so much bandwidth and provide stability.
The Internet of Things has become the future model to homes near you. From being able to record your security footage to the cloud, to changing the temperature from your AC unit from your cell phone the Internet of Things have changed our lives drastically. Many people in the city and suburbs have come dependent on technology that has not only made our lives easier, but faster. Programming languages like Java and JavaScript have enabled the creation of the current applications that we use in all our devices. Many of these programs run solely on the cloud but they can also be individually installed in your personal computers or cell phones.
With the new 5G network, which has yet to be fully implemented in the United States, the internet will soon be on another level of big data. As a rule, the quicker the data can download the bigger it becomes. When I first started using the internet, we used dial-up. As much as I miss the sound of a 56k modem connecting to the internet, I do not miss the torturing loading speeds. One of the issues we had while working for Google, was the issue with flooded networks. This was not a problem experienced very long ago as it was only six years ago. Too many computers connected to the network would cause a stall in the system, making it harder to provide a service to the customer. Since then, internet speeds have become exponentially faster. The evolution of ever faster internet speeds has translated into a heightened speed of productivity in tech jobs.
Careers in Information in Systems will continue to grow over the next decades, as long as we are able to connect to the internet. The internet has become the lifeline for many of the workers in my field, and it’s what drives the computer science programs. Many people today work from home, especially those in the Information Systems field. Thanks to the convenience of transaction processing systems, office automation, knowledge management systems, electronic commerce, and teleconferencing more people have been able to work in the comfort of their own home.
Technology, like many other things, does have its risks. Software glitches, environmental disasters, data loss, and hackers are a few examples of the many risks facing technology today. Glitches in software can cause misinformation or provide downtime to a multi million-dollar company which can result in millions in financial losses. Environmental disasters can destroy the hardware that holds the data, and software that runs the current platforms. Many data centers that hold thousands of servers, are guarded by concrete steel walls and with security guards securing the premises. A hurricane or earthquake can destroy data centers centers. The good news is that many companies, like Facebook and Amazon, place data servers in different parts of the country as a failsafe. Not all companies can afford the same luxury. Another threat to Information Systems are hackers. Individuals who create viruses or ransomware in order to destroy or steal data from companies that hold important information. In a world of limited privacy, which is worse, the companies who listen in 24/7 to your conversations, or one sneaky hacker who potentially steals the same information you give for free to corporate companies? Something to think about.
When it comes to cyber security, it is important for an Information Systems Specialist to have some background in the information security field. When it comes to privacy, it is imperative that measures are in place to protect the company from inside and outside cyber-attacks. In todays businesses models, we depend on the cloud to save our data, and run our platforms that we use for our jobs. Many social engineering attacks can trick a simple power user to give up their credentials, causing a company to cripple for some time while trying to recover. Security will always be an issue when it comes to managing the IS infrastructure, and we can’t certainly train all our employees to be security specialists. Businesses can’t run without hardware, software, storage and networking centers. Therefore, many companies spend less than they should to secure the information. Some companies use propriety software and hardware for security. Since the process of security is automated, it makes decision making on attacks as easy as the click of a mouse button by an administrator. As I stated earlier, data is currency in today’s world, and it’s very valuable to dark web hackers. Honeypots, a separate server with fake information that allows hackers to roam the system without damage to the company, are a common tool for large companies.
Before I moved to New Jersey, I had my own consulting company in Florida. One of my biggest clients was a broker who owned a realty company. He had five office employees and seven realtors who worked for him. Being a Microsoft Office 360 partner, gave me the opportunity to get clients who needed assistance in migrating systems. This broker had an issue with security. Some people who quit in the past were still accessing clientele information because he had employees use personal emails for business. Of course, this was a huge mistake for the broker as it resulted in monetary loss that would be hard to prove in court. That’s where I came in. I consulted with the broker and explained to him that this cannot happen again if he wanted to protect his business. In a strategic move, I presented him the idea of having a corporate Microsoft Office 360 account, and then I proceeded to educate him as to why this would be a perfect fit for his company. I explained how his employees could share pictures, contracts, charts, teleconference and message in real time. In addition, I explained to the broker that when an employee left the company or was terminated, he could instantly disable their account to avoid information theft.
After three weeks of implementation and planning, I migrated all his employees and realtors to new email accounts. I also provided his employees and realtors with full on software and hardware training. We spent two days getting everyone trained for all the features in Microsoft 360. Thus, ensuring that they were all comfortable on their own. It took one month to fully launch the new platform for his company. In the end he was happy and learned that the expense was well worth it. After the migration, I was contracted to handle his administrative account. In this role my job was to push upgrades in order to ensure the system was running smoothly on the Microsoft server sides. During downtime I would push updates and report any suspicious activity. I had full control of the users, password resets, locking, and removing accounts. Before moving to New Jersey, I trained his nephew (who was in IT) how to manage the software, and he was hired on full time for the job.
For me the job of installing and training was a tedious process. I had to learn new software and create a training program before I could train his company. In the process I had learned to be an administrator for the company, while also learning the ins and outs of Microsoft 360. This was my biggest client at the time in Florida. Many other clients I had were just regular people who needed help with their internet or website. With this experience I learned more about cloud computing, because Office 360 runs on the cloud. Therefore, it gave me an insight on the pros and cons of cloud computing. Sometimes the system would be slow, and I was doubtful that it would fit the client’s needs. Eventually, I learned that with the job of protecting valuable information comes new knowledge, and the client would have to adapt to the new system in order to ensure that his business was safe from outsiders. I’m sure his system has improved in the past 3 years, as technology speeds and Microsoft servers continue to improve. My previous skills in Information Systems allowed me to adopt to the new role of trainer and administrator, making it a new skill that I can take anywhere with me. Even though I helped the company be more competitive by helping employees transfer files faster and filling out contracts in real time, it made me a competitive business owner to the other IT consulting companies in the area as well. Overall, it was a valuable learning experience. | https://medium.com/@cyb3rs3cur1ty/my-thoughts-in-management-in-information-systems-40fdc9ac2417 | ['Jc Nevarez'] | 2020-11-27 21:50:31.026000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Cybersecurity', 'Information Technology', 'Thoughts', 'Project Management'] |
High Summer Thunderstorm Returns Me | What glory to feel the pressure change,
the air to capture moisture from far above,
to bring it to earth as supplicant gift.
I am desiccated as desert bones in my mid-summer skin;
only the salves of supermarkets — moisturizer and chap-stick —
aid me in this season of sun-blanched skies.
The numbers, the measurement of suffering,
bespeak and belie the nature of this moment and place;
what is one-hundred-twelve degrees to scorched Mercury?
To my body, to this bag of skin filled with water,
today is a visit to a level of Dante’s Inferno;
I wonder: will the sun deny me life as it has countless others?
But in a moment, a series of moments as magic as life itself,
a rumble from far away announces the return of a king
like the drums of the Praetorian Guard once heralded Caesar.
Thunder strikes a spark, a charge,
from high to low like the blow of a sword —
and the parched land of my life is drenched in unseasonal showers.
I take my place under the deluge;
my part in this play is to celebrate, to welcome
this gift as a priest names and sanctifies the portent.
I raise my face, my arms, to the life-giving sky in welcome;
nothing but good can come of this sacred moment,
as my outstretched tongue begs for the blessing of living water.
This high summer thunderstorm returns me
to myself as a boy, who once felt the raindrops in the air
as proof that the world is good, and is my home, and bears no grudge. | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/high-summer-thunderstorm-returns-me-e2d9ada0cc85 | ['Craig Allen Heath'] | 2017-09-06 19:32:15.950000+00:00 | ['Childhood', 'Wisdom', 'Nature', 'Poetry', 'Poem'] |
What are Hybrid power train, Electric power train, and Drive train? | An electric vehicle uses one or more electric traction motors for propulsion. A conventional internal combustion engine vehicle makes use of an IC engine to propel the vehicle. You could have read the basics of electric vehicle, how electric vehicles work, and what is a hybrid car. In this article, we discuss the power trains — Electric power train and hybrid power train.
What is the power train?
A power train is a group of components in a vehicle, that generate power and deliver to the surface where the vehicle travels.
For example, an aircraft power train converts the chemical energy in fuel and transfers the energy to the air to move the vehicle. In a car, it transfers energy to the road.
The power train of an internal combustion engine car includes
Electric power train and hybrid power train
Did you guess that an electric power train includes an electric motor? Both hybrid and electric power trains include electric machines.
Let’s see what is an electric and hybrid power train
Electric power train
An electric power train is the group of components in an electric vehicle that transfers power from the battery to the surface where the vehicle runs. The components in an electric power train are
Inverter to convert battery DC power to AC to drive induction motor in the vehicle
to convert battery DC power to AC to drive induction motor in the vehicle Gears to change the speed
to change the speed Differential gears to change the direction of motion
to change the direction of motion Wheels and shaft
If the vehicle has a hub motor connected, the gears and differential can be avoided. Electric car power train components are highly critical in an electric vehicle since the efficiency of components affects the energy consumption and the distance covered by a single charge.
The reduced range is a major drawback of an electric vehicle. Fewer components in electric drive trains reduce the need for frequent charging of electric cars.
Overnight charging of vehicles from home charging stations helps to meet the requirement of the vehicle the next day.
A hub motor which integrated into the wheel avoids the gear and other mechanical couplings. Mechanical parts are less efficient than electrical components in a vehicle. So the removal of a single component would increase the efficiency of the vehicle by reducing the losses.
The power train of hub motor electric vehicle are given below
Hybrid power train
A hybrid electric vehicle uses one or more sources of energy along with electricity to run the vehicle. And the mechanism to transfer energy from the energy storage (both fuel and battery) to the surface where the vehicle runs is the hybrid power train.
They comprise of
Electric Motor
Inverter
Gears
Differentials
IC engine
Clutch
Power splitting mechanisms
Wheel and shaft
Based on the power train configuration hybrid electric vehicles are classified into micro hybrids, mild hybrids, and strong hybrids. You can read more about them in these posts and here.
How does power train differ from drive train?
A drive train is a group of components that deliver power to the driving wheel. A drive train comprises all the power train components except the engine or motor that generates power.
A power train is a combination of motor/engine and drive train. An electric vehicle will have an electric machine and conventional cars will have an internal combustion engine in their power train.
A power train is a combination of motor/engine and drive train
The complexity of a drive train drastically reduces the efficiency of the vehicle. The efficiency of a vehicle is critical in the case of the electric drive where a high voltage battery stores energy to drive the vehicle.
Conclusion
A power train is a group of components in a motor vehicle that transfers energy from the energy storage system to the surface where the vehicle runs.
The electric power train consists of Electric motor, inverter, axle, differential, and wheels. Hybrid electric power train contains an IC engine and power split mechanisms along with the components of an electric power train.
Don’t forget to share the post with your friends and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram! | https://medium.com/@sibik55/what-are-hybrid-power-train-electric-power-train-and-drive-train-1234115fac59 | ['Sibi Krishnan'] | 2020-11-02 19:36:50.341000+00:00 | ['Electric Vehicle', 'Drive Train', 'Automotive', 'Power Train', 'Electric Car'] |
Taking Care of Business | Man, I am feeling accomplished. The terror of day 2 has worn off for me and now I’m getting stuff done on our old 1910 triplex which our family loves so much. It’s a wonderful home with so many nasty little home improvement surprises. Now that I don’t have the excuse of prioritizing my time elsewhere, I’m forced to come face to face with some of these projects that I’ve put off over the years.
Example 1 — We’ve had a water problem down in the crawlspace for years. A bunch of work has been done but lately I’ve noticed new problems popping up. The big one is that one of the beams under the house was getting wet during heavy rains. I don’t know much about taking care of a house but I know this is bad. Water leads to rot and then the house falls down with or without us in it. I tracked the issue down to an area near our kitchen fridge. I pulled the fridge, examined the darks of the unfinished nether walls yet found nothing. I spent the remainder of the day spraying a hose against the side of the house, then crawling under to see the water make its way down the path that I’d identified (I’m not sure why I did this but it felt right). The result was still nothing. I was out of ideas. The next day it rained hard so I hung out in the crawlspace for a while during the storm and booyah! The issue exposed itself. The pipe for the sump pump ran right underneath the beam in question and it had a crack along a joint. Every time it did it’s pumping thing the water sprayed right up onto the floorboards and foundation. I figured this was an easy enough fix so I quickly measured the pipe (2 in, which I later found was wrong) and headed out to my old stomping grounds, Home Depot, (despite Lowes being closer) to get the supplies. I was feeling like a pro home inspector at this point so I decided to take on the intermittent gas smell in the upstairs apartment.
Before I get into example 2, I do want to clarify that the gas smell was pretty negligible but we had received a few complaints from guests so we wanted to do what we could to address it. I know gas stuff involves wrenches so I went over to my neighbor Tom’s house to borrow a couple decent tools. Also, the only thing that uses gas upstairs is a stove and amazingly there was an Appliance Repair guy (Keir from Appliance Repair Geeks who was awesome) getting into his car as I was walking Cormac back from school that morning. I stopped him to see if he had some time to look at it. He didn’t but he did tell me that aluminum gas lines notoriously leak and that could be the culprit in this case. It was enough for me to move on.
Onto Example 2 — Let me start with this. Gas scares me. As it should scare anyone with my knowledge and experience working with gas. The one thing that makes me comfortable are those little shut off valves. I figure I can shut that thing off then mess around with whatever I want to with the appliance in question, in this case a stove. My experience working with gas appliances is pretty much limited to stoves and hot water heaters though. So I’m feeling really confident at this point after figuring out the sump pump thing and rocking out my HD trip grabbing all of the supplies I need along with some paint for another couple projects. So I start wrenching. I start with the side of the line connected to the stove but I couldn’t quite muster up the strength to loosen the connector. I turned to the line connected to the gas pipe. That one was much easier so I started unthreading. More confidence. As I lift the line off of the pipe I instantly know something is not right. The hissing sound quickly turns into the most distinct gaseous aroma I’ve ever smelled. What could have happened? I turned the shutoff valve into the off position. Quickly I double checked. It was in the off position. So why in the hell am I starting to become queasy with lack of oxygen? Not enough time to troubleshoot. I frantically start to screw the gas line from the stove back onto the pipe. My nervousness made this difficult. I couldn’t tell if I was making progress or if I was aimlessly twisting a piece of metal around and around as my world became more breathless and prone to explosion. Finally the seal was closed again. I stood shaking then opened the window and the door to let things air out. As I do in most situations like this, I turned to Sarah with a “what do I do and why did I make this mistake” facial expression. I called Keir first who told me I should call a plumber which makes sense because he does appliances, not gas lines. Then I called our favorite plumbers M. Cary and Daughters. We’ve used them for all of my mess ups in the past and they came out in no time and confirmed that the gas shut off valve problem was just a stripped lever. The plumber (not one of the daughters) even told me that I got the wrong part (and wrong size) for the pipe problem downstairs which saved me one of those classic moments where you start a project, quickly realize you have the wrong part, and realize that you have to go back to the hardware store. Thank you M. Cary and Daughters. By Friday though, both projects were done and I saved at least 500 bucks by doing them myself. Let’s just hope they take.
My best friend. A project finished… | https://medium.com/@chris-gleason/taking-care-of-business-bbc246b2f577 | [] | 2019-03-10 13:32:30.824000+00:00 | ['DIY', 'Life Lessons', 'Stay At Home Parent', 'Home Improvement', 'House'] |
GSoC 2020: An overview and an addendum on Rust | Dating chatbots are the new Turing test // CC-BY-NC 2.5 © xkcd
So let’s walk you through what my project is about and on the outset, it’s pretty intuitive. At the time of application, the feature list was tightly-focused and was a solid start for implementation:
Welcome new members and share with them kick-start resources related to Wikimedia Outreach projects. Provide help around FAQs (for example by using the following syntax: +search-faqs: <then question>), so we don’t wait for a human (waste of time) and also avoid repeating answers. Direct channel members to the relevant members and/or relevant streams/topics. Bridge communication between a Zulip stream, say ‘Technical Support’ and the IRC channel #wikimedia-tech.
A segue on Discord
If you’ve stumbled across a popular server in Discord (ever!), you’ve definitely encountered very featureful bots, some might even say too many features. So, you already have a good idea in your head what the bot is supposed to do — welcome people, give them resources, point them to places and maybe even play a game of tic-tac-toe (on that note: there’s a great fishing bot).
Should we tell stock photo agencies no one writes code like this? // Unsplash License © Markus Spiske
The case for Zulip
Discord has been around for a while and despite being proprietary, their API has matured over time. Working with Zulip meant dealing with a fairly nascent API but given the fact that everything is open-source, I can tailor what I create instead of simply being dependent on an opaque API. To drop a hint, since I know that the zulip package is going to use configparser to parse the configuration files, I can include other configurations into the same file to save setup time and effort, I let the package deal with the portion of the file they require and I can deal with the configuration I need as well. Being open-source has a distinct advantage in that I don’t have to be sure that the docs are up-to-date, I can see the behaviours of the current production API as they are meant to be given, absolute clarity regarding input and output and that’s crucial when developing any new application.
That’s enough with me talking about open-source, let’s circle back to the project I am working on and the current feature list as it stands, heavily truncated for ease of reading —
Always listening This means that the bot can be summoned from anywhere with any message we want to summon it with. Welcoming The #announce stream announces all new signups, each signup will trigger a bot action from goodbot on the #general stream (Getting started topic)… Replying and error control If summoning the bot, the bot will helpfully give a list of commands and expect you to answer them… Organization-level assistance The bot will seek to assist applicants about respective project ideas, guide them to instructions and org-admins… Project-level assistance The bot will seek to assist them with specific projects by directing them to respective mentors, Phab tasks, and instructions about that particular project by dynamically accessing continually-updated resources… Technical assistance The bot will direct participants to technical IRC channels such as #wikimedia-tech, #pywikibot, and other technical channels (with configurable options) when requested… Zulip-IRC bridgebot The bot will also sync messages across a specific stream such as #technical-support stream on Zulipchat and Wikimedia technical IRC channels such as #wikimedia-tech to ensure proper and quick resolution of queries… Summoning user-groups The bot will maintain its own database of user_groups, such as mentors for specific projects, GSoC/GSoD/Outreachy org-admins. The bot will provide resources to contact these user-groups as well as the ability to send pings via Zulipchat itself… CI/CD We will use Travis CI for continuous integration, build verification and continuous deployment… Toolforge deployment and integration The entire pipeline of integration and deployment to Toolforge will be triggered by an event (either through Travis CI or GitHub Actions) carried out after the commit is pushed to production and results in a successful build… Searching Wikipedia and StackOverflow Both sites have strong, mature APIs and will be a very useful resource without needing to leave Zulipchat, also helpful in answering queries by mentors on why certain errors are occurring… Code quality Extension documentation is always a prerequisite for maintaining code quality presently and in the future. Hence, I have provided ample time for documentation purposes, which we can host on GitHub wiki itself. Another aspect of maintaining code quality is to enforce a consistent style guide and ensure the absence of logical and syntactical errors in our project using a linter — preferably such as flake8, primarily for its speed and the lack of false-positives. Linting will be automatically enforced in continuous integration via Travis-CI…
This should establish an opening idea into what I’ll be working on this summer, and finally, some proof of the pudding —
A simple demo of our Zulip-IRC bridgebot // Standard YouTube License © Ankit Maity
I’ll be talking more about what we’re working on over the summers in the coming posts (including one more demo video) but that’s it for today. Now, let’s talk about — and you guessed it, Rust.
The addendum on Rust
StackOverflow has been a better part of my college years and maybe for some of you too, with that you probably come across the StackOverflow Developer Survey and if you’ve kept track of the results, there’s one interesting fact that stands out — Rust has been the most-loved language for five years straight. Five years, in an ever-changing and continuously innovating developer community, seems novel to me. In fact, when most of the languages we use today are decades old, it seems that Rust has made a solid foothold in the community.
And the obvious question is — why?
How does this code look to you? Pretty and elegant, or completely unreadable? Depending on the answer, you might like or not like Rust, and in this one line, we see how iterators (a primary Rust abstraction) can be used to create a vector containing the first ten square numbers.
To quote Jake Goulding of Integer32 (you can read his full blog here)—
Rust’s static typing does its best to get out of the programmer’s way while encouraging long-term maintainability. Some statically-typed languages place a large burden on the programmer, requiring them to repeat the type of a variable multiple times, which hinders readability and refactoring. Other statically-typed languages allow whole-program type inference. While convenient during initial development, this reduces the ability of the compiler to provide useful error information when types no longer match.
As someone who has started learning Rust, I can clearly attest, the learning curve is quite off-putting; but unexpectedly, it is the fresh breath of air I seem to have been waiting for. I still love Python and C++ (do take a guess which one is objectively better) from the bottom of my heart — but Rust offers an opportunity at something much better and that’s to become a language that you want to write code in — and one I certainly hope Rust achieves. | https://medium.com/@ankittt/gsoc-2020-an-overview-and-an-addendum-on-rust-5b93d5fcde7a | [] | 2020-06-03 14:57:44.691000+00:00 | ['Wikipedia', 'Technology', 'Chatbots', 'Rust', 'Gsoc'] |
Baby Steps to Your First Full-Stack App | Plan
Planning is essential for large projects and can also be a great tool to help keep you motivated. There are a few parts of planning that you may want to consider depending on the scale and complexity of your project.
Before you even start coding, create a high-level doc explaining what your goals are for this project and what the end system might look like, including what tools you plan to use, where everything will be hosted, etc. Here is the doc that I worked from for my project.
Consider using different tools at different stages of the project. For example, when I first wrote my scraper, I found it easier to store the collected data in Google Sheets rather than having to set up a proper database, but I knew I couldn’t use that as a long-term solution because it would quickly hit row limits.
Almost as important as outlining what you will do is documenting what you won’t do in v1. Unless it’s essential to your app, leave off things that add a lot more complexity. For my app, I thought it would be really cool to use the data I’m collecting to offer predictions rather than just describing historical data. Having never made a predictive model before, I know it could take me months just to learn enough to implement that one feature.
By documenting what is outside the scope of what you’re working on for v1, you can keep yourself from going down a rabbit hole and cut down the time it takes you to have a minimum viable product. And since it’s written down, you won’t have to worry about forgetting it if you want to come back to it in a future iteration of the app.
I also find it helpful to outline user stories. Rather than thinking in detail about the technical needs for the project, think about what the user will want to do. For example “user can sign up for email alerts” or “user can filter a dashboard to see high-level stats about a specific comedian.” If you’ve worked on any assignments for coding classes, you’ve probably noticed that they phrase the requirements like this, and it’s also a common practice in Agile companies. Of course, you’ll need to break out each user story into more detailed technical goals later, but it’s a good way to start segmenting your work (and depending on how eager you are to share your app with the world, you could potentially ship it with only a couple of user stories completed and add the others later).
When you’re ready to start coding, pick a user story and break it out into even more granular steps (e.g. for filtering a dashboard — I needed to populate a dropdown menu, make the selection trigger a GET request to the database, and update the charts based on the response from the request). I used a white board to diagram what the relevant features would look like and keep track of my to-do list for the features, but you could use an app or a notepad.
Diagram of homepage and design options for a signup form
Diagram of dashboard and detailed to-do list
Know when to fold ‘em
I learned this one the hard way — don’t throw too much time at something that you’re not making any progress on. After I had a working scraper, I wanted to host it in Heroku so that I could schedule it to run every night. I spent most of my second week of vacation trying to get this to work, and every time I thought I had found the solution, it was another dead end. Eventually, I just gave up and figured out how to schedule the program locally in a couple of hours, and I leave my laptop open every night so it can run. If I ever have a ton of users relying on this, I’ll go back to researching this issue, but for now, I don’t think my mom will be upset if she misses an update one day a month.
Talk to people!
If you’re working on a solo project, get input from other people at the outset and intermittently throughout your work. Maybe they’ve seen a similar project that could be a useful blueprint, have suggestions for what functionality they would want to see as an end user, or can recommend some technology that you didn’t even know existed.
I was initially planning to use MongoDB and Node just because those were the tools FreeCodeCamp promoted when I first started learning web development (even though I had never used them). A former coworker suggested Flask instead of Node, and I was able to reference an old project he had worked on to see what the Flask routes should look like. Another friend took a look at an early iteration of my landing page and suggested some revisions to make it easier to interpret.
Note: you should specifically be talking to people to get ideas/feedback, not just a pat on the back.
Be kind to yourself
Ok, this advice sounds like the kind of empty nonsense that you use to justify eating a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts in a weekend (not that I’ve ever done that). But it’s important to keep in mind that you’re a human who has a life outside of whatever app you’re working on.
I genuinely thought that within that two weeks (give or take a couple extra days) I could write a scraping tool, schedule it, and build a full-stack website to show cool D3 charts with dynamic filtering, despite the fact that I had never worked with schedulers or back-end technologies and had limited experience with D3. Once I missed that self-imposed deadline and was back to work, it was hard to make very much progress each week, and I quickly became disheartened.
If you’re setting your own deadlines, be exceedingly generous. Or consider not setting any deadline at all (if it’s a side project). Work on it when you have the energy, and acknowledge that you need time to decompress from work/school, hang out with friends and family, and enjoy your other hobbies. | https://medium.com/swlh/baby-steps-to-your-first-full-stack-app-8a72f0ccf4f | ['Meghan Maloy'] | 2020-07-13 18:39:19.079000+00:00 | ['Planning', 'Coding', 'Web Development', 'Full Stack'] |
Sony TVs boast faster, smarter processing and improved audio, but there are no major technology changes | Sony TVs boast faster, smarter processing and improved audio, but there are no major technology changes Danielle Jan 16·2 min read
Sony made no mention of major new technologies, such as mini LED backlighting, for the 2021 TV lineup, but the company has announced plenty of other improvements. Most noticeably, the new Cognitive Processor XR processing unit marries higher speed with more granular and processing algorithms. It will be available on Sony’s high-end XR series of smart TVs.
The end result of XR manipulation, which places great emphasis on the viewer’s focal point of an image, should be better overall images with increased detail, fewer artifacts, a higher contrast ratio, according to the company. Sony says its 4K and 8K UHD models will also deliver distinctly improved upscaling of lower-resolution content.
[ Further reading: TV tech terms demystified ]Sony audioSony already has the world’s best-sounding TVs, and the company says its 2021 models will be even bertter. Re-designed planar drivers that directly vibrate the display panel and bezel are said to produce more oomph, and—thanks to more of them and refined placement—they’ll even successfully reproduce 5.1.2 surround sound. If you’re never heard a high-end Sony TV, especially an OLED, take a listen next time you’re in a store—they sound better than many soundbars.
Sony Sony’s X95J LED will also get the benefit of XR processing. Sony already boasted arguably the best LED/LCD processing on the market.
Beyond improved image processing and audio, Google TV will make its way to Sony’s XR series, and as you may have noticed, the monikers are losing a digit. What was once a model 950 will be a model 95, and so on. Sony skipped a letter and will go directly from H to J. We’re not sure why, though it’s likely a visual thing. “I” can be confused with 1 in some fonts.
The new XR LED models range from the 8K Z9J to the X90J (called the X92J at 100-inches) at the low-end. The new OLEDs are the A80J and A90J. As usual, higher numbers are used for higher-end models.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@daniell01751005/sony-tvs-boast-faster-smarter-processing-and-improved-audio-but-there-are-no-major-technology-5ac654fc6899 | [] | 2021-01-16 08:17:52.937000+00:00 | ['Cutting', 'Mobile Accessories', 'Chargers', 'Entertainment'] |
Thanks For Squeezing Me In | Prompts = Juxtapose, Breakthrough, Backlog
‘Hello? Dr. Carbuncle? Sorry to call but you said I should if I needed to.
‘Yes, I understand you can only give me a few minutes, that you have a backlog of cases in your waiting room. I was just hoping I could tell you about my dream. Maybe it’ll lead to a breakthrough.
‘Right, right, I need to juxtapose the dream with my day-to-day reality. Ok, so… this could take some time. I guess the first thing I was wearing an orange tutu while fishing for buffalo wings…
‘No, that wasn’t the strangest bit.
‘Hello? Doctor? Hello?’
Links to other sites where I publish:
Instagram = https://www.instagram.com/one_hundred_words_by_parz
Facebook = https://www.facebook.com/Parzival-Sattva-427507144484255
Blogger = https://onehundredwordsbyparz.blogspot.com
Medium = https://medium.com/100-word-or-less-stories
YouTube = https://www.youtube.com/user/parzivalsattva
And a link to where my Lovely Lady Love (who also operates the camera) posts her art: https://www.youtube.com/user/recyclinggoddess
Join in on the fun of making a story from the same prompts I do! https://www.facebook.com/groups/565109053911712 | https://medium.com/100-word-or-less-stories/thanks-for-squeezing-me-in-2152a6cc171 | ['Parzival Sattva'] | 2020-12-23 08:42:15.170000+00:00 | ['Flash Fiction', 'Microfiction', 'Psychology', 'Dreams', '100wordstory'] |
Our Radical Debt Diet for 2021 | We were financial casualties of 2020. I lost my job in March, so we’ve been living on unemployment and credit every since. Our debt has grown wildly. It’s a monster at this point. Last night, my husband and I sat down together and looked our debt monster straight in its ugly, dollar-hungry face. Including student loans, we’re about $110,000 in the hole.
We know better. We both had financial problems followed by recoveries before we even met. We know how to fix this. It would have been less painful if we’d started sooner.
First, we need to stop feeding the monster. We have to stop spending money we don’t have. We shouldn’t have done that in the first place, but it is too late to take it back. Now the monster is growing under its own power through interest. We could still make it worse if we tried, but we’re not going to do that.
Next, we need to shrink the monster by paying down. This is where things start to get a little painful. I don’t mean finding a new job, although that is on the pain scale somewhere between a paper cut and falling out a window. We’ve made the decision to sell off some of our more valuable possessions. That’s not easy; I, for one, like my expensive toys. I’ve been sad about it all day, but it is the fastest way to take a bite out of our debt.
But we can’t just go throwing money around in the wind. We are going to pay stuff off from highest interest to lowest. I know some people stand by paying off the smallest debt first and working up from there, but this is the approach that makes my number-crunching husband the happiest.
The final step sounds much easier than it is. We have to dedicate the next year, or to be realistic, the next few years, to not spending a lot of money on things we don’t need. That should be easy, right? Think about all the things you enjoy that you don’t need to survive. Yeah. That’s a lot to give up. We have made some room in our current 2021 budget for occasional restaurant meals and outside entertainment, but it is a tiny fraction of what we’ve spent in better times.
I’m almost 50, so somehow I magically need to save something for retirement while paying on my debt. That is, however, a necessary expense. I will continue getting older no matter how stupid we’ve been this year. I wish it weren’t so. (I feel like I should mention that I graduated from college at age 45; my student debt is not something I’ve been carrying for 30 years.)
Needless to say, I need to find substantial employment as soon as possible. I have been looking for a decent work-from-home job to limit my COVID-19 exposure because I have a few conditions that could make infection deadly. I hope that the vaccine widens my search in 2021, but we aren’t there yet. In the meantime, I am hustling everywhere I can. Rise and grind, as they say.
I am optimistic about 2021, even though the immediate future looks grim. We will find our way. We always do eventually.
How has 2020 treated your pocketbook? What are your financial plans for 2021? Hire me? (That last one was a joke. Mostly.) | https://medium.com/@experimentalferret/our-radical-debt-diet-for-2021-85bc2f94e8e8 | ['Mia Desanzo'] | 2020-12-20 22:00:24.399000+00:00 | ['Debt', '2021 Budget', '2021', 'New Year Resolution', 'Money'] |
Love in the time of lockdown — no apparent boom for breeding songbirds | Blue Tit © Edmund Fellowes
Data collected by the volunteer bird ringers operating Constant Effort Scheme (CES) Sites for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) provide insights into the numbers, breeding success and survival rates of 24 widespread resident and migrant songbirds.
So, how did these species fare in 2020? It has been suggested that birds may have benefited from the reduction in human activity across most of the British and Irish countryside in the spring and summer. While some birds that are particularly prone to disturbance, such as coastal waders and terns, prospered at some sites, the evidence generated by CES ringers suggests that it was actually a poor breeding season for many of our smaller birds.
The spring was one of the warmest on record but, perhaps counter-intuitively, this was not necessarily good news for all bird species, as Lee Barber, the BTO’s Demographic Surveys Officer, explains. “In warm springs, caterpillars tend to hatch earlier and develop faster; birds also lay their eggs earlier, but not to the same extent, and so the availability of food peaks before the period when their young need it most, with fewer fledging as a result. The results from our ringers show that the average number of juvenile Blue and Great Tits caught per adult was lower in 2020 than in any other year since the survey began almost 40 years ago.”
Ringers were not the only group of BTO volunteers to record a dearth of tit species in the UK during 2020, according to Garden Birdwatch (GBW) Development Officer Rob Jaques. “Participants in the BTO’s Garden BirdWatch survey reported Blue and Great Tits from fewer gardens than average during the summer. Data from CES ringers suggest adult numbers were higher than average in 2020, so the drop in GBW observations mostly likely reflects the poor breeding season.”
On a more positive note, some of our summer visitors fared well in 2020, with the numbers of some returning migrant birds being well above average. Lee notes that “The abundance of Chiffchaff and Blackcap, two short-distance migrants that winter in southern Europe and North Africa, was the highest since monitoring began in 1983, and numbers of the declining Willow Warbler were also above average.”
For many, volunteers, results such as this provided a real boost, explains Dave Leech, the Head of the Ringing Scheme. “It was a tough year for everyone across the country. Ringing was impossible in many areas due to restrictions imposed in response to the Covid outbreak, but the spring lockdown in England ended soon after the start of the CES period in May and about half of all sites were able to provide data this year. Our ringers invest a huge amount in monitoring our birds and this opportunity to engage with the natural world in such a positive way really helped them to process the challenges of 2020.”
The full report can be read here | https://medium.com/@phil-pickin/love-in-the-time-of-lockdown-no-apparent-boom-for-breeding-songbirds-96fbdd137faa | ['Phil Pickin'] | 2020-12-18 11:03:11.371000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Wildife', 'Ornithology', 'Birds', 'Wildlife Conservation'] |
‘Mimosas and Jazz’: What’s Next for the Depolicing Movement in Austin? | Chas Moore
A world without police would be one “filled with mimosas and jazz and dancing,” Chas Moore, leader of Austin’s foremost depolicing organization, told a rally November 4.
Moore’s Austin Justice Coalition, or AJC, is basking in recent successes and strong ties with power players in local politics, including the mayor, council members, and state lawmakers.
Years of lobbying forged these relationships, but AJC took on new prominence since June, when the group organized a huge rally demanding that the city defund the police.
Austin City Council responded in August when it voted to cut police funding by about a third, partly through eliminating vacant officer positions and partly by transferring certain police functions to other departments — a plan that hasn’t yet been fully realized.
AJC’s demands dovetailed nicely with Progressive council members’ desire to find more funds for an expanding array of social services programs, nonprofit contracts, and emergency benefits, which otherwise would come under financial pressure due to the economic downturn.
Attendees at AJC’s post-election rally
Police spending makes up a big chunk of the city budget, so reducing the police budget allowed the council to shift funds into emergency mental health services, housing, and abortion access.
AJC’s latest rally took place in Woolridge Square, the day after the election, before it was fully clear who the next president would be. It coincided with a downtown march organized by Indivisible Action, Stand Up America, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
The gathering, Chas Moore said, “gives me hope that we can actually reach this thing we’re trying to reach, which is a new world, with no parties — let’s just vote for the right people — no capitalism, no cops, free healthcare. If you’re hungry, everybody gets food. I really think we can do that.” The crowd applauded.
About 100 to 150 people attended the rally, spread out across the lawn, many carrying signs. A few were clad in the black outfits typical of the Antifa protest movement. One young man wore a Trump mask with a Pinocchio-length nose, and another carried a rubber pig head on a stick.
Moore continued, “And that makes me crazy but that makes you crazy because you’re clapping. But the only way we do that is by not stopping. I believe in a world where Texas is gonna be blue and we were this close.”
‘Utopia of What This Country Can Look Like’
“I believe that if we keep going we can get to that place.” Moore then cited recent remarks by a fellow activist, who had laid out a utopian vision for the future: “Nikia Winfield (a social work advocate), a couple Wednesdays ago, talked about this utopia of what this country can look like. And she said it was filled with like mimosas, and samosas, and jazz, and just people dancing. And I think we can get there.”
Chas Moore and other leaders in the depolicing movement hold a bleak view of law enforcement, arguing that not only do they do little good, but they actually pose a threat to the wellbeing and security of Black communities.
AJC gathering, Woolridge Square, Nov. 4, 2020. © Honest Austin
They cast police not only as individually racist but also as minions of evil ideologies and systems of power: White Supremacy, Capitalism, Homophobia, Misogyny — all of which Moore referenced in his speech. Banishing these forces from American society would usher in a new era of prosperity and security for all.
Standing in the way of that are politicians and power systems that defend the old order, according to the activists. Moore lamented that some 69 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. The president reportedly outperformed among Hispanic and Black men, and Moore said this was “because we still are ascribing to the ideals of White Supremacy.”
“The fact that the blue wave did not really hit the shores of Texas means that a lot of the things that we want to do in Texas are still going to be very difficult to do, which means that in two years we have to come out here and do this thing again.”
City Council Allies
In the short term, AJC is looking to help its council allies who are facing runoff elections. While all members of the council voted for the police budget cuts in August, some more than others have embraced the more sweeping rhetoric of the depolicing movement, including Public Safety Committee Chairman Jimmy Flannigan, and Council Member Greg Casar.
‘No one is free when others are oppressed,’ says a sign carried by one of these women.
Moore said that he had spoken with Casar the day before. Casar easily swept to victory in a three-way race, winning 67% of the votes in his eastside district. But Flannigan, in Austin’s northernmost district, failed to win a majority and is headed to a runoff.
“Here in Austin we have Jimmy Flannigan who’s been really good. He’s losing potentially to somebody who was in that picture with the Proud Boys,” Moore said, referring to Flannigan’s opponent Mackenzie Kelly, who was recently photographed at a Back the Blue Rally where some ‘Proud Boys’ flashed white power signs. (Kelly told CBS Austin that the Proud Boys “do not represent my values or beliefs nor would I associate with them”).
“So we have to make sure that we’re getting out in Jimmy Flannigan’s district,” Moore said. “Alison Alter is another person who’s been really good and she’s voted for police reform and the defunding. She’s also going to a runoff. We kept our colleague Greg Casar on by a lot — that deserves a round of applause. But the fact remains we have so much work to do.”
State Policy Priorities
Beyond local politics, Austin Justice Coalition and allied organizations are preparing for the upcoming legislative session which starts in January. Some state lawmakers, including Republicans, have said that the session would include a focus on criminal justice reforms.
AJC’s policy lead Warren Burkley said, “As y’all know we are the lead on defunding APD… we’ve got great momentum right now. We want to keep that same energy going into the state policy into lege coming up.”
He said they would back the proposed George Floyd Act, by Rep. Senfronia Thompson, which would ban chokeholds during arrests and require law enforcement officers to intervene or render aid if another officer is using excessive force while on the job.
AJC also will back a bill that would ensure “nobody should get cuffed for a taillight out,” Burkley said. He referred to this bill as the Sandra Bland Act, though in fact a bill by that name already became law in 2017.
That law mandated that county jails divert people with mental health and substance abuse issues toward treatment and required independent investigations of jail deaths.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in 2019 sought to pass an add-on to that bill, limiting the power of officers to jail citizens for very minor offenses, like a missing taillight. The bill failed when the Democratic Caucus divided over certain provisions and missed a deadline for passing it over to the Senate before the legislative session ended.
Burkley said that activists would also fight for changes to police licensing rules, and oversight: “We’re always trying to increase police accountability because right now there is none.”
Activists will find at least one open door at the Texas Senate, where newly installed state senator Sarah Eckhardt is sympathetic to the protesters’ cause, though she noted that she doesn’t necessarily agree with all of what they are calling for.
She attended the November 4 rally and spoke very briefly. “In the interest of full disclosure I am a former prosecutor,” she began, also referring to herself as “the man,” and “a politician.”
“I need you, and we need each other, and that’s why I’m here. And I think thats why y’all are here. We may not always agree but a sign of a functioning and healthy democracy is when conflict is creative and not disruptive, when we can find new paths through listening to one another and arguing with one another — arguing well. So that’s why I’m here tonight and I’m very, very grateful to be invited up to the mic. Thanks. be safe going home.”
Coalitions Within the Left
AJC’s organizing efforts involve forging ties with an array of grassroots and national groups. Other speakers at the event included Yasmine Smith, director of development for Austin Area Urban League, which focuses on economic issues affecting African Americans, and a speaker who identified himself only as “King,” founder of Star Power Black Kollective.
Graffiti on E. 6th Street memorializing Michael Ramos. © Honest Austin
In his speech, Moore referred to ties with the Marxist protest group Mike Ramos Brigade, among others: “I think we’ve been doing some strides, like over the past year. If I may, AJC and the Mike Ramos Brigade have put aside our petty differences and been willing to work together on the things we can agree on.”
(At an AJC rally at Huston Tillotson-University in June, Mike Ramos’ mother gave a speech disavowing any association with the Mike Ramos Brigade. The group is named after a man who died in a police shooting in April 2020).
Moore said that AJC also enjoys good relations with local socialist organizers: “DSA (Democratic Socialist of America) and AJC have always had a good relationship. I think it’s only going to get better. We’re more willing to work with anybody on the side of right because we’re all we have until we can get to a place where we have — this whole country should be blue, if you think about the ideals of what America is.”
“I would offer up the idea that we’re just getting started,” Moore said. “No matter if Biden wins, tomorrow the police institutions around the world are still going to exist. There are people still in prison, there are people that want to roll back our homelessness laws, people are still going to be gentrified, Black women are still going to die at the highest rate when giving birth just because they don’t get the proper healthcare they need, people with disabilities are not going to get the rights and the justice they deserve.” | https://medium.com/@honestaustin/mimosas-and-jazz-what-s-next-for-the-depolicing-movement-in-austin-f634c3806b2d | ['Honest Austin'] | 2020-11-08 22:51:12.237000+00:00 | ['Defundthepolice', 'Depolicing', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Criminal Justice Reform', 'Police Reform'] |
Building API Automation Testing Framework, The Page Object Modeling Way | A Very Short History Lesson
The QA role in a scrum team has changed considerably over the last decade.
In the beginning, we were mostly using several testing tools and did everything manually — testing a product, or an enhancement, and signing it off. Then, some fancy automation tools entered the Testing sphere, including QTP, Selenium, and MS CodedUI. At that moment, we felt like champions, — superheroes even.
However, with every new step we made, product managers’ expectations were rising. Today, we’re dealing with complex web applications where we often need to work with third-party integration APIs.
Why do we need 3rd party integration APIs?
Let’s say you are working on a food delivery web app. Naturally, you will have some sort of Food Chart there (where your order will be stored) and an Order Button. When that button is clicked, and the order goes to the restaurant, you are “stuck” because the logged user has nothing to do with it anymore. In order to complete E2E test, you need to pretend to be “the restaurant” (third party vendor) and confirm the order, cook it and send it to the user.
How we do it? There are two ways:
Manual QA way : Select order, click on the Order Button, use API tool to send an API request (such as Postman or SoapUI) and complete the Order.
: Select order, click on the Order Button, use API tool to send an API request (such as Postman or SoapUI) and complete the Order. Automation QA way: Use an automation testing tool (such as Selenium WebDriver) to select the Order and click on the Order button, API package to send the API requests, and then complete the order with an automation testing tool.
RestSharp + C# = ❤
Demo Time
For the demo purpose, let’s use an exposed sample jokeAPI — the RESTful API that serves uniformly, and well-formatted jokes.
We will send and validate simple HTTP GET info in order to receive JSON object and validate the request-response code.
API documentation
Request sent via SoapUI and Postman:
SoapUI API request and its response
Postman API request and response
Build the framework from scratch
Open Visual Studio and create a new Unit Test Project.
Create a new Visual Studio Unit Test Project
Install all necessary NuGet packages:
NuGet packages installed to the project
The most important thing over here is the RestSharp NuGet.
RestSharp is a C# based library that is used to test RESTful Web Services. This library behaves like a headless Client to access REST web services. We can create highly customizable HTTP Requests to send to the Restful server. This enables us to test a wide variety of Request combinations and in turn test different combinations of core business logic.
Build the project structure as shown in the picture below:
Project structure
Assembly: Similar to POM page assembly class — responsible for creating page instances and getting instances respectively
Helpers: Folder for helper and wrapper classes
Models: Similar to POM page models class — we are going to put API resources there
Tests: Folder for test classes
Within the Models folder, create a folder structure to match service endpoint (see the screenshot below).
Try to make folder structure similar to API URL
InfoResource.cs
using Newtonsoft.Json;
using NUnit.Framework;
using RestSharp;
using System;
using System.Net; namespace API
{
public class InfoResource
{
private static RestClient RestClient { get; set; }
private static IRestResponse Reponse { get; set; }
private static RestRequest RestRequest { get; set; } private void InitialiseEndpoint()
{
RestClient = new RestClient();
RestRequest = new RestRequest("jokeapi/v2/info/", Method.GET);
}
{
var endpointUri = new Uri("
RestClient.BaseUrl = endpointUri;
} private void AddEndpoint()var endpointUri = new Uri(" https://sv443.net/ ");RestClient.BaseUrl = endpointUri; private void SendGetInfoRequest()
{
Reponse = RestClient.Execute(RestRequest);
Console.WriteLine(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(Reponse.Content, Formatting.Indented));
} private void ValidateResponse()
{
Assert.AreEqual(HttpStatusCode.OK, Reponse.StatusCode);
} public void SendRequestAndValidateResponse()
{
InitialiseEndpoint();
AddEndpoint();
SendGetInfoRequest();
ValidateResponse();
}
}
}
The SendRequestAndValidateResponse method is the test method responsible for creating, sending and validating the response.
Resources Assembly
For the resources assembly, we are going to use the Page Factory POM concept. This is an important step since the framework needs to be created in a way that smoothly works with the Selenium Web Driver testing framework. By doing that, we will simply pass a resource the same way we do for pages.
Create a new class within Resources.cs within the Assembly folder with class definition as follows:
using System; namespace API
{
public class Resources
{
public static T GetResource<T>() where T : class
{
var page = (T)Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(T));
return page;
} public InfoResource InfoResource => GetResource<InfoResource>();
}
}
Resources (Page) assembly class
Note: If you are adding the API module in your Selenium Web Driver framework, you will partially skip this step because you already have Pages.cs class, so you can just add a new getter method for the new resource. On the other hand, you can rename it to PagesAndResources.cs.
TestBase and Test classes
TestBase and Test classes are not going to be impacted at all. On my end, with no Selenium Web Driver tests, those are looking as follows:
Test and TestBase classes structure
//TestBase.cs
using API;
using NUnit.Framework; namespace Test
{
[TestFixture]
public abstract class TestBase
{
protected Resources resources; [SetUp]
public void StartUpTest()
{
resources = new Resources();
} [TearDown]
public void EndTest()
{
// kill webdriver instaces
}
}
} //Test.cs
using NUnit.Framework; namespace Test
{
[TestFixture]
public class DummyTest : TestBase
{
[Test]
public void Test()
{
resources.InfoResource.SendRequestAndValidateResponse();
}
}
}
Run the test and observe the results!
We did it! Our assertion passed!
We expected 200 OK response and got it.
Assert.AreEqual(HttpStatusCode.OK, Reponse.StatusCode);
You can now continue using the framework independently or include it in the existing Selenium Web Driver testing framework.
Till the next time — Happy testing! | https://medium.com/maestral-solutions/building-api-automation-testing-framework-the-page-object-modelling-way-afd35e21b6f6 | ['Enes Kuhn'] | 2020-04-03 12:21:31.167000+00:00 | ['Maestral Solutions', 'Api Testing', 'Api Test Automation', 'Visual Studio', 'Automation Testing'] |
A long Covid, or Over the Wall — Thursday 2nd July 2020 | I was clearly in the mood to write a year ago. I’ve just done something I don’t usually do and read forward in the diary and I’d written a lot in a short space of time. I think I was excited and frightened at the changes ahead — the end of the first lockdown.
I think I’ve been excited and frightened a lot of the time since then.
But, like then, it feels as if there is a big change ahead. I was talking to Anna about it recently, about how it feels like we’re heading into a new phase of the pandemic. The various lockdowns until now seem like a first phase, and what’s ahead feels like the ‘living with the virus’ phase. Here in the UK anyway.
I haven’t described that too well. But I’m more excited than I am frightened of what’s ahead.
It’s just gone 8 pm here and I’m on the couch with a podcast playing on my phone. My weekly shopping arrives in the next hour and once it has I’ll settle down to finish a book I’ve been reading recently called Before the Coffee Gets Cold. It’s about a cafe in Tokyo where you can time travel but have to return to the present by drinking a cup of coffee before it gets cold. It’s lovely.
And so let me transport you back to a year ago and the things on my mind then.
Remember to drink the coffee before it gets cold.
The view from the hill on the Rezzy. You can see Welsh hills and two football stadiums from up there.
Thursday 2nd July 2020
10 minutes to nine at night and Liverpool, the champions of England, are currently 2–0 down against Manchester City, the former champions of England. I came back downstairs from a chat with Anna, who has finished work early for the weekend, having missed the first goal. I should probably have stayed upstairs.
I’m sat in my second favourite chair in the house, the swivelly rocking one my Auntie dropped off a couple of weeks back, and Max, face lit up by iPad, and Amy, face looking on at the TV in dismay, are sat on the couch. Outside, the Ice Cream Van is making his nightly stop outside our house. I’ve lived in this house for over three years and I’m surprised nobody has told the driver of the Ice Cream Van to fuck off and not play his loud music at 9 pm every night. I wouldn’t do that, of course.
Over the weekend I ordered 24 cans of a special Jurgen Klopp edition Erdinger beer. Each can has Klopp’s face on it and as they were released to celebrate Liverpool being the champions of England, I couldn’t resist buying them — 6 cans each for me, David, my Dad and David's best friend, Jackson. I’ve opened one of my six and am about halfway through it. A good beer. A championship-winning beer.
Manchester City have just scored their third goal of the half and I’m wondering if the Liverpool players might have sampled one or two of these in the past week. Who could blame them?
+
It’s half-time now, and I’ve just had another swig of my beer. Three more swigs like that and I may be on the way to the fridge for another. It’s Thursday evening, almost the weekend, the champions of England are playing and Anna has finished work for the weekend, and so two beers tonight feels justified. Especially ones in a red can with Jurgen Klopp’s face on.
I booked off a long weekend for myself at the end of July today during which I’m planning on having a day out with my Mum and Max, playing on my Playstation for the first time in a few months, and getting my head around the idea that I’ll probably be moving house in August.
+
The second-half is almost upon us and so it’s time to watch the champions play for 45-minutes.
Up the reds.
This is part of a series of diary entries I wrote from April 2020 to April 2021. I’m posting them a year out from when I first wrote them. You can read the other ones I’ve posted here | https://medium.com/a-long-covid-or-over-the-wall/a-long-covid-or-over-the-wall-thursday-2nd-july-2020-66af56ee0512 | ['Who Is Andrew Beattie'] | 2021-07-02 09:01:12.374000+00:00 | ['Diary', 'Journaling', 'Coronavirus Diaries', 'Covid Diaries', 'Covid Journal'] |
20 growth hacking strategies to growth hack your e-commerce startup | In this digital era, the concept of business is quite changed. An e-commerce website is ruling all over the world. It is a great platform where you can increase the ranking of your business. Customers are really showing positive response towards these e-commerce websites. The entrepreneurs are putting 100 percent efforts for expanding their business. It is a great way to start your own business or to join e-commerce websites. This is also beneficial if you do not have to spend much money for a business startup. There are numerous strategies that can help you with business online. E-commerce business is not an easy task. The constant tracking and persistence make it excellent among competitors.
E-commerce websites:
To expand the e-commerce business, an individual has to go through various strategies. There are numerous steps that have to synchronize while starting a business. There are multiple ways to incline up your business online, such as selling proprietary products, building an affiliate site and many more. Every type of e-commerce business model has some pros and cons. On starting an e-commerce business, the initial market Research phase is one of the most important steps.
20 growth hacking strategies to growth hack your e-commerce startup and e-commerce growth:
1. Try to implement unique ideas:
Creativity and uniqueness are the two main factors which distinguish you from others. So, try to solve various questions which might occur in customer mind. Like
• Why visit your store?
• What are your specialties?
• Is it beneficial or not?
• Why choose you instead of others?
For example:
The products having unique quality as well as quantity are mostly liked by customers. You will surely attract towards the store which offers a maximum discount.
2. Instead of behaving like seller think like a buyer:
This is an appropriate way which can solve your all questions like “why”, “when”, “where” etc. Try to offer them a service which they actually need. Start thinking like buyers and this will help you to build a good reputation in the market.
For example:
You can also fast and free deliveries of product to your customer.
3. Impressive content:
Nowadays people generally focus on expressive and impressive business ideas. Thus we can say instead of quantity-quality is main demand of customers. So, it is important to add rich content by making it informative. You can add visual representation and feedback from other customers. Add sufficient amount of description with limited testimonials. Just keep these things in mind while making your content impressive:
• Keywords
• Memes
• Slideshows
• Videos
• Newsletter
For example:
Impressive content plays a vital role in the development of a business. So, try to make it unique by using simple language instead of complicated.
4. Designing of e-commerce website:
As we all know e-commerce websites are all about online sites. Thus, designing of online website is a complete reflection of the product. Therefore try to implement a theme with limited color images. Make your icons visible on a front page. This is main backbone of a website which can lead your e-commerce site towards success or failure.
For example:
Designing of a site should be eye catchy. So, for this, you can add animated videos or discount offer plans.
5. Target the website visitors:
Customer satisfaction is a major criterion when talking about e-commerce websites. An individual has to implement a maximum number of strategies to target the audience over and over again. This process continues until the customers are willing to buy your product. An individual can accomplish this e-commerce growth strategy by using marketing tools. You can also take help of social media for promotion activities. Along with new customers, you have to also concentrate the old people also. Therefore to re-engage the people you have to implement some innovative ideas.
For example:
People like to view the website first instead of placing an order for any product. So website content with contact number can influence them.
6. Marketing Automation:
After going through the content or designing part there are numerous activities which an entrepreneur has to perform. One of them is marketing efforts.
E-commerce marketing helps in attracting customers. This procedure is applied to upscale the cross-selling, and generate recurring sales. To engage a large number of customers, companies have to target audience by marketing jobs, such as sending newsletters and other promotional activities.
For example:
For this marketing, strategy companies can target audience by promotional activities such as by distributing pamphlets or advertising about a product.
7. E-mail marketing:
This strategy can be implemented to engage customers or to get in touch. Try to make it precise and attractive so that the customer can visit again. For this you have to implement certain steps that are given below:
• Optimize order of emails
• Optimize 404-page errors
Email marketing is ruling for more than 40 years. This strategy is time-consuming through which an individual can reach to specific audiences. This concept of email is helpful to communicate with an audience, and also makes traffic more efficiently.
For example:
Try to optimize the errors which cause disturbance such as 404-page error.
8. Ensure brand consistency:
To retrieve your customers back, an individual has to take care of consistency of brand. It further ensures the marketing materials as well as customer services. You will need to make your product available in any of your channels.
For example:
A company has a logo which is displayed on the items of that brand. Therefore, after some time a logo become so popular that it defines the brand consistency in a market.
9. SEO strategy:
This strategy is used to increase the ranking in Google search. SEM is another term which increases the visibility by paid advertisements. PPC i.e. pay per click is SEO strategy according to which your website will appear on top while clicking on product requirement.
The e-commerce economy is growing rapidly. Continuously numbers of businesses are taking place. This means that SEO will be more important than ever before connecting with a skilled SEO.
For example:
Google ranking is necessary to maximize the profit.
10. Take help of social media channels:
Social media is one of the most cost-effective methods for e-commerce startup. Social media is the main pillar of e-commerce strategies. The advertising message on social media channels is also responsible to provoke customers. You can choose the channels like
• Facebook
• Youtube
• Instagram
For example:
Social media is the best platform for advertising. Through Facebook or youtube channels you can target the audience.
11. Exclusive offers or discount:
This is the best way towards which a large number of people gets attracted. These offers can be in the form of discounts, lucky draws or coupons. It builds the curiosity among customers to try it once. And of course, it will increase the visitors on your e-commerce websites.
For example:
Discount and giveaways are the major things which are necessary to attract an audience.
12. Share your experience of a startup:
By adding blogs or about us section in e-commerce website you can share your total experience with customers. Therefore it builds the stronger bond between customer and entrepreneur. Stories of your startup can also motivate others.
For example:
By creating a blog on official site you can share an experience of startup.
13. Establish strong relationship with influencers:
Find the influencers and try to build a strong relationship with them. They will push your business in the right direction through their experienced decision making. You can easily publish the testimonials in high profile magazines.
For example:
Influence the people by promoting a brand on a large scale.
14. Increase customer service programs:
In e-commerce marketing customer is king. So, firstly understand who your real customer is. After that, try best possible ideas to satisfy your customer by understanding their needs. Try to offer them delivery services as soon as possible.
For example:
Fast and free services are essential to satisfy a customer.
15. Read human psychology:
Analyze the customer psychology because it can really impact on the financial condition of a company. This will give you a short idea about a perception of the customer. Focus on the quality as well as a quantity of product. This can further impact on your sales.
For example:
We know that 10 always greater than 8 so try to reach 100 percent satisfaction instead of near about perceptions. Try to convince your customers that they have to pay less and will earn more.
16. Mobile commerce:
A mobile-friendly platform is always necessary for e-commerce businesses. If someone has not supported platform then get ready to face negative revenues. But after making it mobile compatible, you can get the benefit of real-time notifications.
For example:
You can get the accessibility services by order tracking, click-to-call, and other product-related information.
17. A fine quality of images:
Eye-catchy images are required to create a center of attention among others. Therefore a good quality image of the product can engage customers. People will love to buy the product which looks outstanding.
For example:
Rather than focusing on quantity try to focus on quality.
18. Focus on customer feedback:
This will provide you knowledge of customer opinion. Therefore you can easily enhance the product if needed. Or otherwise, a positive feedback will boost your energy. Try to implement the correction needed in your e-commerce websites this can further increase your ranking and explore your ideas.
For example:
Notice the customer feedback by regular calling or rating mechanism.
19. Promotion and advertisement:
This you can do by making a short video of your product. Hence you can also explain the working and benefits of your product through social media advertisement. Promoting a brand by offering gifts is in trend. Thus it increases the reputation of business in the market.
For example:
Distribution of pamphlets, advertising on social media channels or newsletters can influence people.
20. Create a buzz:
Stop thinking about profit at the time of startup of business just tries to create a buzz. In an initial stage, try to make it cheap or free for customer use. Target your audience by giveaways or other methods.
For example:
Explore your business by increasing traffic. This can be done by festive giveaways scheme also. After creating a business plan, the first step of e-commerce startup business is to choose a domain name. The domain shown is responsible for a mirror image of your business. So, it should be excellent and must have your registered business name in the primary. This is an important step because it is difficult to switch to a different domain name. | https://medium.com/@hupport/20-growth-hacking-strategies-to-growth-hack-your-e-commerce-startup-f5a3d86b6bfb | ['Hupport Appointment Scheduling Software'] | 2021-02-08 16:29:13.016000+00:00 | ['Growth Hacking Strategies', 'Startup', 'Business', 'Ecommerce Startup', 'Growth Hacking'] |
I Turn Eighteen Years-Old Tomorrow and I’m Terrified | I turn eighteen years-old tomorrow and I’m terrified.
Even though it’s not about legitimate things to be afraid of right now, I still feel it. I can’t escape that pound in my chest when I think about a few months from now. My safety net will fall and I’ll be forced to jump into a life I’m not ready for. Or at least think I’m not ready for.
It’s absurd think I’m running out of time while being so young. The world has told me that I should have accomplished certain things by now. You know, have lived a little, discover who I am. Maybe these are just from coming of age movies, but that doesn’t erase the shame I feel for not having done them.
I have no clue who I am and don’t see it coming to me any time soon. Therefore I have failed. It doesn’t help that without the societal pressure I still would feel that way. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve failed myself in the past four years. I lost my youth to anxiety, depression and isolation. I let them control every part of me; there wasn’t a second of any day I wasn’t reminded of my cowardice and nonexistent self-worth. Everything moved so fast around me but I was unable to grasp on to any of it. It was so damaging, but I thought there was no other way. What else is life like for the people who are left behind?
The world simply isn’t made for people like me. All it will do is torment me until I decide to give up. There were times I thought no one would care if I vanished. Other times I blamed how I was raised, the people around me, even the point in time I was born. But deep down I knew it all came back to me. I was the one who decided not to do anything about how I felt. Things weren’t right from as early as I can remember. That’s the way it has always been, and always will be. It took me sixteen years to tell one person what I was going through. Even longer for my parents to know.
I think I can now say things got better. Not great, but better. My past isn’t a stain I have to recon with, but an old friend I can turn to. Something to remind me of where I never want to be again. This fear I can’t escape doesn’t have to be negative. I guess it could represent a desire to carve a better life from here on out, because I know I deserve it.
I turn eighteen years-old tomorrow and it’s only the beginning. There is so much more left in me, even if I can’t see it. I’m finally starting to realize that my life isn’t doomed from here on out. At my ripe age of seventeen years and three hundred sixty five days, I now know that I’m worth it. | https://medium.com/@meli.white5/i-turn-eighteen-years-old-tomorrow-and-im-terrified-5b0195af0ac8 | ['Melissa White'] | 2020-05-02 19:03:47.972000+00:00 | ['Coming Of Age', 'Youth', 'Growing Up', 'Birthday'] |
How to Use Financial Anomaly Detection in Finance & Marketing | Finance is a massively important part of any business. However, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
That’s why 60% of small business owners believe they aren’t knowledgeable about finance or accounting. How about yourself?
Balance sheets, income statements, budgets, etc. — not the funniest things in the world.
Moreover, optimizing finances, spending, and expenses add to the mountain of financial tasks to do every day.
You’re already overseeing a team, managing tools, and struggling to find time for business development.
But, there’s a new solution that few companies are taking advantage of to solve all of these problems. It’s called financial anomaly detection. And, it’s a lot easier to implement than you might think.
Want to learn how? Continue reading.
What is financial anomaly detection in marketing?
Financial anomaly detection is artificial intelligence-powered software that identifies rare events. These include both worthwhile financial opportunities and potential risks.
Here’s how it works: a company adopts marketing security software like Morphio to begin. The AI analyzes the company’s financial data to determine what normal operations look like. These are placed within a standard deviation.
Any data sets found outside of the normal band is a financial anomaly. A.K.A a suspicious piece of marketing financial data that needs to be investigated.
Anomalies in finance are also placed within three levels: 1, 2, and 3. Think of one as a minor anomaly and three being major. Major anomalies are tackled first and then the lesser ones are addressed afterward.
It can seem complicated, but it isn’t. This technology is plug-and-play. You register, integrate tools and campaigns, and kick your feet up. You work as usual and the software will find optimizations and problems on the fly.
The data is also easy to understand with straight-forward information and simple dashboards.
Here’s an email alert you’d receive from Morphio, for instance:
Easy enough, right? Once you’re alerted revenue isn’t on track or you’re hitting KPIs out of the park, you investigate to find out why.
That brings me to my next point.
Financial anomaly detection uses cases
Now that you understand what anomaly detection in finance is, I’m going to run you through some of the best use cases.
Fraud and risk detection
Problems happen when you least expect them. Having peace of mind knowing you’re at a lower risk of financial fraud is priceless. It’s also one of the best uses of financial anomaly detection.
Financial fraud and risks come in many different forms, too. These include credit card fraud, unsafe transactions, and data breaches.
In fact, while identity theft has declined, fraud has continued to increase since 2015.
No need to sweat bullets, though. Financial anomaly detection takes the weight off your shoulders so you can get back to working on what matters.
For example, a large financial e-commerce company began working with a fraud prevention company to make its platform safer. In particular, they had money disappear, fraudulent orders on a regular basis and knew something had to change.
A machine learning algorithm was created to allow or disallow transactions based on standard behavior and historical datasets.
The results? Cost reduction in solving fraud-related issues, customer support, refund forms, and refund verification. Additionally, customer satisfaction increased since transactions were simpler, faster, and safer.
Maximizing marketing budgets
Marketing takes money. Everything from content marketing to SEO and PPC takes consistent cash to scale a business.
Have you ever wondered if you’re getting the most out of your budget, though? Don’t worry. It keeps most marketers up at night. 29% of businesses fail because they simply run out of money. That means you have to use your capital in the best way possible.
Financial anomaly detection solves this by analyzing marketing and advertising campaigns. It finds elements that are generating the greatest performance and those draining hard-earned money.
This puts you in the position to jump on good opportunities and cut out the bad apples. Ultimately that means you will save budget on campaigns that are doing little while reallocating that into higher ROI ventures.
In other words, the client saved money, improved the customer experience, and gets to work smarter thanks to an anomaly algorithm.
Lower your expenses and costs
What expenses does your business have? Employees, equipment, and tool are probably a few. It’s easy to focus on optimizing conversions and CPC but forget there are many other ways to save money.
There’s no need to spend hours doing it yourself, either. You have enough on your plate.
Anomaly detection software discovers events including overspending, low conversion rates, and lack of ROI. This data is used to make adjustments like reducing the budget for certain projects, re-doing tool stacks, and cutting out low performing campaigns.
The best part? It’s all done for you. Managing teams, tools, and your daily tasks are enough to make your head spin. Take most of these little nuisances out of the way and suddenly you’re free to scale with ease.
That’s not to mention you lower your cost, save budget, and can allocate that time and money elsewhere. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/how-to-use-financial-anomaly-detection-in-finance-marketing-bd715a82bb81 | ['Eric Vardon'] | 2020-02-13 05:40:12.192000+00:00 | ['Financial Analysis', 'Marketing Security', 'Roi', 'Digital Marketing', 'Anomaly Detection'] |
My TRICK For The Law Of Attraction Based On Tom & Jerry | My TRICK For The Law Of Attraction Based On Tom & Jerry
By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America — Tom & Jerry cosplayers, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77012406
Most of us are probably familiar with the cartoon that is Tom & Jerry. It involves a cat, Tom who is always trying to eat the mouse, Jerry. Jerry always gets away, otherwise, there wouldn’t be any cartoon.
But what if there was more to it than that? What if there is something we can learn from this vis a vis the Law of Attraction?
My favorite one of the two was always Tom. I disliked how Jerry always got everything so easily. As I matured (not that much), I learned something from my attitudes.
By Source, Fair use, Wikimedia
Tom’s Always TAKING
Tom the cat is always looking to take things away from the mouse. In several cartoons, he abuses the mouse for his own sexual interests (when there is a darling pussycat involved). The cartoons never start with Tom having a really great life and Jerry trying to take it all away.
Unfortunately, I was a Tom in life. I always thought other people had more than me and wished it would all be taken away so that we would be on equal ground.
If you’ve noticed in the cartoons, this usually backfires on Tom quite a lot. It backfired on me. People don’t like someone who tries to spoil the fun.
If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ‘Em
I relished the Tom & Jerry movies in which they would join forces to achieve a common, greater goal. For the first time, Tom would be rewarded and loved by the people in the cartoons.
Not that I thought of Tom & Jerry while doing this, but at some point, I began to encourage the success and the happiness of others around me. I didn’t notice it then, but my luck began to change as well.
People Say
“Well, how can I think positive?” Don’t think positive. Do positive. Encourage the success around you and you will find it will come knocking on your door next.
Lastly
Have fun. Ain’t no success guru or billionaire ever said they were miserable while doing things. Jerry’s usually the one minding his own business and enjoying his life when Tom tries to take it all away, or maybe he’s just hungry.
I don’t know. It’s just a cat and mouse cartoon.
But being more positive and encouraging of others’ success does lead to magnetism in the way of business and friends, in my own experience.
Best of luck with whatever you are working on now. | https://medium.com/illumination/my-trick-for-the-law-of-attraction-based-on-tom-jerry-1262b46c906c | ['Sabana Grande'] | 2020-12-09 03:12:07.266000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Self Improvement', 'Education', 'Cartoon', 'Law Of Attraction'] |
What Can We Expect From Conversational AI In 2021 | Yes we are going to see continued growth in conversational AI in 2021. It’s predicted that 1.4 billion people will use chatbots on a regular basis with $5 billion projected to be invested in chatbots by 2021. Voice assistant use will also grow. The use of voice assistants is expected to triple by 2023 (juniper research) and 50% of businesses will spend more on conversational than mobile in 2021.
Conversational commerce
For retail and e-commerce firms, conversational commerce, which is e-commerce transactions made by conversational methods such as texting and messaging, is generating waves. C-commerce not only allows brands to better serve their client base, but it’s opening up doors to new customers as well. A report made by Facebook states that 40% of global respondents said that c-commerce was their first introduction to online shopping.
97% of all respondents said that they plan to continue or increase their c-commerce spending in the future. Brands are likely to start considering how to leverage this trend and integrate messaging apps within their sales and marketing strategies.
Voice Commerce
According to Techopedia, Voice Commerce describes the utilization of voice recognition technology that enables consumers to purchase online merchandise or services.
Basically, it lets consumers buy products or services by simply using their voice. However Voice Commerce can also be part of a much wider customer journey, the transaction may not have to occur via voice. For example a consumer might have seen an ad for a product and asks Alexa about its price. The user then decides to buy it a few days later on the Amazon website. That’s why Voice Commerce involves much more than an isolated transaction process via voice.
Trending Bot Articles:
Voice is a big deal, the number of digital voice assistants in use worldwide is estimated to reach 8 billion by 2023.
Already smart speaker users:
research products
add items to their shopping list
track a package
make a purchase
provide ratings or reviews
contact support
reorder items
In 2021 there will be more Alexa in skill or Google Home action purchases as more retailers will leverage this medium; British supermarket chain Ocado has led this by example.
There will also be a continued rise in the enablement of product purchases:
Amazon has put a lot of time and effort into creating a seamless customer experience with its Echo devices.
Conversational AI taking the next steps
2021 will see a transformation for conversational AI chatbot capabilities with projects such as https://www.kuki.ai , Blenderbot , Meena and GPT-3. Open-domain chatbots will push the boundaries of what is possible. There will be an increase in AI chatbots that are personalised, processes more advanced problems and has a greater understanding of customer sentiment. In this way, your standard chatbots are likely to be replaced by conversational AI chatbots that are able to have a more human-like back and forth conversation.
These new technologies include very large language models: The Meena model has 2.6 billion parameters and is trained on 341 GB of text (1)so these models make huge computational demands. In 2021 as compute power continues to drop in price there will be a rise in availability of this open-domain chatbot technology.
Companion systems
As we live under the constraints inflicted by a global pandemic, we have been tackling an unexpected increase in alienation and loneliness in 2020. The demand to fulfil a companion role for AI assistants is something we expect to expand in 2021. With AI advancements this is becoming more realistic.
In 2020 chatbots took an informational role in many areas of the crisis; we covered a Covid support chatbot back in April. This looks set to continue in 2021.
Chatbots in immersive game experiences
Conversational AI technology looks set to be used in some really interesting ways in 2021. Particularly embedded in real-time games and integrated in multiple platforms.
Voice interaction will augment user interfaces.
We see a rise in the popularity of adding voice capabilities to software products. Specifically leveraging this sort of technology in touch screen situations. Software developers will improve their products by removing friction from the touch screen experience by bringing in voice controls. This sort of feature would be particularly useful for more complex search screens.
Conversational search
Voice search is now a rapidly growing form of access to information, but to be even more useful, it will need to become more conversational. Multiple conversational turns, follow-up on search responses, clarification and refining searches — are all aspects of natural conversation that Conversational AI is starting to replicate. These will be assisted by advancements in features such as Continued Conversation. At the same time voice search data and your own “voice” presence will become more important. Hey Google, who are “insert company name here”.
Chatbots as sales assistants
In 2020 we have seen a rise in chatbots taking on the role of sales assistants. Providing specific knowledge about products is where this type of technology can excel: Providing product recommendations based on provided parameters. We’ve been working on these types of projects ourselves and will have more to show in 2021!
Conversational IVR use will continue to grow
Speech recognition and natural language understanding for automated inbound and outbound request processing will rise. With companies offering advanced audio gateways and services. More and more legacy IVRs will be replaced with conversational IVRs: no more struggling with keypad input and overly complicated menu prompts. Advanced features such as automatic handover to live agents and multi voice options to give your Smart IVR a voice that matches your brand will improve the customer experience.
We will also see chatbot technology being utilised in different ways. Particularly in an Agent assist role, where chatbots will listen to call-center conversations and provide advice, information or even responses to operatives in real-time.
Conclusion
2021 looks set to be an exciting year. Advancements in technology and changes in customer patterns and the workplace in many industries will continue to drive the growth and use of conversational AI. Everyone at The Bot Forge is looking forward to some really exciting projects in the new year!
(1) https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html) | https://chatbotslife.com/what-can-we-expect-from-conversational-ai-in-2021-bdcc4a049fe2 | ['Adrian Thompson'] | 2021-01-28 14:34:34.385000+00:00 | ['Chatbots', 'Chatbot Development', 'Chatbot Design', 'Voice Assistant', 'AI'] |
Pluton — Liquidity Injection Programme | Dear Plutus Members
In 2015, Plutus was introduced to the Ethereum community. One year later, we hosted a crowd sale to issue our decentralised loyalty token, Pluton (PLU), and raised circa. $1M across nine days.
Plutus has conducted research and development; thoughtful coding; and developed established partnerships since its inception. Plutus now has thousands of members across the UK and Europe.
At the time, 20,000,000 PLU were created for our in-app Pluton Rewards programme, of which 850,000 (4.25%) was pre-sold via the 2016 public sale.
Our Pluton Rewards feature is now live and the 3% rewards users receive for using their Plutus Card is taken from the remaining 19.15m pool.
Whilst the initial crowd sale allowed us to develop a full finance application, it has not helped us ensure seamless PLU swaps on our peer-to-peer PlutusDEX, nor create token awareness on third party exchanges. We are now looking to list PLU across several exchanges and conduct some low-cap token sales to help in achieving these goals.
Exchange Listing(s) & Token Sale Partners
Having conducted due-diligence on numerous exchanges and token sale platforms, we have established long-term partnerships with five credible partners. We have opted for exchanges and platforms with reputable marketing teams and active user bases who may be open to joining start-ups such as ourselves.
We will conduct three micro-sales in October 2020. The success of these will enable a follow-up listing and token sale held several weeks later on a well-known Tier 1 exchange. This will be followed up with an additional Tier 1 listing before the end of the year.
The collaborations carry multiple deliverables by our partners, including joint marketing campaigns and co-branded cards. This will expose Plutus to a large audience and will help in attracting a new customer base.
Community Vote
With the aim of improving accessibility and awareness of PLU, Plutus is seeking to re-allocate two million tokens from the Rewards Pool to the Plutus Development Fund. The community will vote on whether they approve of the decision to relocate the PLU.
Current Tokenomics
There is just under 19.15m PLU locked in the Pluton Reward pool to be emitted to our customers. Every time a user spends with their Plutus Debit Card, they will receive up to 3% of the purchase back in PLU; the reward pool algorithm is designed to have a longevity of 100+ years. There is currently just over 850,000 PLU in circulation from the pre-sale. Since March, users have acquired 5,363 PLU from rewards which equates to $100,000+ at PLU’s recent highs, increasing the total circulating supply to ~855k.
We are looking to transfer 2m PLU from the 19.15m Reward Pool to the Plutus Development Fund approved by a community voting process. Once the re-allocation of 2m tokens has been completed, a portion of those tokens will come into circulation. Visit the Pluton Longevity Calculator for additional details on the longevity of our rewards programme, or our Yellow Paper for full details on the tokenomics.
Details of Upcoming Allocation
The token allocation will be divided into three parts.
15% (300k PLU) will be allocated to an initial sale.
35% (700k PLU) will be designated towards our PLU initiative and short-term development.
50% (1m PLU) will be locked away for two years in the Plutus Development Fund.
Initial Sale (300k PLU)
The 300k PLU will be sold across four external exchanges plus our own platform at a 40% bonus. PLU will be sold at a 30-day average price determined on the day of the listing.
For an unspecified amount of time, PLU can be sold on our PlutusDEX at whatever the listing price is on the day of sale, regardless of what it is trading at on external exchanges. This is a safety measure for new purchases in case market forces push the price down.
Note: Each of the above exchange listings will collaborate with market makers. Due to the nature of the contracts, the above listing partnerships can only be announced by the exchanges first.
Plutus Development Fund — Short Term (700k PLU)
Below is an outline of how the 700k PLU set aside for the Plutus Development Fund will be allocated.
Community Based Marketing (100k PLU)
This is allocated towards community-based marketing activities with the aim of increasing awareness of Plutus and PLU.
Further Development (300k PLU)
This is allocated to infrastructure improvements, as well as co-branded products/features with our exchange partners.
Governance & Legal Costs (50k PLU)
Funds derived from this will go towards operational and legal costs that are necessary within the financial sector.
Accessibility of PLU on External Exchanges (250k PLU)
This is designated towards further exchange partnerships throughout the year and market makers.
Plutus Development Fund — Long Term (1m PLU)
The remaining 1m PLU will be locked across two years for future development.
500,000 PLU will be unlocked on 30th September 2021.
500,000 PLU will be unlocked on 30th September 2022.
Note: We may move some coins back into the reward pool if the additional PLU is no longer required.
Plutus Roadmap
Here is a detailed explanation as to where any resulting funds will go towards.
Marketing
The contract agreements include obligations from all our partnered exchanges to exercise marketing campaigns on our behalf including digital advertising, email newsletters, community AMA’s, and a heap more. The raised funds will enable higher intensity campaigns by Plutus.
Longevity
The Pluton Liquidity Injection Programme will allow us to continue operations and help in scaling Plutus from a start-up into a business. This programme is essential to maintaining and elevating the Plutus app and card.
Product
There is still numerous features and updates that Plutus aims to develop, including the required infrastructure and services necessary to obtain a banking license.
Over the next year, we will be seeking to close additional partnerships with traditional investment and VC firms to achieve our long-term roadmap. This includes: | https://medium.com/plutus/pluton-liquidity-injection-programme-4b7670dae509 | [] | 2020-11-19 09:51:07.705000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Announcements', 'Fintech'] |
Music in 2007 to pick up where 2005 left off | After a bit of a down year for music that you may not have noticed because you were still so happy with the great crop from 2005. The year 2007 is set to be a great year for new stuff. In the first 4 months alone there will be new albums from the following artists.
Jan
Clinic (Visitations)
Of Montreal (Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?)
The Shins (Wincing The Night Away)
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (Some Loud Thunder)
Feb
Apples In Stereo (New Magnetic Wonder)
Bloc Party (A Weekend In The City)
Magic Numbers (Those The Brokes)
Mar
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists (Living With The Living)
Low (Drums And Guns)
Modest Mouse (We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank)
Arcade Fire (Neon Bible)
Apr
Bright Eyes (Cassadaga)
I have been listening to their single Dashboard on repeat on Modest Mouse’s site. More on the upcoming Modest Mouse album from Pitchfork
Brock doesn’t seem content to have just one star collaborator in new Modest Mouse member Johnny Marr. The Shins’ James Mercer guests on three We Were Dead tracks: “We’ve Got Everything”, “Florida”, and “Missed the Boat”. Other song titles include “Fire It Up”, “Steaming Genius”, “Parting of the Sensories”, and “Spitting Venom”.
Also the Arcade Fire is set to play some shows in New York (not all of them will be in churches either though it would be great to see them in a venue like this), if you are in the area get to the show, they are amazing live. Possibly the only band not named Radiohead that I would travel a half a day to hear. Though it appears that their reputation for live shows is really jacking up the value of their tickets. Also worth seeing in NYC: David Bowie and Daniel Johnston. [Brooklyn Vegan] | https://medium.com/alttext/music-in-2007-to-pick-up-where-2005-left-off-896292936bf5 | ['Ben Edwards'] | 2017-04-21 05:55:13.465000+00:00 | ['Clinic', 'Music', 'Low'] |
A Soul very familiar. | “Soul connections are not often found and are worth every bit of fight left in you to keep.” -Shannon Alder
Isn’t it rare, when you meet people you connect with? Little do you now, a total stranger can turn into your soul person in no time. The same happened with me. I met this person quite a long time back. Today, he’s the person i can confide in, whether a high or a low.
A Soul very familiar
Out of the blue appeared those gleamy impeccable eyes, curious , with a twinge seeking affection and passion,
With a tardy yet benevolent smile, he stole her soul.
Awestruck, she looked at him finding herself lost in those deep eyes waiting to consume her,
His touch like a fallen feather aroused her deepest desires, she knew she had fallen but bridled.
They gazed at each other, forlorn of hope,
Their nimble fingers entwined with each other invoked bodily pleasure.
She felt the love emanating from his passionate kiss, craving for more
Wanting the moment to never end, they hugged goodbyes waiting to meet next.
As she walked, she covet for him to turn back and kiss him. But he walked and hiatus prevailed.
Abha | https://medium.com/@abhasingh-9152/a-soul-very-familiar-2b686139486e | ['Abha Singh'] | 2020-12-10 16:27:57.889000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Writers On Medium', 'Nomad', 'Poem', 'Literature'] |
The Rule of Cool | And don’t even get me started on disintegrations. Credit: Lucasfilm
The Rule of Cool
We love mysterious characters. Why then do creators feel compelled to ruin the mystique
Admit it, Boba Fett was way cooler before.
Before we knew he was the original clone, brother to 200,000, with a million more on the way. Before we knew his surname came from his proto-father Jango Fett, the clone template himself. Before we’d seen him as snot-nosed kid laughing at his dad’s jokes.
Before. When he was a masked bad ass with a rocket pack and an assortment of nifty weaponry. A savvy hunter that saw through Han’s float-away-with-the-garbage gambit. A killer so remorseless Darth Vader singled him out amid a cadre of the galaxy’s deadliest to sternly warn that disintegrations were off the table.
Not even an unceremonious end in the Sarlaac’s belly could diminish him. He was so cool we denied his death, a sentiment bolstered by comics and novels.
Boba Fett is the Elvis of the Star Wars universe.
At least, he was, back when an air of mystery draped his shoulders as tangibly as the braid of wookiee hair and the bullet-riddled half-cape.
We see this same pattern time and again in pop culture: interesting side character is introduced as part of a larger story, side character captures the imagination, creator destroys the mystique by retroactively telling their story. AKA, the dreaded origin story.
This is not to be conflated with the superhero origin story, a necessary but often masturbatory part of the genre that precedes the really good stuff. Though I would argue that Wolverine is far more interesting prior to Wolverine: Origins than he is after.
Star Wars is king at this, shining a light into the dark corners of the franchise, giving everyone a name and background.
Is Han Solo a better character now that we’ve seen how he meets Chewie, wins the Millenium Falcon, or completes the Kessel Run? Or that the Solo name came via a bored Imperial recruiter? Emphatically no. Fortunately, Han emerges with his mojo intact because the movie largely avoids recasting Han in a different light from what we’ve seen previously.
The Prequel Trilogy is the ultimate origin story, a three-movie saga conceived solely to depict Anakin’s dark side osmosis, culminating in his conversion to Darth Vader. And, just as in Fett, Vader’s dark shadow is lessened for it. The Phantom Menace establishes Anakin as a figure of prophecy, reframing his decision to throw Palpatine down the shaft in Return of the Jedi as something preordained and less a father’s final act of mercy.
The Prequels change Vader from a murderous villain redeemed by the love of his son into a misunderstood man prone to emotional outbursts and horrible decisions who finally sees the light.
Something is irrevocably lost, each time a creator goes back. | https://medium.com/fan-fare/the-rule-of-cool-2b7f2ea82dd9 | ['Eric Pierce'] | 2019-05-19 11:43:50.265000+00:00 | ['Star Wars', 'Writing', 'Film', 'Books', 'Creativity'] |
A cruise through the telemedicine storm with Docplanner crew | Photo by Andreea Swank on Unsplash
Let me bring you into the story about a group of people that were creating an essential product. This group was led by the needs of their users — they knew what their competitors offer and they knew what the expectations of doctors and patients were. In addition to time pressure, there was also the big responsibility of not screwing up. Even if the group had some clue what they should do, it was like they were embarking on a journey in rough seas, with no stars visible in the sky.
I just described the product teams at Docplanner during the start of the pandemic. This whole situation put us, a healthcare startup, in a state of highest readiness. We felt that supporting both doctors & patients in those hard times is our duty, our responsibility. We knew that we had to act really fast. We’re more than used to working in a lean way: experiment, ship fast and check results for the next iteration, but always based on the backbone of proper research, discovery, and definition of goals. At Docplanner, we pay much attention to research– we never start with solutions. But… let’s go back in time and recreate the course of events.
There was a storm
First page from the newspaper. March 2020.
I remember as it was yesterday. Cloudy but quite warm day, it didn’t stand out unusually. We all knew what was going to happen — the situation in China had gone on for 2 months already. But regardless, no one expected it to impact our lives so suddenly and fast. All that was certain was that everything will change and that we have to keep our families and ourselves safe. No one predicted such a course of action.
“It’s hard to imagine what the situation will look like. But if it lasts longer (3–6 months), I’m going to suspend my private practice.” “My plans depend on the general regulations, for sure if the situation gets worse, I will limit private visits.” “I will observe the situation, but I’m rather careful, and I prefer to close the office.”
These quotes were just a drop in the bucket, though. It was clear that big changes were on the way in the medical field, regardless of how essential it is. That was the beginning — beginning of a journey we’ve taken as Docplanner in the past two months. As one of the biggest platforms facilitating patients’ contact with doctors, we had to do something. We felt responsible for supporting our customers in such a difficult situation. Doctors, in large part, had to diametrically change their way of work or completely close their offices for patients. On the other hand, patients’ needs haven’t changed. They still needed help or advice — the only thing that changed was the fear accompanying them.
First harbour — foundations, well-known as a calendar
Way before the pandemic began, we believed in the potential of online consultations. But, as you probably know — there’s always something more urgent to do or fix before you start developing new features. As I mentioned before, you need to do proper research, usability testing, rethink everything in terms of technology.
This pandemic never gave us time for it. So, the whole company turned the system in which we work on a daily basis on its head. There was no time to rethink anything. Only one thing mattered — we had to deliver the solution as fast as we could.
Firstly, we had to:
Give patients a possibility to book online consultations.
Give doctors a possibility to share their schedules for online consultations.
Therefore, we decided that our first step will be to create a calendar dedicated for online consultations. The journey to deliver this calendar wasn’t that long because our crew knew what to do — there were no huge changes. We just had to duplicate our existing solution and change the design, as to make it understandable for users. We also wanted to avoid changes that were too drastic.
Technology aside, there was one more obstacle. Since remote consultations weren’t legal in all of our markets, we were facing some difficulties in compliance with local law. However, our product experts in Brazil cooperated with the government, which after some time decided to legalize online consultations as a result of the outbreak. It was a great success for us that showed how much we can do and pictured the scale we might achieve.
After the first few days of this journey, finally, our developers led us safely to the first port, where we could say “we did it”. The first storm was defeated.
“I’d really prefer to stay at home now. I just needed advice, and with online consultation, I could get it without leaving my house.” “I’ve never used such a service but I’m positively surprised. The doctor helped me and sent me e-prescription, so I’m very satisfied with this online consultation”
Second harbour — payments
The first night was over.
In the morning, everyone knew what our next destination and goal were. Yesterday we succeeded, but it still felt incomplete. We felt like we had built a yacht without sails. It’s nice, but something must be driving it. This was the case of the calendar — our patients finally could book an online consultation but for doctors, collecting and monitoring payments was too time-consuming. Especially in this challenging time, we had to find a way to relieve them.
The solution seems obvious, right? You just have to integrate with some payment system. This is true, but the biggest challenge was to find a proper system that would cover all our markets. Something reliable, simple to use, and reasonably easy to connect with in terms of technology. During the day, two of our teams made sure that the course we took was correct, and during the night watch, they made sure that we wouldn’t encounter any surprises.
This course was definitely one of the most time-consuming journeys. It required many sacrifices and hard work. But, despite all these difficulties, we reached our destination: we implemented a third-party payments solution that allowed users to pay for their visits through a link on our website directly before their online consultation. We knew that it’s far from the end because there were many improvements ahead of us, but we could breathe a sigh of relief. This change really made doctors’ work easier, and patients could safely proceed with payments.
“Payments before the visit are very useful, especially when it comes to first-time patients.” “It’s very helpful and convenient, I don’t have to spend time to see if patients proceed with the payment.”
We just had to verify the real needs and habits of our users, so we could create adequate solutions later and offer them convenient payment options.
Third harbour — Docplanner Video Tool
I’m not sure if we’ve ever been closer to our users than we are right now. Each day we encountered their problems, methods of work, new approaches, fears, and plans. Even though the situation was super difficult, we had opportunities to get to know their deepest needs and issues they were struggling with. Thanks to that knowledge, we weren’t lost anymore. We were no longer on a journey without any light or compass. We knew exactly what direction we should take. We knew what we had to do.
“I was using Skype at first, but I had some difficulties with connection (bad quality), so now I’ve switched to Hangouts or Zoom.” “Sometimes my patients couldn’t find me on Skype via nickname, so I had to write a really long description.” “I guess that Whatsapp lately was overloaded and it was causing some difficulties with the connection.”
We knew that creating a tool which allows doctors and patients to communicate within our service is a must-have — at the beginning, a whole new team was formed just to manage this video project. That kind of feedback that we got above made us realize that we need to act fast, because a video tool is one of the fundamental pieces of online consultations. Does it sound like something impossible to achieve in just a few weeks? In Docplanner, everything that seemed impossible became possible. It’s all due to the engagement of people and sacrifices they did to deliver this functionality.
Of course, we started with an MVP — besides there was no time for advanced solutions, it’s the fastest way to validate if the product will meet users’ needs. Firstly the tool covered just basics: video and microphone. Our priority was to provide a safe, reliable, and convenient solution. Patients no longer had to find doctors on Skype or Whatsapp — they just received a link from the doctor a few minutes before the scheduled appointment. Next, we could think about improving our product — it all came with time. Our users exactly knew what they wanted, missed, or needed.
“I miss some kind of chat where I can write to the patient or they can write to me.” “Some place to take notes from the interview and the whole consultation would be useful.” “I really miss the possibility to share and attach files — it’s not convenient to switch to email during the consultation.”
As product researchers, we’ve heard a bunch of these kinds of suggestions: problems, missing functionalities. We were all new to this product, so doctors caught every opportunity to ask questions. So, actually, we as researchers were also playing the role of IT support or CS. That was really fun.
Besides in-depth interviews, we had a chance to observe the tool from another perspective — seeing how users are struggling in real life and how they use our tool. Then, we could share these insights with other teams. The cooperation was amazing — everyone was isolated, working from the different ends of the world but with one common goal: a goal that we achieved.
I can say that we already delivered most of these missing features and of course, it wouldn’t be possible without people who love their work and stand for what they do, what we do for the world.
“I am really happy that you’re developing video consultations. I’m a huge fan. Firstly, you were some kind of tool for registration, and now you’re becoming our offices.” “I wasn’t convinced to do online consultations, but actually I’ve changed my mind lately. New space, area appeared that until now was closed”.
It’s in these kinds of moments that I’m most proud of being a part of Docplanner. I do believe in our mission and these words only confirm to me the belief that our work matters. We’ve (almost) arrived at the last harbour in one piece.
Fourth harbour — a journey around the world
Is this the moment, when we can take a deep breath because we already delivered everything? Nothing could be more wrong. Our product made sense during the pandemic but we need to keep our eyes open for new needs, behaviors, and situations that might reveal further improvements. Thanks to that we will be able to adapt our product to solve users’ problems and continue this journey. We’ve gotten rich with new experiences and knowledge during these past two months. For sure it will be a bit easier now, but there’s a long way ahead of us. We can compare it to a journey to explore the world — because we don’t know where we’ll finish.
Whether the pandemic will be over soon or not — our video consultations will stay with us. We need to make doctors satisfied with a reliable tool. We need to make sure patients understand how it works. Since now we have some time to drop an anchor and think — that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’ll go back to the beginning, analyze everything, and keep improving our MVP.
And all of this in one crazy journey through the storm, that surprised us all. This journey with the Docplanner crew was just beautiful. It was a pleasure to be in the middle of a cyclone with such inspiring people.
“You can’t stop the wave, but you can learn to surf” — Jon Kabat-Zinn | https://medium.com/docplanner-tech/a-cruise-through-the-telemedicine-storm-with-docplanner-crew-605260387da1 | ['Katarzyna Adamczyk'] | 2020-07-01 08:15:07.279000+00:00 | ['Product Development', 'Covid 19', 'UX Research', 'Telemedicine', 'UX'] |
Designing an accessible find my rail zone service | Here at the West Midlands Combined Authority, we instil inclusive design principles into our everyday work. We ensure that our services are usable by everyone, anywhere and anytime.
Over the past year, we’ve been rebuilding the Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) website from the ground up. We redesigned pages and wrote new content to make the website easy to use and accessible. One of the biggest challenges was turning the existing train zone map page into an accessible service. We needed to overhaul the current map and create a service where any user can find their rail zones.
During the discovery phase, we found out that many users did not understand rail zones. However, users need to know which train zones they’ll travel between before they buy a train ticket. Imagine buying the wrong ticket and having to pay extra on your journey because the zone map was hard to use.
The old rail zone map
On the old TfWM website, if you were a train user you had to zoom in and pan across the interactive map to find your rail zones. This doesn’t sound very accessible, and it wasn’t. By restricting zone information to a map, we were blocking users with visual impairments. It also wasn’t intuitive to use, having to press the big purple buttons each time you wanted to zoom, move and refresh the map.
The old interactive rail map was the only way to view rail zones.
During the redesign of the website, we had the opportunity to turn this map into a functional service that is easy to use by everyone.
What users want
During the discovery phase of the ticket finder for our new website, we found that many users don’t understand a lot of the information around zones. Experience of zones tended to come from visiting London or other cities, or from regular rail passengers. Many participants weren’t aware that zones existed.
We discussed the terminology around zones with users. We discovered that users don’t understand what rail zones are or what rail zone ticket is best for their needs.
When someone completely new to ticketing searches for tickets, this can be confusing. Our ticket names include the zones in which the ticket is valid. Users must know the rail zones they want to travel between before they buy their ticket.
During the discovery phase, we identified four ‘must have’ user needs when building the new service. From the user stories, we clarified the goals of the new rail zone service. We would refer to these during design and development. They were:
To provide a clear, plain English description of what rail zones are in the West Midlands Network
As users didn’t understand rail zones, we needed to write new content so that it’s free from jargon and uses plain English.
To be able to tell users what rail zones two or more stations are in
We must provide an easier way for users to find what rail zones their chosen train stations are in without the map. This would make it quicker for users to find the zones they need by calculating it for them.
To provide a text alternative to the map for people who can’t use maps
Maps are visual by default and hide information for users with visual and motor impairments. We already performed research into accessible maps with our transport disruptions service. The solution was to present the information on the map as a list. A list in logical order so users with screens readers can get the information they need at the right time.
Designing the new service around these user goals will help users to understand the rail zones in the West Midlands network.
Designing the new service
First, we needed to see if we could reuse an existing train schematic map that was up to date. We were happy to use the existing train map schematic from West Midlands Trains. This map included the Metro tram line and bus interchange routes. This information was not necessary to complete the main task which is to find out which rail zones you need for your travel, so we removed it.
Throughout the design phase, we checked that the colours on the map met colour contrast requirements. We knew that individual train lines did not need to have their own colour as train lines and zones aren’t related. So, we used the same colour for all the train lines to simplify the map. This made it easier for us when choosing the zonal area colours.
For the concentric zone areas, they needed enough contrast to differentiate from each other. In the old map, each zone has its own colour. As these different colours didn’t add any value, we could use two alternating colours instead. These colours were light and dark beige. We tested these two colours as they had enough contrast next to each other and with the orange train lines on top.
The rail zone map with the full step-free access filter applied.
When users choose their train station from the autocomplete field on the left, the map highlights the train station name. This helps users to refer to the location of the train station on the map. The styling of the train station changes to a purple box to highlight this change.
Along with train station zone data, we also had data for train station facilities. This includes part and full step-free access, as well as parking. Selecting or deselecting these options in the key shows or hides matching train stations. This helps users with motor disabilities filter the train stations that they can and cannot use.
The map view is the default view, but users can switch to the list view at the top of the page. Stations already entered in the fields will carry over from either view. The user doesn’t have to re-enter their stations if they prefer one view over the other.
The list of stations in the West Midlands network grouped by zones in accordions.
For the accessible text alternative to the map, we categorised the list of stations by zone. We split the rail zones across accordions, rather than one long list. Screen readers will read the rail zone accordion names first. This is easier to navigate rather than list all stations together. Users also have the option to show or hide all the accordions through the open or close action buttons.
The ‘Find my bus area’ service can also be accessed when a user is buying a ticket. This is so users can refer to the map or list when they confirm the zones for their train ticket. We added a function where we recommend the best zone ticket for the user based on their stations. This will reduce cognitive load on the user as we provide the best zone ticket recommendation for them.
Our new ticket finder where we ask users which train stations they’ll travel between.
Remember, not all maps are accessible for users with visual and motor impairments. If you need to use a map to display information, then look for an alternative way of providing the same information in an accessible format. The format you use may depend on the information you are providing and your user base. Remember to test this format with your users to make sure it’s right and iterate if necessary.
If you don’t provide an accessible alternative to a map, this will damage the usability of your website. You’ll be restricting important information to users who cannot use maps. If users can’t find the information they need, then they’ll likely abandon your website.
The Find my rail zone map with two stations selected.
As this service is still in beta, we are monitoring the performance of this service through feedback. Take a look at the new service for yourself and let us know what you think by leaving us feedback.
You can also join our User Testing Group to give us feedback and participate in user testing. | https://medium.com/wmca-digital-and-data/designing-an-accessible-find-my-rail-zone-service-b70ac0a9b2a1 | ['Jacob Mincher'] | 2021-06-17 09:57:08.900000+00:00 | ['Transport', 'User Experience', 'Accessibility', 'User Research', 'Service Design'] |
Loops in Functional Languages | Adventures in Programming
In this article, we are going to look at how loops are used, first in an imperative language, like Python, then in a pure functional language, like Elm. While the particular languages used are not as important as the ideas, these are languages that I have used a lot, and which I like a lot, though for different purposes. The first few examples will be mathematical, but involve nothing more exotic that adding numbers. The very last example is about text processing.
The article is organized as follows:
Imperative Loops recalls how we do loops in an imperative language like Python, with a side note on the notion of infinity in the fourteenth century.
recalls how we do loops in an imperative language like Python, with a side note on the notion of infinity in the fourteenth century. A Primer on Functional Languages reviews some basic notions, that functions have types a -> b or a -> b -> c . Skip if you know this already
reviews some basic notions, that functions have types or . Skip if you know this already Reduce and fold presents a standard way of doing loops in functional languages. Can be skipped if you know about reduce and fold .
presents a standard way of doing loops in functional languages. Can be skipped if you know about and . Functional Loops is the fun part. We will talk about the type Step state a and all the goodness that flows from it.
1 Imperative Loops
Let’s go back to the days when we first learned to program, computing things like the sum 1 + 2 + 3 + … + 9. This is a task perfectly suited to the for loop , as in the Python example below.
>>> sum = 0
>>> for i in range(1,10):
... sum = sum + i
>>> sum
45
For loops are good when we know the number of times the loop body will be executed. However, that is not always the case. Consider the so-called harmonic sum,
h(n) = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/n
It was known to the mathematician|bishop Nicole Oresme (ca. 1323–1382) that this sum diverges, so that if you add all the terms, you get infinity. Since neither you nor a computer can do infinitely many additions, what this really means is the following. Choose a number L. Then there is always an n such that h(n) > L. We can write a program to find n given L:
>>> sum = 0
>>> n = 0
>>> L = 10
>>> while sum < L:
... n = n + 1
... sum = sum + 1.0/n
...
>>> n
12367
2 A Primer on Functional languages
Let’s do a quick review of some notions common in typed functional languages like Haskell and Elm. (Skip if you already know this.) Consider first this little fragment.
add : Int -> Int -> Int
add x y = x + y
It defines a function which adds two numbers:
> add 2 3
5
But what does the funny looking Int -> Int -> Int mean? Two points to explain this. First, every piece of data has a type. Thus 2 has type Int and “hello” has type String . Second, functions are data, so they must also have a type. Consider this snippet:
> String.length "hello"
5
The function String.length takes a String as input and produces an Int as output. Thefore it has type String -> Int . Upping our game, the function add takes two Int’s as input and produces an Int as output, so it has type Int -> Int -> Int . This notation suggests something. What is the meaning of the expression add 1 ? Well, it is a function of type Int -> Int , namely the function that adds 1 to its input. By applying add to the integer one, we obtain a function of type Int -> Int from a function of type Int -> Int -> Int . This sort of things, called “currying” by some and “partial application” by others, is quite useful, as we see next.
Mapping a Function over a List
Consider the task of incrementing all the integers in a list. We can do it this way:
> List.map (add 1) [1, 3, 5, 7]
[2,4,6,8]
We used List.map to apply the function add 1 to each element of the list [1, 3, 5 7] , obtaining the new list [2, 4, 6, 8] . Quiz time! Since List.map is a function, it must have a type. What is it? Well, it is something more exotic than we have seen so far:
(a -> b) -> List a -> List b
This means that List.map takes two arguments. The first argument is a function of type a -> b . This function (let’s call it f ) takes things of type a and returns things of type b . The second argument is a list of things of type a . Thus List.map applies f to every element a list of things of type a to produce a list of things of type b .
3 Reduce and Fold
One way to do loop computations in a language of pure functions is to use reduce or a fold. We will use List.foldl (“fold left”) in Elm. This is a function which takes three arguments:
a reducer, which is a function type a -> b -> b
an initial value of type b
a list of things of type a
The result is a thing of type b . As an example, we find the total number of characters in a list of strings. First, make the definition
> reducer str acc = acc + String.length str
Thus reducer "hello" 2 has the value 5 + 2 = 7. Now do this:
> List.foldl reducer 0 ["the", "little", "frog", "jumped", "high"]
23
The general form is List.foldl reducer accumulator inputList . List.foldl operates by repeatedly “eating” elements of inputList , using reduce to update accumulator each time. When the list is empty, it returns the accumulator. Done!
The sum 1 + 2 + … + n
Let’s redo some of the computations of the first section using pure functions. To add the numbers 1, 2, … 9, we do this:
> List.foldl (\i acc -> i + acc) 0 (List.range 1 9)
45
Here \i acc -> i + acc is the “anonymous” function which adds its arguments i and acc . Naturally enough, List.range is used to create lists of integers:
> List.range 1 9
[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Harmonic sums
Let’s compute the harmonic sum
h(n) = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/n
To this end, define a function that makes a list of integers [1, 2, ..., n] :
> seq n = List.range 1 n
<function> : Int -> List Int > seq 4
[1,2,3,4]
Then set
> h n = List.foldl (\i acc -> 1/(toFloat i) + acc) 0 (seq n)
<function> : Int -> Float
A brief test:
> h 1
1 : Float > h 2
1.5 : Float
Looks, good, so now we can do a real computation:
> h 1000
7.485470860550343
4 Functional Loops
The last example showed how we can compute the harmonic sum h n using List.foldl . But how do we do computations where the number of loop iterations is not known in advance? This is where a new type definition comes in:
type Step state a
= Loop state
| Done a
The state will be used to carry some, well, state through the computation, with the final value being of type a . Both state and a are type variables, which makes this a very general definition, applicable to many situations. A value of this type can be either Loop state or Done a . In the first case, Loop , there is more computation to be done using the value state . In the second case, Done , the computation is complete, and is a value of type a .
The loop function works with Step state a and a function
nextState : state -> Step state a
to drive the computation:
loop : state -> (state -> Step state a) -> a
loop s nextState =
case nextState s of
Loop s_ ->
loop s_ nextState
Done b ->
b
The function nextState : state -> Step state a computes the next state (or final value) from the current state. Let’s illustrate this with the problem of computing the sum 1 + 2 + … + n. Define a type alias ST to hold two values: a counter , which keeps track of how much computation remains to be done, and a value , in which the final result is built up, step by step:
type alias ST =
{ counter : Int, value : Int }
The next-state function is defined below:
f : ST -> Step ST Int
f st =
case st.counter of
0 ->
Done st.value _ ->
Loop { st | counter = st.counter - 1
, value = st.value + st.counter }
To see how it works, consider these two examples:
> f { counter = 0, value = 4}
Done 4
and
> f {counter = 2, value = 4}
Loop { counter = 1, value = 6 }
The effect of loop is much like that of List.fold . At each stage of the computation, the counter is added to the current value and then the counter is decreased by 1. This continues until the counter reaches 0, at which point value is returned. Note that the loop construct requires some care. What would happen if we said counter = st.counter + 1 ?
Harmonic sums again
The same construct applies with almost no change to compute harmonic sums. First, a slight redefinition
type alias ST2 =
{ counter : Int, value : Float }
Then a new next-state function:
f2 : ST2 -> Step ST2 Float
f2 st =
case st.counter of
0 ->
Done st.value _ ->
Loop { st | counter = st.counter - 1
, value = st.value + 1 / toFloat st.counter }
Finally, the computation:
> h n = loop { counter = n, value = 0} f2
<function> : Int -> Float > h 2
1.5 : Float > h 100
5.1873775176396215
Functional While Loops
At long last we give the functional version of the computation
>>> sum = 0
>>> n = 0
>>> L = 10
>>> while sum < L:
... n = n + 1
... sum = sum + 1.0/n
...
>>> n
12367
To begin, define a type alias ST3 which holds the necessary information: the limit value L, the current value of n, the current sum:
type alias ST3 =
{ limit : Float, n : Int, sum : Float }
Then define the next-state function that either terminates the computation or advances it:
f3 : ST3 -> Step ST3 Int
f3 st =
if st.value >= st.limit then
Done st.index else
Loop { st | index = st.index + 1
, value = st.value + 1 / toFloat (st.index + 1) }
Finally use loop to run the next-state function on some initial data:
> loop { limit = 10.0, n = 0, sum = 0} f3
12367
We can roll this work into the following definition:
numberOfTerms : Float -> Int
numberOfTerms l = loop { limit = l, n = 0, sum = 0} f3
Now comes the interesting question: is numberOfTerms really a function? That is, given a number l: Float , will int always return an Int ? The answer cannot be found by inspecting the code. Rather, one needs another piece of information, Oresme’s result that the harmonic series diverges. Given this, one can say that numberOfTerms l will return a result given a enough time. The catch, however, is that the time may be longer than the lifetime of the computer on which the program runs. This make the loop construct fundamentally different from fold and reduce , which are guaranteed to terminate.
Text Processing
We end with an optional, somewhat long example of text processing. Imagine an array of strings (“lines”) in which lines have no newline character and in which paragraphs are separated by empty strings. The goal is to find the paragraph boundaries corresponding to a line with given array index. To this end, set
type ParagraphBoundary
= BeginParagraph
| EndParagraph
The function we seek looks like this:
> boundary : ParagraphBoundary -> Int -> Array String -> Int
boundary boundary lineNumber lines = ...
Thus the function function call boundary BeginParagraph 5 lines will find the beginning of the paragraph containing the line with array index 5. For example, if
someLines = ["a", "b", "", "c", "d", "e", "f", "", "g", "h"]
the boundary BeginParagraph 5 someLines = 3 , while boundary EndParagraph 5 = 6 . We present the implementation of the boundary function below with little comment. They main point is that by using the loop construct, one achieves an efficient implementation that generally requires scanning only a small part of the array.
Implementation
Since we need to be able to search both forwards and backwards, we make this definition:
type Direction
= Forward
| Backward
The state is defined by
type alias ST4 =
{ lastIndex : Int, lines : Array String, currentLine : Int }
with boundary defined like this:
boundary : Boundary -> Position -> Array String -> Int
boundary boundary position lines =
let
initialState =
{ lastIndex = Array.length lines - 1
, lines = lines
, currentLine = position.line }
in
case boundary of
BeginParagraph ->
loop initialState (next Backward)
EndParagraph ->
loop initialState (next Forward)
Finally, here is the next-state function: | https://jxxcarlson.medium.com/loops-in-functional-languages-63cd104a192a | ['James Carlson'] | 2020-04-02 10:10:29.062000+00:00 | ['Functional Programming', 'Elm Lang', 'Elm'] |
Image Augmentation: Make it rain, make it snow. How to modify photos to train self-driving cars | Image Augmentation is a technique for taking an image and using it to generating new ones. It’s useful for doing things like training a self-driving car.
Think of a person driving a car on a sunny day. If it starts raining, they may initially find it difficult to drive in rain. But slowly they get accustomed to it.
An artificial neural network too finds it confusing to drive in a new environment unless it has seen it earlier. Their are various augmentation techniques like flipping, translating, adding noise, or changing color channel.
In this article, I’ll explore the weather part of this. I used the OpenCV library for processing images. I found it pretty easy after a while, and was able to introduce various weather scenarios into an image.
I’ve pushed a fully implemented Jupyter Notebook you can play with on GitHub.
Lets’ have a look.
I’ll first show you an original test image and will then augment it.
Sunny and Shady
After adding random sunny and shady effect, the image’s brightness changes. This is an easy and quick transformation to perform.
def add_brightness(image):
image_HLS = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_RGB2HLS) ## Conversion to HLS
image_HLS = np.array(image_HLS, dtype = np.float64)
random_brightness_coefficient = np.random.uniform()+0.5 ## generates value between 0.5 and 1.5
image_HLS[:,:,1] = image_HLS[:,:,1]*random_brightness_coefficient ## scale pixel values up or down for channel 1(Lightness)
image_HLS[:,:,1][image_HLS[:,:,1]>255] = 255 ##Sets all values above 255 to 255
image_HLS = np.array(image_HLS, dtype = np.uint8)
image_RGB = cv2.cvtColor(image_HLS,cv2.COLOR_HLS2RGB) ## Conversion to RGB
return image_RGB
The brightness of an image can be changed by changing the pixel values of “Lightness”- channel 1 of image in HLS color space. Converting the image back to RGB gives the same image with enhanced or suppressed lighting.
Sunny
Shady
Shadows
To a car, a shadow is nothing but the dark portions of an image, which can also be bright at times. So a self-driving car should always learn to drive with or without shadows. Randomly changing brightness on the hills or in the woods often boggle a car’s perception if not trained properly. This is even more prevalent on sunny days and differently tall buildings in a city, allowing beams of light to peep through.
Brightness is good for perception but uneven, sudden or too much brightness create perception issues. Let’s generate some fake shadows.
def generate_shadow_coordinates(imshape, no_of_shadows=1):
vertices_list=[]
for index in range(no_of_shadows):
vertex=[]
for dimensions in range(np.random.randint(3,15)): ## Dimensionality of the shadow polygon
vertex.append(( imshape[1]*np.random.uniform(),imshape[0]//3+imshape[0]*np.random.uniform()))
vertices = np.array([vertex], dtype=np.int32) ## single shadow vertices
vertices_list.append(vertices)
return vertices_list ## List of shadow vertices
def add_shadow(image,no_of_shadows=1):
image_HLS = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_RGB2HLS) ## Conversion to HLS
mask = np.zeros_like(image)
imshape = image.shape
vertices_list= generate_shadow_coordinates(imshape, no_of_shadows) #3 getting list of shadow vertices
for vertices in vertices_list:
cv2.fillPoly(mask, vertices, 255) ## adding all shadow polygons on empty mask, single 255 denotes only red channel
image_HLS[:,:,1][mask[:,:,0]==255] = image_HLS[:,:,1][mask[:,:,0]==255]*0.5 ## if red channel is hot, image's "Lightness" channel's brightness is lowered
image_RGB = cv2.cvtColor(image_HLS,cv2.COLOR_HLS2RGB) ## Conversion to RGB
return image_RGB
OpenCV’s fillPoly() function is really handy in this case. Let’s create some random vertices and impose the polygon on an empty mask using fillPoly() . Having done this, the only thing left to do is to check the mask for hot pixels and reduce the “Lightness” in the HLS image wherever these hot pixels are found.
Random shadow polygon on the road
Snow
Well this is something new. We often wonder how would our vehicle behave on snowy roads. One way to test that is to get pics of snow clad roads or do something on the images to get a similar effect. This effect is not a complete alternative to snowy roads, but it’s an approach worth trying.
def add_snow(image):
image_HLS = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_RGB2HLS) ## Conversion to HLS
image_HLS = np.array(image_HLS, dtype = np.float64)
brightness_coefficient = 2.5
snow_point=140 ## increase this for more snow
image_HLS[:,:,1][image_HLS[:,:,1]<snow_point] = image_HLS[:,:,1][image_HLS[:,:,1]<snow_point]*brightness_coefficient ## scale pixel values up for channel 1(Lightness)
image_HLS[:,:,1][image_HLS[:,:,1]>255] = 255 ##Sets all values above 255 to 255
image_HLS = np.array(image_HLS, dtype = np.uint8)
image_RGB = cv2.cvtColor(image_HLS,cv2.COLOR_HLS2RGB) ## Conversion to RGB
return image_RGB
Yup! That’s it. This code generally whitens the darkest parts of the image, which are mostly roads, trees, mountains and other landscape features, using the same HLS “Lightness” increase method used in the other approaches above. This technique doesn’t work well for dark images, but you can modify it to do so. Here’s what you get:
winter is here
You can tweak some parameters in the code for more or less snow than this. I have tested this on other images too, and this technique gives me chills.
Rain
Yes, you heard that right. Why not rain? When humans experience difficulty driving in rain, why should vehicles be spared from that? In fact, this is one of the situations for which I want my self-driving car to be trained the most. Slippery roads and blurred visions are risky, and cars should know how to handle them.
def generate_random_lines(imshape,slant,drop_length):
drops=[]
for i in range(1500): ## If You want heavy rain, try increasing this
if slant<0:
x= np.random.randint(slant,imshape[1])
else:
x= np.random.randint(0,imshape[1]-slant)
y= np.random.randint(0,imshape[0]-drop_length)
drops.append((x,y))
return drops
def add_rain(image):
imshape = image.shape
slant_extreme=10
slant= np.random.randint(-slant_extreme,slant_extreme)
drop_length=20
drop_width=2
drop_color=(200,200,200) ## a shade of gray
rain_drops= generate_random_lines(imshape,slant,drop_length)
for rain_drop in rain_drops:
cv2.line(image,(rain_drop[0],rain_drop[1]),(rain_drop[0]+slant,rain_drop[1]+drop_length),drop_color,drop_width)
image= cv2.blur(image,(7,7)) ## rainy view are blurry
brightness_coefficient = 0.7 ## rainy days are usually shady
image_HLS = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_RGB2HLS) ## Conversion to HLS
image_HLS[:,:,1] = image_HLS[:,:,1]*brightness_coefficient ## scale pixel values down for channel 1(Lightness)
image_RGB = cv2.cvtColor(image_HLS,cv2.COLOR_HLS2RGB) ## Conversion to RGB
return image_RGB
What I did here is that again I generated random points all over the image and then used the OpenCV’s line() function to generate small lines all over the image. I have also used a random slant in the rain drops to have a feel of actual rain. I have also reduced image’s brightness because rainy days are usually shady, and also blurry because of the rain. You can change the dimension of your blur filter and the number of rain drops for desired effect.
Here is the result:
Fake rain but not much blur
Fog
This is yet another scenario that hampers the vision of a self-driving car a lot. Blurry white fluff in the image makes it very difficult to see beyond a certain stretch and reduces the sharpness in the image.
Fog intensity is an important parameter to train a car for how much throttle it should give. For coding such a function, you can take random patches from all over the image, and increase the image’s lightness within those patches. With a simple blur, this gives a nice hazy effect.
def add_blur(image, x,y,hw):
image[y:y+hw, x:x+hw,1] = image[y:y+hw, x:x+hw,1]+1
image[:,:,1][image[:,:,1]>255] = 255 ##Sets all values above 255 to 255
image[y:y+hw, x:x+hw,1] = cv2.blur(image[y:y+hw, x:x+hw,1] ,(10,10))
return image def generate_random_blur_coordinates(imshape,hw):
blur_points=[]
midx= imshape[1]//2-hw-100
midy= imshape[0]//2-hw-100
index=1
while(midx>-100 or midy>-100): ## radially generating coordinates
for i in range(250*index):
x= np.random.randint(midx,imshape[1]-midx-hw)
y= np.random.randint(midy,imshape[0]-midy-hw)
blur_points.append((x,y))
midx-=250*imshape[1]//sum(imshape)
midy-=250*imshape[0]//sum(imshape)
index+=1
return blur_points
def add_fog(image):
image_HLS = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_RGB2HLS) ## Conversion to HLS
mask = np.zeros_like(image)
imshape = image.shape
hw=100
image_HLS[:,:,1]=image_HLS[:,:,1]*0.8
haze_list= generate_random_blur_coordinates(imshape,hw)
for haze_points in haze_list:
image_HLS[:,:,1][image_HLS[:,:,1]>255] = 255 ##Sets all values above 255 to 255
image_HLS= add_blur(image_HLS, haze_points[0],haze_points[1], hw) ## adding all shadow polygons on empty mask, single 255 denotes only red channel
image_RGB = cv2.cvtColor(image_HLS,cv2.COLOR_HLS2RGB) ## Conversion to RGB
return image_RGB
Coding this was the hardest of all the functions above. I have tried a radial approach to generate patches here. Since on a foggy day usually most of the fog is at the far end of the road and as we approach near, vision keeps clearing itself.
Foggy Highway
It’s a real difficult task for a machine to detect nearby cars and lanes in such a foggy condition, and is a good way to train and test the robustness of the driving model.
Torrential rain
I thought of making the rain part a little better by combining fog and rain. As there is always some haze during rains and it’s good to train the car for that also. There’s no new function is required for this. We can achieve the effect by sequentially calling both.
The car on the right is barely visible in this image, and this is a real world scenario. We can hardly make out anything on the road in heavy rain.
I hope this article will help you train the model in various weather conditions. For my complete code, you can visit my GitHub profile. And I’ve written a lot of other articles, which you can read on Medium and on my WordPress site.
Enjoy! | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/image-augmentation-make-it-rain-make-it-snow-how-to-modify-a-photo-with-machine-learning-163c0cb3843f | ['Ujjwal Saxena'] | 2018-04-12 18:23:03.697000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Image Processing', 'Self Driving Cars', 'Tech'] |
Advocating for Etsy Sellers in Upcoming EU Platform Regulation | Photo by Valeriia Miller from Pexels
These days, it feels like everyone is discussing the impact technology companies have on society and the need for new regulations better suited for the digital economy. We agree. We believe that marketplaces like ours have a responsibility to help protect consumers from goods, services, or content that violates regulatory policy, including unsafe products. Our sellers — and Etsy itself — will not succeed unless buyers believe that Etsy is a safe place to shop. That’s why we continue to invest in the people and technology that underpin our marketplace trust and integrity functions, and move quickly to identify and remove potentially harmful content.
Yet, for all the talk of platform regulation in Europe these days, you don’t hear much about how the upcoming proposals will specifically help the self-employed microbusinesses who sell goods on Etsy. That’s why we continue to work hard to educate lawmakers about the needs and concerns of our community.
In fact, we recently responded to the European Commission’s public consultations on the upcoming Digital Services Act (DSA) and the review of the General Product Safety Directive (GPSD), where we argue that any upcoming measure should avoid imposing overbearing compliance burdens on small and microbusinesses.
Etsy sellers need legal certainty and transparency. For example, the idea that all businesses must designate an economic operator established in the EU must recognize that microbusinesses do not have the resources to find, appoint, or pay a representative to manage their compliance obligations. For this reason, we urge policymakers to enable Etsy sellers to comply with EU legislation in a simplified manner, and provide educational resources tailored to their unique circumstances.
All in all, while it is increasingly clear that all parties in the online ecosystem must collaborate to ensure safety online, the upcoming legislation and corresponding obligations will only succeed if they are designed with small businesses in mind.
We’ll keep encouraging lawmakers to prioritize the needs and concerns of Etsy sellers, and to adopt meaningful legislation that makes it easier for our sellers to start and grow their creative businesses.
You can find more detailed information on our recent positioning on the upcoming DSA and the review of GPSD here and here respectively. | https://medium.com/etsy-impact/advocating-for-etsy-sellers-in-upcoming-eu-platform-regulation-449007226bdd | ['Laura Blanco'] | 2020-12-02 11:20:50.990000+00:00 | ['Microbusiness', 'Platform Regulation', 'Digital Services Act', 'European Union', 'Economic Impact'] |
The Impact of Immigration on the Scientific Community | blog:
The Trump administration’s restrictions on the immigration sector
During the past four years, several immigrant communities have been through difficult situations in the US. This is mainly because the current administration, led by President Donald Trump, does not entirely agree with programs offered by the local immigration system and has tried to increase requirements and restrictions, eradicate humanitarian programs, hinder legal processes and deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible.
The Trump administration has always wanted to offer immigration alternatives based on merit and remove humanitarian options, programs based on family ties, and reduce business immigration under the premise of protecting American workers.
For the benefit of the current administration, the global Coronavirus pandemic allowed the implementation of emergency measures that substantially restricted immigration. President Trump banned foreigners from entering the US during the health crisis, suspended the issuance of employment-based visas, Green Cards or legal permanent residence, and applications for international protection through humanitarian programs such as political asylum.
Speaking specifically about business immigration, dozens of local companies, universities, financial institutions and experts criticized the Trump administration’s decision to suspend work visas amid a global crisis. Nowadays, after more than 11 months since the first case of Coronavirus was reported in the US, multiple organizations still release studies and research that reveal the importance of business immigration to overcome the economic crisis brought by the global pandemic.
Do you need help with a Business Immigration Case? Our team can help you.
Scientific community comments on the importance of immigration
The Biophysical Society, an organization focused on developing biophysical knowledge, recently commented on the Trump administration’s restrictions on business and student immigration during the global Coronavirus pandemic.
This organization states that the current administration of the US focused mainly on suspending the issuance of H-1B visas, which are used by local companies to hire highly qualified foreign workers in specialized fields such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The Trump administration stated that this restriction would encourage local companies to hire American workers and reduce the local unemployment rate.
However, according to figures presented by the Biophysical Society, more than 2.5 million jobs related to STEM fields were not filled by American citizens nor foreign workers during the health emergency, delaying the US’ scientific development and, therefore, its international competitiveness.
In fact, the Biophysical Society states that “Curbing immigration will not lead to a clean exchange of trained, qualified American workers (…) The needs of national security must be balanced with the need to maintain international scientific and technological cooperation and collaboration. If not corrected, current visa regulations will hinder the effectiveness of the United States research enterprise.”
Apart from business immigration, the scientific organization assures that restrictive policies of the Trump administration must be removed, especially those that affect:
The issuance of Green Cards.
Other than H-1B visas, any employment-based visa.
The issuance of study-based visas.
Time allowed for international students in the US.
Visit our Blog section and keep up to date with the latest immigration news.
Motion Law — the guide you need for your immigration case
If you have any questions about an immigration issue or relating to a case you may have currently in progress, then please don’t hesitate to contact us for a FREE Phone Consultation with one of our expert immigration attorneys.
Simply call Motion Law today at: (202) 918–1899.
DISCLAIMER: Motion Law Immigration Social Media & YouTube Channel is made available by the law firm publisher for educational purposes only as well as to provide you with commentary on general information reported from numerous online sources. Whilst we may offer a general understanding or interpretation of the law, we not to provide specific legal advice. By using Motion Law Immigration YouTube channel you understand that there is no attorney-client relationship between you and the YouTube channel site publisher. Motion Law Immigration YouTube channel should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your state. | https://medium.com/@media-27365/the-impact-of-immigration-on-the-scientific-community-c117089d80f0 | ['Motion Law Immigration'] | 2020-12-22 20:57:18.593000+00:00 | ['Immigration Consultants', 'Immigrants', 'Immigration In Usa', 'Immigration Reform', 'Immigration'] |
Why do we have to find the dream job that we love | People tell us that we become what we were meant to be. For some people, it is hard to choose a career path, a profession, or an area of study, while others know what they want and see themselves in a certain profession or life path since their childhood. Even as a child, I was certain about one thing that no matter what profession I select, I should be happy and content.
After getting my degree in Public Relations and Communications, my dream was to work for a corporate giant, like many of my classmates. Not knowing the reality of the corporate world, I joined the rat race and later regretted it. In my past experience at a corporate job, I always felt like I was always looking at the clock waiting for it to strike 5.30. Having quit my first job, I got almost every piece of advice there is about switching jobs during the formative years of my career:
“If you’ve worked at an agency for less than one year, try not mentioning it on your resume.
“Stay at the same organization for at least two years. Don’t shift industries or you won’t be able to grow.”
I realized that understanding what you want from a job allows you to be more honest with yourself and towards your employers. At my last gig, which was in a start-up, I made a significant change to my mind-set. I was thriving at work because of the relaxed work environment. I believe this comes down to the work culture that a start-up has to offer — the job was everything I’d wished for. I was free from the prison of a dull, unfulfilling corporate life and dived into a fast-paced startup, working in a niche that I loved, not having to be at the office at any given time, the flexibility to work when and where I wanted.
I learned this while working on this job that my peers weren’t very open to trying new things. At that time, I simply thought, “As long as I kept bringing new ideas to the table, at some point, they’ll be keen to try something different.”
I rapidly gathered that change wasn’t a part of the organization’s culture. But I also realized something significant: I understood the kind of work environment I needed in order to thrive.
When you are unapologetically yourself, when you stand up for who you are, what you want to create in this world, who you want to surround yourself with, the universe opens up in a mysterious way. I believe everything that is meant for you will find you, and everything that is not — won’t. It is up to us to be the channel for our uniqueness, it is up to us to embrace ourselves and that is how that version of ourselves shows up in the world. When we shine boldly in our light, in our element, we motivate and empower others to follow suit. I believe being a part of Mavericks has undoubtedly given me space and freedom to be exactly who I am. | https://medium.com/the-mavericks/why-do-we-have-to-find-the-dream-job-that-we-love-da258a9df5c5 | ['Nikita Singh'] | 2019-09-13 07:53:14.365000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Work Life Balance'] |
A pop quiz on Cindy Sherman | As a student I missed a test question about one of my favorite artists, and it led me on a weird journey.
Untitled (Self-Portrait with Sun Tan), 2003, by Cindy Sherman
When I was a student at Portland State University, I took a course in the history of photography. It was a class that perfectly linked my twin loves, film and art history. It was also the sort of class with weekly multiple choice quizzes. One week, after exploring the work of Cindy Sherman — hero, icon, genius! — I came across a perplexing multiple-choice question about her. The question asked us to classify Sherman’s photographs as one of the following: portraits, self-portraits, stereotypes, or constructions. I stared at this question for a very, very long time.
Cindy Sherman famously uses herself as the subject of all of her photographs, so “self-portraits” at first seemed obvious. I almost checked that box, but then I hesitated, because Sherman’s intention is not actually to play herself in her photos but to disappear into another character. So perhaps they were portraits, of people real and imagined, with Sherman’s own likeness (mediated by celluloid), as the medium. After all, many certainly conform to the Western norms of portraiture, with subjects frequently depicted from the waist up, posing and acknowledging the camera. Yes. “Portraits” was the answer. But wait: didn’t they also play equally with stereotypes? The wealthy countess, the mall rat, the dewy starlet. Sherman embodied all of these caricatures and more. “Stereotypes” had to be right. As for “constructions,” well, that was clearly a throwaway; lazy quiz filler to fool those who hadn’t done the reading. Every artwork is a construction, is it not? “Constructions!” Please.
Untitled #92, 1981, by Cindy Sherman
I kept staring at the question, and it stared back.
Untitled #92, 1981, by Cindy Sherman
Portraits.
Self-portraits.
Stereotypes.
Constructions.
(It’s weird to be quizzed on a living artist; someone who is still making work. What if I happened to know Cindy Sherman and I just straight-up asked her? Would she even know the answer? Probably not, I decided.)
Untitled, 2004, by Cindy Sherman
I got the multiple choice question wrong. I emailed the professor, saying the question was totally ridiculous. Sherman’s work cannot be classified as only one of the four options, I wrote, as they are all equally at play in her art.
The professor had this to say: “While I do agree with you that all of these issues are important in Sherman’s work, the best possible answer is ‘constructions’ since some of her works are not portraits, the argument can be made that they are both self-portraits and not self-portraits, and only some of her works deal with stereotypes (for example, the later history works are recreations, not stereotypes).”
There was really no point in arguing with the professor. (At university the student is always wrong. It is the opposite of being a customer.) Instead I became more and more intrigued with Sherman.
When asked to take a photograph in the style of an artist from the course, I took a photo in the style of Cindy Sherman: caked in makeup, with lipstick on my teeth, a fake fur coat draped over a summer dress for some reason. I wore fake lashes, colored the inside of my nostrils black, and put my eyebrows a few centimeters higher than where they were meant to go. I gathered all the lamps in my house for that “studio lighting” look. It was simultaneously a portrait and a self-portrait; a stereotype, and — yes — a construction.
Construction #1 (after Cindy Sherman), by Anna Weltner, 2017
Construction #2 (after Cindy Sherman), by Anna Weltner, 2017
Construction #3 (after Cindy Sherman), by Anna Weltner, 2017
Construction #4 (after Cindy Sherman), by Anna Weltner, 2017
I thought recreating Sherman’s process would help me understand her work more, and it did, but not necessarily in the all the ways I expected.
I am a very fair-skinned person, and recreating a tanned look like one of Sherman’s “Hollywood/Hampton types” was difficult. No matter how much bronzer I put on, I still appeared washed out under the makeshift studio lights. My friend (and makeup artist) Isabela kept looking at the pictures and going, “Ugh, you still look normal!” and applying more extreme shades. It is almost impossible for me to appear tan.
Happy with the shoot, I was editing my “constructions” in Lightroom and thinking how I still looked sort of pale when I had a really awful idea of something to Google.
Untitled, 1976, by Cindy Sherman
I was horrified at the discovery that one of my most cherished artists had impersonated Black people in her early photographs, but also at the way I’d sort of intuited this fact simply by imitating Sherman’s process. It had occurred to me that Sherman’s portraits, self-portraits, stereotypes and/or constructions bordered on mockery of their subjects. “But where does an artist draw the line?” I’d planned to ask in my thought-provoking final paper for the semester, which I had already decided would be on Cindy Sherman. Anyway, I had found the line. And recently, I found that paper too (see below).
I am still highly influenced by Sherman, in an almost subconscious way. I’m a filmmaker now, and in my current project, Goitre, I use myself as the model to explore the representation of women in art history, through the lens of one specific malady.
Venus at a Mirror, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1614–1615
Goitre (film still), by Anna Weltner, 2020
While setting up each shoot I didn’t even think the name “Cindy Sherman” once, though I see now her influence is undeniable. I have, for obvious reasons, omitted the cherub and the African maidservant from my Rubens, however. Some aspects of art history just aren’t worth repeating.
Anyway, here’s that paper.
The Stereotype and Cindy Sherman
When American artist Cindy Sherman made her series “Untitled Film Stills,” a collection of 69 untitled photographs shot between 1977 and 1980, she (perhaps accidentally) struck a cultural nerve. The black-and-white photographs, each starring the artist herself in various guises, showed invented scenes from non-existent movies. The result was a kind of uncanny valley of visual reference: The images were enigmatic and mysterious, yet they quoted so well from the language of cinema that they struck the viewer with a faint yet persistent feeling of recognition (“Hang on a minute, I know I’ve seen that movie!). In truth, the images were constructed entirely from Sherman’s imagination — yet they were influenced so thoroughly by the cinematic mode as to fit neatly in the brain beside lingering memory-images of B movies, Hitchcockian mysteries, and French New Wave films.
Untitled Film Still #58, by Cindy Sherman
Sherman herself says she didn’t anticipate the now-obvious interpretation of the series as a critical examination of the way women are portrayed and typecast on film (the ingénue, the femme fatale, the matron, the secretary, and so on). But the “Film Stills,” and the greater portion of her work that followed, would continue to critique the gaze of cinema and of image-makers in general — so often male, wealthy, and white — throughout history. For the most part, Sherman’s work is a rebuttal to the traditional ways of visualizing women on screen or on canvas. But her work is not always blameless, either. There can be trouble when you try to look like someone else — someone poorer than you, for example, or much older, or not as sophisticated as you are.
In fact, Sherman’s occasional missteps in this area show us just how difficult it is for an artist to invent and embody a character without resorting to offensive stereotype.
It’s perhaps to avoid further typecasting that Sherman has not titled individual pieces or bodies of work for several decades, though writers and museum curators have often informally dubbed groups of work: “The Horizontals,” “The Clowns, “The Fairy Tales.”
Speaking of a series of “Hollywood/Hampton types,” she showed in Los Angeles, (a body of work featuring tastelessly wealthy, garishly dressed, buck-toothed, often absurdly fake-tanned women, spot-lit and photographed against flat colored backgrounds) the artist recalls that “…I’ve been kind of criticized because people thought I was making too much fun of the characters I was portraying … they thought I was just making fun of these Hollywood types. As if, you know, here she comes from the East Coast and who does she think she is, or something. I kind of like those characters too; it’s not like I didn’t like them and I’m going to make fun of these women.”
Untitled #408, by Cindy Sherman, 2002
This example highlights the inherent difficulties of artistic representation. For one thing, where is the line between having fun and making fun? Secondly, it’s much easier to identify a potentially harmful stereotype in an artist’s work than it is to pin down their intent in crafting it. (Perhaps these women look absurd and ridiculous because society’s standards of beauty are on them are absurd and ridiculous, etc.) And lastly, it shows how written and visual languages are not always compatible. All Sherman did was wordlessly portray a character; I’m the one who put the labels “tasteless” and “garish” on her, cruelly pointing out her buck teeth or orange skin. If we are to take as sincere Sherman’s assertion that she “kind of like[s]” these characters, then suddenly my words seem much more offensive than her images.
Of course, Sherman is smarter than this. She is a master at reading, crafting, and subverting subtle visual cues. Whatever she may say, Sherman’s complicated relationship to a character is certainly much deeper than kind of liking or kind of disliking.
The artist, who came to prominence in the 1980s, belongs to a loose group of artists (among them Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger, and Louise Lawler) designated “The Pictures Generation” for their emergence at a time when mass media and advertising were infiltrating American culture at an unprecedented rate. Her work is a direct response to the nonverbal messages about women we’re asked to accept every day.
Blake Gopnik wrote of Sherman in The New York Times last year, “taken one by one, the ‘Film Stills’ confirm the reading that has made them famous: that a woman’s identity is formed, and limited, by the images she’s seen of other women. That is, a woman learned how to be a secretary from movies as much as from business school. Not many images could teach her about being a C.E.O.”
But Sherman’s work goes beyond simply identifying gender roles. Her pieces are notable for the fine, superficial details that stick out of them — what Barthes would call the punctum. These are the little things women may be unaware of when they dress and style themselves but which other people notice right away. In one, a too-narrow halter top results in a touch of side-boob; in another, the wire of a bra creates a comically unnatural profile. Often, her characters fail to dress their age, go far too heavy on the rouge, draw lipstick far outside of their natural lip-lines. Yet often we sympathize with them, aware of how media-perpetuated beauty standards are always at odds with the realities of individual bodies, the demands of hard work, or simply the slow progression of time. Crucially, Sherman lets us see the superficiality of her constructions. We quickly identify the caked-on makeup, the prosthetic noses and breasts, and the eyebrows covered in white powder to allow new ones to be drawn in. We know the characters are imaginary. At the same time, Sherman’s convincing expressions, paired with little touches of individualism (a funky necklace or unique hairstyle), may remind the viewer of someone they know — bringing back fond memories, perhaps, of a favorite piano teacher, a grandmother, or a therapist. Sherman’s ability to change her face and shape-shift into countless new identities for the camera allows a measure of escapism from the obligations of being one person in particular.
But assuming another’s likeness without due consideration also brings fresh hazards. A 2016 retrospective of the artist’s work at Los Angeles’ Broad Museum included an early “Bus Rider” series which epitomizes such problems. Impersonating everyday people one sees on public transportation, Sherman appears several times in blackface. In the accompanying text placed beside the images, the artist explained that “when I made this body of work, my intention was to be inclusive, and the bus riders I was basing my work on were both black and white … I was 22, naïve, and unaware of the potential offense in these characters.”
Here, though, offensiveness is not a matter of subjectivity, as it is in the case of the Hollywood/Hampton types and other series. Blackface, given its painful history, is an objectively bad idea, and these early photographs are Sherman’s least successful and most ill-conceived works. Photographed in black and white, the makeup appears an unrealistic charcoal-black, echoing the color white actors would historically apply to their skin to mock black people. Sherman has not used cosmetics to alter her features as she so often does in other instances, so underneath the dark makeup the characters still look like…Cindy Sherman. Strangely, the only objectively offensive works in the retrospective are also the only ones in which the artist does not seem to truly disappear.
These works, and the negative reactions they inevitably elicit, show the need for extreme caution in representing people different to oneself. For all her sensitivity to (and skilled subversion of) the stereotypes perpetuated by films, television, and advertising, Sherman herself has not always been so sensitive to the ways in which her own works might recall, even perpetuate, harmful stereotypes. Such pitfalls, while rare, underscore the need for visual artists to use their influence thoughtfully. The photographic image is powerful, if blunt, object, and Sherman — not unlike the advertising agencies, art directors, photographers, filmmakers, and other “mass-media generators” whose ideas she so often challenges — is a master image-maker. ∆
Bibliography
1. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2010.
2. The Broad. Accessed July 18, 2017. https://www.thebroad.org/art/cindy-sherman. “Cindy Sherman Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.” The Art Story. Accessed July 18, 2017. http://www.theartstory.org/artist-sherman-cindy.htm.
3. Cindy Sherman in “Transformation”. Performed by Cindy Sherman. USA: Art 21, 2009. Accessed July 18, 2017. https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s5/cindy-sherman-in-transformation-segment/.
4. Frank, Priscilla. “”The Obvious Problem With Blackface And The Art World’s White Gaze.” The Huffington Post. August 31, 2016. Accessed July 18, 2017.
5. Gopnik, Blake. “Cindy Sherman Takes On Aging (Her Own).” The New York Times. April 21, 2016. Accessed July 18, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/arts/design/cindy-sherman-takes-on-aging-her-own.html. | https://medium.com/@annaweltner/a-pop-quiz-on-cindy-sherman-a3eae8ef3ab2 | ['Anna Weltner'] | 2020-10-31 19:16:41.835000+00:00 | ['Cindy Sherman', 'Art History', 'Academia', 'Representation', 'Photography'] |
Schrodinger’s Inbox | Let’s talk about Schrodinger’s cat for a second, shall we? Remember Schrodinger? He has a box, and inside that box is a cat. But I’m not just talking about any old cardboard box. The box is a special box — it either kills the cat or keeps the cat alive. But for just a moment, right before Schrodinger looks underneath the box, the cat is neither dead, nor alive. It’s both. It’s in a state that physicists call “superposition”. It’s both dead and alive. And all it takes is for Schrodinger to look underneath and see that his cat is dead. By looking into the box, the state of superposition collapses in on itself, and he kills the cat.
But I’m not worried about dead cats, or Schrodinger’s box, or any of that. I’m more worried about that email that’s going to tell me if the deal went through. Nobody’s ever told you about Schrodinger’s inbox, I’m sure, but let me tell you, it’s almost as deadly and mind-numbing as Schrodinger’s cat.
If this deal goes through, I’m a millionaire. Everything I’ve worked toward for the last two years is packed tightly into the pixels of this single email. But it’s not even my inbox. It’s Schrodinger’s inbox.
I’m not one to engage numbers with six zeroes. Or five zeroes. Or even four zeroes. If there are numbers with six zeroes in my life, they’re surely not associated with my bank account. More likely, they’re the number of opportunities I’ve missed, or the odds that I’ll ever be anything other than a high school dropout, or the number of miles I’m going to have to travel before I find myself.
If the deal goes through, and I open Schrodinger’s inbox to find that email with the contract signed and ready to launch, almost everything in my life changes. Without a doubt, it’ll change the way people perceive me, but in the end, I might still be that confused, misguided kid who couldn’t finish high school. I’ll just have more money in the bank, more of an excuse to justify why I didn’t live the life society expected of me.
The anticipation scrapes my mind, but I’m not one to stay with my finger glued to the refresh button, like some Hollywood version of Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, I wait until long after I know that I’ve already received this life-changing message.
It’s waiting in my inbox: Schrodinger’s inbox. Which means that I’m stuck in this state of superposition. Neither a millionaire, nor a non-millionaire. Neither rich nor poor. Neither with or without an excuse for leaving high school. Society accepts me, and scoffs at me. My parents are proud, and disappointed. The last two years of my life are a violent waste of time, and a brilliant investment.
I wait. I tell myself that I’ll check it at the end of the day, but the end of the day arrives, and I refuse to check Schrodinger’s inbox.
I’m not afraid of losing the deal. I’m not afraid of failing, or being rejected. I’m staying in this state of superposition for as long as I can, because I’m afraid that I might open Schrodinger’s inbox, find that I’m a millionaire, and find that nothing else has changed. So I’ll stay here — both dead and alive, both a failure and a success, for as long as I can. | https://medium.com/a-story-each-day/schrodinger-s-inbox-d65ef6f64144 | ['A Story Each Day'] | 2015-11-16 02:22:48.174000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'A Story Each Day'] |
A Chinese Supplier of Dog Products Just Offered Me Face Masks | A Chinese Supplier of Dog Products Just Offered Me Face Masks
And that’s an incredibly positive sign
Photo by Michael Amadeus on Unsplash
Starting in 2016, I developed a popular pet product on Amazon. Called the Crusty Comb, it was a special flea comb designed to clean the faces of long-haired dogs like my Bichon Frises. Developing the product required working with a factory in China. They created custom bags for me, attached labels, and shipped them to my company here in the United States.
Today I received a message from the same supplier pitching a new product: face masks.
As COVID-19 has spread worldwide and begun to seriously impact the United States, shortages of essential goods have made a bad situation much worse. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m living under a general lockdown and shelter-in-place order, which restricts all but essential travel.
With supply chains strained, staff reduced and alleged panic buying, stores have been out of products like paper towels, hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, gloves and surgical masks for over a week. On a visit to CVS pharmacy yesterday, the manager told me that they received a shipment of new supplies (including hand sanitizer) in the morning, and there were lines out the door.
By the time I arrived in the afternoon, the supplies were long gone. They won’t receive another shipment for a week. The situation was the same throughout the East Bay — I visited six stores seeking essential goods, and none had sanitizer, masks or other basic supplies in stock. Even the availability of many foods was patchy — although this does seem to be improving.
Sanitizer, masks and gloves and other basic medical supplies, though, are likely to be unavailable for a while. And even if masks were in stock, I don’t know that I’d buy any. Authorities say that they have limited efficacy at protecting against the virus, unless they have an N95 certification, which means that they filter out 95% of particles down to .3 microns.
And they’re urgently needed in other places. Consumer pharmacies aren’t the only places lacking masks — hospitals are facing a major shortage as well, leading some workers in hard-hit places like Washington State to make masks out of office supplies in an attempt to protect themselves and patients. On a recent visit to UCSF in San Francisco, signs warned that masks would only be provided to patients with respiratory symptoms. Normally, during cold and flu season, they’re handed out liberally at stands throughout the hospital.
At UCSF in San Francisco, N95 masks were restricted to selected patients. Credit: Gado Images.
There’s an obvious reason why masks and other essential medical supplies are barely available here in the United States. Like many products in the modern economy, they rely on a global supply chain that ultimately terminates in mainland China. And until recently, China wasn’t sharing.
Amid its own major outbreak of COVID-19, China’s normally export-focused economy stalled. And what production capacity remained was turned inwards. Even during the peak of China’s initial crisis, the country turned out 200 million face masks per day.
But that’s barely enough to meet the country’s intense internal demand. China (and other countries like Singapore) have issued masks to all citizens. While they may not protect the wearer very much, masks do help to protect others from the coughs and sneezes of the infected, potentially contributing to reducing community spread. As a result of massive internal demand, exports sank, and shortages in the United States and other Western countries grew.
It’s a story which will likely apply to many other products we’ve come to rely on. Face masks are an obvious example, because demand for them has spiked. Reserves were quickly depleted, and so we in the West are feeling the effects of limited supply. As reserves of other made-in-China products are depleted, we’ll likely see shortages in other categories. It’s a byproduct of a supply chain which — especially in technology — has become increasingly serpentine and globalized.
Masks are a bit like the canary in the supply chain coalmine. Shortages here are an immediate indicator of supply problems in China. But other supply challenges will abound as the COVID-19 crisis worsens, and affects larger swatches of the world economy.
Ultimately, though, there is good news (at least when it comes to masks). Through draconian quarantine measures and the mass control of its population, China appears to have gotten the virus’ spread in check — at least for now. As more Chinese return to work, factory capacity is increasing. And factories are increasingly turning their production capacity away from consumer goods and towards essential products.
According to NPR, thousands of Chinese factories have turned to making masks and other COVID-19 related supplies, in a literal “army” of production. Factories are working at 110% capacity, and have brought in new equipment and workers to meet demand. As the virus has abated domestically, demand within the country has dropped. As a result, exports have begun — tentatively — to resume.
This is very good news for countries like the United States, where the virus is just beginning to ramp up. The delay between China’s outbreak and our own has given us crucial time — time for China’s world-leading manufacturing capacity to come back online, and time for authorities and others in the United States to arrange imports of essential goods.
The fact that suppliers are offering shipments of masks to even tiny, lowly importers like me is a very positive sign. It means that production capacity is resuming, and Chinese companies are actively seeking customers for their products outside the country again.
The fact that a former supplier of plastic bags is now offering me masks is also encouraging, and a bit concerning. According to NPR, masks are surprisingly challenging to make. Not just any factory can produce them properly — especially the more complex masks that can achieve an N95 certification. The country has already confiscated over 31 million counterfeit masks that don’t meet standards.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that my dog product manufacturer isn’t actually making the masks they’re selling. It’s a common practice — and was before the pandemic — for Chinese factories to offer their customers products sourced from other local suppliers, which may or may not be marketed under their own brand. When in 2017 I asked my bag supplier about also supplying flea combs, they quickly responded with a variety of options, likely sourced from a local peer.
There’s also the question of whether imports can happen fast enough. Even with courier delivery and rush production, my supplier quoted me a lead time of 15–19 days to receive a shipment of masks. If Italy is any indication, the United States may not have that kind of time.
As factories in China turn their production capacity to pandemic essentials, it’s likely that supplies of other products will experience shocks. Of course, demand for these products is already likely to be lower to begin with. No one is much concerned with buying a dog flea comb in the midst of a global pandemic (and I have exited that market anyway).
Despite production challenges, quality issues and longer lead times, the restarting of global supply chains is a very good sign. Experts are divided on whether China can maintain control of COVID-19 as more Chinese return to work. But if they can — or even if they can maintain rates of infection at reasonable levels — having their production capacity back online will likely have a major impact outside the country.
Today’s globalized supply chains lead to weaknesses, like the inability to receive exports of essential products when local demand surges and production turns inwards. But it also provides strength, in that China can continue to make and sell essential products to the United States, even as our own infections mount and our internal production capacity stalls.
Would I trust a face mask potentially made by a former supplier of dog products? At the moment, that’s not really the question. The question is whether I’d trust it over a homespun alternative made from the lining of surgical trays, or vinyl bought from Home Depot (both of which are in use in Seattle hospitals today). Or if I’d prefer it to no mask at all.
For essential medical supplies, quality assurance is still essential. I’d likely wear an untested mask, if no other alternatives were available. But would I use an untested ventilator? If I worked as a doctor, would I trust an untested respirator to keep me safe while treating a known infected person?
Again, much of this may be a moot point. If Chinese companies are offering these products to people like me, they’re presumably offering more complex medical supplies to the major distributors with the capacity to do their own quality assurance and other testing.
Ultimately, China’s capacity to keep the virus in check, the delays between their outbreak and our own (helped along by quarantine measures here), and a herculean effort to increase production may mean an increase in the supply of essential products just as the West needs them. And it may ultimately save thousands or millions of lives. | https://medium.com/bay-area-covid-19-quarantine-log/a-chinese-supplier-of-dog-products-just-offered-me-face-masks-7fdb6c537a4a | ['Thomas Smith'] | 2020-03-24 19:34:28.137000+00:00 | ['Supply Chain', 'Business', 'Coronavirus', 'Masks', 'China'] |
Crop Consulting Re-Defined For Small Farms | There is one thing that completely struck me when we started customer research in the agricultural industry: Professional farmers regularly ask crop consultants for help.
We met this tomato farmer, growing nothing but tomatoes for almost 10 years in more than 6ha of greenhouses. One single plant species for almost a decade, every day. Yet still, this perfectly reasonable and pretty smart man is relying on the services of a Dutch horticultural consultant, visiting him EVERY WEEK to improve the conditions in his greenhouse.
What is going on in the greenhouse?
Why Growers Need Help
Farmers basically operate companies, we just call them farms. And just like every other company, they face all different kinds of challenges. The farmer has to take care of a plethora of tasks, way beyond only growing plants. They have to understand the market, need to sell their crops, find and train labour, operate complicated machinery and technology, be fluent in rules and regulations and then shit hits the fan and all of the crops are lost because of a heavy disease infestation in the whole !/&!%$ greenhouse. Why haven’t you seen this coming?
Because it’s freakin’ hard, that’s why! Crop cultivation systems are so complex, it’s incredibly hard to understand the dependencies between the different components of the system. Plus, every farmer sees nothing but their own farm, day in, day out. They get so used to the daily routines that it’s sometimes hard to see discrepancies.
The Biggest Challenge
“Knowledge still is the biggest challenge in agriculture today.” Jacco van der Wekken, CEO Delphy Groep NL
Jacco van Der Wekken, CEO Delphy Groep B.V.
The moment I heard this sentence in a meeting with Jacco van der Wekken, CEO of one of the biggest global crop consultancies called Delphy, I was absolutely baffled. Delphy employs over 200 consultants and operates globally. Jacco wasn’t talking about the developing world, but rather about the professional agricultural industry. Think huge greenhouses or open fields, heavy investments and well-trained labour.
How could this be? We’ve been growing plants for tens of thousands of years and still people don’t know how to do so properly? Plants seem to be some seriously complex pieces of work!
The Problem With Traditional Consulting
Good consulting feels just like this. Ahh!
There’s a broad range of crop consulting services available on the market. You can use them to buy the help of experienced agronomists, sometimes they also do their own research to be on the cutting edge of applied science. They are typically based on year-long contracts and assign you to one consultant. It’s like marriage, but you only talk about plants and tech. Amazing, isn’t it?
Yes, if you can afford it. This is why smaller farms rarely rely on these services, but rather turn somewhere else for help. If you’re lucky, there are associations or state agencies you could consult. Maybe there are industry suppliers offering consulting services, but if you ask Monsanto what to do then what do you think they will tell you?
Bummer. What else could you do? Ask The Internet. It is open and full of valuable information. It is everywhere, this information, floating around just like this. Problem is: these little bubbles of precious truth float in a sea of bullshit and nonsense and everything looks the same. In the end, you spend three times as long to validate information than to find it in the first place.
I’m happy if my plants are happy!
Stripping Down Consulting
Sometimes you just don’t need to get into a dedicated relationship with a consultant. Sometimes, all you need is help. What if you could instantly ask a trusted source, a real expert with years of experience in his or her field of expertise? What if you could pay a small amount of money and just get help. Quick!
Hm. Why not?
Introducing: Farmee Experts
A couple of weeks after the meeting described above, me and my co-founders at farmee went back to Delphy and presented our idea: a remote online consulting platform. And hey: they liked it. In fact, they liked it so much that we’re partnering for a pilot phase to kickstart Farmee Experts. It is based around the idea: What if you could instantly ask the best expert agronomists in the world and get an answer you can trust within 24 hours?
Farmee Experts is optimised for mobile…
Our vision is to expand it into a digital consulting marketplace, connecting farmers to a broad network of specialised experts all around the globe. Farmers would no longer need to rely on one consultant for all their needs, but could build their own network of experts for different tasks. And our agronomists could broaden their client base globally, from the comfort of their homes. Imagine sitting on your sofa at night, quickly helping a young grower in a remote location of Canada, who hasn’t had access to professional agricultural services before.
…but works on Desktop computers as well, of course.
This is how it currently works: Any farmer in the world experiencing an issue with their plants can post a question on the Farmee Experts web application, accessible from any computer or mobile phone with a browser. Within 24 hours, the question is answered remotely by Delphy’s experienced agronomists. Farmers just have to pay for this specific advice without any long-term costs. All questions and answers are private and cannot be seen by other users. As a special launch deal, Farmee Experts offers the first answer for newly registered users completely free. After that, any question will be answered for a fixed price of 49 USD during the market entry phase. And if you’re not satisfied, you get your money back.
Give us a visit, we’re here to help: https://experts.farmee.io
About Farmee
Farmee is a German AgTech-startup, developing digital solutions. Our mission is to enable people to grow better food. We are working on both digital products for ordinary people growing food for themselves and their communities as well as services for professionals, such as Farmee Experts.
Come visit us at www.farmee.io. | https://medium.com/farmee/crop-consulting-re-defined-for-small-farms-af51ca812536 | ['Flo Haßler'] | 2019-01-14 09:51:27.242000+00:00 | ['Crops', 'Agriculture', 'Consulting', 'Agronomy', 'Agtech'] |
You’ve Been Trained to Hate Yourself | Society trained me to value my intellect, ignore my soul, and judge myself as unworthy.
School trained me to compare myself to others and focus on my weaknesses. There was always something that I wasn’t naturally good at. Yep, gifted and talented but remedial PE. I started believing that I was somehow lacking and that I needed to fix myself. I suspected that everyone else was doing great but that I wasn’t OK. This became my shameful secret.
This training of generations has led to an epidemic of anxiety, depression, hostility, fear, and loneliness. If you feel somehow lacking or broken, I invite you to release your Self (yes big S Self) from this social conditioning.
Everything that you need to live a life of grace, ease, abundance, peace, joy and love is trapped inside of you waiting for you to re-connect with and free your Self. | https://caprice.medium.com/youve-been-trained-to-hate-your-self-2647e2f13d79 | ['Caprice Thorsen'] | 2019-03-19 18:23:25.363000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Spirituality', 'Love', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement'] |
Remember Your Worth & Build a Wall | Photo by Rachel Ruquet on Unsplash
Let go of the fears that are holding you back,
Don’t be fazed by any setbacks.
Your brain will want to quit; it’ll try and justify,
All the reasons why it’d be easier to just comply
With every voice telling you to stop reaching for your dreams-
I know its hard to block out their bloodthirsty screams.
Self-confidence can be built but also destroyed.
Overtime critics’ opinions make you paranoid.
Remember your worth and build a wall,
Between yourself and those who wish to see you fall. | https://medium.com/illumination/remember-your-worth-build-a-wall-ae53a971edaa | ['Dianna Carney'] | 2020-09-29 18:07:29.786000+00:00 | ['Self Confidence', 'Poetry', 'Self Worth', 'Fear Of Failure', 'Poem'] |
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Promoting Prostitution Charge | The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office filed a felony charge of promoting prostitution in the second degree against a man after a Sheriff’s Office investigation along Aurora Avenue North in Seattle.
In October, detectives with the Sheriff’s Office were conducting the operation in the 13500 block of Aurora Avenue North. A female detective was working in plainclothes when contacted by the suspect.
They allegedly discussed sexual acts, and the man allegedly said he could get an apartment and a bank account in both of their names. The plainclothes detective also said they discussed a fee she would pay him.
The detective said the texting continued almost daily until Oct. 27 when the suspect said he was going to get an apartment “near the track by Northgate.” Investigators said on Nov. 6, the suspect agreed to meet at a motel along the Wallingford side of Aurora Avenue North.
King County Sheriff’s deputies arrested the 45-year-old South Seattle man there and said he was in possession of the phone the plainclothes detective had been texting. He denied being involved in promoting prostitution.
In charging documents, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office noted his criminal history — which includes seven warrants since 2005 for failing to appear in court — and the added dangers of prostitution during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“If the defendant further engages in or promotes prostitution upon his release, his behavior has the potential to increase the transmission of Covid-19 in the community and place other Washington state residents at risk of contracting the disease,” a deputy prosecuting attorney wrote in the bail request.
A judge set bail at $2,000. His arraignment, where the defendant is expected to enter a plea, is scheduled for 1:45 p.m. Nov. 25.
This case is the 14th promoting prostitution case filed by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office this year. That number also includes charges of promoting commercial sexual abuse of a minor — the charge when juveniles are involved. In 2019, our office filed 23 cases. In 2018, there were 17 cases filed.
The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office handles promoting prostitution cases because those crimes are felonies (first- or second- degree) under Washington State law, and felonies investigations are referred by police to our office.
Prostitution itself is a misdemeanor, and such misdemeanor crimes in Seattle are referred by police to the separate Seattle City Attorney’s Office rather than the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Patronizing a prostitute — soliciting or requesting sexual contact from another person for a fee — also is a misdemeanor referred to the Seattle City Attorney’s Office. | https://medium.com/@kcprosecutor/promoting-prostitution-charge-3f2ced1c4f4b | ['King County Prosecuting Attorney S Office'] | 2020-11-17 18:41:46.374000+00:00 | ['Criminal Justice', 'King County', 'King County Prosecutor'] |
The Ark | “Is the world crying, Daddy?”
Aaron stared through fly-specked glass at the grey, foggy drizzle. Ninety days straight, they hadn’t seen the sun. The damn fog had followed them from San Francisco. Nevada was supposed to be hot. Sunny. A desert, for God’s sake.
They’d moved inland after Sam’s mother died. Aaron had always hated winter at the coast. Freezing rain. Ice-rimed streets.
But, since the change, it was the same everywhere. Aaron’s head felt as if it was stuffed with cotton wool. He was never dry or warm. The bed-sheets were cold and clammy when he crawled in at night.
“Is it?”
His son’s words finally penetrated the mist clogging his brain. Aaron shook his head to clear it. “Is it what?”
“Is the world crying?”
Aaron stared. “What are you talking about, Sam?”
“Grandpa says the rain is God’s tears. But, Auntie Ruth says it’s the world crying for help.”
Sammy’d been only a year old when they were forced higher into the mountains to escape the rising water. So many drowned cities. So many homeless. Hard-scrabble settlements bloomed like cancerous lesions — miles of cardboard shelters and tent-ghettos strung out along every major roadway.
They’d been lucky to find this abandoned trapper’s cabin. Its weathered logs stunk of long-dead animal — the crumbling pelts Ruth and Aaron dragged outside and burned when they first arrived. At least, the roof didn’t leak.
“I don’t know, Sam…” His voice trailed off. How d’you explain severe climate change to a five-year-old? Aaron wasn’t sure he truly grasped the magnitude of it himself.
Governments, the military, big multi-nationals, everyone’d had a hand in trying to slow it down, to reverse the damage. They’d stopped the converter program — shut down the network of mighty, ocean-cooled condensers which harnessed the sun’s energy.
The condensers were supposed to be a boon, to save humanity. They were designed to replace polluting fossil fuels and save their power-starved world. And the program had worked, at first. But, something went wrong. What was left of the ice caps melted. Sea-levels rose catastrophically submerging the low-lying, coastal areas.
Then, the rains came. The massive influx of fresh water diluted the oceans and further destabilized the system. Even after the converters were taken off-line, the flooding continued.
Many, like Sammy’s grandfather, believed their world was finally cleansing itself, perhaps to begin again. Some of the enders as they were called, pitched their tents in the foot-hills to prepare for the final coming with prayer and celebration. Their old-fashioned hymns about “goin’ to glory” and the “better world awaitin’,” echoed through the mountain passes.
Some banded together in tight, well-armed communities. They stockpiled supplies and collected whatever or whoever they decided should be saved. They took what they needed, by force, if necessary. And built huge arks, massive ships to bear them safely above the coming flood.
Aaron knew of an ender group, close by.
He gazed at his son — so like his mother, with her dark curls and sparkling hazel eyes. The boy was tall for his age, and smart. Sammy already knew how to read and write. He loved animals. Even the wild ones would take food from his hand. Maybe, if Aaron was lucky…
“C’mon, Sam. We have to pack.” Aaron grabbed the boy’s shoulder and pushed him towards the bedroom. He yanked open drawers, stuffing Sam’s clothes into a carry-sack.
“What about Grandpa and Auntie Ruth? Should they pack, too?” Sam stroked the ears of a black cat curled in the middle of his pillow. She yawned and stretched, purred at the boy’s touch and offered her swollen belly for a rub.
“They’ll be fine. They’ll understand.”
“We’ll understand what?”
Aaron spun around. His father and sister watched from the doorway. “We’ll understand what?” his father repeated.
“I’m sorry, Dad, Ruthie — but, I have to try. Please. It may be our only chance.”
“You’re not taking the boy to those enders. He belongs with his family.” Aaron’s father reached for the boy. “Come here, Samuel.”
Before Sammy could move, Ruth touched her father’s outstretched arm. “No, Dad, Aaron’s right. We have to save Sam.”
“Save me from what?” Sammy pressed close to his father.
Aaron knelt by the boy. “You have to be brave, Sam. Can you do that for me?”
Wide-eyed, the boy nodded.
“Good. Let’s finish packing. We have to hurry.”
With the help of Aaron’s father and sister, Sam’s clothes, some warm, heavy blankets and all their provisions were stuffed in kit-bags and stowed in the their SUV. Aaron held out a hand for Sam’s carry-all as he bundled the boy into the back seat.
The boy wrapped both arms round the unwieldy pack. “No, Dad. It’s okay.”
Driving rain turned the rough track up the mountain into a slippery, rutted quagmire. No-one spoke. It was too hard to be heard over the rising wind and the rhythmic, frantic slapping of the over-taxed wipers, as they strained to keep up with the deluge.
Thunder crashed and growled overhead. Blinding, sulfurous flares streaked across the skies as the storm clawed the plateau like a ravening beast. Muddy cataracts uprooted trees and gouged chunks from the road.
At last, the SUV crested a rise and slid onto the high plateau. Aaron braked hard and stared at the armed men who barred the gates to the compound.
“Please, I need to speak to whoever’s in charge.”
A burly, dark-bearded man raised his rifle. “You c’n speak to us.”
Aaron climbed out and pulled Sam forward. He gestured for Ruth and their father to get out. “Please, take us with you. We have extra food, blankets. Some tools.”
The man shook his head. “No room.”
“Then, take my son and my sister. Please. I beg you, take them with you.”
Another man stepped forward, rifle at the ready. “Leave the packs and go.”
“Enough.”
A tall, grizzled man strode from the shadows by the gate into the twin cones of light from the SUV’s headlamps. He pushed back his hood and brushed long strands of wind-whipped, graying hair out of his dark eyes. “I’m sorry, but Cain’s right, we have no room.”
Aaron pushed Sam into the light. The little boy shivered in the steady downpour, clutching his carry-all. “He’s a good boy. A hard worker. My sister’s a medic. Please.” Aaron’s voice broke. Numb, frozen, he sank to his knees in the mud.
The tall man shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’d best go — get out of the storm.”
Aaron studied the tall man’s exhausted face and red-rimmed eyes, dark with strain and loss. “There’s nowhere left to go.”
He struggled to his feet and helped his father into their vehicle. Carefully buckled him in. Then he unloaded their bags and bales and piled them beside his sister. He hugged Ruth, and kissed her on both cheeks, shouting above the wind, “Take care of Sam.”
He picked up his son. Holding fast to his carry-all, the boy tucked his head into Aaron’s neck. “Mind your Auntie Ruth. And, always remember, I’m very proud of you. I love you, Sam.”
The little boy nodded.
Aaron placed the boy and his bundle in Ruth’s arms, and turned towards the armed men. “There really is nowhere to go.”
He walked to the SUV and slid inside, quickly reversing down the road. At the first bend, he cranked the vehicle around and cut the lights. They raced down the narrow, bumpy track in the dark, checking behind for any sign they’d been followed.
“They’ll be alright, Dad. He won’t leave them.”
“How can you be sure?”
“He has kind eyes, Dad. He still cares. He won’t leave them.” Aaron smiled at his father. Neither man saw the towering wall of seething, dark water bearing down on them out of the heart of the storm… | https://medium.com/plain-brown-wrapper/the-ark-79e0a730a32c | ['Elle Fredine'] | 2020-10-04 13:03:06.281000+00:00 | ['Writing Prompts', 'Floods', 'Climate Change', 'Fiction', 'Family'] |
The Road To Wooler | The Pennine Way, a 267 mile trail that originates near Manchester, shares a mile and a couple of hills with St Cuthbert’s Way. David, who is a keen hiker, would probably have liked to alter course and follow the Pennine Way south, but I remind him of our true task, hiking eastward. Another time, perhaps.
Despite the poor conditions — intermittent rain and a gusting wind from the north — the day’s hike is not as difficult as what we endured yesterday. The ascent of Wideopen Hill, coming after a long day’s hike, had been mentally mortifying. Even though the cumulative ascent of Day Three will be greater than our slog up Wideopen Hill, it does not seem as taxing: the hills come in smaller chunks, and I feel relatively fresh as we stair-step up the slopes. Our altitude increases, and by early afternoon we are high in the heather.
For the first time on the trail I see a grouse. These birds huddle beneath the purple heather, waiting to surprise unwary walkers, Moments before a hiker’s boot steps on them, they flush in a blur of wings and adrenaline-releasing shock. They flap away, making a chuckling cry that sounds like “Go back! Go back,” before settling into a new hiding spot.
Heather-clad hills reach to the horizon on Saint Cuthbert’s Way. Author Photograph.
We do not have to break trail through the thick heather, but the path becomes so narrow, that I am forced to place one foot precisely in front of the other. This gait, most frequently observed among tightrope walkers, tends to be unbalancing, and on a number of occasions, with wind striking my right quarter, I nearly topple into the bushes.
The rain, which has been intermittent through the day, gains strength and ferocity as we descend into Wooler. We are soaked through to the skin by the time we reach the car park at the foot of Wooler Commons. Unfortunately, the planners of St Cuthbert’s Way decided that this would be an excellent place to play a trick on the pilgrims. Rather than proceeding directly into town, the trail now makes a sharp detour, a meandering course up a hill (as if there hadn’t been enough hills already in our day). The direct route, along the road, would have seen us tucked up in a cozy B&B in no time, but as the rain and wind lashes our faces, we turn and trudge uphill to experience the long route into town. Stepping daintily between sheep droppings, I curse the sadistic trail planners one more time. It was simply too much. Larks and capers!
A vent in the clouds throws sunlight on the hills of St Cuthbert’s Way. Author photograph.
Wooler is the first large town we’ve encountered since leaving Melrose. It boasts a High Street with two cash machines, and a Co-op supermarket that was open until 10:00 PM! Civilization! After a lovely dinner, I slip between crisp sheets in the Black Bull Hotel. Our room is over the pub, and from below comes the monotonous voice of a game of Border’s Bingo. The caller repeats a series of numbers: “22…22…22. 33…33…33.”
I am footsore and exhausted. It won’t keep me awake for long. | https://medium.com/the-peripatetic-historian/the-road-to-wooler-f32368d72e9b | ['Richard J. Goodrich'] | 2020-12-14 13:12:18.949000+00:00 | ['History', 'Outdoors', 'Hiking', 'Pilgrimage', 'Travel'] |
The Cyber Cold War | by Máté Hekfusz
CNN
There is a new cold war going on. It is very similar to the old one: it started without much fanfare, and it is currently simmering under the public eye, only emerging in the form of high-profile incidents. It involves an emerging arms race and even has the same players. But the world has changed, the weapons must change too: instead of bullets and bombs, this new cold war is fought with lines of code.
The world today is much smaller than it was in the 20th century. Individuals and countries alike are interconnected with thousands of threads of technology. The Internet is the largest and most influential of these threads: usage statistics say that 4.3 billion people — more than half the Earth’s population — are connected to it in 2019. The online world is thus humanity’s greatest common space, where billions of systems exchange petabytes of data every day. Most of these systems rely on software to function and to interact with the Internet. But software is not all beneficial, or even built for legitimate usage — they could be used to steal data, siphon computer resources or outright destroy systems. Collectively, this type of software is known as malicious software — malware, for short.
Malware takes as many forms as legitimate software. Some types are named, aptly, after disease carriers (viruses and worms), others after historical concepts (trojans), and yet others are distinct enough to deserve entirely new names (rootkits, ransomware, and many more). As the Internet grew in scale and complexity over the decades to become the all-encompassing presence in our lives today, so did malware. Its humble beginnings were in the 1980s with programmers trying to highlight early system flaws, but it has since become capable of terrifying feats: whether it is ‘zombifying’ millions of computers into one powerful network to be used for illicit purposes or locking down billions of dollars’ worth of data while demanding ransom money, malware today can cause enormous damage.
It was only a matter of time before nation-states took notice. They recognized the potential of malware to be weaponized and have started adopting it as cyberweapons. The two biggest countries leading the charge, just like in the previous cold war, are the United States and Russia, with both their names tied to already-infamous cyberweapons. Today’s world is multipolar, however, and beyond the two former rivals, many other nations are joining the fray: China, the UK, Iran, and even North Korea are among those also gearing up, making and collecting pieces of malware to be used when the time comes. Their hope is that they can attack and cause major damage to their enemies without ever stepping foot or even entering the airspace of their territory. That is cyberwarfare.
Cyberattacks major enough to be considered ‘warfare’ have been rare so far. Two of the most infamous instances, as mentioned above, belong to the two frontrunners: the US and Russia. The US created Stuxnet, an extremely sophisticated piece of malware designed to infiltrate and decimate Iran’s nuclear program. Hailed as the “world’s first digital weapon”, when it was discovered in 2010, it managed to damage a thousand of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and delay their enrichment program. Despite the US never officially confirming their involvement with the malware, the genie was out of the bottle, and the cyber cold war began. A couple years later, Russia also showed what it was capable of: it unleashed a groundbreaking cyberweapon on Ukraine with Industroyer, which was specifically designed to attack and disable power grids. In 2016, it plunged Kiev into darkness for an hour and was shown to be capable of infecting other critical infrastructure systems.
These attacks show that malware can affect the physical world and have the potential to cause real harm to people. One only needs to imagine the damage an unexpected power outage, lasting hours, or a malfunctioning nuclear facility can inflict. After all, one of the biggest strengths of cyber weapons is the lack of awareness about them. Critical infrastructure systems are rarely designed with security in mind, as they were never planned to be connected to the Internet. They are often equipped with outdated software, but even well-maintained devices can be compromised with zero-days — flaws in the system that no one but the attacker knows about. As a rule of thumb, anything that is connected to the Internet can be hacked and infected: voting machines, banks, hospitals, and other infrastructure critical to our daily lives.
In recent years, multinational groups like NATO and the EU have started recognizing the threat of cyber-warfare. NATO has recognized the Internet as a potential area of conflict, while the EU has started preparing its leaders to respond to a large-scale cyberattack. These are signs of progress, but the question remains: will governments manage to keep pace with the rapid advance of technology? The Internet is still expanding: ‘smart’ technology has reached home appliances, and one can put together entire smart homes where they can control every device remotely through voice commands. Some are looking even further, however: ‘smart cities’ are planned, where everything from trash cans to traffic lights is part of one massive Internet-of-Things (IoT). Recalling the earlier maxim that everything that is connected can be hacked, one can see that if everything is connected, then hacking and malware become a huge threat to people’s everyday lives.
It would be alarmist to say that malware will inevitably cause the next great conflict. Cyberweapons are expensive, and large-scale cyberattacks have so far been few. But that is just another way in which the cyber cold war is reminiscent to the old one: it goes largely under the public radar until the next notable incident. There is little hope in reversing this trend: as the world keeps getting smaller and more connected, nation-states will no doubt continue to use malware as part of their arsenal. If that is true, the best we can do is to keep this war as it is: cold. | https://medium.com/sia-nyuad/the-cyber-cold-war-8030906edb73 | ['Sia Nyuad'] | 2019-05-10 10:53:34.087000+00:00 | ['Cybersecurity', 'Cold War', 'Cyber'] |
Tips for Good Form When Shooting a Basketball | Dedicated student and athlete Luke Stankavage splits his time between schoolwork and basketball. A member of the National Honor Society, Luke Stankavage plays varsity basketball at Ardrey Kell High School in North Carolina and is one of the top players on his team because he spends time honing his basketball skills.
To improve your basketball shooting skills, begin by analyzing both your stance and grip before each shot. In terms of stance, keep your feet shoulder-width apart and slightly bend your knees. Keep both of your feet facing the basket and place them together or staggered, depending on what is most comfortable for you.
Regarding grip, spread your fingers just wide enough that you can balance the ball in a single hand. Hold the ball on your finger pads, not your palm, and place your non-shooting hand, also known as your balance or guiding hand, on the side of the ball so you have some control over the direction of your shot. This hand does not move as you deliver the shot.
During the shooting process, check how your body moves. Keep your elbow comfortably under the ball as you make your shot. Meanwhile, uncoil your legs, core, and arms as the shot progresses. You want to shoot tall so your entire body is uncoiled and your wrist and elbow make a straight line from your body to the basket. | https://medium.com/@lukestankavage/tips-for-good-form-when-shooting-a-basketball-24e1b891ca7a | ['Luke Stankavage'] | 2021-07-02 05:57:35.507000+00:00 | ['Basketball'] |
First Attempt in XBOM (eXtensible Blockchain Object Model) | Introduction
Those having experience in developing chaincode in Fabric know well how a chaincode looks like. In a nutshell, we define the data structure (state) for some assets, and functions which one can query the state, or invoke if change of state is needed. Since v2.1, Fabric team also introduces Contract API (link) which simplifies the way chaincode is written. This still follows the same pattern.
Recently I see another attempt to change the way we develop smart contracts with classes and objects, which is a favourite model for many developers. Prasaga introduces Extensible Blockchain Object Model, XBOM, in which assets are defined as objects and owned by accounts. XBOM provides a coding environment and methodology, which is currently implemented in Hyperledger Fabric for a permissioned chain offering and will be available on DataGrid Blockchain (DGB), an open permissionless chain in the future.
With XBOM, developers build applications with object oriented programming model, and XBOM provides an infrastructure serving them. The infrastructure (named Class Manager Infrastructure) then interacts with the underlying infrastructure, which is a fabric network in this case. Theoretically the developer does not care about the blockchain, as it is well handled by the infrastructure. That is the reason XBOM is positioned as “Decentralized GlobalOS”, like an operating system on top of the blockchain.
For those who are interested in this approach, the best way is to gain more information from their website. Here is the overview of XBOM.
The first available XBOM material is a set of chaincode in Golang. Since this summer they have published several videos. I have tried the code and here I document some of my experience and observation during my first attempt.
Some Concepts about XBOM
While you can always find good and official explanations on the material, here I try to provide some quick ideas about XBOM.
XBOM at a Glance
XBOM is a First-Class Object Model, meaning that everything is object in this environment. While the developers are dealing with the classes and objects in their code, these classes and objects are objects inside XBOM. XBOM provides a Class Manager Infrastructure such that developers can focus on their applications with their own classes and objects on a blockchain environment, without involving the chaincode and handling the ledger natively.
The Class Manager Infrastructure interacts with the underlying blockchain platforms. Taking Fabric as an example, each object is stored as a key-value pair in the ledger. The key is a unique identifier, called Ledger Object Identifier (LOID), and the value keeps all relevant information about this object. The Class Manager Infrastructure is responsible for interacting with the ledger storage, and is in fact a set of chaincode when it is implemented in Fabric.
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We can see this approach in a layered representation, and compare this with traditional coding on Fabric environment (source: David’s slide shown in the video with some colour code).
Application developers are no longer coding at chaincode level. Instead they are working at object level. They will use the object transaction model provided by Class Manager Infrastructure. In general, each transaction is to specify which account context the transaction is working, the target object, method and input arguments for the method. The Class Manager Infrastructure processes the transaction and returns the output.
Transaction at object level
We will go in depth into how Class Manager Infrastructure works with the fabric network and ledger later in the demonstration.
Account, Ownership and Containment
Our demonstration is to create an account object. Here we introduce the concept of object containment in XBOM, and how account is associated with the containment. Each object has reference to a parent object or directly (and eventually) to an account object (Class Account). This forms a tree structure of objects. This model is good for providing ownership of assets (objects) to an account. (Source: David’s slide shown in the video.)
Tree structure for objects, owned by an account.
After bootstrap we have the first account: System Account. In the demonstration we are going to create a new account with the System Account. We will detail how this is done.
Our demonstration is to create a new Account object with System Account.
This is just a tip of an iceberg in XBOM, but should be good enough for the demonstration. You can always get the latest update on their site.
Demonstration and Illustration
The demonstration follows the material (videos) on XBOM website. You can find the video of how the demonstration works. Meanwhile I make some illustrations and observations about the demonstration.
Video sources
Quick Start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNAkDeLpG2Y
Overview #1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P37UmQpI3g
Overview #3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_FnXb6u3b8
A Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server on AWS EC2 is instantiated for demonstration. The code and installation instruction is available here through registration.
We broadly divide the demonstration into two steps.
Step 1 is mainly on Fabric operation. The fabric network follows the Test-Network in fabric-samples with modification. In particular, a script classmanager.sh is created to perform all the tasks. This classmanager.sh largely follows network.sh in Test-Network. During the whole demonstration we use classmanager.sh to perform all the tasks, including bringing up the network, deploying the Class Manager Infrastructure and bootstrapping all components. After Step 1 we have a Class Manager Infrastructure ready for our next step.
Step 2 focuses on Class Manager Infrastructure. We will interact with objects provided in the Class Manager Infrastructure. All commands are working in this layer, and Class Manager Infrastructure is handling the relevant activities in chaincode invocation. During the demonstration we will take a look at what happens in the ledger. This gives us a better understanding about how Class Manager Infrastructure is interacting with the Fabric. Our task is to create a new Account object, and after that we will use “inspect” method from the Class Object to take a look at the new Account object.
Step 1: Bring Up Class Manager Infrastructure
Step 1.1: Bring up modified Test Network and Create Channel
This brings up a sample network, following the Test Network in Hyperledger Fabric 2.0+. It contains three organizations. One orderer organization and two peer organizations. A channel mychannel is created and the two peer organizations join this channel.
./classmanager.sh up createChannelor./classmanager.sh up createChannel -s couchdb
Note: couchdb can be used as the world state database for each peer with -s couchdb .
Step 1.2: Deploy Class Manager Infrastructure
Class Manager Infrastructure is a set of chaincode designed with the purpose of building the Class Manager Infrastructure. It uses the standard lifecycle chaincode to deploy this set of chaincode to the Fabric network.
./classmanager.sh deployCC
After deployment, it is what we observe in the ledger. We see a database is created on the channel (mychannel) and chaincode (classmanager).
Inside ledger, mychannel_classmanager is the database holding all objects.
Step 1.3: Initialize Bootstrap
Class Manager Infrastructure bootstrap creates all the required components to support the transaction at XBOM level.
./classmanager.sh InitBootstrap -loid default
This is equivalent to invoking the chaincode function InitBootstrap with LOID default.
After the bootstrap function is invoked, we see more records in the database.
We see some objects are created after bootstrap completes.
Here are the records created. The keys are LOID of various objects defined in XBOM. As LOID is a hash version of something, you will see many “unreadable” items in the database, except for the RootDictionaryLOID, which gives us some idea in the demonstration.
Step 2: Interacting with Class Manager Infrastructure
Now we have the Class Manager Infrastructure. We start working at the XBOM level from now on.
The demonstration is to obtain the Object Handle for Root Account object, and create a new account (i.e. a new Account object) using Root Account object.
After bootstrap in Step 1.3, we now have several objects we are going to work with.
Root Account object: A root account or system account is represented by a Root Account object. As introduced above, we need an Account object as a context when we interact with the Class Manager Infrastructure. We are using the Root Account object to create this new Account object.
A direct query (GetSystemAccountObject) is provided to get the LOID of the Root Account object. This is shown in Step 2.1
Root Dictionary object: The root dictionary stores a map from unique string names and unique LOIDs. As our purpose is to obtain the Object Handle of Root Account, we need to make a query on the root dictionary.
A direct query (GetRootDictionary) is provided to get the LOID of the Root Dictionary object. This is shown in Step 2.2.
With this information we can start working at transactions like this.
The input includes the following information
Account Object: the context of current account
Target Object: the object our transaction is acting upon
Method Name: the method of our action
Input Argument: arguments needed for the action
After processing in Class Manager Infrastructure, we will get back the designed result (returned argument).
In this demonstration we are going to perform two transactions. Both in the context of Root Account object:
Get Root Account Manager object handle from Root Dictionary (in Step 2.3)
Create new account using the Root Account Manager object handle (in Step 2.4)
We will see the transaction more in detail.
Finally, Class Object comes with a method for inspection. As all objects inherit from Class Object, so does our new Account Object. This is shown in Step 2.5.
Step 2.1: Get System Account Object
./classmanager.sh Invoke -ic '{"Args":["GetSystemAccountObject"]}'
We get back the System Account object: [83, 121, 115, 116, …]
Step 2.2: Get Root Dictionary Object
./classmanager.sh Invoke -ic '{"Args":["GetRootDictionary"]}'
We now have the Root Dictionary object: [82, 111, 111, 116, …]
Step 2.3: Transaction: Get Object Handler of Root Account Manager
Now we perform the first XBOM transaction: use System Account object (obtained in Step 2.1) to access Root Dictionary object (obtained in Step 2.2), by specifying the method ClassDictionary_GetObjectByName with input argument RootAccountManager.
This is the first XBOM transaction.
Account Object: System Account object [83, 121, 115, 116, …]
object Target Object: Root Dictionary ObjectHandle [82, 111, 111, 116, …]
ObjectHandle Method: ClassDictionary_GetObjectByName
Input Arguments: ObjectPathName: RootAccountManager
./classmanager.sh Invoke -ic '{"Args":["ObjectSend","[83,121,115,116,101,109,65,99,99,111,117,110,116,79,98,106,101,99,116,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]","[82,111,111,116,68,105,99,116,105,111,110,97,114,121,76,79,73,68,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]","{\"Mtdstring\":\"ClassDictionary_GetObjectByName\"}","{\"ObjectPathName\":\"RootAccountManager\"}"]}'
The returned argument is the ObjectHandle of Root Account Manager object: [44, 32, 80, 101, …] . We will use it in Step 2.4.
If we take a look on the ledger, we see RootDictionaryLOID is updated with a new revision. The transaction above has made some updates on the Root Dictionary object.
If we go deeper into how the transaction is processed in Class Manager Infrastructure, this is the actual process of a transaction flow.
How Class Manager Infrastructure interacts with the Fabric.
The Class Manager Infrastructure takes care of all the tasks interacting with the underlying Hyperledger Fabric system. Object information is retrieved from the ledger, and updated when needed after the process. This is why we see updates on the ledger.
Step 2.4: Transaction: Create a New Account
With the Root Account Manager object handle available, we now send another transaction. Still in the context of System Account object, the target is now Root Account Manager, with method ClassFactory_NewObject. An input argument, number of accounts to be created, is set 1.
Here is the transaction to create a new account.
Account Object: System Account object [83, 121, 115, 116, …]
object Target Object: Root Account Manager ObjectHandle [44, 32, 80, 101, …]
ObjectHandle Method: ClassFactory_NewObject
Input Arguments: NewCount: 1
./classmanager.sh Invoke -ic '{"Args":["ObjectSend","[83,121,115,116,101,109,65,99,99,111,117,110,116,79,98,106,101,99,116,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]","[44,32,80,101,53,74,36,52,35,113,59,53,46,50,89,84,97,56,35,92,98,95,35,66,96,32,90,118,81,80,89,68]","{\"Mtdstring\":\"ClassFactory_NewObject\"}","{\"NewCount\":1}"]}'
The ObjectHandle of New Account object handle is returned: [45, 38, 60, 97, …]
If we take a look on the ledger, we see RootDictionaryLOID and more records are updated. Besides, a new record is created, which should be corresponding to the new account object created in this transaction.
Step 2.5: Inspect the Account Object Newly Created in Step 2.4
Class Object comes with a handy method Inspect_Object. Since all objects in XBOM inherit Class Object directly or indirectly, we can use this method to get more detailed information about any object. Here we use it for the Account Object we created in Step 7.
The transaction looks like
Account Object: System Account object [83, 121, 115, 116, …]
object Target Object: New Account ObjectHandle [45, 38, 60, 97, …]
ObjectHandle Method: ClassObject_Inspect
Input Arguments: Unused: 0
./classmanager.sh Invoke -ic '{"Args":["ObjectSend","[83,121,115,116,101,109,65,99,99,111,117,110,116,79,98,106,101,99,116,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]","[45,38,60,97,79,122,35,32,42,105,59,110,88,54,43,43,80,80,49,116,38,43,55,123,58,33,102,79,50,44,95,43]","{\"Mtdstring\":\"ClassObject_Inspect\"}","{\"Unused\":0}"]}'
We see a big output. Here is the collapsed view of the output.
Here is the first item in “definitions”.
You can see this is a huge output of an object, including the object itself, methods, and class ancestry tree. The result is a JSON object parseable for information or other uses.
This is the end of demonstration.
Summary
Hope you can get some ideas through this first attempt in XBOM. As mentioned above, XBOM itself can be seen as a way of coding smart contracts with developer-friendly object-oriented programming model. The demonstration has shown the first Class Manager Infrastructure implemented on top of Hyperledger Fabric with Golang. I will come back with further elaboration once there are more detailed documentation and more demonstrations. Stay tuned. | https://medium.com/@scottiegratton21651/first-attempt-in-xbom-extensible-blockchain-object-model-f3750dfbd431 | [] | 2020-11-20 20:09:20.132000+00:00 | ['Prasarana', 'Hyperledger Fabric', 'Object Oriented', 'Chaincode', 'Xbox One'] |
An Interesting Account Takeover!! | The original token and the forged token had a difference of 32 characters. This was a huge problem as the server was not accepting any junk value in place of that 32 characters. Both the tokens were being decrypted to the same value i.e
“a:2:{s:9:”timestamp”;i:1614104013;s:10:”profile_id”;s:8:”40884692";}”.
This left me totally frustrated 😫 😫. I started searching more about Zlib Compression. I went to Reddit and posted my query and surprisingly my Inbox was flooded with numerous amazing blog posts and ideas on how to deal with the Zlib.
And after 2 hours of reading on the internet, I found out that Zlib includes an ADLER32 checksum if you use the Adler-32_Checksum() function after inflating you get BC89137A, notice that this checksum is present in the original token. In Zlib, everything after this checksum is not part of the compression stream and will therefore be ignored, this was the reason why both tokens give the same result even after a difference in length.
So now the challenge was to find the 32-bit string. As all the token-related work was happening on the client side I was pretty sure to find something in the JS files.
After few hours of looking in the JS file, I Found an endpoint “ /php / user ”. I decided to brute force the directory and finally found the endpoint “https://example.com/php/user/example/”, this endpoint had a string named “Transction_Token”, and indeed this was the last piece I was looking for.
Putting the pieces Together
Now it was time for putting everything together and exploiting it.
This attack needed to be precise as every time the page is refreshed the “Transaction _Token” changes. So I made a python script to automate the whole thing.
I generated the token for my second account and used it to change the password and IT WORKED!!!!
Important Takeaways
If there is a token then there is a chance that it can be cracked.
Manually read the JS file once as these contain very important information on working of the Web App
Try asking on Reddit for technical details, it will surely surprise you, Also there people don't see your follower count before replying to you 😅 😉.
Trust your Gut Feeling And Always Go the Extra Mile 😇
Thanks a lot for reading. Share if you like it
You can find me on Twitter: mayank_pandey01 | https://medium.com/@mayank-01/an-interesting-account-takeover-3a33f42d609d | ['Mayank Pandey'] | 2021-03-18 16:21:53.648000+00:00 | ['Web Penetration Testing', 'Cybersecurity', 'Hacking', 'Cryptography', 'Bug Bounty'] |
Christmas Blessings | Photo by Ash Edmonds on Unsplash
This year’s Christmas was a strange one.
Normally it is my favorite holiday. I start shopping back in August, and by the end of November I’m done. This year that did not happen.
Because of all the craziness going on in our nation along with some personal family issues and my son moving back home, money was seriously tight. The stress of everything on top of everything (if that makes any sense) made a huge impact on my state of mind.
Not only by mid-November had I not bought any presents, but I didn’t have the money to, nor did I even want to. With two kids, it killed me. Luckily, my husband took over the Christmas shopping.
Now, the kids knew money was tight. My youngest, age 17, sent me his Christmas list. Each item was less than twenty dollars.
“Mom, if you can’t afford to get any of the things on my Christmas list, that’s okay. If you get me a bag of my favorite chips, I’d be happy.”
It was the exact reminder I needed that Christmas wasn’t about the presents. It warmed my heart that I had raised boys who understood the value of a dollar and weren’t raised needing material items.
By the time Christmas day arrived, my closet was full of presents. Most were items for the boys that they needed or could use, but there were a few surprises that I knew would thrill them.
On top of that, my husband surprised me by buying me a new laptop. This is something I’d wanted for a couple of years, and he knew how much my writing meant to me. I love how he will do whatever he can to help me chase my dreams.
We spent the day watching movies, playing with the dog, and having a wonderful day together.
That was the spirit of Christmas. If it weren’t for my husband and boys, my spirits would have been in the dumps but because we stuck together through the rough year, we made it and thrived.
I don’t know what the next year is going to bring. It’s a bit scary to think about. What I do know is that no matter what is thrown our way, we will make it together and that is what is important.
Even though the year is not quite over, it somehow feels as though it is. There’s only a week left, and the last big stressful thing is behind us. I’m already looking forward to next Christmas.
Is that crazy? | https://medium.com/@stefanivader/christmas-blessings-141975b0ad6a | ['Stefani Vader'] | 2020-12-26 13:12:13.157000+00:00 | ['Holidays', 'Blessings', 'Parenting', 'Family', 'Gifts'] |
5 important things for measuring product placement success | In this post I want to show five important principles that are relevant to a proper performance and success measurement of product placement — from the perspective of advertising companies. Currently, unfortunately many of them are often not or only insufficiently taken into account. This not only leads to wrong results and recommendations, but can also lead to dangerous actions. Of course we know that this is only in rare cases because of the experts in the marketing departments. Rather, a proper success measurement is often seen as too complex that it would survive the long processes from daily business to the Jour Fixe at the C-level management.
Nevertheless, I want to push the professionalization of product placement and its performance measurement with this text. At the end you will also find specific recommendations on how to handle the issues in operational practice.
1. Look at all relevant dimensions
The success of product placement is mainly defined by three dimensions.
Cost
Since each marketing campaign must also be measured at its cost, this dimension is also for product placement of great importance. The measurement of this figure is simple.
Reach
The importance of the reach is obvious. The measurement of this figure has become significantly more difficult than it was 30 years ago in the times of internet and smartphones. Nevertheless, there are a number of instruments that can determine the reach across different channels — not as accurate as it is possible in online advertising, but usually sufficiently.
Advertising Effect
The advertising effect ultimately decides whether the combination of cost and reach has a positive or negative impact on the target audience. The measurement of this dimension is the most complicated and is often neglected.
Each of the named dimensions is equally crucial for the success and must be taken into account when measuring a product placement’s performance.
A high reach at low cost, but negative advertising effects does more harm than good. An excellent advertising effect with good reach, but prohibitive costs would be also not ideal from a business perspective.
One has to find the ideal combination. Only the combination of all three dimensions ultimately decides whether the profits of the advertising company rise.
2. Consider explicit as well as implicit advertising effects
Advertising effects appear on a conscious (explicit) as well as on a subconscious (implicit) level. While the explicit advertising effects can be relatively easily detected by so-called recall interviews, the implicit advertising effects are more difficult to detect.
In the evaluation of advertising effects, both areas are relevant. A pure explicit effect measurement would most times only verify the reach. When someone remembers a placement, this does not necessarily mean that it has also affected him in terms of his attitude or even purchase intention. The measurement of implicit advertising effects is usually done with extensive studies.
3. Consider indirect and potential reach
When determining the reach of product placement, you should not only rely on ratings and directly measurable data, such as YouTube clicks. The indirect and potential reach are just as important and relevant for product placement.
Indirect: If a product placement is accompanied by a comprehensive campaign, the contacts of this campaign should also be considered. If these were only consider separately, you would miss the immense synergies.
Potential: A movie will be re-published in various variants for many years after the first screening. A brand appearance at Fox News will no longer be relevant one year later.
4. Do not compare product placement to other advertisement with only one or two figures
If you compare product placement with other forms of advertising, you should always take all parameters and dimensions into account. In practice, some measure the value of placements often purely with the display time and compare it with commercials. Marketers respond by also taking into account the long-term reach.
Both approaches are not accurate and misleading at the end. An explicit commercial produces a completely different advertising effect and is also much less expensive to implement, as a product placement. Thus, a commercial break is possibly cheaper, but not as potent. At the end, the commercial might provide an even much worse value for money. The additional consideration of the reach might be an improvement, but does not solve the problem.
All models (that we know), which calculate an impact, advertising or media value that assigns a theoretical monetary value to the placement, are based on very few parameters and are therefore hardly relevant. Media values also usually only on consider explicit attention and reach values (see 2. for this issue). They are great as a supportive measure and success indicator. However, you have to be aware that the calculated values don’t represent any real and proper assets. Therefore, these valuescan’t be really used for comparing product placement with other forms of advertising.
In the end, product placement can be compared with other forms of advertising only when doing a clean and comprehensive A/B test. Since this is quasi impossible in practice, it is advisable to consider product placement as a complementary component of the marketing mix and not directly comparing it with completely different marketing activities. If you still want and need to compare it, you should at least take into account as many dimensions and parameters as possible.
5. Always look at the correct KPI, not only the good ones
When measuring the performance of product placement, always ensure that the right effects are correctly determined. In particular, a performance measurement should never follow the motto to only measure what looks good. As an example, let’s have a look at “Social Media Marketing”. There, the pure “Like-number” was especially in recent years often defined as a key success factor — although this value has almost no significance. With product placement it would be about a pure focus on the (un)aided brand recall. This value can be increased relatively easily and almost has no meaning, if you don’t look at more figures.
Also important is the consideration of performance indicators in combination with pre-set goals. If you wanted to only increase the attention, the brand recall is a very important parameter. However, if you wanted to primarily increase the reputation of the product and brand, the campaign may have been a total failure, although the recall value was high. Here, the recall alone as a key figure is useless.
Recommendations
In practice, one is often forced to ignore many of the described points, as the consideration would cost too much time or would be difficult to explain to other relevant departments. I want to give some recommendations, considering those circumstances.
Basically, product placement should be seen as a complementary component in the marketing mix and not 1: 1 compared with alternative forms of advertising. This is particularly important because the full potential of product placement will be unlocked when it’s accompanied by additional advertising and PR activities.
When measuring advertising effects, you should consider implicit effects at least a little. This can be done for instance by in-depth interviews. Although not all effects are taken into account in this case, gross errors and problems can be identified with this kind of research.
To be able to consider advertising effects and therefore the impact holistically, I once built Placedise. There, you could predict the advertising effects (explicit and implicit) on the basis of scientific research with big data and predictive analytics. I hope that other companies adapt this approach to offer even better solutions in the future.
In the end, it is especially important that you take into account all dimensions of success, and don’t measure performance only in terms of reach and recall values. Only with comprehensive and honest analysis, you can optimize future campaigns. Even if these findings won’t make it to the highest decision-making level in your organization, you can thereby optimize your own work and of course improve your own standing in the long term. | https://medium.com/on-advertising/5-things-that-you-should-consider-when-you-measure-the-performance-of-product-placement-734243c146c1 | ['Jens Kuerschner'] | 2020-12-21 15:33:57.004000+00:00 | ['Advertising', 'Sales', 'Product Placement', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Marketing'] |
#LiNk.Pakistan vs Sri Lanka Live Stream | Pakistan vs Sri Lanka Live Stream Watch Free Online HD TV Show, 2019
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Misbah-ul-Haq refered to inadequacies in basically all divisions of the Pakistan T20I outfit following their consecutive annihilations to a second-string Sri Lanka side in Lahore, yet shielded the choice to bring back Ahmed Shehzad and Umar Akmal.
In the course of the most recent two years, Pakistan have won 21 of out the 28 T20Is and lost seven, five of which have come over the most recent nine months. “Losing is rarely great, particularly against a group that is without their significant players, and it’s an eye-opener,” Misbah, the group’s lead trainer and boss selector, said in the post-coordinate question and answer session. “We can see inadequacy in each division: bowling, batting and especially the manner in which we got out against turn, and furthermore our demise bowling. | https://medium.com/@timmyanderson183/link-pakistan-vs-sri-lanka-live-stream-977e02b2c278 | ['Timmy Anderson'] | 2019-10-09 09:37:08.501000+00:00 | ['Live Stream', 'Pakistan Vs Sri Lanka', 'Sri Lanka', 'Cricket', 'Pakistan'] |
美國軟體工程師履歷準備技巧 | 最近有同樣是轉領域的朋友問我如何寫一份好的履歷 。身為同為轉領域的人，我想分享一下自己準備履歷的一些想法和經驗。此篇除了分享如何寫履歷外，也會分享一些轉領域者準備第一份履歷的經驗。
Photo by Bram Naus on Unsplash
基本觀念：
首先要知道的是在現在競爭激烈的CS/DS領域之下每個HR每天可能都要看不下百份履歷，所以履歷的精簡和精準就能幫助你容易脫穎而出。下面會分享如何善用關鍵字讓履歷更容易被篩檢出來。
如何讓履歷更精準精簡？
很多研究指出HR平均花10sec看一份履歷，為了讓HR更快的掃描你的履歷並且被選中，關鍵字就變得十分重要。
HR快速掃瞄履歷時，如果有他想要的關鍵字才會詳細去看project的內容，甚至有些HR懂的技術不多只看有沒有他需要的關鍵字而已
建議去LinkedIn, Glassdoor, indeed 或公司career網站 查詢相關職位的qualification大多需要哪些技能哪些關鍵技術
有了概念後去修改履歷強調出你具備這些技能，在哪些project裡面應用到這些技能。關鍵字可搭配粗體字讓人資更快找到
Example:
以上是我去Linkedin 找到的某大公司Hiring Qualification，大致上會分成Basic Qualification 和 Preferred Qualification。可以發現裡面提到了MySQL, Cassandra, Large-scale distributed system. 如果你剛好有這些方面的經驗就可以在履歷上對此多加著墨。如果沒有這些經驗多看看公司職位的qualification也可以了解業界目前的熱門技術，當作之後學習技術的參考。
另外，語句撰寫的好是能讓你的Resume看起來更專業更有重點, 提供一些tips讓語句看起來更有力度
Keyword: 描述問題和技術善用關鍵字，利用技術關鍵字說明你利用了哪些技術去解決哪些問題 Focus on impact: 說明你這個project對整個team產生了什麼影響，最後的結果有什麼影響力 Quantify your accomplishment: 善加利用數字來增加你履歷的力量，HR也更能從中量化你個人的成果。可以是amount, cost, time Action verb: 利用動詞開頭能讓你的語句更簡單且有力的呈現出自己的貢獻。 Example: Implemented, Improved, Built, Developed, Automated
這裡提供一個我自己會用的簡單小公式：
Action verb + Accomplishment + 技術
Example: Reduced 10% of XX server latency by using Redis as a cache
排版
Resume以一頁為主，頁數太多HR也沒太多時間全部看完，如果你的經歷豐富超過兩頁我建議只放上質量比較高的project即可。 字體不宜太小 10 — 12為主，行距切勿太緊密 跟你想找的工作無關的經驗不要放 切勿有錯別字 利用好的結構、順序
履歷結構和順序有很多種寫法，這邊提供我自己覺得不錯的：
New grad:
Personal info: 姓名、電話、Email、地址、 Linkedin、Github Education: 學校、科系、GPA(太爛就別放了) Skills&Tools: 例如C++, python, SQL等等。盡量只放自己真的熟悉的技術 Intern Experience: 有實習經驗的話非常好，可以詳細寫出你在實習期間做了什麼專案、對公司作出了什麼貢獻 Research Experience: 學術研究經驗 Projects: 課堂專案、side projects Courses: 如果以上內容還不夠填滿你的Resume，可以加上修過的課程
Experienced:
Personal info Skill: 有個說法是skills放越多的代表這個candidate越菜，所以建議只放自己真的有一定了解的技術，只摸過一點皮毛的建議不要放 Work/Intern experience: 有工作經驗以後，此欄位就是你整個履歷最重要的內容，在面試時最常被問到的就是過去工作經驗，所以需要好好花心思在此。 Projects: 除了工作以外如果有side projects可以展示出你對技術的熱誠 Education: 有一段工作經驗以後學歷就變得不是那麼重要，建議順序放後面一些
如何充實履歷？
轉領域的人常常會遇到自己做過的projects太少不夠塞滿resume，我剛轉領域念Computer Science時也有這個問題，我建議可以去以下幾個地方找些project來做：
線上課程如Udemy, Coursera都會有以projects為主的課，找些自己有興趣且Projects質量較高的課程來修。 如果還在學校，可以找系上教授問問有沒有Projects可以參與 去一些Open source論壇找自己有興趣的project參與，網路上很多如何參與open source project的教學可以參考
projects做完如果可以盡量放上去github。放上去github可以向HR和Engineering team 證明你真的有做過這些projects。建議可以在project目錄下寫個Readme.md，內容可以包括目的、技術與框架、功能、專案架構、如何make&run、demo video、結果。
結語：
履歷的準備是絕對不可以忽略的一環，履歷就是你給HR的第一印象，沒有好的第一印象就算再有能力、面試準備的多完善也拿不到面試門票。好的履歷絕對可以幫助你多拿到幾家面試！
謝謝大家耐心閱讀，希望這些分享有幫助到你 | https://medium.com/@chris34346/%E7%BE%8E%E5%9C%8B%E8%BB%9F%E9%AB%94%E5%B7%A5%E7%A8%8B%E5%B8%AB%E5%B1%A5%E6%AD%B7%E6%BA%96%E5%82%99%E6%8A%80%E5%B7%A7-f7b247922a5c | ['Chris Cheng'] | 2020-12-15 08:22:44.377000+00:00 | ['Resume', 'Software Engineer', 'Job Hunting'] |
LeetCode problem #24–Swap nodes in pairs (JavaScript) | In this LeetCode challenge, we’re asked to create a function that takes a LinkedList and swaps each of its ListNode elements in pairs. In other words, if the LinkedList’s values start as [1, 2, 3, 4] our function should change it to [2, 1, 4, 3] .
The reason this challenge isn’t incredibly easy is because of the way in which we swap ListNodes. Unlike arrays, ListNodes require updating once swapped, to ensure that their .next pointers are correct. What this mans is that in order to swap 2 ListNodes, the following must take place (note that when I say “point” in these instructions, I am referring to that node’s .next value):
The node before the nodes being swapped must point to node 2 Node 2 must now point to node 1 Node 1 must now point to node 3
For both of the below solutions, we initialise a “dummy” list, which is a copy of the original LinkedList, with a dummy node added to its head. This allows us to manipulate what was originally the first ListNode easily, and we can then chop off this dummy node at the end by returning the dummy LinkedList’s .next property.
Solution #1: While loop
In this solution, we initialise a copy of the original LinkedList which we will use to traverse it, swapping as we go. We then run a while loop for so long as there remain 2 or more elements in the new LinkedList, as 2 are required in order to perform a swap.
Finally, we swap the 2 nodes, traverse 2 nodes further into the LinkedList, and the process repeats.
Solution #2: Recursive
This approach is more or less identical to the while loop, but is slightly more concise. The performance differences between the two approaches in JavaScript are negligible. | https://medium.com/@duncan-mcardle/leetcode-problem-24-swap-nodes-in-pairs-javascript-ec9ec076776a | ['Duncan Mcardle'] | 2020-11-06 20:02:06.393000+00:00 | ['Leetcode Medium', 'Leetcode Solution', 'Javascript Development', 'Leetcode', 'JavaScript'] |
Venture Capital Funding Hasn’t Just Recovered — It’s Booming | Venture Capital Funding Hasn’t Just Recovered — It’s Booming
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Containment measures for COVID-19 plunged the world into a deep recession, with tens of millions of people losing their jobs.
However, Venture Capital funding survived much of the crash intact, down just 4% year-over-year in the first quarter, and down just 2% YoY in Q2. The second quarter already represented significant growth from March’s bottom, up 17 percent quarter over quarter.
The numbers for Q3 show that there’s indeed been a swift turnaround, as funding was up 9% YoY. Q3 was a “seven quarter high” in venture funding for US companies, and Q4 is on pace for significant YoY growth.
Figures by CrunchBase. Q1, Q2, Q3. Visualized by author.
Q4 — The Grand Finale
Venture capital runs the gamut from angel investments all the way to IPO, and there are a lot of exciting IPOs rounding out 2020, including Affirm, Airbnb, DoorDash, QuantumScape, Wish, Roblox, ThoughtSpot, UIPath, and C3.ai.
There’s a bunch more, and several will run into 2021, but in any case, there’s a lot of recent VC funding and deals in the pipeline.
Affirm is a $10 billion installment loans company that filed for IPO on October 8th, and is expected to list once the SEC completes its review.
QuantumScape is an Electric Vehicle battery company with exciting tech that supposedly surpasses Telsa — a rival whose stock is up over 10,000% all-time.
C3.ai is an AI solutions company that IPOd under the ticker $AI. Their products include AutoML, a niche within AI that’s growing even faster than the industry as a whole. While I haven’t worked with C3.ai in particular, I work with AutoML tools like Obviously.AI, which makes implementing AI orders of magnitude easier, so there’s a lot of potential.
Not Just a Recovery, an IPO Boom
The long line of IPOs may even rival the frenzy of the dot-com era, and become the biggest year ever for IPOs. A lot can change in the next month, but it’ll be a big year no matter what.
Globally, U.S. exchanges have made up 87% of IPO proceeds in Q3, according to the Global IPO trends: Q3 2020 report. In the first three quarters of 2020, well over 100 companies IPOd, including long-awaited giants like Palantir and Snowflake.
Summary
If you’re a startup looking for funding, quarterly financing data shows that now is an incredible time. You need look no further than Crunchbase or even Twitter to find countless startups raising capital. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/venture-capital-funding-hasnt-just-recovered-it-s-booming-6ffd1b5b2c2c | ['Frederik Bussler'] | 2020-12-13 11:43:23.811000+00:00 | ['VC', 'Investing', 'Venture Capital', 'Startup', 'Funding'] |
Telling false stories to our children is favorable? Is Santa Claus beneficial? | Telling false stories to our children is favorable? Is Santa Claus beneficial? Jorge Castro ·Dec 10, 2020
Cheating is dangerous. Using false stories to manipulate our children, so they perform what we want, unconsciously, we are programming their brains to adopt this method as good because it is pragmatic and beneficial. We use their ingenuity and misconception for the greater good. If this method echoes for many years, as adults, we accept abuse from politicians, leaders, and corporations, even when data and evidence are available and enormous. The economy evolves, inventing surplus wants, and aspirations. We condemn our governors as liars but can not act; we only witness egomaniacs and sociopaths committing conflict as kids powerless in a dysfunctional household. | https://medium.com/@jorgeprax/telling-false-stories-to-our-children-is-favorable-is-santa-claus-beneficial-f607094c89f0 | ['Jorge Castro'] | 2020-12-10 19:31:01.816000+00:00 | ['Neuroscience', 'Brain', 'Politics'] |
How Smartphones Change Our Relationships | Humans are social animals. We seek companionship and acceptance. The relationships we build are critical to our individual happiness and well-being. On the hierarchy of needs, Maslow puts “love and belonging” third, superseded only by basic physiological survival and general safety.
The way we fulfill this need is by sharing events, thoughts, feelings and ideas with one another. By opening ourselves up to others, we build the trust and common ground required for deep, reciprocal relationships.
This process of relationship building has played out since at least the dawn of recorded history, but technology is starting to shift this fundamental human activity.
I recently finished reading Enchanted Objects by David Rose, of the MIT Media Lab. The book was eye opening on many levels, but I was particularly struck by his points on a concept known as the “filter bubble”.
The filter bubble is the individual conscious space we each occupy. It is created by our unique perception of our surroundings. We all have a bubble. It comes part and parcel with life as a conscious being. Our bubble is shaped, over time, by the aggregate of our interactions with all the things around us.
While our personal bubble is unique, it also shares elements with the bubbles of other people in our lives. These common elements are the result of shared experiences. When we share an interaction with another person our filter bubbles overlap. These overlaps form the basis of our relationships.
Think of these overlaps as Venn diagrams. They are only partial and are never a complete mirror.
Take, for example, two friends together at a concert. They both have a similar physical experience. They hear the same music, experience the same basic smells, sights, sounds, atmosphere, and weather. They share the same jokes and discussions and overhear some of the same conversations. This is the overlap. The shared portion of the Venn diagram. But, each person also has their own inner monologue. Their own reactions to the physical experience. You’ve no doubt experienced the flood of memories and emotions that can come from hearing a piece of music or smelling a familiar smell. This inner experience is where the Venn diagram diverges.
Our circle on the Venn diagram represents our full experience of life, both shared and internal. But the overlaps are where we stitch ourselves together. This is where connection, community, family, friendship and love happen.
The deeper our relationship with someone the more we work to expand the overlapping segments of our filter bubbles. We talk about our feelings in the moment and tell stories about the memories an experience dredges up. We divulge more of our inner monologue.
This sharing strengthens our relationships, but it takes work. It requires presence and it often requires shared catalysts (i.e. the concert mentioned above).
This is where technology is changing things.
Smartphones are a persistent, personal window into a world outside of your current experience. The people you are with have no insight into what you are reading, watching or hearing. And even more, to interact with a smartphone requires attentive processing, which means your brain must be almost fully engaged. Mentally, the phone pulls you completely out of your current environment.
As such, the interactions that occur through your smartphone fall squarely on the divergent side of the Venn diagram. They are not shared, they are part of your inner experience.
The more time spent staring into your phone the less present you are in the moment, and the more the foundation of a shared experience shrinks. This means the divergent sides of the Venn diagram grow at the expense of the overlap. Even your inner monologue completely changes. You are no longer reacting to shared stimuli, you are reacting to something happening miles away in cyberspace that only you can see.
Take, once again, our two friends at the concert. If one is now spending time checking their phone, they are effectively eliminating the shared catalyst. They miss jokes and discussions. They don’t see events as they occur. Depending on the depth of interaction with the phone, they may even become oblivious to the music. From a sensory standpoint, they become functionally blind to their surroundings.
With every passing moment the two sides of the Venn diagram drift further and further apart. This disconnection chips away at the core of the shared experience. With less commonality in the physical experience, the work of sharing the inner experience becomes extremely challenging. It is difficult for the person on their phone to relay their feelings and thoughts because their friend is not privy to the other side of the interaction. Likewise, the friend engaged with the concert is unable share their thoughts and feelings because the other has missed the relevant pieces.
The smartphone dismantles all of the relationship building opportunities of the shared experience. Effectively, the two friends are alone together at a concert.
And the impact runs even deeper than that.
Almost all interactions on a smartphone are asynchronous. Take texting for example. You send a message out into cyberspace and wait for a response. In the time between sending the message and receiving a response there is no feedback. You are completely blind to the reaction of the message recipient. This of course differs from a face-to-face conversation, where, even if the verbal response is delayed, you still receive real-time feedback in the form of facial expressions and body language.
These non-verbal cues are part of the filter bubble overlap. They are physical insights into a person’s inner monologue. They improve your understanding of the person and help guide the conversation. Texting, social media and many other digital communication tools are devoid of this nuance. You’re left to interpret all of those cues from whatever digital response you receive. And the longer a response is delayed the more you start to infer things with no real context to support them.
Say a friend takes longer than normal to respond to a text message. Your mind attempts to fill in the gaps left by the lack of non-verbal cues and physical context. Maybe they are mad. Maybe your message offended them in some way. Maybe their phone is dead. Or maybe they are locked in a life or death struggle with a Grizzly bear. Unfortunately, in the asynchronous world of smartphone interactions there are a million reasons a response might be delayed, but you have no way of accurately reading the situation.
These asynchronous interactions create a weak filter bubble overlap. There is no shared physical context, as you are both in different locations, and all you are able to know about the inner context is what the other person chooses to divulge in their response.
Back to our concert goers, the net of all of this is that the person checking their phone at the concert is left with nothing but a set of weak connections. Their interactions through the phone are weak by nature, and in pursuing those, they have lost their opportunity for a strong connection with their friend who is physically with them at the show.
They have missed their chance to forge a deep connection with another person through shared experience. Which is the critical piece to addressing our need for love and belonging.
The more technology captures our attention, the more our shared experiences with others become weak and superficial. The Venn diagrams of our relationships overlap less and less. This change in our interactions is touching every aspect of our life. A recent study even found that 20% of young adults report using their smartphones during sex. That this is coinciding with a rise in loneliness, especially in young people, cannot be coincidental.
As screens become more and more personalized this filter bubble issue is only going to increase. Smartphones are just a middle step in personalizing our screen-based experiences. The next wave of screen technology, including personal heads-up displays like Google Glass and augmented reality, will eventually allow us to experience the entire world in a completely personal way of our own choosing. The possibilities are endless but they are also ripe with risk. How far could our filter bubbles diverge when every detail of our experience is personalized?
This is not to say that these technological advances are inherently bad. But it is to us to acknowledge that these issues exist and do the work to address them.
As designers, how might we change our design approaches in order to drive stronger human-to-human connections? How can we better leverage technology to enhancing shared experience and physical context instead of diminishing it?
We talk about human-centered design and/or user-centered design, but are these ideas too individualized? Do they miss the larger design context? What would it mean to start thinking about humanity-centered design or community-centered design instead? | https://hairyelefante.medium.com/how-smartphones-change-our-relationships-2acedaa0b1d1 | ['Jesse Weaver'] | 2018-08-06 21:24:06.963000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Technology', 'Tech'] |
Do NOT Waste Your Money on Toys this Year! | Do NOT Waste Your Money on Toys this Year!
photo credit: Nick Fewings Unsplash
Holidays are coming, and it’s shaping up to be a very long winter, one that may feel like the longest on record! Because of the pandemic, we may be spending a lot more time at home as more schools are forced to transition to remote learning. You might think this is the perfect time to stock up on toys that will keep kids busy.
Forget it! Save your money.
There’s a better solution. My advice is based on 25 years of experience as a clinical and academic pediatrician and 21 more years as a parent. But don’t just trust me. The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees; they say the best gift for your kid may be a box.
Why choose a simple, boring brown box over that shiny new toy with bright colors, flashing lights, and moving parts? Over the last century, modern manufacturing and global trade have changed the toy market forever, which is now over a 20 billion dollar industry. Have you ever been to Toy Fair?
Every year, new toys hit the market. Competition and the race for the next trendy gizmo drives new products to become increasingly complex and specialized. As a result, many toys have become more limited in function, each with a complex set of instructions and a single way to play. That’s great for teaching kids how to follow the rules but fails to foster creativity or truly inspire children to think outside the box. In my experience, teaching kids to follow a single set of rules to create a single acceptable outcome is very well accomplished by our modern educational system (that’s another article) and has no place in playtime. The beauty and value of play are lost when a toy comes with instructions. Play is about expanding creativity rather than limiting it.
For instance, take the world’s most iconic toy, Lego. The original kit was literally a set of blocks that snap together. In 1949, Lego had one set, described as Binding Bricks. Now Lego has no less than 17,000 unique sets. We now need to buy tens of kits to create a city and follow hundreds of pages of instructions, only to wind up with an identical city to the next door neighbor’s. And if your kids are anything like mine, once a Lego kit is assembled, Lord help the parent who tries to take it apart to extend the playtime. In truth, the best way to play with Lego is to toss them in a box and hide the instructions.
Toy companies are not the only ones to blame; the modern education system contributes to creativity loss. This generation of parents has been trained to believe that there is a right and wrong way to do things, focusing on standardized tests and conformity in answers. We are tricked into believing that the best toys should come with a gazillion parts, a complex and detailed set of rules, a single way to do it right, and a healthy dose of anxiety and frustration. So how does the cardboard box fix this problem?
Cardboard fosters endless creativity. For starters, shipping boxes don’t come with rules. Unlike toys, they don’t even come with parts; a child is not told what that box should become. It’s up to the child’s own imagination. They need to create the toy they want to play with. A box can become a kid-sized medieval fort or castle, teleportation devises from the future, a theatre for the next 3-hour performance you will happily sit through, or it may become a spaceship that will bring the family on a trip to Mars.
photo by 3DuxDesign
2. Supports self-esteem. With open-ended materials like cardboard and no wrong way to play, every child has the opportunity to feel the pride that comes with success; something that, as a pediatrician, I feel is severely deficient in modern society and is in part to blame for the massive number of kids currently on anxiety medications in the USA.
3. Builds 3D spatial thinking and STEM skills. Constructing an entire city or prototyping the next modern invention with cardboard requires many skills, including fine motor, 3D conceptualization, basic geometry, and engineering concepts.
4. Saves the Planet. Perhaps one of the greatest values of using the cardboard box as a toy is the environmental benefit. With over 26 million tons of plastic going into landfills every year, it is easy to appreciate that we don’t need more shiny plastic toys, particularly those with limited use with a short life span. Why not give a cardboard box, already made with recycled materials, a second life?
5. Saves space. The cardboard box allows parents to reclaim their formal living room. Just flatten and store projects when needed. And over-used, retired projects can always head right back into the recycling bin.
Two kids take cardboard construction to the next level.
Admittedly, not every child can instantly see hours of creativity when they look at a box. Nor can many adults. The 3DuxDesign Modeling System is a line of products designed by teenage siblings who saw the simple cardboard box's unique value but recalled the limitations of using duct tape. The two siblings teamed up to create a series of beautifully simple yet elegant reusable cardboard connectors. The 3Dux modeling system allows children to use a cardboard box to design, build, and recreate anything they can imagine. Reusable, the system allows parents to easily dismantle giant forts, reclaim their living room, and kids to recreate new structures for hours of endless creative play.
photo by 3DuxDesign
Learn more about 3dux design’s story and how Ayana and Ethan Klein are determined to bring creativity back to early childhood, one Amazon box at a time. https://www.3duxdesign.com/pages/about-the-designers
Take it to the Classroom
If fun and games aren’t all parents want for their kids and cardboard, check out some live virtual architecture and engineering classes to take cardboard construction to the next level.
Sure, we all love to see our children’s eyes light up when they open those gifts and pull out that beautiful shiny new toy. Don’t be so quick to toss the box it came in! | https://medium.com/modern-parent/dont-waste-your-money-on-toys-this-year-4503aeb9aca6 | ['Marci Lentnek Klein M.D.'] | 2020-12-09 12:35:59.592000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Parenting', 'Education', 'Education Reform', 'Parenting Advice'] |
CONDITIONAL STATEMENTS IN JAVA | As we go about our daily lives, as we try to get things done daily, we come in contact with objects of various kinds and we use these objects to carry out various task. Now one category of objects that we happen to come in contact with are devices(analog / digital), they range from your phone to your computer up to your car and the self opening door in your office or at the mall, including a television. Now you might be wondering where all this is going…… patience
In relation to what the topic is all about today, dear reader i, introduce to you the concept of CONDITIONAL STATEMENTS IN JAVA. what is a conditional statement as it relates to java programming, well simply put, its all about making decisions geared towards a desired output. Everyday we make decisions and for those decisions, we get a certain result.
In java, there are two types of decision making statements that can be used when programming a device or a software that can be run on any device such as the ones stated above. Now these statements help the device and the user of the device as well to perform an action based on a certain condition or state.
The first conditional statement is known as the IF-STATEMENT
N OTE: The if statement has three versions which are: 1. IF — STATEMENTS 2. IF / ELSE STATEMENTS 3. ELSE — IF STATEMENTS
. Using the first mentioned device, we shall see how an if statement works.
Now in java, we use if statements to check for a condition (state) of the phone and if that condition is true then an action is executed. If the condition is not true then nothing happens. As in the case of the phone, if the condition or state of our phones battery is low, then the phone tells us to charge it, if our phone storage is full, we get a notification to fix it also when there’s a software update, we are told to download….. pretty simple
The next version of the if — statement is known as the if / else statements.
. Using the second mentioned device, we shall see how an if / else statement works.
Looking at the above pic, you can see that the “if conditional” statements have been extended to perform another action in case the first is false. In the if/else statements, in addition to the first condition, we can also define another action that can be performed if the first condition is not true(“the first condition is false). The above conditions are pretty self explanatory as they happen to be evident in out daily use of computers.
The final version of the if statements is called the else if statements.
. Using the third mentioned device, we shall see how an else- if statement works.
Now in addition to the if / else, in java when you want to test other conditions you can use the else if keyword. Take the first case for example, we can see that after testing the first condition, we decided to test for two more conditions which are possible outcomes in our daily use of air conditions. So basically with the java else if statements, we have the ability to provide actions to be carried out in relation to any possible condition.
Then finally, the second type of conditional statements that are used in java is known as the “Switch Case”. Now as the name implies, it acts as a switch case that controls a light bulb. so basically there can be as many switches that act as conditions that light up various bulbs(“carry out actions”)…..see pic below
. Using the fourth mentioned device, we shall see how a switch case statement works.
Looking at the above pic, its obvious that the distance required to automatically open the door is stored in the distance variable . Following the variable declaration and initialization, the switch case follows, testing all possible distances which have their corresponding actions. So what happens there is that we store the major variable needed to carryout a specific action and then also include other cases that can perform other actions.
NOTE: you don’t always have to use a switch case to call only one specific method, it can be used to also create a scenario where several actions can be carried out depending on what the user wants.
The switch case can also, have as many cases as needed and in addition, the default statement is used to carry out an action if all the other cases don’t equal the action needed(“This is optional”)…. see pic below.
. Using the fifth mentioned device, we shall see how a switch case statement works with a default statement.
End of topic…..you have now seen how conditional statements are created in java, so go ahead and include it in your programs as you code….. see ya next time…… | https://medium.com/java-for-absolute-dummies/conditional-statements-in-java-4017415fec82 | ['Nonso Biose'] | 2017-02-05 23:58:46.529000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Learning To Code', 'Programming', 'Web Development', 'Software Development'] |
Making Every Day a Monday: Praveen Varshney & Varshney Capital | Image Courtesy of Praveen Varshney.
Praveen Varshney was born to solve problems. This knack for problem-solving initially pushed him to study Science at UBC, with a hope to work in engineering. However, after failing first-year physics, he felt a bit of a paradigm shift. As he reflected on his love for people and relationships, he saw Commerce as a better option and a natural calling. Today, he has combined that love for people and the ability to solve problems as Director at Varshney Capital Corp, a leading Merchant Banking and Venture Capital firm — in Vancouver. NBR was very fortunate to sit down with Praveen and discuss his vastly interesting philosophy of life and his greatest pieces of advice.
Growing up, Praveen’s two most influential role models were his parents. His father, Hari B. Varshney, (the Business Career Centre at Sauder is named after him), worked in accounting and had his CPA designation. Praveen decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and major in accounting. However, his desire to pursue projects that required problem-solving and thinking outside the box never faltered. He recalls an entrepreneurship course at UBC, his first foray into the field, where you designed a business idea, plan, and pitch. For Praveen, it was very formative in terms of what he wanted to do, but also just fun! However, he did not go on to pursue entrepreneurship immediately; upon graduating he worked at KPMG for five years and earned his CPA designation. A few years later, both Praveen and his father were named CPA Fellows (FCPA), an award for the distinction and honour that they brought to their profession and community.
However, his entrepreneurial instincts continued to grow, so he decided to leave KPMG and create a company with his father and brother. They initially launched a mining company in the Northwest Territories, which went on to become one of the world’s largest and last new diamond mines, Gahcho Kué. The endeavour was taken public and was a tremendous success. This led to starting their next venture: a casino company, Thunderbird Gaming. Once again, the venture was successful, went public and provided capital to fund two more ventures. One of them was Mogo: a fintech company that launched in 2003 and IPO’d on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2015 with a subsequent listing on NASDAQ. Mogo leverages the increasingly popular blockchain infrastructure to enable users to buy bitcoin, offer personal loans, provide identity fraud protection, mortgages, a Visa Prepaid Card, and free credit score with free updates. These subsequently successful ventures offered enough financial freedom for the Varshney’s to create Varshney Capital, their own family firm.
Varshney Capital has built a portfolio with unique breadth: from crypto to resource exploration to compostable, biodegradable patented single-serve coffee pods and real estate, there was no shortage of interesting innovations to discuss with Praveen. He admitted he is no expert in each and every business sector. However, his experience of building companies has given him the foresight to invest successfully in unknown industries by focusing on criteria like strong financial control, qualitative factors (the team), and timing. Firstly, Praveen noted that if a leadership team doesn’t have a strong financial grasp of their company, it’s effectively like “driving a car without any of the instruments and panels, which will ultimately lead to crashing.” Second, his ability to read qualitative factors such as the founder’s vision, passion, and the subsequent team they’ve built is one of the most important factors. Finally, once they’ve analyzed all this, they look at the timing. Praveen admitted that he doesn’t mind being a bit late to an investment opportunity because they can analyze incumbents and tweak the venture’s offering to be more successful in landing customers and partnerships.
On Praveen’s path from a traditional accountant to a prominent serial entrepreneur to an esteemed angel investor, he has reaffirmed and developed many important values that have led to his successes. He spoke to the importance of integrity. For students, he noted that if you ever want to become a leader, “you must develop integrity.” To help build the future of business, he noted leaders must act according to principle and not simply as a result of what a situation provokes, which Praveen noted as especially important in the ambiguous world of entrepreneurship. Beyond that, he discussed the value of a personal brand. For Praveen, building a brand of clarity, consistency, and constancy is vital to ensure we leave the desired impact on our partners, customers and other external parties — if done right, it leads to opportunities as you’re reputation is one of being reliable and dependable, the “go to person” wants on their team.
Within Vancouver, there are few, if any, individuals who have made as much of a social impact through business or daily life. In early 2000, the Varshney’s played a huge role in Victoria-based Carmanah Technologies becoming the largest solar-powered LED lighting company in Canada. Praveen recounted that this venture was life-changing since it was the first time he had positively affected the planet while simultaneously delivering value to shareholders. That awakening has helped shape the Varshney Capital portfolio as it now holds a number of social impact enterprises such as Little Kitchen Academy, a franchise of cooking schools for kids, and NEXE Innovations, an advanced materials company that has developed a plant-based, fully compostable coffee pod for use in Keurig brewing systems. Aside from the obvious tech ventures that have helped drive momentum in Vancouver’s startup ecosystem, Praveen feels that the continued acceleration of the market is largely thanks to such socially-driven businesses that have helped increase the amount of capital available in the market. Further, beyond his financially invested ventures, Praveen spends a tremendous amount of time helping the community by being a partner with Social Ventures Partners Vancouver, a community of philanthropists that catalyze the growth of non-profits via a unique venture model consisting of capacity-building expertise and funding. He’s also involved with numerous other charities such as Room to Read, The Dalai Lama Centre for Peace & Education, Foundations for Social Change, Covenant House and Instruments Beyond Borders.
Praveen and Varshney Capital Corp have become one of the most significant players in Vancouver’s startup ecosystem. They have helped pave a path for many others to follow, particularly by mentoring many entrepreneurs along the way. Ultimately, Praveen has a built career where
“every day is a Monday”: a day full of new ideas, inspiration and opportunity.
He mentioned that while many of his partners are beginning to consider retirement, it is far off for him as he is still having “way too much fun,” which is certainly great news for Vancouver! | https://medium.com/new-business-review/making-every-day-a-monday-praveen-varshney-varshney-capital-c3a643d8cf63 | ['New Business Review'] | 2021-04-15 16:43:53.233000+00:00 | ['Vancouver Startups', 'Social Enterprise', 'Venture Capital', 'Technology'] |
Dear 2010 self. | Dear younger me,
I’ll start by saying that you’ve done well.
I haven’t yet completed university but you are close.
You went to a new school and have adapted well. Through the years you have made new friends and lost them throughout school. It will be the same when you finish school when you realise only a few people matter.
My advice is to cherish your friendships.
Be good to your friends especially the ones close to you. There will be hardships especially when you’re trying to fit in. Don’t get too into gossip because it has caused some issues in some years.
Be kind, never forget that.
You just celebrated 10 years with a close friend unexpectedly. It happened when you randomly met and gatecrashed her date (not really but they invited you to join).
You will become more talkative just wait for the day you meet a certain girl at the bus stop where you ultimately become the best of friends a year later. She has allowed you to be more proactive in conversations and widen your friendship circle.
Oh yeah, that boy you liked in year 5, you end up being good friends with him through to year 12. You even had two classes with him, he is a great person. Don’t stress about love and relationships, continue having crushes. I only say this because yours truly is still single and has yet to mingle. | https://medium.com/from-the-outside/dear-2010-self-44a13efe5143 | ['Tracy Nguyen'] | 2019-12-31 21:51:01.112000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Friendship', 'Self-awareness', 'Reflections', 'Self'] |
3 Web Technologies Killed by Google | AngularJS
AngularJS is perhaps the first relevant JavaScript framework to appear.
It was released by Google in 2010 — at a time when the most prominent JavaScript library was jQuery.
Instead of just a library like jQuery, AngularJS, also known as Angular 1, is a whole framework that brought the MVVM concept to the world of front-end development.
In 2016 the Angular, which we know today, was released.
According to Wappalyzer, many large websites still use AngularJS for their front-end — but support will be discontinued next year.
The technology behind AngularJS is simply outdated — because modern frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular all use a CLI by now.
This allows us to write code in, for example, React.js that would not work in a browser — in Reacts case; it is the JSX syntax that is converted by the CLI into classic JS & HTML for the production version.
AngularJS, on the other hand, reminds us very much of Vue.js when we use it without CLI. Instead of converting the code, we write for production; we write everything directly in our HTML and JS files.
So are the so-called directives, which we implement as HTML attributes:
data-ng-repeat: "item in items"
Without the JavaScript code provided by AngularJS, the browser could not do anything with these attributes — a classic example of client-side rendering. But the trend is more and more towards server-side-rendering and static pages where our JavaScript data structures are converted to HTML that can be rendered in the browser.
Where for Angular, there is the so-called Angular Universal to render a page on the server-side; for AngularJS, the possibility seems to be missing.
Working without a CLI and simply importing the library over a CDN and writing code like jQuery is not that complicated. Still, CLIs have become an integral part of the developer community — regardless of the framework or library, because it makes sense to have TypeScript, Linting, and transcompiling support. Without a CLI, however, this is virtually unthinkable.
As of December 2021, AngularJS will stop long term support. | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/killed-by-google-aa2c71c324cf | ['Louis Petrik'] | 2020-11-15 12:27:39.013000+00:00 | ['Web Framework', 'Software Development', 'Google', 'Web Development', 'Cloud Computing'] |
Scaling your features | Part 2:
Effects of scaling on Gradient descent -based Machine learning Algorithm.
Scaling is also required when Gradient descent comes into the picture. If we have the variable with different scale Gradient descent will pick learning rate (alpha) which is applicable to the feature of the smallest scale.
Without scaling:
Gradient descent curve for salary
Gradient descent for age
One value of Learning Rate is not applicable for both the variable. If the Learning rate is chosen according to the age variable and then the same Learning rate is applied to the salary variable then it will take time to converge.
After Scaling:
Gradient descent curve for salary
Gradient descent curve for Age
Here the same learning rate is chosen for both the variables
So, the Gradient descent won’t take time to converge.
Normally we train our ML model offline but if we need to train our model online then training time is very important.
So, we can say that the purpose of scaling is to reduce training time and it doesn’t face a significate effect on accuracy. | https://medium.com/@ncjatin/scaling-your-features-c9f6bf8ffb20 | ['Jatin Chaturvedi'] | 2019-05-01 14:11:41.172000+00:00 | ['Feature Engineering', 'Scaling', 'Knn', 'Gradient Descent', 'Machine Learning'] |
Profitable Crypto trading strategies part 5: Voltra | The name Voltra is actually the combination of “Volume” and “Trades”. The reason is pretty obvious: the Voltra algorithm is primarily constructed on the traded volume. This means that it generates buy and sell signals using the price and its traded volume. This is actually our very first algorithm where trading volume is a key component.
The first unfortunate part is that the algorithm has four hyper-parameters which are tough cookie to optimize. Matter of fact, I had to run the (brute force) optimization code all night because it takes several hours to finish. The second part is that, like all our previous methods, it is not a magical formula that wins every trade. But if you know a tad about investing or trading then this does not come as a surprise.
Also Read: Best Crypto Trading Bots
Let us now take a look at Voltra’s buy and sell decisions. The chart below shows the Bitcoin (BTC-USDT) market at 30-minute intervals for 30 days. As you already know by now: the “B” marks indicate buys and “S” indicate sells. | https://medium.com/coinmonks/profitable-crypto-trading-strategies-part-5-voltra-633f81eed360 | [] | 2020-12-28 18:52:35.649000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Ethereum', 'Investing', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
What Is Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)? — AAX Academy | As we’ve explained earlier on in our article about Wrapped Bitcoin, WBTC is an interesting ERC20-based token, backed by Bitcoin. Issued on the Ethereum ecosystem, it acts as a unit that can be stored in wallets, used in smart contracts and transferred to dApps. To date, over 115K of WBTC has already changed hands, currently coming second only to Chainlink in terms of market cap. So, why is this asset so popular?
Why WBTC?
Let’s say you’ve got Bitcoin in your wallet and have heard a lot about DeFi this summer when the aggregated weekly volume on DEXes broke past the $8-billion mark. You really want to put your capital to good use and try this “DeFi thing” even though the numbers have dropped almost twice by December 2020 — what are you going to do to connect Bitcoin and Ethereum?
WBTC can solve this problem, and the solution is as elegant as easy. In 2019, the founders of a joint project of three organizations BitGo, Kyber Network and Ren suggested to wrap the oldest and largest cryptocurrency on the market in the ERC20 standard, to integrate Bitcoin into the Ethereum blockchain — et voila!
There’s no more need to run a separate Bitcoin node if you’re a DEX, ERC20 wallet or another dApp. The liquidity associated with the BTC market is brought to the Ethereum blockchain and the transaction time is now reduced.
According to the official custodian of the project BitGo, WBTC users will be able to utilize Bitcoin in a wide variety of new decentralized use cases, including on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), as collateral for stable coins or lending, for payments and flexible smart contracts within the Ethereum ecosystem. The leading use cases will be powered by important decentralized projects including Kyber Network, Republic Protocol, MakerDAO, Dharma, Airswap, IDEX, Compound, DDEX, Hydro Protocol, Set Protocol, Prycto, RadarRelay, and Gnosis.
How WBTC works
As the official website states, to receive WBTC, a user requests tokens from a merchant, the merchant then performs the required KYC/AML procedures and verifies the user’s identity. Once this is completed, the user and merchant execute their swap, with Bitcoin from the user transferring to the merchant, and WBTC from the merchant transferring to the user.
The significance on Wrapped BTC and similar projects is clear. It connects the DeFi space to the market for bitcoin. It also means that the bitcoin held as collateral for WBTC is essentially being HODLed, unless holders of WBTC opt for redemption. With more BTC being HODLed, scarcity increases, which can potentially have a positive impact on the price of bitcoin. | https://medium.com/aaxexchange/what-is-wrapped-bitcoin-wbtc-aax-academy-e058dfba730f | [] | 2021-01-05 07:05:30.238000+00:00 | ['Aax', 'Defi', 'Bitcoin'] |
Total Health: Dr. Tara Scott of ‘Revitalize Medical Group’ On How We Can Optimize Our Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing | Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I was born the middle child of foreign parents- my dad was literally off the boat from India and my mom was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I definitely didn’t fit in. My dad was super strict, so I became a perfectionist and overachiever. I graduated valedictorian at age 17, 1 week later started college, 2 years later went to med school and was a doctor by age 23.
What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.
I was just drawn to science and to help people. Since I was so young and awkward, I wasn’t comfortable around men and decided to go into OB/GYN to help women through all the stages of their lives.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?
The people who have been my biggest supporters were my sisters. When I was 19, my parents moved to India leaving us with no relatives except one cousin several states away. They have been the ones who have had my back and been my biggest encouragers. We all live in different states, but I couldn’t do live without them.
Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?
The struggle you are in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow.
Throughout my life I have had setbacks and challenges. The biggest one, of course, was the plane crash that left my daughter paralyzed. But with each challenge, I found a way to cultivate resilience, which served me well so I could build endurance and perseverance.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
One project I completed this year is launching my online course “Revitalize Your Hormones”. It is an educational tool for patients to start a “DIY improvement” to get their health on track. Many people reach out to me on social media, and due to restrictions with my medical license I can’t help everyone.
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. In our work, we talk a lot about cultivating wellness habits in four areas of our lives, Mental wellness, Physical wellness, Emotional wellness, & Spiritual wellness. Let’s dive deeper into these together. Based on your research or experience, can you share with our readers three good habits that can lead to optimum mental wellness? Please share a story or example for each.
There are so many things and mental wellness is something I still struggle with!
Mindset is SO important. We all have a choice, and I am working on training my mind to CHOOSE things like Joy, peace, Positivity. We are all responsible for our own triggers, so I work hard to control my reactions. There are so many stories of people who “think” about doing a certain activity (like Michael Phelps) and then when it comes time to do it, your brain actually thinks you already have done it, so it is easier and familiar. Gratitude! There has been lots of research about starting your day with Gratitude. I love the 5-minute Journal — to list 3 things I am grateful for and at the end of the day 3 amazing things that happened. Meditation and mindfulness- we are all too busy in this 24/7 society. I have made meditation a practice of mine for the last 3 years. I am also working on more stillness and less activity!
Do you have a specific type of meditation practice or Yoga practice that you have found helpful? We’d love to hear about it.
I really enjoy Yoga and wish that I could get there more often. I like to do a guided meditation and I find the app Headspace so helpful. My mind is going a mile a minute and they have great introductory videos to help you understand how to begin a meditation practice.
Thank you for that. Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum physical wellness? Please share a story or example for each.
Three habits that I have maintained in my life for optimum wellness are exercise, diet, and meditation.
I have always liked to exercise, and have played soccer, enjoyed running and also triathlons. For me, running is my Prozac! It gives me community with my running friends and also lets me exercise as well. Currently we are on a mission to run a half marathon in every state.
I wasn’t always a healthy eater- I used to live on heat and eat and have a serious sugar problem. But as I get older, I realize that I feel much better when I eat healthy. I avoid gluten, dairy and most grains. I have plenty of raw veggies every day and usually only eat meat 4–5 x per week. I also like a lot of seafood. I try to eat food in its native form and avoid processed food.
Meditation is only something I have done the last 3 years or so. Most of my life has been stressful as an OB/GYN/ entrepreneur/ mom of 3, but I finally realized that there will ALWAYS be stress. So instead of trying to reduce it, I started concentrating on how to manage it. I like to do a guided meditation every morning with the app Headspace.
Do you have any particular thoughts about healthy eating? We all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?
I have a ton of thoughts here as this is what I spend a lot of focus on with patients. Food is so addicting! I think the thing that has helped the most is concentrating more not on what you eat but WHEN you eat. Eating 3 meals and 3 snacks is actually really bad for you! Now, what is important is to have at least 12–14 hours overnight where you DON’T eat. And also, ideally you should go 4 hours between meals. It takes your body that long metabolically to get your sugar levels back in check. I also find that for most the macros are off- we tend to eat a lot of carbs and not enough good fats! Our brains need fat- salmon, avocado, nuts.
Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum emotional wellness? Please share a story or example for each.
This one isn’t as easy for me. I wasn’t encouraged to have emotions when I was a child. I think realizing that you can’t please everyone all the time was pivotal for me.
One habit that I love is using a gratitude journal — I love the 5 Minute Journal. Every morning you write 3 things you are grateful for a one affirmation. At the end of the day, you write 3 amazing things that happened that day and how you could have made the day better.
The last thing that has been helpful lately is realizing my triggers and taking responsibility for my triggers. If someone does something that triggers me, it is MY responsibility to control my response.
Do you have any particular thoughts about the power of smiling to improve emotional wellness? We’d love to hear it.
Smiling is definitely contagious! I think they actually studied how long it would take someone to smile back- and they always reciprocated. And when you smile, you just can’t feel down.
Finally, can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum spiritual wellness? Please share a story or example for each.
For me, spiritual wellness is tied to my faith. I was not raised as a Christian but found my faith as an adult after I had my children. In 2019 when my family survived a small plane crash and my daughter and husband were critically injured, that was a time that I had to rely heavily on God. That he will work things out for His purpose, not mine. And even though it didn’t change the situation, it did provide me comfort.
Do you have any particular thoughts about how being “in nature” can help us to cultivate spiritual wellness?
Being in nature is so important! The older I get, the more I crave being outside and feel the calming effect. I just look at the mountains and am instantly in a better mood. They have actually done studies of patients who have had surgery. The ones that had a hospital window that let them see outside to nature actually healed quicker!
Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I think the biggest thing I would want women (and really even men) to know is to be proactive about their health. For women, they should have their hormone levels tested so they know what they are at risk for. We live in a world that is very proactive about heart disease, but not breast cancer. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, and I feel that it is preventable. Our focus right now is on early detection, but I would love to focus on prevention!
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)
There are so many!
My role models in my career are Dr. Sara Gottfried and Dr. Carrie Jones. I would also love to meet Michelle Obama or Princess Kate. I would also love to meet Oprah!! There are too many to choose from.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
YouTube- Tara Scott MD
Facebook- Revitalizemed
Instagram- Revitalizemed
Website- https://revitalizemed.com/
Online course- https://academy.revitalizemed.com/
Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success. | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/total-health-dr-tara-scott-of-revitalize-medical-group-on-how-we-can-optimize-our-mental-physic-f22fc7fb4aba | ['Authority Magazine'] | 2020-12-29 20:25:54.852000+00:00 | ['Wellness'] |
First-Gen Apple AirPods Are the Best Wireless Headphones for Hiking | This review starts with a disclaimer: the best headphones for hiking are probably not wireless. The price difference between wireless headphones and the free set that came with your smartphone isn’t always worth it for the hiker who is prone to breaking or losing expensive tech.
But if going cordless is a risk you’re willing to take, the first-generation (specifically) Apple AirPods are the absolute best for the trail.
Sound Pass Through
Wireless headphones, especially ones designed for working out or active lifestyles, will boast creating the perfect seal in your ear to block out all ambient noise.
You don’t want that.
You need all five senses during a hike, especially out in the wilderness. There’s no way you can hear the warning rattle from a Western Diamondback or mountain biker approaching when there’s noise-cancelling technology in your ear. AirPods don’t create a seal and do let in outside noise, and that’s exactly what you need.
Pro tip: I listen to podcasts at a low volume because music drowns out ambient noise, even with the AirPods.
Too Ubiquitous to Look Silly
When Apple first launched AirPods in late 2016, it made sure that every picture you saw showed someone wearing them from a profile view. There’s a reason for that, as CNET’s Scott Stein showed in this picture that went viral:
Photo by James Martin/CNET
Pretty silly.
That looked ridiculous in 2016 and maybe it still looks ridiculous now, but AirPods are so common in 2019 that we don’t even notice. Take a look around at the gym, on public transportation, or on the trail — AirPods are now so recognizable that they completely disappear as a fashion statement.
Bad At Camouflage
You will eventually drop something valuable during a hike — it happens. And when it does, you better hope it has a stark contrast against the desert or forest floor.
Most AirPod competitors come in black, which isn’t exactly camouflage, but I find the bright white of Apple accessories easier to find on the ground (as illustrated above).
Pairs Perfectly With Apple Watch
Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash
I always hike with my phone, but trail runners will love the freedom of hitting the dirt with nothing more than an Apple Watch and AirPods. I’ve done a few runs with only a podcast synced to my watch and it is truly freeing.
Cheaper First-Gen Price
Now that Apple has launched its second-generation AirPods, and a third well on the way, you can grab a first-gen pair for less than $130 new and even less than that used.
This makes it easier to cope with your loss if one does decide to take a tumble down the side of the Grand Canyon.
Charging Case Fits in Hip Pocket
This isn’t exclusive to AirPods but it does make me feel better about every hip pocket that is too small for today’s smartphones (which is all of them).
Keeping the charging case in my Osprey’s hip pocket makes it easy to access and keeps my Clif Bar company.
Conclusion: There’s One Big “But”
There’s a catch to AirPods, and it’s a big one — you either have the ears for them or you don’t. Some people will put in a pair of AirPods and they’ll fall right out. There are some third party accessories to improve the fit but there’s only so much you can do.
Luckily there’s an inexpensive way to figure this out: if the wired EarPods that come with your iPhone don’t fit, then AirPods won’t fit. It’s that simple.
Do hike with the AirPods, prefer a different brand of wireless headphones, or blaze the trail with something different entirely? Hit follow and let me know in the comments below.
Follow me on Instagram | https://9to5hiker.com/apple-airpods-hiking-f501401a40a9 | ['Jim Burch'] | 2019-08-09 19:13:38.246000+00:00 | ['Gear', 'Hiking', 'iPhone', 'Technology', 'Apple'] |
The harsh reality of esports design | Design is needed in almost any industry, especially in esports. Esports is a form of organized multiplayer sports competition using video games; it is essentially like the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup but the players participate in video game titles like League of Legends and Valorant. Esports is currently a billion-dollar industry that is only going to grow in the many years to come.
After COVID-19 hit in January 2020, there has been a new influx of new designers on Twitter and this resulted in many new talents among the esports design community.
The rapid rise of esports and its global audience — expected to near 500 million this year — is too important to the future of the sports industry for TV broadcasters to sit on the fence.
Esports arena
What is esports design?
Esports design is still a new, young, and fast-growing industry that is often under the impression that it is not very professional due to it attracting a much younger and social media-oriented audience. However, many esports designers are very talented and have a great eye for design.
Esports design encapsulates different disciplines within design which are not limited to:
Motion graphics designer
Illustrator
Stream designer
Merch designer
Logo and brand identity designer
Here are some designs made by creatives in the esports industry.
Player graphic by Obscur and Finn Marten
Esports logos by Goldfield Design
Merch concepts by Obscur and Finn Marten
Esports itself is quite an interesting industry and not as convoluted as you might think. There are so many more opportunities for people to get involved in esports than just as a gamer. There are roles including content creator, competitive player, and talent acquisition. However, many of the creative roles in esports that require you to work behind the scenes are underappreciated and are underpaid and some even work for free for their respective teams. Esports design is often overlooked by newcomers on Twitter at first glance as it’s quite hidden among the public eye due to the designers of the “esports design community” interacting solely on Twitter. The demographic of those esports designers are mainly very young and are males aged 12–18. There is an overwhelming amount of artistic and creative talent from these designers; many of these designers are highly skilled in Adobe software such as Photoshop however many lack professionalism, understanding of basic design principles, and often undersell themselves.
State of creatives in the esports industry
Many creatives in esports currently have a great artistic eye, genuine passion for design, and creative culture, however many are inexperienced with working in a professional environment. The issue that lies is that many of the designers do not follow basic design principles, brand guidelines, or grids due to the normalcy of not following rules in the esports design scene. The esports industry thrives off hustle culture and many esports designers improve their designing ability simply by grinding alone or by joining design competitions hosted by esports organizations like Misfits on platforms like Twitter. Esports design is fairly competitive with approximately 5% of the population actually working for tier 1 organizations such as Team Liquid and Evil Geniuses.
State of esports organizations
There is a tier and hierarchy for the esports organizations which is commonly agreed upon among the members of the community.
Tier 1: These organizations are world renown and are established in their own right. They often pay the median salary to all their employees and offer full-time positions paying an hourly wage. However, the roles in these organizations are extremely scarce and competitive and only 1% of the population in the esports design community manage to work for one of these organizations.
Ex. 100 Thieves, Luminosity Gaming, and Evil Geniuses
100 Thieves logo
Tier 2: These organizations are popular among the members of the esports community and semi-popular outside of the esports community. They often only have freelance and contract positions and often pay per graphic. Competition is very high among these organizations as the majority of designers in the community aim to join at least one of these organizations in their careers and make fan projects for these organizations.
Ex. SSG, OG Esports, and NYSL
Tier 3: These organizations are only known among the veterans of the esports community or are university-based esports teams. They are also the ones to underpay their creatives or request them to work for free. Competition is fairly low among the freelance positions in these organizations which is why many creatives end up working for them.
Ex. Obey Alliance, Soniqs Esports, and Pioneers
Tier 4: These organizations are often newly established and many classify themselves as teams more than actual organizations. These organizations often have a wide roster of roles and it’s very easy to join these teams. However, this is often a newcomer’s trap as many of these teams do not pay their creatives at all and most of these teams don’t even compete in tournaments or in the professional gaming scene and are made of mostly just small streamers and gamers.
Ex. Team Vigilant and Team Villainous
The sad truth is that most esports organizations underpay their creatives and some ask them to work for free in exchange for using their title in their name. In addition, there have been several organizations that have been doing a scheme where they host a design challenge to get designers to create free graphics for them. Most esports organizations also do not retain branding for too long as the length of their audience’s attention span is very low so they are always seeking a refresh of their brand identities.
What are the benefits of being inside the esports industry?
As much as I admire and appreciate the various talented and hardworking people in the community there are far more negatives than positives I can think of.
Some positives I can think of:
Active, friendly, supportive, and closely-knit community
Connecting with other designers interested in esports culture
Discovering talented artists and finding inspiration for merch design
What are the disadvantages of being inside the esports industry?
Oversaturation of inexperienced designers
Difficult to get into if you have few connections/followers
Lack of permanent positions
Low salary
Lack of professionalism
Success often depends more on the number of followers than raw talent and experience
Lack of inclusivity for women
Common misconceptions about esports design
A common misconception for esports is that it is easy to get into if so many designers are inexperienced in the industry. In fact, that is exactly why it is very competitive due to the oversaturation of inexperienced designers and it encourages esports organizations to hire these inexperienced designers with no real experience outside of freelancing for cheap or free labor. I know several instances of tier 1 esports organizations including FNATIC where they hired a 16-year-old designer that has little to no understanding of grid systems.
Is it worth getting into esports design in 2022?
Yes, if you are willing to dedicate thousands of hours, have a genuine interest in esports, and want to support your favorite team.
No, if you don’t have much time in your hands and wish for a sustainable and stable career.
Future of esports design
A major underlying and ongoing issue in the delay of growth for esports design is the lack of inclusivity for women in the industry. In fact, 99% of the people working in the industry are male and this resulting gender gap makes it very difficult to make esports mainstream.
Another underlying issue that is hindering the growth and success of esports design is designers underselling themselves and not being professional with their own brand. Many of these designers may clout tweet to receive likes and exposure and it overall looks bad on the community.
Another issue is that many of the designers asking for feedback chase only for appreciation and compliments and do not know how to take any constructive criticism and feedback and saying anything other than positive is often shunned upon. This results in designers with a massive ego and overconfident in their design ability and hinders their professional and technical growth.
Despite all the shortcomings, there will be an increase in lucrative opportunities in the industry with an increasing amount of universities and colleges also implementing a dedicated esports curriculum. | https://medium.com/@stephenzyan/the-harsh-reality-of-esports-design-9ddaa4de5bcd | ['Stephen Z. Yan'] | 2021-12-25 05:47:41.111000+00:00 | ['Visual Design', 'Esports Design', 'Graphic Design', 'Esports', 'Branding'] |
Kenny Mathers, Votive Candle Masturbator, Still at Large | Authorities continue the search for thirteen-year-old altar boy Kenny Mathers, who fled Sunday services after performing a provocative gesture on a votive candle during divine liturgy.
What started as a run-of-the-mill liturgy at St. Mark’s Orthodox Church in Bare Back, OH, ended in carnage. Witnesses stated that Kenny performed a masturbatory action with the candle while Father Stacey delivered the sermon. During a speech on overcoming carnal desire, parishioners saw Kenny grab a red candle, blow out the flame and proceed to rub his hand up and down the shaft in an attempt to get a laugh from his fellow altar boys. The joke soon turned violent as Kenny continued to fondle the candle, even as the laughter subsided.
Robert Christopher, sub-deacon, saw the spectacle from the sanctuary. “He jacked it off,” said Robert. “No other way to put it. Kid just started whacking off that candle like it was no one’s business. It was nasty, but I gotta hand it to him, he’s got excellent form.”
Others were not as appreciative of Kenny’s talent for choking the chicken. Marybeth Williamson, Sisterhood treasurer and choir soloist spoke after the service. She sat in the back of an ambulance called for several women who fainted as Kenny bashed the candle. She had an emergency blanket draped around her shoulders. Marybeth managed to speak through her shivering:
“It was disturbing. One minute I’m enjoying Father’s moving homily, and the next I’m watching one of our most devout altar boys grab a candle and start…pumping it! He pumped it like he just got back from a week-long vacation to his grandmother’s house! I thought he’d melt the glass jar, he was going that fast. I thought I was going to die!”
Father Stacey, in an attempt to stop Kenny, threw himself between the altar boy and the gathering. Father suffered second degree burns to the face from hot wax shooting out from the molested candle.
As parishioners hid behind their pews in fear of further retaliation, one anonymous soul called emergency services. Within minutes, a cavalcade of police officers and bishops encircled the church, demanding Kenny’s surrender. After a heated standoff, Kenny managed to slip out by way of an old tunnel leading from the sanctuary to the rectory, and he sped off via pocket rocket. A tense chase ensued, ending in police officers losing track of Kenny, who turned down a dirt road into the woods.
Kenny now sits at the top of the state’s most wanted list, with police officers and church officials working in tandem to catch him. Trumbull County Sheriff Max Tomlin believes Kenny has crossed state lines. Kenny’s family denies any knowledge of their son’s whereabouts, but asks for sympathy and for Kenny’s safe return.
Several parishioners, who were absent from the service, started a GoFundMe in an attempt to aid the victims of Kenny’s outburst. Funds will go towards the intensive psychological care many of the parishioners now require. Pledges will also help raise money for replacement candles, which have all been retired since the incident. | https://medium.com/the-good-news-satire/kenny-mathers-votive-candle-masturbator-still-at-large-afd3685e2848 | ['Christian Cholcher'] | 2019-07-11 13:57:31.387000+00:00 | ['Comedy', 'Humor', 'Satire', 'Religion'] |
The Quiet Semi-Supervised Revolution | The Quiet Semi-Supervised Revolution
Time to dust off that unlabeled data?
One of the most familiar settings for a machine learning engineer is having access to a lot of data, but modest resources to annotate it. Everyone in that predicament eventually goes through the logical steps of asking themselves what to do when they have limited supervised data, but lots of unlabeled data, and the literature appears to have a ready answer: semi-supervised learning.
And that’s usually when things go wrong.
Historically, semi-supervised learning has been one of those rabbit holes that every engineer goes through as a rite of passage only to discover a newfound appreciation for plain old data labeling. The details are unique to every problem, but in broad strokes, they can often be depicted as follows:
In low data regimes, semi-supervised training does indeed tend to improve performance. But in a practical setting, you often go from ‘terrible and unusable’ levels of performance to ‘less terrible but still completely unusable.’ Essentially, when you are in a data regime where semi-supervised learning actually helps, it means you’re also in a regime where your classifier is just plain bad and of no practical use.
In addition, semi-supervision generally doesn’t come for free, and a method which uses semi-supervised learning very often doesn’t provide you with the same asymptotic properties that supervised learning does in high-data regimes — unlabeled data may introduce bias, for instance. See e.g. Section 4. A very popular method of semi-supervised learning in the early days of deep learning was to first learn an auto-encoder on unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning on labeled data. Hardly anyone does this any more because representations learned via auto-encoding tend to empirically limit the asymptotic performance of fine-tuning. Interestingly, even vastly improved modern generative methods haven’t improved that picture much, probably because what makes a good generative model isn’t necessarily what makes a good classifier. As a result, when you see engineers fine-tuning models today, it’s generally starting from representations that were learned on supervised data — and yes, I consider text to be self-supervised data for the purpose of language modeling. Wherever practical, transfer learning from other pre-trained models is a much stronger starting point, which semi-supervised approaches have difficulty outperforming.
So a typical machine learning engineer’s journey through the swamps of semi-supervised learning goes like this:
1: Everything is terrible, let’s try semi-supervised learning! (After all, that’s engineering work, much more interesting than labeling data …)
2: Look, numbers go up! Still terrible, though. Looks like we’ll have to label data after all …
3: More data is better, yay, but have you tried what happens if you discard your semi-supervised machinery?
4: Hey, what do you know, it’s actually simpler and better. We could have saved time and a whole lot of technical debt by skipping 2 and 3 altogether.
If you’re very lucky, your problem may also admittedly have a performance characteristic shaped like this instead:
In that case, there is a narrow data regime where semi-supervised is non-terrible and also improves data efficiency. In my experience, it’s very rare to hit that sweet spot. Factoring in the cost of the extra complexity, the fact that the gap in the amount of labelled data is typically not orders of magnitude better, and the diminishing returns, it’s rarely worth the trouble, unless you’re competing on an academic benchmark.
But wait, isn’t this piece titled ‘The Quiet Semi-Supervised Revolution’?
One fascinating trend is that the landscape of semi-supervised learning may be changing to something that looks more like this:
And that would change everything. First, these curves match one’s mental model of what semi-supervised approaches should do: more data should always be better. The gap between semi-supervised and supervised should be strictly positive even for data regimes where supervised learning does well. And increasingly this is happening at no cost and remarkably little additional complexity. The ‘magic zone’ starts lower, and equally importantly, it isn’t bounded in high data regimes.
What’s new? Lots of things: many clever ways to self-label the data and express losses in such a way that they are compatible with the noise and potential biases of self-labeling. Two recent works exemplify recent progress and point to the relevant literature: MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning and Unsupervised Data Augmentation.
Another fundamental shift in the world of semi-supervised learning is the realization that it may have a very important role to play in machine learning privacy. For example, the PATE approach (Semi-supervised Knowledge Transfer for Deep Learning from Private Training Data, Scalable Private Learning with PATE,) whereby the supervised data is presumed private, and a student model with strong privacy guarantees is trained using only unlabeled (presumed public) data. Privacy-sensitive methods for distilling knowledge are becoming one of the key enablers of Federated Learning, which offers the promise of efficient distributed learning that doesn’t rely on the model having access to user data, with strong mathematical privacy guarantees.
It’s an exciting time to be revisiting the value of semi-supervised learning in practical settings. Seeing one’s long-held assumptions challenged is a great indicator of the amazing progress happening in the field. This trend is all very recent, and we’ll have to see if these methods stand the test of time, but the potential for a fundamental shift in the architecture of machine learning tools that could result from these advances is very intriguing. | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-quiet-semi-supervised-revolution-edec1e9ad8c | ['Vincent Vanhoucke'] | 2019-05-15 20:35:32.812000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Semi Supervised Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning'] |
What is “Plogging” and Why Runners Should Try It | Running
What is “Plogging” and Why Runners Should Try It
It’s not as weird as it sounds
Running through my neighborhood, I will often gasp at the amount of garbage I see along my normal route. Bottles, cans, wrappers — it’s as if people just throw things on the ground or out of their car window when they are done with them. One day, I decided to bring a garbage bag and gloves on my run to clean up my neighborhood on a casual three-mile run.
Turns out, other people do this and it’s called “plogging.” The word is a combination of “jogging” and the Swedish phrase “plocka upp” which means “picking litter.” For the last few years, the phenomenon swept across Sweden where plogging clubs have assembled in many cities and villages. The trend is now popping up in other parts of Europe and even America.
The concept is pretty simple, go on a run and pick up things along the way! Because you may need to stop abruptly, this may not be ideal on a training run where speed is a concern. However, it’s ideal on a fun-run where no pace needs to be kept or on a recovery walk after a racing event. All you need is gloves and a garbage bag and once you fill it up, throw it in the garbage or recycling bin.
It’s a great way to mix up your running routine and do something good for your community. You may be thinking…why should I clean up after people when I didn’t make the mess? How is this my problem? If you love the Earth, or more importantly your neighborhood, it's a great way to rise up and be the one to make it beautiful. I love my part of Chicago, so seeing my normal running path nice and tidy warms my heart.
If you are someone who loves volunteering, you may have been let down by this year’s events. This is a great way to contribute good deeds by yourself or with others you are quarantining with. If you are not usually into volunteering, think of it as good karma to pay back all those poor folks who pick up our cups who can't seem to make it into the garbage can at race events!
Think about how many of us runners there are and collectively what impact we could have if we all did this periodically. Runners: Guardians of the Neighborhood! | https://medium.com/runners-life/what-is-plogging-and-why-runners-should-try-it-b1137b3476c6 | ['Bradley S.'] | 2020-11-18 02:57:20.364000+00:00 | ['Running', 'Earth', 'Recycling', 'Volunteering', 'Fitness'] |
BNS Mini Bounty Program is Here | Dear Users,
A few days back, we launched Bitdroplet — an SIP tailored for Bitcoin. We crafted this product with utmost regard to help people build wealth in the long term by investing small amounts in Bitcoin. We are looking out for people who can help us spread the word, which is why we are conducting a ‘Mini Bounty Program’ where you have a chance to win BNS tokens. The total giveaway for this program is $3000 worth of BNS tokens.
BNS Bounty Program
There are two types of tasks under BNS Bounty Program:
Create a review-style YouTube video for Bitdroplet and include BNS
Register and submit a link to your published video. We will review the quality of your work and if it’s good enough, you will receive the BNS token reward.
Guidelines:
YouTubers with Minimum 5,000 subscribers are eligible for the program.
Participants must have an average of 8,000 views in their last 5 videos.
The video around the BNS token or Bitdroplet review should have at least 2000 views to be eligible for the Rewards
The video description should be between 50–100 Words along with website URL.
Video length should be at least 5 minutes.
Video must explain both Bitdroplet and BNS token.
The Video with automated voice or video creator, poor or low quality slideshow will not be acceptable
Vernacular language based video will be approved for reward based on the internal review and the quality of content in the video.
Total Reward Allocated — $1500 worth of BNS tokens
Each person whose work is selected will receive the reward based on the quality of their work:
Excellent Quality: $101 — $350 worth of BNS tokens
Satisfactory Quality: $50 — $100 worth of BNS tokens
Create a review-style article for Bitdroplet and include BNS
Register and submit a link to your published article. We will review the quality of your work and if it’s good enough, you will receive the BNS token reward.
Guidelines:
Bloggers with their own website or Medium/Reddit/Steemit handle are eligible for this program.
For bloggers with their own website, minimum website traffic requirement is 10,000 per month.
Medium/Steemit handlers must have at least 300 followers.
Reddit handlers must have at 100 karma
Minimum word count for the article is 750 words.
Article must explain both Bitdroplet and BNS token.
We will verify the content for plagiarism. Duplicate content will not be eligible for Bounty.
Only one submission from Free Platform and Other has to be from TLD
The TLD website should older than 3 months
The content should link to Bitbns Website (Two links, One with Anchor text using the keyword shared)
Keywords:
Dollar cost averaging bitcoin — Link to http://bitdroplet.com/
Best investment strategy — Link to http://bitdroplet.com/
Better investment than FD — Link to http://bitdroplet.com/
Total Reward Allocated — $1500 Worth of Giveaway
Each person whose work is selected will receive the reward based on the quality of their work:
Excellent Quality: $101 — $350 worth of BNS tokens
Satisfactory Quality: $50 — $100 worth of BNS tokens
*Note:
Participants with much higher mass reach can contact us via telegram to get additional bonus. Price of the token will be as per the public sale value of the token
The Bounty Program would be valid, in a first-come-first-serve basis, until we have distributed the entire reward amount allocated for articles and videos.
Team Bitbns | https://medium.com/bitbns/bns-mini-bounty-program-is-here-83834e9f792d | [] | 2020-01-08 06:57:23.417000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Win', 'Bitcoin News', 'Btc', 'Bitcoin'] |
Where Is My Donkey? | Happy Thanksgiving, Know Thyselvers!
You already know this, but please remember to be grateful for something with every opportunity (you create these opportunities). I have an app that reminds me to take a few moments and write down what I am grateful for each day. I have been doing it for 225 days in a row. Strangely enough, it is the only thing I have managed to remain consistent with…
Yes, we have yet another donkey story to touch upon that I hope you will enjoy. Your feedback is always welcomed and highly appreciated! I only have 2 more stories to share with you and then we will change Storytelling Thursdays to something else. Probably quotes/really short parables. We’ll see how we feel!
If you choose to submit something in response to this week’s story, please make sure to tag it under “storytelling”. Cheers! | https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/where-is-my-donkey-1d67fee128b2 | ['𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊.'] | 2020-11-26 17:30:06.791000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Energy', 'Short Read'] |
5 Simple Reasons Why Data Projects Fail | 5 Simple Reasons Why Data Projects Fail
Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash
Have you ever sunk weeks into building a dashboard, ML model, or datamart only to have it collect cobwebs? Or started building something and just kept building and building with no end? Or maybe you delivered insights to your stakeholders that ended up being not very insightful. Unless you’re god’s gift to data, you can probably cringe remembering a project that fell into at least one of these traps. Failing is okay and is a part of life, but hopefully, we also learn from our failures sometimes.
I’ve definitely had my fair share of underwhelming projects and want to share five common pitfalls that lead to failed data projects. It may or may not surprise you that the reasons projects fail are usually not technical ones but rather ones of communication.
To understand why these failures occur it’s important to consider the position that analytics teams find themselves in within the broader organization.
In medium and large corporations, analytics teams often play a centralized support function to multiple stakeholders. This means that they frequently get requests from multiple stakeholders on different parts of the business and are one or more steps removed from the original business context. This can create a challenging environment in which the analyst frequently needs to overcome their knowledge gaps of the business in order to assess a good solution for their colleagues. In addition to the business context gap, there is also a communication gap between the analyst and the business team. Communication gaps occur because the business stakeholder often doesn’t understand or appreciate the technical challenges of what needs to be done to gather, process, and analyze the data, while the analyst doesn’t always have a good enough grasp on the underlying business context to ask their business partner the right questions.
In this environment of fragmented understanding, misalignment and misinterpretation can easily take hold if the analyst isn’t aware of the pitfalls that can occur outside of the technical work.
Let’s take a deeper look at the types of oopsies that you need to avoid.
Business stakeholder thinks they need just a quick data point.
One unfortunate, recurring theme for many analysts is being kept in the dark on business initiatives and only getting very tactical last-minute requests for data. How many times have you received a request like “hey, we’re launching a new sales initiative and need to know our sales rate, but we’re logging sales in some system you never heard of instead of the one that we usually use. Is it possible to get a count of sales by tomorrow?”
Being treated as an after-thought isn’t the fault of the analyst, but many analysts would rather fulfill the hastily-put together request than to push back and request more context. The problem with doing this though is that the need is rarely just a quick data point, is it? The original request is frequently followed-up with additional “quick enhancements” and due to a lack of overall data strategy or plan, whatever gets built in response to these “quick enhancements” is rarely scalable or able to adapt to evolving needs of the business.
I encourage you to always probe the broader needs of quick enhancements. However, I realize it is not always possible to do so. In the event that there isn’t an opportunity to scope out the bigger context, I suggest pipelining these types of requests in your regular keep-the-business-running pipeline and control the deadline of your delivery. Don’t let users blow up your prioritization over artificial deadlines. Often times, the aggressive timelines users give are more based on anxiety or fear rather than on true need. People should expect to wait if they didn’t give sufficient notice.
The analyst fails to understand the business context.
Unlike the example above, sometimes users come to the analytics team searching for a holistic solution. There might be a new product launch and the product manager wants to build a dashboard with a suite of new KPIs or they may be seeing a concerning trend and want a root-cause analysis of what is driving it, and they are looking to you for help and guidance.
One issue that creeps up in these situations is that the analyst may fail to properly assess what the business needs. Sometimes users are able to be very prescriptive and communicate what they need effectively but in many cases the business stakeholders may not be able to translate what they are doing into what they want to measure. It is ultimately the responsibility of the analyst to conduct the proper interviews and to think critically about the problem.
To be able to surprise and delight your stakeholders with highly relevant deliverables, make sure to ask yourself these three questions:
Do I understand what the business stakeholder is telling they need?
Do I understand what the business stakeholder is NOT telling me they need but actually need?
Do I understand who else might need this?
If you are unsure of what the stakeholder is asking for, schedule additional interviews and make sure you get additional context. It’s okay to ask questions and not know simple business procedures. Having an end-result that is what the users want is worth the inconvenience of additional questioning during the build process. If you don’t understand the context enough to have some hypotheses about additional features the user might need, talk with your internal leader and ask for some advice. Your business leader may have a unique perspective having knowledge of both the analytical and business processes. If you’re not sure of who else might benefit from your work, try to get a better picture from your stakeholders about everyone involved/impacted and reach out to them for either a heads-up or additional input on what would make your work have a larger impact.
There is no executive sponsor.
Sometimes analysts have original ideas. Maybe you’re thinking “hey, I really think an enterprise view of these five metrics would be a really cool idea” or “I think an ML model in this onboarding process would do a better job than manual review” and you could be right. But oftentimes, being right isn’t enough. Anyone who failed to get traction for a good idea will tell you that in large companies, innovators must also be effective communicators and influencers. If you like to work on something behind-the-scenes in isolation, you cannot expect everyone to stop on a dime and change how and what they do to accommodate your innovation, even if it’s a good idea.
The best way to get your ideas off the ground is to have someone from the business champion your idea/project. To do this, you need to be inclusive and solicit buy-in from strategic stakeholders who can help spread your ideas to others in the company and make them tangible priorities for others. Get people involved early. Think collaboratively and make people aware of what your intentions are.
There are not enough check-ins throughout the project.
As professionals with personal pride, we sometimes want to work in isolation until the end result is polished and beaming with insight. All we want the end user to have to do is admire the sheer genius of our solution. Unfortunately, this urge for perfection can create the exact opposite effect. Without regular check-ins, projects can start to deviate from what the stakeholder expected or timelines may get pushed out beyond the project’s usefulness.
Allowing users into the building process can sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable as we have to talk about our progress while everything is still raw and undeveloped. It can also slow things down as you have to pivot more often based on feedback that you’re getting. However, this discomfort definitely pays off when the finished product feels like it was made for the end-user and their involvement with the project gives them a sense of ownership that often helps turn them into an evangelist for your work.
I personally like to take the approach of scheduling flights of weekly meetings that last approximately the length of time I think it will take to complete the project. This way I create a sense of accountability in myself to make regular progress but also avoid the awfulness of permanent meetings.
There’s no onboarding after the delivery.
It can be a blurry line as to where your responsibility ends and the stakeholder’s begins. You’ve done what was asked. You executed and made sure your work makes sense. Is it now also your responsibility to make sure the user actually uses what you made? Sadly, many good projects never get proper recognition because of poor follow-through once the technical work is complete.
It is unfortunate because us data professionals will toil for weeks and months to engineer a worthwhile solution but will fail to check-in with the end users to make sure they understand the product you made and know how to use it. Some times a little communication and promotion of your work can mean the difference between a home-run project vs one that ends up collecting cobwebs.
Conclusion
Your models are tight, your engineering is sound and your insight is profound. Hopefully, this list also convinced you why relationships and communication are also crucial for unlocking the full potential of your technical work. Combining technical wizardry and communication prowess, well now you’re just unstoppable. | https://towardsdatascience.com/5-simple-reasons-why-data-projects-fail-98fd04c41738 | ['Nikita Goldovsky'] | 2020-12-15 21:36:43.208000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Management', 'Opinion', 'Editors Pick', 'Data Science'] |
PI planning during pandemic | I believe this is the third time we’ve had a PI (Program Increment) planning during corona-time, and I’m finally ready to talk about it and share some of our learned lessons.
See, PI planning was always a special day (with special food), where we got all stakeholders in one room and held them hostage until we had a clear view of the coming quarter. Imagine all these people in a single room with no windows, crowding over profiterole plates. Good times.
So how do you keep the engagement online?
Analyse external dependencies
It’s really hard to hold external teams representatives in a full-day online event, that does not really concern them. When we gave the idea some thought, there was no need having them present the whole time, just in case there are matters to resolve. If dependencies development timeline is clear, it is enough to have an on-call duty in case something has to change. So having an alignment about those dependencies in a dedicated short call, saved time to all parties. We knew their timeline and were able to adjust ourselves to it. If there are any issues, we can always have a short meeting and mitigate risks.
Have an owner for every major feature
As a team lead, it is pretty difficult to stay in the details of each and every feature. Having an owner for big features allows me to have one focal point for every major development. She can help me understand when integrations are planned, give effort estimation and complexities. On top of that, I find that when developers take the role of an official “owner”, it increases engagement and sense of responsibility. It’s their little project to lead and oversee development end-to-end. Caring makes the difference.
Divide (and concur)
There’s a lot to plan, and it takes time. Having all team member on the call can be exhausting. For me it works best to work feature by feature (according to priority of-course) and have only the relevant people in the conference.
Others can utilise this time as they see fit (in my experience, most just continue with the day-to-day work). Having short precise sessions for every big feature focuses me, and keeps other team members focused in their specified periods of time. Everybody knows they will be contacted when they are needed, and until then, they are free to work on whatever they think they should.
So one would ask (and in fact I was actually asked that by a manager recently),why would I have all my team members present in the PI planning, and not send just the owners to plan it for all. There are in fact teams that work exactly like this, feeling other people to their commitments.
I believe that all team members should participate because, at the end of the day, this is their work we’re all planing, and everyone’s got a say. The sessions are lead by myself and feature owner, but in practice, people join, give feedback and make suggestions. This engagement is what makes the commitment for the quarter matter. We are all committed, we all take part in the process.
Use an online board.
This may sound very obvious now, but we actually started out old-school style with a big board, colourful post it’s and red strings connecting them (with stickers). After PI ended we had to carry this board to our sitting area, make sure we don’t damage it on the way, and I remember sitting in front of it and updating all the numbers in JIRA.
Well, it’s 2020. Luckily we had to use a virtual board on our fist remote PI plan, and were amazed at how much easier it is to have it all digital.
So to sum it all up, I would say that the keys to a fast and non-exhausting PI planning, is to have a good preparation in advance to understand the requirements, have an owner to every feature to hold the details that one person will probably get lost in, and have the meetings short and to the point, with relevant audience only.
Hope this helps someone, and if not, well, I owe you 5 minutes 😊 | https://medium.com/@linayaakobovich/pi-planning-during-pandemic-b9a376427e61 | ['Coding For Life'] | 2020-12-21 20:33:02.048000+00:00 | ['Scrum', 'Work From Home', 'Agile', 'Long Term Planning', 'Pi Planning'] |
An American Expat’s Advice for a COVID Thanksgiving | An American Expat’s Advice for a COVID Thanksgiving
As an expat, I haven’t been with my extended family at Thanksgiving in almost 10 years. I get it. It’s hard. On this holiday, which is so much about togetherness, being far away is so tough. But flying home 8 hours for a long weekend that isn’t a holiday where I am currently living … just won’t work. The kids are in school, we are working, flights are expensive, and travel is unpredictable. So, we don’t come home for Thanksgiving. And, it’s not easy. It isn’t a holiday here, so we have to conjure up all of the festiveness ourselves. No one else is celebrating, so we have figure out how to make it happen — we have to hunt down supplies (if we want to make dinner ourselves) or figure out how to mark the day (if we choose not to cook). Over the past nine years, I’ve met many other expat Americans navigating the same challenges. We make different choices, fight different battles, but we’ve sorted out how to make it work for us (more or less). We celebrate (or we don’t), we honor our traditions (or we make new ones), we share our culture with new friends from other countries (or we gather together with other Americans in order to feel more at home).
Along the way, we’ve tackled a lot of the same challenges that are facing many Americans this year. Due to COVID, many people are having to cancel or seriously alter their Thanksgiving plans. You can’t see the people you want to, or celebrate the way you’re used to. Believe me, I understand. Here’s what I’ve learned over the years, in case it helps.
Accept that it *will* be different. Don’t try to replicate “normal” Thanksgiving in an abnormal time. Accept that this year will not be a perfect copy of what you’ve done in the past. It can’t be — circumstances are different. You’ll make yourself crazy trying to “get it exactly right.” So don’t.
Allow yourself to miss what you’re missing. Being away from people you love on a day that is ABOUT being with people you love is really hard. It’s sad, and it can definitely be lonely. Let yourself feel sad, lonely, disappointed, or angry at the circumstances. Don’t try to feel like everything is normal. It’s ok to be sad about what you’re missing.
Figure out what’s really important, and figure out how to do that (or to approximate it). Is pumpkin pie your favorite? Make or buy one! Are mashed potatoes the thing that makes the meal special? Make some! Would it not be Thanksgiving without football? Find a game and watch it (even if it’s old, even if it’s recorded, even if you already know how it turns out). Whatever feels essential to you that you CAN do, do it. Don’t judge or criticize yourself, just go with it. And don’t be afraid to try something that’s not quite right, but might be close enough. (This is definitely a “close enough is good enough” situation.)
Let go of everything else. All the other “stuff” that you don’t care about (candied yams, or whatever) just drop them. Don’t waste any of your energy on stuff you think you SHOULD do, but don’t actually want to. One of the silver linings for this year is permission to abandon anything that doesn’t bring you the joy of the holiday.
Remind yourself of why you’re doing this. Why *aren’t* you doing a normal holiday this year? As an expat, we think about the job, or the lifestyle, or the relationships that brought us to our new country. This year, everyone can appreciate that we are spending the holidays apart to PROTECT each other. It’s as important as it can possibly be. It helps to remember that this is all happening for the greater good.
Connect with the people you love. If it’s at all possible, figure out a way to connect with the people you’re not able to be with. Call, exchange photos of your day, video chat, arrange to watch a movie or a football game “together”. Anything to feel as close as possible, while you’re apart.
Look forward to the future. This is temporary. It’s not for forever. It’s what’s happening right now … but it’s just one year. Think ahead to what you will be able to do next year. Make plans! Having something concrete to look forward to really helps.
Appreciate what you created. However it turns out, whether you ordered pizza and pretended it wasn’t Thanksgiving, or cooked the whole meal from scratch, you made it through. Give yourself a pat on the back, and give yourself some real credit for getting through what might have been a really tough day. It isn’t easy, it isn’t what you wanted, but you made it.
Happy Thanksgiving, and good luck, from one American who can’t be with her family, to another. | https://medium.com/@emily.calle/an-american-expats-advice-for-a-covid-thanksgiving-222fb65109d1 | ['Emily Calle'] | 2020-11-25 13:47:11.974000+00:00 | ['Covid Diaries', 'Coronavirus', 'Thanksgiving 2020', 'Thanksgiving', 'Expat Life'] |
Summer Of Love & Nudity | memories of the University of Keele
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
Tony Elliott, founder of Time Out, died very recently, aged 73. When I read his obituary in The Times, I was reminded that he was, like me, an alumnus of the University of Keele.
Other Keele alumni include Marion Boyars (publisher), Andrew Glover (composer), Liz Kessler (children’s writer), Robert Lee (historian), Michael Mansfield (barrister), Priti Patel and Clare Short (politicians).
Elliott dropped out of Keele, where he was studying French and history, in 1968, midway through his degree and the year before my own arrival. The first issues of Time Out, named after a Dave Brubeck album, were co-edited by Bob Harris, later known as the presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test. Initially, the publication consisted of just a single sheet of event listings in London. Within two years it was nearly 70 pages thick and stocked in W H Smith, the UK’s largest stationery chain. It went on to cover cities world-wide.
Keele is a rural campus university, some distance away from the nearest town, Newcastle-under-Lyme. It has expanded greatly since my time there and is now the largest campus in the UK. I have not been back in decades, and dare say I would hardly recognise it, although photographs suggest the woods and lakes behind Keele Hall remain much as they were.
Conceived as a ‘people’s university’, Keele was established to serve the towns known collectively as the ‘potteries’ — Hanley, Burslem, Fenton, Longton, Stoke-upon-Trent, and Tunstall. It aimed to overcome the divide between the arts and the sciences and what was seen as the ‘evil of departmentalism’. Established in 1949 as a college for North Staffordshire, Keele was awarded full university status in 1962, and renamed after the nearby village.
My first choice had been to go to the University of East Anglia, but I had been interviewed by Germaine Greer, who had been unimpressed by my less than enthusiastic reading of a Sylvia Plath poem and had spent the greater part of the interview delivering an intimidating monologue to which I barely attended, transfixed as I was by the short crocheted mini-dress she was wearing and the scores of cigarette butts upended on their filter bases all over the room.
In contrast, I had found the interview at Keele much more to my taste. A pair of chummy blokes sat opposite me in a peculiarly shaped room at the top of the Victorian mansion that is Keele Hall and some mild conversation passed back and forth between us, to which I contributed rather little. I also liked the student union. There was good music on the jukebox and some cool people playing table football.
I badly wanted to go. But my A-Level grades were below par and, resigned to having to find an alternative, I began to send off for information about journalism schools, only to be surprised a few days later to receive confirmation that Keele was accepting me.
In those days Keele was unique in insisting that all students complete a Foundation Year before specialising in their two chosen subject areas. Even then you had to take two subsidiary subjects alongside the main ones. I eventually studied English and American Studies, with Astronomy and Philosophy, or was it Politics or Psychology, I honestly can’t remember. Perhaps I did them all, in different years.
That first year was like being at an American high school. Each day you had to roll up to a vast auditorium and listen to a lecture from the full range of university departments. It meant that you saw and mixed with everyone, no matter what their subject interest.
Early October 1969 was very balmy and I remember discovering one of my early companions was Stephen Benn, son of Tony Benn, minister for Technology in the Harold Wilson government. Stephen wore a very long knitted scarf and played piano for us in one of the university’s music rooms. Later in the year his father came and gave an address in the university’s main hall.
Just about everybody in their first year lived on campus. I was placed in a brand new hall of residence, on the ground floor. A very beautiful Irish girl called Bernadette lived in the same hall and was rumoured to walk around with nothing on under her fur coat. I was unable to verify this, but there was one guy who would stand completely naked just outside the union branch of NatWest, where I opened my first account. Later that year the university was headline news in tabloid newspapers when a group of students had to be disciplined for sunbathing naked in the centre of the campus. One of my close friends attended naked Love-In sessions in an upstairs room of the students’ union building, normally used for TV viewing.
It was the period of student protests and there were regular sit-ins during that first year, including one that happened at night during an occupation of a vast ground-floor room in Keele Hall, when one of the lead agitators had an epileptic fit and there was general panic.
It could be hard to concentrate on course requirements. During the year you had to deliver nine 2000 word essays on a full range of subjects, and pass exams in your subsidiary areas. The night before one of the 2000 word essays was due everybody would be up late trying to submit by the early morning deadline.
At the end of the year I was fed up to discover that, having narrowly missed the pass mark in the Astronomy exam, I would need to return to campus during the summer vacation for a resit. The resit date directly clashed with the Isle of Wight Festival and had I been a more flamboyant, carefree character than I was then, I am sure I would have forgone the exam and attended the festival. But I dutifully resat and passed the multiple-choice test.
The Grateful Dead had played at a small festival in Madely, just outside Keele village, during the May Bank Holiday weekend. Mungo Jerry, Ginger Baker’s Air Force and the Flying Burrito Brothers were also on the bill. It was a free festival and within walking distance so I attended both days. The weather was good, and there was much unashamed baring of skin. I enjoyed it all up until a point near the end when those left in the crowd began pulling down perimeter fences, lighting fires and generally becoming rather manic and wild.
Like Tony Elliott I too dropped out of Keele halfway through my course. Unlike him, I returned a year later. | https://medium.com/publishing-well/summer-of-love-nudity-ac0b6c1f62f6 | ['Michael Thorn'] | 2020-07-22 10:13:59.710000+00:00 | ['Alumni', 'University', 'Nudity', 'Protest', 'Students'] |
How to lose weight without Dieting | It can be difficult to stick to a conventional diet and exercise program. However, several proven tips can help you eat fewer calories easily.
These are effective ways to for weight loss and prevent weight gain in the future. These are some ways for weight loss without diet or exercise. All are based on science
● Chew well and slow down for weight loss
Chewing your food carefully makes you eat more slowly, which is associated with reduced food intake, greater fullness, and smaller portions. To get into the habit of eating more slowly, it can be helpful to count the number of times you chew each bite.
Eating slowly can help you feel fuller with fewer calories. It’s an easy way to lose weight and avoid weight gain.
● Use smaller plates for unhealthy foods
The typical dish is bigger today than it was a few decades ago. This tendency may help you to weight gain, as using a smaller plate will help you eat less by making portions appear bigger. On the other hand, a larger dish can make a serving size appear smaller, forcing you to add more food. You may utilize this to your advantage by presenting good items on bigger plates and less healthy things on smaller dishes. Smaller dishes can make your brain think you are eating more than you are.
Hence, it makes sense to consume unhealthy foods on smaller plates, which causes you to eat less.
● Eat lots of protein
Protein has powerful effects on appetite. They can increase feelings of fullness, reduce hunger, and help you eat fewer calories. This may be because protein affects numerous hormones that play a role in appetite and fullness, including ghrelin. Based on breakfast, you may want to consider switching to a meal that is high in protein, such as eggs.
Some examples of high protein foods include chicken breast, fish, Greek yogurt, lentils, quinoa, and almonds. Adding protein to the diet has been associated with weight reduction, even without exercise or deliberate calorie control.
● Keep unhealthy foods out of sight
Keeping unhealthy foods where you can see them can increase hunger and cravings, causing you to eat more. A recent study found that while high-calorie foods are more noticeable in the home, residents are more likely to weigh more than people who only keep a bowl of fruit visible. Keep unhealthy foods out of sight, such as in cabinets or cupboards, so they are less likely to catch your attention when you are hungry.
On the other hand, keep healthy foods visible on your shelves and place them in the front and center of your refrigerator. If you put unhealthy items on the countertop, you’re more inclined to have an impromptu snack. It’s best to keep healthy foods, like fruits and vegetables, insight
Check out our fat Burner and reduce your body fat: Fat Burner
● Eat foods rich in fiber
Eating foods high in fiber can increase satiety, helping you feel fuller for longer. Studies also indicate that one type of fiber, viscous fiber, is particularly useful for weight loss. Increases satiety and reduces food intake Viscose fiber forms a gel when in contact with the body. This gel increases the absorption time of nutrients and slows down stomach emptying.
Read more on Weight loss without Dieting
If you are interesting in travel and photography content, then must check-out: www.creativepic.in | https://medium.com/@viralkida02/how-to-lose-weight-without-dieting-83a671a71cf2 | [] | 2021-12-30 06:06:56.592000+00:00 | ['Diet', 'Weight Loss', 'Weightloss Recipe', 'Weightloss Foods', 'Weight Loss Tips'] |
Better Software Without If-Else | DESIGNING BETTER SOFTWARE
Better Software Without If-Else
5 Ways to Replace If-Else. Beginner to advanced examples
Let me just say this right off the bat: If-Else is often a poor choice.
It leads to complicated designs, less readable code, and may be pain inducing to refactor.
Nevertheless, If-Else has become the de facto solution for code branching — which does make sense. It’s one of the first things any aspiring developer is taught. Unfortunately, lots of developers never advance to more suitable branching strategies.
Some live by the mantra: If-Else is a hammer and everything’s a nail.
The inability to determine when to use a more suitable approach is among those that distinguishes juniors from seniors.
I’ll show you some techniques and patterns that’ll put an end to this horrific practice.
The difficulty will increase by each example.
1 Entirely unnecessary else blocks
This is perhaps one of those junior developers are most guilty of. The example below is a prime illustration of what happens when you get beaten into thinking If-Else is great.
Simple if-else
It can be simplified by just removing the else ` block.
Removed else
More professional looking, right?
You’ll regularly find there’s really no need for an else block. Like in this case, you want to do something if a certain condition is met and return immediately.
2 Value assignment
If you want to assign a new value to a variable based on some provided input, then stop the If-Else nonsense — there’s a more readable approach.
Value assignment with if-else
Despite the simplicity, it’s awful. First off, If-Else is easily replaced with a switch here. But, we can simplify this code even further by removing else if and else altogether.
If statements with fast return
Take away the else if and else , and we are left with clean, readable code. Notice that I’ve also changed the style to be fast return opposed to single return statement — it simply doesn’t make sense to continue testing a value if the correct one has already been found.
3 Precondition checking
Most often, I find that it won’t make sense to continue executing a method if it’s provided with invalid values.
Say we have the DetermineGender method from before, with the requirement that the provided input value must always be 0 or 1.
Method without value checks
Executing the method without value validation doesn’t make any sense. So, we’ll need to check some preconditions before we allow the method continuing its executing.
Applying the guard clause defensive coding technique, you’ll check method input values and only move on to executing the method if.
Check preconditions with guard clauses
At this point, we’ve made sure the main logic is only executed if the value falls within the expected range.
The IFs have also been replaced with ternary now that it doesn’t make sense to have a default return of “Unknown” at the end any longer.
4 If-Else to Dictionary — avoid If-Else entirely
Say you need to perform some operation that’ll be selected based on some condition, and we know we’ll have to add more operations later.
One is perhaps inclined to use the tried and true, If-Else. Adding a new operation is simply a matter of slapping in an extra else if. That’s simple. This approach is however not a great design in terms of maintenance.
Knowing we need to add new operations later, we can refactor the If-Else to a dictionary.
Readability has vastly increased and it’s easier to reason about this code.
Note that, the dictionary is only placed inside the method for illustrative purposes. You’d likely want it to be provided from somewhere else.
5 Extending applications — avoid If-Else entirely
This is a slightly more advanced example.
Let me also clarify something real quick… This is a more “enterprisy” approach. It won’t be your typical “lemme just replace that if-else” scenario. Now, read on.
Know when to even eliminate Ifs entirely, by replacing them with objects.
Often, you’ll find yourself having to extend some part of an application. As a junior developer, you may be inclined to do so by just adding an extra If-Else (i.e. else-if) statement.
Take this illustrative example. Here, we need to present an Order instance as a string. First, we only have two kinds of string representation, JSON and plain text. Using If-Else at this stage is not a big issue, tho we can easily replace else if with just if as demonstrated earlier.
Knowing we need to extend this part of the application, this approach is definitely not acceptable.
Not only does the code above violate the Open/Closed principle, it doesn’t read well and will cause maintainability headaches.
The correct approach is one that adheres to the SOLID principles — and we do this by implementing a dynamic type discovery process, and in this case, the strategy pattern.
The process to refactor this hot piece of mess, is as following:
Extract each branch into separate strategy classes with a common interface Dynamically find all classes implementing the common interface Decide which strategy to execute based on input
The code that’ll replace the example above looks like this. And yes, it’s way more code. It requires you to know how type discovery works. But dynamically extending an application is an advanced topic.
I’m only showing the exact part that’ll replace the If-Else example. Take a look at this gist if you want to see all objects involved. | https://medium.com/swlh/5-ways-to-replace-if-else-statements-857c0ff19357 | ['Nicklas Millard'] | 2020-08-18 14:31:38.904000+00:00 | ['Best Practices', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming'] |
How to Trim String in JavaScript | It’s super simple to remove whitespace from a string. To remove just the leading whitespace, you can use trimStart() . To remove trailing whitespace, use trimEnd() . Or remove it all with trim() 🙌
const string = " hi "; string.trimStart(); // "hi "
string.trimEnd(); // " hi"
string.trim(); // "hi"
Trim Return Value
All trim methods, will return a new string. That means your original string will be left intact.
const string = " hi "; string.trimStart(); // "hi "
string.trimEnd(); // " hi"
string.trim(); // "hi" string; // " hi "
What is Whitespace
So trim removes whitespace. So that is the white space created by:
space
tab
no-break space
line terminator characters
Trimming Line Terminator Characters
You might be wondering what are line terminator characters. Well, let’s take a look at some examples.
'hi
'.trim(); // "hi" 'hi \t'.trim(); // "hi" 'hi \r'.trim(); // "hi"
Multi-line String
In JavaScript, you can easily create multi-line strings using the Template Literals. So if you’re wondering if trim works with that, you bet it does 👍
const multiLine = `
hi
`; multiline.trim(); // "hi"
Trimming Multiple Words
Remember trim only works for whitespace at the start and end. So it doesn't trim the space in between words.
' hi there '.trim(); // "hi there"
Multi-Line of Multiple Words
Same with multi-line, it only trims the beginning of the first word and the ending of the last word.
const multiLine = `
hi there
`; // Returns "hi there"
Trim Aliases
trimStart vs trimLeft
trimStart removes the leading white space. So all the whitespace from the beginning of a string to the first non-whitespace character will be gone.
You might also see people using trimLeft() . Well, that's because it's an alias. It does the same thing.
const string = " hi "; string.trimStart(); // "hi "
string.trimLeft(); // "hi "
trimEnd vs trimRight
trimEnd removes the trailing white space. So all the whitespace from the end of a string will be gone. The alias of this method is trimRight() . Again, they do the same thing.
const string = " hi "; string.trimEnd(); // " hi"
string.trimRight(); // " hi"
Which one should I use?
So which one should you use? Well, let’s see what the ECMAScript Specification says:
The property trimStart nad trimEnd are preferred. The trimLeft and trimRight property are provided principally for compatibility with old code. It is recommended that the trimStart property be used in new ECMAScript code.
trimStart and trimEnd for the win 👑
Why are there aliases?
So trimLeft and trimRight were introduced first. However, the committee decided to propose a word change to trimStart and trimEnd instead. That's because it's more consistent to their other built-in methods, padStart and padEnd . Which makes sense to me, I think consistency is key and using the same language helps lessen confusion.
But for web compatibility reasons, they’re keeping the old terms ( trimLeft and trimRight ) as aliases. So if your code is using the older methods, no problem, they will still work 👍 However if you have the capacity, I'd recommend you changing it to use the official ones instead of the alias so you don't have two different methods floating around in your codebase. Remember it's all about that consistency 😎
Trim Methods Use Case
trim
I mostly used trim() . Very handy to remove whitespace for a form input 👍
<input type="text" id="search" /> const inputValue = document.getElementById('search').value.trim();
You can also use it to remove odd whitespaces in a sentence and format it properly. Essentially creating your very own sentence prettier 💅
const uglySentence = "One Two Three Four "; const prettySentence = uglySentence
.split(' ') // ["One", "", "Two", "", "", "Three", "Four", "", "", ""]
.filter(word => word) // ["One", "Two", "Three", "Four"]
.join(' '); // "One Two Three Four" // ✅ Result
console.log(prettySentence); // "One Two Three Four"
trimStart
I haven’t used this before. But I can see where this can be handy. Take a markdown file. You would want to preserve the leading whitespaces. But with the trailing whitespaces, you might want to automatically get rid of it so it doesn’t render out a confusing or unexpected result for your user.
- List Item
- Sub List Item
- Sub List Item
trimEnd
I don’t have a great example for this one. But if I stayed with the markdown file example. We might want to prohibit nested listed items. However, we still want to preserve trailing whitespace. In markdown, if you use insert two whitespaces, it will create a line break. I’m going to denote whitespaces with a dot · , so you can see what's going on.
Markdown won’t create a line break here
hi
there // Result
hi there
To force a line break, you can add 2 spaces.
hi··
there // Result
hi
there
So knowing this, you might not want to remove the trailing space. However, you still want to get rid of a nested list. In that case, then trimStart might be the one for you.
Browser Support
Support for trim() is pretty awesome! However, it's a bit limited for trimStart and trimEnd , that's because they were introduced later on.
BrowsertrimtrimStarttrimEndChrome✅✅✅Firefox✅✅✅Safari✅✅✅Edge✅✅✅Internet Explorer✅❌❌
Community Input
@ArtesEveni:
const string = ' hi ';
string.replace(/ /g, ''); // "hi"
Resources | https://medium.com/dailyjs/how-to-trim-string-in-javascript-43a898befce9 | ['Samantha Ming'] | 2020-04-27 13:32:02.318000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Web Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Front End Development'] |
10 Mind-Blowing Affiliate Marketing Stats | 10 Mind-Blowing Affiliate Marketing Stats
Over the last few years, affiliate marketing’s popularity has skyrocketed…
That’s because affiliate marketing is basically win-win for anyone who’s involved with it.
If you’re after building an income online as an affiliate marketer or launching an affiliate program for your already existing business, the following infographic of Affiliate Marketing Statistics is going to help you fully understand if affiliate marketing is worth the trouble or not.
Enjoy :)
Created by Dear Boss I Quit
If you’d like to embed this infographic on your own website, you can copy and paste the code right below to your HTML editor: | https://medium.com/@xaric/10-affiliate-marketing-statistics-infographic-a280a27b8e19 | [] | 2020-12-27 19:09:47.548000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Affiliate Marketing', 'Statistics', 'Affiliate Marketing Tips', 'Infographics'] |
America’s Complete Independence from Britain | By Archibald Willard — Archibald Willard, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=499045
British Economic System in the Colonies
The American colonies were intertwined in the British economic system which was balanced in favor of English manufacturers providing goods from the raw materials obtained from the colonies. It was a system that had been carefully laid out in British favor.
As taxes were imposed on items that hurt the colonies financially, they turned to temporary economic independence from Britain as a bargaining tool. It began to be seen that the colonies and Britain were not perfectly joined as originally thought as many “began to reconsider the British system and their place within it.” The idea was to go back to the way things were once reason was seen and the taxes lifted by the Crown.
Yet, as the Mother Country did not learn from previous actions, they continued to put the colonies in a situation where manufacturing was looking to be more permanently temporary. Thoughts of total economic and cultural independence were not in the original thoughts of most colonists as they were perfectly happy in the British economic system. They provided the resources and Britain provided the final goods.
As the threat of an altercation between the Mother Country and her American offspring increased, plans for economic self-sufficiency were put into place with no thought of the long-term effects. Many of these failed but the attempt was loudly seen as a strong move to complete independence. The colonies were not taking any of Britain’s actions lying down.
No Economic System in Place for New Country
Once political independence was achieved, the citizens of the new country found themselves without a stable economy and a need to establish a foundation quickly as continued use of British products made them slaves of the Empire in a different form. One problem that plagued all the states of the new union was the lack of expertise in creating the right manufacturing environment where none existed before.
With superb marketing skills, many experts were enticed over the Atlantic to help build the economic foundation of America. This proved to be more difficult that many had imagined as foreign goods were still desired and an imbalance between the states on dealing the matter existed. The states still saw themselves as separate colonies governed uniquely instead of as one entity. It would take collaboration and Congress to step up to try and rectify this. It would happen but at a cost in which no state was completely satisfied. Each state would fight for its own voice and right to govern. This would continue to be a struggle through the end of the Civil War.
Growing Pains
Manufacturers struggled to find their place in American society as did the merchants who had to deliver desired products at reasonable prices and still make a profit. Societies that could be seen as precursors to the unions were formed to help protect American laborers and fight against foreign imports. Though they would die in time, these societies helps shape the early American economy.
Even the rural farming families struggled to fit in as they were both manufacturers and merchants. This spilled over into the cultural realm as society was being defined in ways that were vastly different than in Britain. The desire for more equality while struggling with inborn status views was found reflected in membership of manufacturing societies where many only had the rich as members and all had no women.
Culture Came Before Economics
The cultural independence came originally through being separated from Britain for so long and being largely ignored. As the taxes began to be impressed upon them, they “began to recognize and defended the considerable autonomy that they had gained.” Independence culturally had been developing all along. The taxes just exposed it. The more Britain looked at America and the colonists’ reactions, the more they saw danger as “to British eyes, a land of so many independent common men and so many chattel slaves seemed doubly strange and threatening to proper order.”
Cultural independence did not happen when political and economic independence occurred. It had occurred long before. It took the steps toward economic and political freedom for anyone to fully notice how different culturally the Mother Country was from her child. The British and the Americans were totally different culturally while fooling themselves that they were one and the same.
Had to Be Quick
The efforts of America to be politically, economically, and culturally independent from Britain was similar to that of a wildebeest born who has to quickly find its footing before the predators swoop down. It finds itself falling time and again but grows stronger with each effort. Eventually it takes off running and outdistances its mother.
This was the development of American independence.
Sources
Peskin, Lawrence J, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 2003).
Taylor, Alan, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001). | https://rebeccagraf-63084.medium.com/americas-complete-independence-from-britain-b8b2244a3cde | ['Rebecca Graf'] | 2018-08-03 22:28:21.761000+00:00 | ['History', 'American History'] |
Airdrop | Review Airdrop
1. Connect your wallet with the one you have interacted with in the ecosystem here
2. Hit connect and it will ask you for the type of wallet you are using. In this guide we will use Metamask. Confirm in the wallet and you will see the AirNfts terms and conditions that you must review and accept. Then you sign in your wallet the terms (NO FEE CHARGE).
3. Once logged in, click on the user circle and then My Nfts.
4. The AirDrop received will appear in the collection. Clicking on the NFT will display another screen with the selected work.
5. Clicking on the three dots will bring up the menu in which you can share, edit price, reopen for sale or send NFT to another wallet.
6. In the information section we can see the unique ID of each NFT and review it in Binance Scan, as well as add the ERC 721 token in the mobile version of Metamask, although we recommend using AirNfts directly for a better experience.
If you want to add in Metamask mobile version, add the contract and the ID of the K-Nft you have received.
0xf5db804101d8600c26598a1ba465166c33cdaa4b
7. You can directly search for your shipment in this link and filter your wallet.
You can also check your ERC 721 tokens in your Binance Scan balances.
https://bscscan.com/token/0xf5db804101d8600c26598a1ba465166c33cdaa4b?a | https://medium.com/@klandestinofinance/airdrop-15229b6f99a7 | ['Klandestino Finance'] | 2021-12-30 06:37:46.658000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Pancakeswap', 'Secret Network'] |
Social Audio? Tell me more! | If you would prefer to listen to this Blog post on Limor click this link
Social audio takes the best aspects of social media and combines it with audio and podcasts.
Most of you will have heard of the term “social media”, a phenomenon which has grown to dominate the lives of people across the world. Likewise, in more recent years a lot of you will have heard the term “podcast”, a podcast in layman’s terms is a home made radio show and they have exploded in popularity in the last 2 years. Everyday a new celebrity, sports star, media organisation or business is launching there own podcast series. Podcasts in time may become the new media which dominates your free time.
The traditional podcast is in exponential growth
This “Traditional” Podcast first appeared in 2003, at the time they were expected to be the next big thing. This initial prediction is only now starting to come to fruition 17 years later. There are many reasons for this new revival and explosion of the industry, these include the advancement in accessibility and technology — the smartphone available to you now is more powerful than the desktop computer which was available in the early 2000s. The world Covid lockdown crisis has also aided growth as now more than ever people desperate for distraction are becoming aware of the podcast market both as podcast consumers and as podcast creators.
Another major reason for growth is the podcasters see an avenue to money from podcasting, much like Youtubers but in a less saturated marketplace. According to the fourth annual IAB podcast Advertising Revenue Report prepared by PwC, U.S. podcast advertising revenue is expected to grow 14.7% in 2020 despite the pandemic. As growth continues, the U.S. podcast advertising revenue is expected to hit the $1 billion mark.
US podcast annual revenue will soon hit $1 billion
Individuals and businesses are also waking up to the fact that there is a new market emerging, the voice market. This voice economy is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2025, the traditional podcast is a great way to start building a presence and sonic identity in this new era of audio.
Social media is something which also started in the mid 2000s and hasn’t looked back since. It may has taken on many different forms over the years be it Myspace, Bebo, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or most recently Tik Tok and continues to evolve. This is exactly what Limor social audio is, Limor is the next evolution of social media into voice.
Social media has shaped the modern world
Social Audio is a remarkably new term and a completely new genre. Unlike podcasting which is a monologue where the host talks and you listen with no interaction , with social audio the listener can instantly interact and talk dircetly with the podcast creator or “cast” creator via voice comments. This helps to spark real social engagement, real conversations and real relationships. This authenticity can be seriously lacking in other forms of social media.
Limor is a social audio platform — Record, edit, share, interact, converse
Social Audio is at the embryonic stage of growth similar to when social media in general first appeared on the scene. As it stands not many people understand or know anything about social audio , which is an exciting new frontier of interaction.
Social audio is the next evolution of social media into voice, and the next evolution of podcasting into a social environment whereby fans can interact and engage with their favourite podcasters via voice and conversation. As the podcast market continues to grow and voice enabled technology becomes more dominant in smart devices and in peoples homes Social Audio will become a real player in the overall social media space.
Explore social audio for yourself now by downloading Limor for free from the App store or google play. Be part of the early stages of Limor and be a first mover in the Social Audio space.
lease let us know what you think of podcasts , the growth of voice technology and voice in social media.
Join the conspiracy and join the conversation.
www.limor.ie | https://medium.com/@limorapp/social-audio-tell-me-more-795fc6e1b58a | [] | 2020-11-04 13:53:19.604000+00:00 | ['Podcasting', 'Social Audio', 'Marketing', 'Podcast', 'Social Media'] |
Top 5 Reasons For Data Science Project Failure | Whether you are a seasoned data scientist or a business executive with a significant investment in analytics, chances are you’ve seen the powerful impact of analytics as well as the failures. So what drives an analytics project’s failure or success?
Data Science projects fail when they produce no actionable insights. Even a seasoned analyst’s efforts to coax insights from the data can be futile unless a number of key factors come together to increase the odds of success.
Let’s talk about the top 5 reasons analytics fail.
1. Starting with data instead of the question. The most common misunderstanding about analytics is that if you look at data hard enough, you will find insights. Staring at daily dashboards in the hope that insights will miraculously reveal themselves is often overwhelming, confusing and unsuccessful.
Successful analytics start by identifying the question you’re trying to answer from the data. For example, if site conversion is an issue, instead of studying your website data hoping to find reasons for low conversion, narrow down your efforts to a specific question. In this case, it might be “How can we increase conversion from 23% to 26%?” This approach allows you to focus on finding actionable drivers of conversion that can have impact.
2. An exploratory approach to analytics. Once you have identified the question you are trying to answer, do you explore all the data at hand in the hopes of finding insights or do you identify which data to study by using hypotheses as guard rails?
The exploratory approach often fails to find any insights and if it does, is a lengthy process. On the other hand, using hypotheses to narrow down both the scope of the project and the data set needed, leads to the answers quickly. This process also generates secondary questions to ask data to further refine the insights.
In our example, the hypotheses might involve certain pages or experiences thought to be driving lower conversion. These hypotheses are then used to identify the data needed to find segments of low conversion, and, once proven, address them.
3. Weak hypotheses. A data science project can still fail even when it begins with a business question and a structured approach for analysis if the hypotheses used to narrow down the scope of the problem are weak. Weak hypotheses result from failure to follow due process with the right stakeholder.
4. Unengaged or absent stakeholders. Successful analytics projects deliver actionable insights that are then used to make changes in the product or customer experience and ultimately drive business results. Any successful data science project, therefore, requires active engagement of the right stakeholders — the decision makers and owners of the business processes involved in the problem being studied. Working with the wrong or absent stakeholders leads to weak hypotheses, long cycles to analysis and wasted or no insights.
In the conversion example, the product manager responsible for conversion, the product dev team making site changes, as well as the analyst need to be involved to make sure any actionable insights are acted upon promptly.
5. Inaccessible or bad data. Lastly, analytics can fail even after following a hypothesis-driven structured approach with involved stakeholders if the organization doesn’t have easy access to clean and reliable data. The data needn’t be perfect for successful analytics, just cleaner and with fewer data issues. Data maturity is thus a prerequisite for analytics maturity.
Thank you for reading my post. I am passionate about using data to build better products and create amazing customer experiences. I write about my learnings at LinkedIn and at Forbes. To read my future posts, simply join my network here or click ‘Follow’ or join me on Twitter.
About Piyanka Jain
A highly-regarded industry thought leader in data analytics, Piyanka Jain is an internationally acclaimed best-selling author and a frequent keynote speaker on using data-driven decision-making for competitive advantage at both corporate leadership summit as well as business conferences.
At Aryng, she leads her SWAT Data Science team to solve complex business problems, develop organizational Data Literacy, and deliver rapid ROI using machine learning, deep learning, and AI. Her client list includes companies like Google, Box, Here, Applied Materials, Abbott Labs, GE. As a highly-regarded industry thought leader in analytics, she writes for publications including Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and InsideHR. | https://medium.com/dataseries/top-5-reasons-for-data-science-project-failure-4a6a4f363f35 | ['Piyanka Jain'] | 2019-03-13 23:12:35.819000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Data Literacy'] |
What is an activist? | What is an activist? It’s a person who believes strongly in social change and does something to effect that change.
Activists build new models.
They also work to get rid of the old.
An activist doesn’t see that the river is unclean. Instead he cleans the river.
An activist is at the same time, an optimist.
And who is this student?
Her story begins in a small village in Zimbabwe. A small village where a young girl, Chido Govera, grew up shouldering a weight of responsibility that no child should be asked to endure, rising at 4am to ensure that her blind grandmother and younger brother had water and food, before she set off for school
If you’d like to read this article, please click on the link below. Thank you. | https://medium.com/@mariarattray/what-is-an-activist-eb50e46347ed | ['Maria Rattray'] | 2020-12-11 04:35:29.190000+00:00 | ['Blue Economy', 'Environmental Issues', 'Activism', 'Change Management', 'Inspirational'] |
The Move to React Native | About six months after joining ClassPass, I found myself managing all of the mobile engineers in the department. This wasn’t by design, I just happened to take over all of the engineering squads that contained mobile engineers. It was an opportunity to examine and improve mobile engineering at ClassPass. One of the biggest opportunities we identified was exploring just how widely we could use React Native in our mobile development.
React Native is a tool; it’s right for some jobs and not for others. And like any tool, it has real power when applied to the right job. It can speed up development in a number of ways. You can surge web engineers into mobile projects in a way you can’t when writing native code, because it’s JavaScript and based on React. Its hot reloading increases engineering velocity since you don’t have to wait for compilation to see your changes. But the biggest benefit is that you can build features once and launch them on both iOS and Android apps.
Like many startups, ClassPass had more work on our product roadmap than we would ever have time to do. It was clear that building features for our mobile apps with half the effort could be a huge win for the company. But when you already have two large mobile codebases and mobile engineers who have had little to no experience with React Native, a transition like this can be complex and challenging. Success meant identifying those complexities, figuring out how best to meet those challenges, and remaining agile enough to keep iterating based on regular feedback. Our adoption of React Native was, for all of us at ClassPass, a real lesson in the huge benefits that can accrue from both careful planning and successful adaptation.
Buy-in From Key Engineers
Changes like this are usually a hard sell to your engineering team. Engineers who are proficient in Swift or Kotlin code don’t want to learn JavaScript or the React framework, particularly when being told to do so by a manager who’s never submitted code to a mobile codebase. It was clear I’d need allies in the engineering team. Two quickly came to mind. The first was a senior iOS engineer who had established himself at ClassPass through technical skill and an eagerness to share his knowledge (he was later promoted to be the mobile lead of ClassPass). The second was a recently-promoted Engineering Manager who was one of the first engineers to see the potential benefits of React Native. Both were much closer to the work, could lead by example, and were well respected by the other mobile engineers.
Find Executive Support
A large technological shift like this means you also need champions from above. Changes like this can have a huge beneficial impact on the business, but realizing them can take time. There’s the basic learning curve of the language and framework. Time spent hashing out best practices and optimizing operations are vital to the project’s success, but carry opportunity costs. Here’s where ClassPass’ culture of transparency and debate really paid off. We had to clearly articulate the long term business impact this kind of transition would have. Writing code once and launching on both mobile platforms simultaneously would be a huge benefit, especially as we were starting to discuss a major international expansion, where many markets have a much more even distribution of iOS and Android devices than ClassPass’ domestic customer base. Once everyone understood that, the executive and technical stakeholders were now aimed toward the same goal, vastly improving the project’s chance at success.
The Learning Curve
At the onset of this initiative, I thought it would help if my team could speak to some engineers who had been successful using it. Back in early 2017 that wasn’t easy to find. It had only been two years since Facebook open-sourced React Native. Artsy was one of the few companies that had experience actually using React Native and had spoken openly about it through multiple blog posts. The CTO was a friend, so I reached out and set up some time for our teams to speak. Hearing first hand about their experience gave us more confidence that this technology was viable for ClassPass.
The team started by using React Native for some smaller features, but we all agreed that some formal training would be valuable. One of our engineers knew of someone who’d led React Native training sessions, and so we scheduled a two-day class. The instructor introduced JavaScript, React, and eventually React Native. Our mobile engineers were very strong, senior, and already had some exposure to React Native; so within a few hours they pushed the instructor into material from the second day. This meant the second day could be used delving into advanced topics. It was great to see the instructor adapt so quickly into a bespoke curriculum based on my team’s desire to better understand advanced concepts like testing and best practices for a “brownfield implementation” like ours.
The Mandate
The team’s success with the training and these smaller projects convinced me we were on the right track but that I needed to keep pushing to make this happen. If each engineer had discretion to use React Native or write native code, many would choose native because it’s what they already knew. If that happened, we would have never realized the full benefits of React Native.
So the mandate I laid out was simple: Use React Native for all new projects on mobile and come speak to me when you think there should be an exception. The team’s reaction was mixed. Some engineers were excited about it and excited to learn something new, while others were skeptical. But the skepticism was kept to a manageable amount due to the mobile lead and the manager being on board, having gone through the training, and having completed some smaller features in React Native.
There was one clear exception to the React Native mandate from the beginning. Our Special Projects group were building a live video streaming product that used biometric feedback from body sensors via bluetooth. The work they were doing had deep integrations into the mobile operating systems, and was therefore not a good candidate for React Native. This exception was clear and non-controversial, and I was curious when we would find another clear exception. It took a full year.
Operations
At this point we had three repositories (iOS, Android, React Native). As we launched more of our features in React Native we faced more operational difficulties. For example, React Native code was pulled into the iOS and Android repos based on a pinned commit hash. This usually resulted in a broken build when an engineer updated the commit hash on either repo. And trying to proactively run UI tests for React Native code against both apps became a manual and time consuming process.
After much discussion in the mobile guild, it was decided the time had come for the “monorepo”. This would be a large project, but a necessary one if we were to get the most out of React Native. The guild lead broke it down into some releasable milestones and over a few months we had monorepo up and running.
In the new world of one mobile repository, changes to React Native code triggers a build to be run for both iOS and Android. Since UI tests are run against both apps, we ensure that master is always functioning for both iOS and Android. Code reviews are more productive since you can see what’s changing across platforms in one PR instead of three. Once we made this change, builds weren’t broken or full of terrible surprises. This was even more valuable for builds tied to our app releases. Reducing these issues helped our engineering velocity immensely. Engineers expect to catch their own bugs during a build. But when they find other people’s bugs, they have to reach out and both engineers are interrupted. Productivity takes a big hit and everyone gets frustrated. The new monorepo kept our mobile engineers much more productive and happy.
The Feedback Loop
Discussing and capturing feedback was a key part of our successful transition to React Native In addition to the large operational changes like the monorepo and the subsequent work on UI tests, many smaller decisions were made regularly. The mobile guild was the primary forum for these conversations. The mobile guild lead’s role in promoting and facilitating these discussions was critical. We also instituted longer “state of the union” meetings twice a year that were entirely focused around React Native. All of these mechanisms for capturing feedback would then feed into action items. Sometimes those actions were establishing and documenting best practices; at other times they were turned into projects on the mobile guild roadmap.
It’s always important to separate naysaying from valuable critical feedback. Interestingly, throughout our transition, the amount of criticism an engineer had about React Native was inversely proportional to how often they used it. The biggest naysayers used it the least, and tended to like it more as they used it more. Distinguishing naysaying from good feedback was also a product of knowing the engineers very well. I made it a priority to have regular one-on-one meetings, observe them directly in guild meetings, and talk about them with managers. With all of this input, it wasn’t too hard to distinguish legitimate critical feedback from simple personal preference.
Mobile Acquisition Flows and Concurrent Development
For years our app was only usable by subscribers. We’d acquire users on the web, who’d then use one of our apps to search for and reserve classes. We had recently “opened up” the iOS app and added a number of flows where you could sign up for a trial subscription upon opening the app or several other points in the process of searching for classes. This was a huge shift for ClassPass and our apps soon became a significant source of user acquisition. As we were about to start launching in markets with much more Android usage, it was critical that this work be ported over as soon as possible.
The mandate meant that all of this code was written in React Native, but the team that built it only had iOS engineers who were expected to launch it in the iOS app with an aggressive deadline. Because it was React Native we assumed it would be easy to port it to Android. This was a pivotal moment for mobile development at ClassPass because it showed great progress but also exposed some major issues. Android engineers were able to get the new flows into the app with roughly 25% of the effort (Two engineers in one month vs four engineers in two months). This was such a clear win for the business and for the team, that most of the skepticism around React Native evaporated. But it had also been a very frustrating month for those Android engineers. The frustration stemmed from our use of the “bridge” and the development of React Native code that was written only for iOS.
The bridge is the mechanism for passing data between the native world and the React Native world. Since both our mobile apps started as native apps, the bridge is used on all transitions from one view to another. But using the bridge causes latency. It also means that bridge modules have to be duplicated in each native codebase. In this case, Android engineers had to go into the native iOS code and try to figure out what the bridge module was doing and then attempt to replicate that in Java. One of the most important action items that emerged from this project was that we needed to adopt patterns that minimize the use of the bridge. It was also clear that it was much more efficient to work on iOS and Android in parallel, rather than developing for one platform and then porting that code over at a future date. Many React Native components have either iOS or Android specific configurations, and in this project engineers would run into components that were configured for iOS but not Android which slowed down development and was generally a frustrating experience.
Opening up our mobile apps for user acquisition was the last big project before we were ready to start developing features concurrently on both platforms. The experience and frustration our Android engineers had in porting over these user acquisition flows only reinforced that concurrent development was a move in the right direction.
The Next Exception
In early 2019 we completely rebuilt our search experience. Client-side development started in React Native as per the mandate. But early in this rewrite the mobile engineers saw latency in the search UX and started to doubt that React Native was going to work for this project. Tickets had been written and engineering work had already started, but now we were questioning what language to use. The product manager for search immediately flagged this a risk. A meeting was scheduled to discuss how to move forward. Because this topic touched both the search project and the mobile guild, most members of both groups came. It was a large meeting and I could tell a lot of people felt tense, like they were about to witness a React Native showdown.
The meeting started with an engineer on the search project describing the latency issue. Almost immediately the Engineering Manager who was the advocate for React Native (but was not involved in the search project) just stated that we clearly shouldn’t use it for this project. There was some silence and it seemed that people were surprised. They were expecting drama but they got quick agreement. Another senior engineer then said, “React Native is just a tradeoff between latency and development speed”. I thought that was perfectly articulated. I said as much and that I agreed with the decision not to use React Native for our search experience. I was thrilled that we finally found our second exception because it finally drew some sensible rules for when we use React Native. It all came back to the bridge.
Our search results page is very interactive. Most searches in large markets result in a seemingly infinite scroll of results. You can also swipe left and right to move to search results for different days, and there are other filter controls at the top of the page. All that interactivity requires moving data over the bridge and slows down the app. Most of the work we had done successfully in React Native were simple flows of one screen to another, or larger and more static pages like details pages for venues or classes. I had asked the team to use React Native unless they thought they had a good reason not to. We finally found another reason. Screens with a lot of interactivity should be done natively. ClassPass still defaults to React Native, but now there are more obvious guidelines for when we stick with native.
The results
Roughly 75% of all mobile development at ClassPass now happens in React Native. Our monorepo and suite of UI tests ensure we are testing React Native code against both apps for all builds. In our Growth squad, almost all mobile development is done in React Native; this has been transformative as almost all mobile work we do improves user conversion. All of this work is done twice as fast as it would be if we still had two fully native codebases. Code can be written once and deployed on both iOS and Android at the same time, and we plow through the roadmap twice as fast as we did two years ago.
I am not a React Native evangelist. As an engineering leader you need to make technology decisions with the best interest of the business in mind. As engineers we are literally building the business and, in the case of mobile app development at ClassPass, React Native was the right tool for the job. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-move-to-react-native-969391f0af97 | ['Matthew Eckstein'] | 2020-05-03 01:02:47.513000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'React Native', 'Engineering Mangement', 'Mobile App Development'] |
I’m Booking A 6-Day Vacation This Summer | Work-life balance is an enormous struggle for me. To one extent, I have made peace with the fact that I never have been good at balancing anything and I don't expect to ever become some multitasking maven.
Yet, as a single mom who works from home by writing online, I can't exactly ignore the quest for balance either. Instead, I'm trying to be realistic about where I'm currently at and where I want to be.
Case in point? A couple of weeks ago, I took a mini vacation and secluded myself in a hotel for 2 nights. During my break, I took advantage of doing nothing but relaxing and I didn't write a thing.
There was a very good book I began reading in the spa called The Power of Off, and I ordered myself a copy. I was so inspired to return home with a better focus on work-life balance... yet I haven't even taken the book out of the envelope it arrived in.
I came home resolved to work less and balance better, yet I still haven't even opened the book about balance to finish reading it.
There are countless occasions where I simply don't do the work it takes to achieve whatever results I want. Why? Because every goal requires some amount of sacrifice, and that's not always something I'm willing to do.
Balance doesn't magically happen because we decide we want it. We actually have to work to make it happen. That's kind of a bummer. I don't know about you, but my natural state of being is pretty much as imbalanced as one gets: stay up late working, wake up too early to work some more, forget about self-care, and put off housework.
It's not healthy, but it is my natural inclination. However, it's also up to me (alone) to find a way to earn a good living and raise a great kid. And part of that means giving us each some downtime.
My little vacation was brief, but it showed me how much I want to get away more often and give my daughter the same opportunity.
As it happens, my brief stay in the Waldorf Astoria left something to be desired. There were a few issues... like finding a cockroach in my room (twice), having a spa treatment canceled because the therapist didn't show up, and getting charged for using the private bar for a bottle of champagne I never took.
For my very first experience in a 5-star hotel, those problems made a dent in the overall experience. Not that the staff wasn't extremely apologetic. They were, but it simply wasn't enough to resolve those issues right then and there.
But I've been emailing with the hotel manager who assures me that my next stay will be dramatically better.
And I'm willing to try, particularly since the Waldorf Astoria has offered us a free night and my next spa service on the house.
To that end, I'm planning a 6-day vacation for my daughter and myself at the same hotel in early July. And honestly? I'm scared as hell about it.
Six straight days without working. Six straight days not making money... But spending it.
Shiver.
It's hard to put my finger on the real reason taking a vacation scares me. But I suppose it's tied up with a ton of guilt. I feel guilty about spending money on experiences because I grew up dirt poor. Spending money on vacations definitely isn't something that poor people do.
And downtime? That's honestly not something I do anymore. Not since I began relying upon my own writing to support me and my kid. Before I began working on my own writing career, I used to have downtime when my social media work was done. In between caring for my daughter, of course.
I used to watch TV. And play games on my phone. I used to just veg. I even used to make more time for dating.
But once I realized I could actually earn a living with my own writing, it was like a fire was lit within me. When it comes to writing these days, I feel like I can't stop/won't stop until...
Well now, I'm not exactly sure.
How are you supposed to know when to slow down or take a break as you try to build your own writing career?
When do you think, "I've arrived?" Or how about, "I can relax?"
I've been working on this writing gig for a year and I quit my job only 5 months ago. I work excessively as much as I can because 1.) I believe it will pay off in the end, and 2.) I'm pretty sure I need to work hard in expectation of the more meager months. That's pretty damn important anytime you have an unpredictable source of income.
The good news is that I can even plan a vacation at all. I'm lucky that my work is flexible enough to allow me to take it anywhere. I am fortunate to choose my vacation days, even if I'm terrible about actually taking time off.
Ultimately, it's an opportunity for me to get better with balance. And to practice perspective. Taking the vacation means spending money that could have stayed in my savings account. And it means pausing some of my progress as an online writer.
That's its own sort of sacrifice but in return? I gain quality time with my daughter, new experiences and memories, and more. It's an opportunity to live in the moment, have fun, and take a time out.
Sure, I'll still be on mom duty. My daughter and I will be busy at LEGOLAND and The World of Coca-Cola. Frankly, Atlanta is filled with museums, so we'll have tons to do and it will probably be pretty exhausting.
But I think it will be a good kind of exhaustion. And I do plan to visit that spa while my daughter is with a sitter.
At any rate, it will be a new experience and something that will ultimately make me proud to have accomplished as a single mom. That might just be enough reason to toss out the guilt, don't you think? | https://medium.com/home-sweet-home/im-booking-a-6-day-vacation-this-summer-1098930b71a1 | ['Shannon Ashley'] | 2019-04-29 19:02:38.719000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Lifestyle', 'Work', 'Parenting', 'Writing'] |
Get your Unslashed Finance Invite Code, today! | Today is a big day. After months of hard work, we are LIVE. Usually, this would be party time, but we would rather get you to your own parties worry free. We are doubling-down and focusing on our mission to make crypto safer.
We chose to do a private launch for two main reasons:
- First, it will enable us to control the number of participants.
- Second, the extra effort of getting an invite code will allow us to only attract deeply interested participants.
This would ensure the launch goes as smoothly and safely as possible.
We want to onboard deeply interested and highly engaged users first
Over the coming weeks, invite code holders will be the only ones to have access to our private launch.
HOW DOES THE INVITATION SYSTEM WORK?
Starting from today, those who have access to the Mainnet will be able to:
- Start Supplying Capital to the Bucket (a collection of pools) in preparation for Epoch 1 of Capital Mining (details will be announced soon)
- Invite their friends to join the deposit period by generating and sharing up to 5 invite codes per day
- Join our Ambassador program by applying here
These invite codes are to be used with care, and should be sent to interested people only.
Why?
For three reasons:
1. The top 50 Most Valuable Inviters will get an extra x1.1 to x1.4 boost on their Capital Mining Rewards (details about Capital Mining to be announced soon). The MVIs will be determined based on 3 main factors: number of invited participants, activity of the invited participants (Supplying Capital/Buying Cover) and amounts of Supplied Capital. The 3 factors will be analysed in conjunction to determine the ranking of each Inviter.
2. Should an invite code you generated not be used within 24 hours, it will be deactivated. And, one of your 5 daily invites will not be renewed afterwards, therefore reducing your available daily invites over the whole private launch period.
3. We might stop the invite code generation if we reach a milestone in terms of number of users and/or TVL, therefore the people that joined first would need to be genuinely interested.
HOW TO GET AN INVITE CODE?
Here are some ways you can look in to, to get a hold of your own code that will let you discover the Unslashed Dapp and grant you the right to supply capital and participate to the early Capital Mining.
1. Earn your invite in our social media channels!
Every day we will distribute 50 invite codes on “first come, first served” basis on all our channels like Twitter, Telegram, and Discord. No need to ask, they will be published at random hours of the day and will be deleted as soon as they are claimed.
Step 1, join us here:
Twitter : @unslashedf
Telegram: @UnslashedFinance
Discord: Unslashed
2. Ask for one in other communities or just tweet about it
Our community members are also present and active in other communities, just ask for an invite code in some of the communities listed below and someone might send you one. PLEASE do not spam and make sure to not be scammed. An invite code looks like a code, no link or url or wallet details will be asked for or shared.
Below are some of our friends’ communities:
Go and check if there are some invites there 😉
Aleph.im : Twitter — Telegram
Paraswap : Twitter — Telegram
Jarvis : Twitter — Discord
Lido : Twitter — Telegram
Harvest : Twitter — Discord
Enzyme (ex Melon) : Twitter — Telegram
And some more general DeFi communities:
DeFi Global — DeFi France — DeFi Italy — DeFi Korea — DeFi Japan — DeFi Room — DeFi Score — DeFi Africa — DeFi Nation — Lobstr DAO
Maybe you are already part of one of these groups? If so, a simple message asking for an invite code might get you an answer :)
And finally, if you are lazy, go for the hashtag #UnslashedSecuringDeFi and someone might respond to your tweet with an invite code 👀 — only if you are polite.
Other communities?
You are probably part of some other communities that we missed. Feel free to tell them to reach out on Twitter or Telegram and get some of these precious invite codes so that they could share and spread the love!
3. Drop Us Your Email
We might send invitations to random emails every day, while giving some precious information about the project.
Leave your email on our website to participate in the daily draw.
We hope to see you soon on Unslashed Finance!
LEARN MORE ABOUT UNSLASHED FINANCE
We are Unslashed and we’ve got your back!
Website: https://unslashed.finance
Manifesto: https://medium.com/unslashed/manifesto-for-a-decentralised-crypto-insurance-unslashed-finance-873078fd0ddd
Capital Mining: to be announced soon
Twitter : @UNSLASHEDF
Telegram: @UnslashedFinance
Discord: https://discord.gg/jQFxqTpbYC
Contact : @marouaneh | https://medium.com/unslashed/get-your-unslashed-finance-invite-code-today-f106ff44d947 | ['Marouane Hajji'] | 2021-01-07 15:12:16.574000+00:00 | ['Decentralized Finance', 'Hacking', 'Ethereum', 'Insurance', 'Insurtech'] |
Why Racism is Bad | The Modern Survival Guide #61
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
This is the Modern Survival Guide, a guidebook I’m writing for things I think people need to know about living in the modern world. The views expressed here are mine, and mine alone. And one of my views, although I am hardly alone in holding it, is that racism is one of the dumbest, most ultimately self-defeating, most ludicrously hypocritical ideas that humanity has ever come up with. And that’s a survival-level problem for a lot of people, because racism appears to be experiencing an upswing. I am actually upset that we still have to have this conversation in 2019, but here goes…
Let’s start with a definition.
Racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.
Racism is bad, m’kay? It’s a social cancer, a blight on our society and culture, and I know of at least seven good reasons why this is the case, presented in no particular order:
It creates violence and repression It limits the cooperative ability of societies It limits economic potential It limits one’s ability to see different viewpoints It limits our ability to make friends It is not based in any good science It rewards ignorance and sloppy thinking
I would call any one of these sufficient to class racism as “evil” all on its own; putting them all together, I’m prepared to make the argument that racism is one of the most evil intellectual traps humanity has ever fallen for. And I want to talk about each one of these points, because apparently that’s where we are as a society right now, and this needs to be said one. more. time: don’t be racist.
#1: Racism Creates Violence and Repression
Racism is bad because it is a major cause of violent and repressive behavior, which is an obvious and inherent trigger for all kinds of very bad social consequences. We’ve been running this experiment in the US since our founding, and the results are unequivocal. At this stage we barely even need the overwhelming evidence the rest of the world has provided to make this point.
Racism creates violence and repressive tendencies by setting up the worldview that a group of people are somehow worse or less human than another group.¹ We know that this is the first step in justifying atrocity, just generally — after all, a main object of wartime propaganda is to create these feelings about the opposing side, with the aim of making them easier to kill. The same sort of effect happens with racism — a racist may become insensitive to the plight of their targets because they believe them to be deserving of suffering, or not worthy of human compassion.
From there it’s just a short step to creating that suffering, and that’s a step people have been taking for millennia. An example of this sort of thinking was the Rwandan Genocide, or the Holocaust.
Ordinarily I would apologize for using the slippery slope argument, but in this case… nah. It’s got too much evidence that this slope really is quite slick.
Similarly, racism generates repression. If one group automatically assumes another group to be inferior, they will treat that group as inferior — less capable of making their own decisions, less likely to be hired for work, less likely to be accepted into relationships, etc. This inevitably creates an atmosphere of repression, even when it has “benign” intent. For example, in US we saw the effects of efforts by white Americans to “civilize” Native Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. And that’s not even touching Jim Crow, which definitely did not have benign intent.
Neither violence nor repression are good things to build into your society. Violence begets violence, and repression leads to revolution (and more violence, not to mention spinning the roulette wheel to see what kind of nation comes out the other side). These are bad things, both from the moral perspective and from the practical perspective, and it is infinitely preferable to avoid trigger conditions like racism in the first place.
#2: Racism Limits the Cooperative Ability of a Society
Part of the big practical problem of racism is that the violence, repression, and general ill will which it engenders are extremely bad for social capital.² If I think you’re a lesser species, I’m going to have real trouble working with you, accepting your ideas, and finding areas where we can cooperate to the interest of both parties. That’s just human nature. I may find ways to exploit you, but that is a very different thing.
And naturally, if I’m actively involved in repressing or hurting you, you have exactly zero reasons to ever cooperate with me — unless of course I decide to commit suicide and need some help with that.
The problem, of course, is that cooperation is one of the primary survival traits of the human species. Anything that limits cooperative enterprise in a society is, by default, a bad thing; it reduces our ability to respond to adversity, removes options for solving problems, hinders our ability to make new connections, and limits our potential accomplishments.
#3: Racism Limits a Society’s Economic Opportunities
Now more than ever, the central driving question of any economy is simple: how many smart people do you have plugged into your workforce and entrepreneurial groups? More = better. The simple truth of the human condition is that there are only so many geniuses to go around, and of those only a fraction will be competent. A society which can make the best use of that resource will be more prosperous than one which cannot, and neither genius nor competence are racially or ethnically limited.
Racism inherently limits the ability of a society to make best use of smart people. If I am forcing you into a lower social or class strata because of your race, I am depriving you of opportunity. Both genius and competence require opportunity in order to do great things. Otherwise the man who might invent a cure for cancer is stuck hoeing potatoes because he can’t get admitted to medical school.
At the same time, I think it’s safe to say that most modern management theories seem to agree that a happy workforce is a more productive workforce (actual implementation of this concept is a bit spotty, but there you go). And racism in the workplace creates a distinctly unhappy group, which will over time decrease productivity in that group.
Therefore racism in society is an active brake on economic prosperity and innovation. It insidiously limits the contributions of people who could otherwise make a valuable difference.
#4: Racism Limits Viewpoints in Society
Being racist means that you are, by default, less disposed to trust statements made by the group towards which you are being racist. This immediately and radically limits communication and the exchange of viewpoints, which is a serious problem.
Without good communication, it is very difficult to identify potential problems, opportunities, and emergencies. And without a good exchange of viewpoints, it is very difficult for people to resolve interpersonal or cultural disconnects.
Racism, therefore, is a disrupting force in communications and understanding in society. If I can’t tolerate being around another person, or if I automatically put down their ideas, I can’t really talk to them. And if I can’t talk to them, I can’t understand their issues or where they’re coming from — and they can’t understand mine. This radically increases the odds of coming into some form of conflict with that person for no good reason, and worse yet, it removes their ideas from my understanding of how the world works.
None of us are omniscient. Our only choice is to accrue as many views as possible and try to find the ones that work. Racism actively and perniciously hinders that process of seeking truth, understanding, and empathy.
#5: Racism Limits Our Ability to Make Friends
If I see you as inferior, and you know it, it’s very unlikely that we will ever be friends. I might be polite to you, maybe even pleasant to you, but that’s not the same thing. A friend is someone you rely upon and who can rely upon you. Racists are rarely friends with their targets, for exactly this reason: why would you be willing to rely on someone you hate or disparage?
Good friends are almost always in short supply, and they are a critical component of social capital and a good life. Limiting the possibilities of friendship for no good reason hurts you. It removes the opportunity to make connections that can improve your life. And from an altruistic perspective, it removes some of your ability to help others.
#6: Racism is Not Based on Good Science
There is a pernicious pseudo-scientific myth that is still going around today and it is this: that people of different skin colors can be demonstrated to be either superior or inferior. This is patently, totally, ridiculously false. Modern genetics has conclusively proven that skin color is simply a function of our ancestors’ homes’ latitude — different skin colors simply reflect different mutations designed to allow us to absorb more or less sunlight, thereby controlling vitamin D production and providing protection from overexposure to UV radiation.
This is real science, not pseudoscience, and it undercuts the logic of even thinking about different peoples as different “races” in the first place. Genetically speaking, all modern humans are extremely similar, with minor variations corresponding to ancestral environments — and given enough time we should expect even those minor variations to slowly vanish in an interconnected, mobile world.
What has been conclusively proven is that there are no genetic differences between the “races” which would make one naturally superior to another in any kind of general sense.
#7: Racism Promotes Ignorance and Sloppy Thinking
Playing off of the previous point, racism promotes concepts that are antithetical to a rational, scientific viewpoint. And this has consequences, one of which is to expose people to the pseudoscience community in general. It’s not that much of a step from believing racist pseudoscience to believing other pseudoscience — it’s reliant on the same faulty implementation of the scientific method. Normalizing racism is a step toward normalizing a non-scientific worldview.
See, the trouble with ideas is that they’re the proverbial djinn in the bottle — once they’re out in the world, they’re harder than hell to stamp out or retract. And a lie can generally get around the world before the truth has its boots on. Racism is a particularly nasty example, because racism relies primarily on heuristical³ ideas and views of the world, and as we discussed earlier in MSG #4, that leads to all sorts of cognitive traps but it feels truthy. It’s very hard for someone, once indoctrinated to racist ideas, to get away from them.
In this sense, racism is a bit like a virus. Like a virus, it spreads, and it has side effects beyond its core purpose. People generally do not react well when simply told they are wrong, for example.⁴ Smart people, especially, will find rationalizations for their reasoning regardless of its actual veracity. Confronting racists directly often leads to a loud, public discussion about racist ideas. And whoever wins, this generally results in the spread of bad ideas, because at least one of the people in the audience to that discussion will be an idiot, and will think the racist was right. Bad ideas tend to pup.
How to Not be Racist
Racism is bad. Therefore we ought not to be racist. But that’s very, very hard. Hell, even singing puppets figured that out. We’re racist because our brains are pre-programmed to make broad judgements based on very little information, and are also programmed towards tribal in-group/out-group responses to threat stimuli. In normal English, that is to say that once we have a bad experience with someone of a different race, we are naturally going to view all people of that race the same way. This mental strategy worked great for sabre tooth tigers, but doesn’t work very well with people.
And the sad truth is that, even if you know this is happening, your brain will do it anyway. Which is why you often see a lot of very vocally not-racist people doing racist shit.
So — avoiding racism is about fighting an inbuilt mechanism in your own mind. Isn’t that just peachy. Actually it is, because there are strategies you can use to do exactly that thing. We routinely employ them, even glorify them — what do you think bravery is, anyway? That’s what happens when someone’s fight-or-flight instinct gets triggered and they make the choice to do something else. We can draw a lesson from that:
Avoiding racism is about making choices.
Not being racist will involve experiencing an event that would normally prompt a racist heuristic, recognizing that your brain will default to that response, and then making the considered choice to not let that event determine your attitude towards whole groups of people.
This choice rests on two big foundations: purpose and education. You will need to have a firm grip on your purpose — to avoid falling into racist patterns of thought and thereby avoid the evils of racism. And you will need the education to recognize situations that might engender a racist reaction, or which might tempt you towards racist views.⁵
The first foundation is purely on you, and you can make that choice right now, if you haven’t already. The second should be treated as an ongoing personal challenge, but you can get started on it right now by going to Google (or your search engine of preference) and typing something like “Why do people become racist?” into the search bar. And then I guess happy reading, because when I did that I got about 105 million results, and somewhere in there you’ll probably find some good information.
Ultimately, racism isn’t going away. We’re never going to find the “end of history” scenario for this subject. There will always be racist people, as long as there are people, and that’s just all there is to it. But racism is bad and you don’t have to be racist. So hold to your purpose, and wake up every day ready to make the choice to treat people as individuals — not as ill-defined, misconstrued groups. | https://allen-faulton.medium.com/why-racism-is-bad-1c76c022c401 | ['Allen Faulton'] | 2019-05-18 05:25:31.629000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Modern Life', 'Racism', 'Life Lessons', 'Social Justice'] |
Handling a change to Redux-Form data from container to component via props | I ended up realizing that I didn’t need to use context for this after all and used this pattern as an alternative.
Thoughts? Let me know in the comments!
Rachel | https://medium.com/pico/handling-a-change-to-redux-form-data-from-container-to-component-via-props-c6a594093ddb | ['Rachel Cantor'] | 2017-11-07 23:32:17.900000+00:00 | ['Redux Form', 'Software Development', 'Props', 'React'] |
Programming Has No Age: How to Learn Java Even if You Think It’s Too Late | Programming Has No Age: How to Learn Java Even if You Think It’s Too Late Alex Vypirailenko Follow Dec 16 · 8 min read
Photo by Martin Reisch on Unsplash
The older we get, the more often we think that it’s too late for us to learn new things, especially coding. We are sure that our brain doesn’t work as it used to work in the youth and we won’t be able to grasp nuances of programming. In other words, we write ourselves off. But, the truth is that we all can learn Java and other languages regardless of how old we are.
I’ve met a lot of people in my life who started to learn coding at a mature age. And they succeeded because people at their age see things differently and exercise an informed choice, especially when it comes to finding the right way of learning. The latter helps them master a new activity more easily.
Other than that, the IT industry is known for its friendly and accepting community, at which specialists are valued by their skills, not by their age.
If that still sounds unconvincing, I recommend considering the next 5 conclusive arguments for why you should fulfill your wishes and start learning to code at any age.
5 Reasons Why Age is Not a Hindrance in Programming
1. Acquiring New Knowledge Keeps Brain Working
Learning to program is equal to a mental exercise — the more you strain your brain, the better your focusing mental effort is.
Back in 2013, Cesar Quililan defined the impact of sustained engagement in learning new skills on human sanity in his study published in Sage Journals. The experiment involved individuals between the ages of 60 to 90 and encouraged them to try a new hobby or craft, such as photography and quilting.
While spending months acquiring a new skill, this group of participants got the most of the memory gain compared to those watching movies or playing simple games.
It all means that you shouldn’t worry — at 30 or 40, your brain is working great! The main thing is to bring it into shape.
I have one happy-ending story of a 32-year-old specialist. He started with zero technical competence and had a hard time while learning to code from scratch. Soon he came across an online course and after completing the course, he qualified to apply for a web developer position. Nobody in the company cared about how old he was.
2. Programming is Not About Body Flexibility and Young Neurons Speed
I also had a friend Arnold, who decided to make a fresh start at his 38 and, like many other adult learners, doubted his abilities. When he encountered his first challenge, he came to me and said: “What if I don’t have enough energy, and indeed, why did I decide that I could?”
Sure, right after stopping to doubt himself and getting stuck to repeated practice, he overcame all possible difficulties. While training, the students should remember that only patience and a systematic approach can lead them to success. Programming languages are not what requires physical preparation and have the autumn of life.
3. Educational Sources Don’t Ask Your Age
These days, the web is full of interactive online courses you can come with to learn Java. A few of them include:
CodeGym, an online platform that suggests completing over 1200 tasks to learn Java programming. Right after registering for the course, you will write lots of code to polish your skills and land a job in the future. Thanks to built-in code validation, you can have each task checked instantly and receive feedback from the virtual mentor. The course developed using the latest techniques, such as gamification and storytelling, will keep you engaged and motivated.
CodeAcademy, an education company created to enhance your learning experience and keep you motivated to continue your training, providing interactive and real-world code challenges.
CodeChef, a unique platform that will encourage you to learn coding by participating in programming contests and challenges hosted three times a month.
Absolute beginners, in their turn, can begin with video tutorials on Coursera or Udemy, such as:
The Complete Java Masterclass, a practical class to teach you Java from fundamentals to the level, at which you can write programs using OOP, Interfaces, Generics, and other concepts.
Java Programming for Complete Beginners (in 250 steps), a course that will guide you through major Java concepts, from Java Basics to Java Collections, Generics, Exception handling, Multithreading and Concurrency, Functional Programming Networking, and File handling.
Java Certification by Duke University, a Java introduction course for new-comers that will shed light on the fundamental programming concepts and provide tools needed to solve the problems.
Mentoring support from professionals is what can significantly support you in your path to Java programming. Other than that, Java coders are known for their friendly community, which means the specialists are willing to help fresh learners when they get stuck at a specific problem.
So, here’s a list of the platforms, at which you can get answers to your coding questions or ask for guidance.
Java Forum, a standard programming forum including various topics and is separated into sections to ensure a fast and hassle-free search.
Java World, a platform that brings together Java news, how-tos, features, reviews, blogs, and other Java-related things.
CodeGym Help, a community created for novices to provide answers to frequently asked questions along with fast and adequate support.
r/learnJava, a subreddit putting together resources for learning Java.
r/learnprogramming, a subreddit for all questions related to coding in any programming language.
Other than practicing Java using online courses or video tutorials and hanging out on forums, I recommend putting blogs on the list as well. The authors are keeping an eye on updates and newly added features to share them with you and enhance your coding experience. I would identify the following two blogs as ones worth considering.
Java Geek, a source that provides specific cases or problems clearly explained.
Bench Resources, another source including described issues and cases related to Java.
4. Your Age Doesn’t Really Matter
I often tell my adult friends who doubt they can start all over again that age is just a number of their experience. After all, who said that humans should work at the same job for the rest of their life?! We are all mature individuals here who know what they want and what results they expect to see. So, if you feel like you desperately want to learn Java or any other programming language, don’t put your desire off until later, start learning right now and your effort will be rewarded shortly.
Besides, don’t compare yourself to other specialists, especially if they are already halfway through the journey you begin. The only person you should compare yourself to is you at the jumping-off point. You’ll be pleased to realize that you are progressing in comparison with the previous phase.
I have another positive experience with a programmer from my course. He came without any previous technical experience, yet after passing a few online courses he could land a dream job.
This and other examples once again prove that it makes no sense to worry about the limited expertise or false code. Everyone at any age makes mistakes, especially when they just start their programming journey. But once you sharpen your skills, the mistakes will disappear and you will feel more confident about programming.
Apart from that, both younger and older students are equally worried about whether they can get a job without sufficient work experience. First of all, the technologies are developing at a lightning-fast speed, which makes it hard for specialists to master all at once. Secondly, many companies prefer to hire specialists with little experience to train them for specific projects. So, there is no real reason to worry.
5. There Won’t Be A Better Time Than Today
Let’s face it: people are so programmed that they often wait for the right time to start something new. But to tell you the truth, the right time doesn’t exist — now is the best time ever.
Moreover, in pandemic reality, working in IT is relatively safe and stable as the tech sector together with pharmaceuticals, logistics, and healthcare is less affected by Covid-19.
Bev White, CEO at Harvey Nash, also said that 82% of IT managers in the United Kingdom expected their headcount to remain the same or even increase. Many companies are now looking for quick access to specialists who can help deliver digital projects at short notice.
With all that being said, now is high time to start learning Java or any other programming language to join the IT market.
Summing Things Up
Programming is not ballet or figure skating, where you need to be young, flexible, and flourishing. Learning to code will rather require some time, effort, and the proper mindset you start it with, while your age is not something that should interfere with the training.
Instead, think of your age as something that can help you notice things that younger professionals don’t. In short, learning programming will keep your attention and focus on a high level. | https://medium.com/javarevisited/programming-has-no-age-how-to-learn-java-even-if-you-think-its-too-late-3f0835e7d0f8 | ['Alex Vypirailenko'] | 2020-12-16 07:05:57.968000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Java', 'Coding', 'Learn To Code', 'Learning To Code'] |
Subsets and Splits