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At War | War, twisted horrors
Words, flesh-tearing bullets
Trigger, you pulled it
90s RnB rain
It’s pouring now
You giving up, how?
Under your windowpane
Calling your name
Boom box,
On my shoulder
You know these cats don’t know ya
Don’t know me
Like they want to
War, brainwashed warriors
Guns, death on delivery
Trigger, who pulled them?
Hood on, but I ain’t no hoodlum
Praying, don’t let them wreck me
Speeding down a highway
Racing to my driveway
Six lanes, out-pacing my demons
All around, tell an angel to get me
Banging the sides
Expensive rides
Parts, flying by
Trigger, you tried to cull them
Guns, you went behind backs to sell them
War, very seldom
Are fought for humans | https://medium.com/brian-the-man-behind-the-pen/at-war-bb14de01d853 | [] | 2020-12-01 23:37:38.953000+00:00 | ['War', 'LGBTQ', 'Poetry', 'Poem', 'Veterans'] |
30 Days To Turning 30 | My twenties have been one hell of a rollercoaster and I’m so glad it’s finally coming to an end. In 30 days, a new decade of my life will begin. I hope that in 10 years when I am looking back at my thirties, I shall have more to celebrate and be thankful for.
But today, I am thankful for life. That I am still here is proof that God is not done with me. That my journey is far from over. I might have failed woefully in the past years but I am not a failure. I’m capable of success. I was created to stand out and excel. My past does not define me. if anything, it has prepared me for what lies ahead. My future is bright. I’m a divine champion.
I have made a lot of mistakes, but I took the lessons from my mistakes to heart, and I’m grateful for every one of them.
I may be single, but I am genuinely happy. I may be broke, but I am content.
I am on a journey to leading a purposeful and fulfilling life through deliberate and conscious effort. And that is something worth celebrating.
I may not have traveled beyond the walls of my village, but I’m only 30. There are a lot of years ahead of me, and the world is not going anywhere, is it?
I know a lot of people had accomplished so much by the time they turned 30, but who says our timing is the same? The house, the cars, the awards, the money, the accomplishments will come. One day, at a time.
I am in no hurry to get them all. The goal is to do something every day that takes me closer to my dream.
I have never threw a birthday party in my whole life. I know 30 would be the perfect time to throw one, but 31st wouldn’t be bad either, right? God willing, there would be money in the bank and a spouse and a kid to celebrate it with. | https://medium.com/@AtufeLydiaSarah/30-days-to-turning-30-a720373805dc | ['Atufe Lydia Sarah'] | 2020-03-03 19:05:03.267000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Birthday Party', 'Birthday'] |
Subsidies and Regulation Hurt Small Farms | Our small farms are good for the world. They provide fresh, healthy food to their communities, they are responsible and caring stewards of their land, and their regenerative farming practices are more friendly to the environment than the practices of large farms growing corn or soy as monocrops with nitrogen fertilizer. But small farms are inherently less profitable than larger ones: the economy of scale means that growing thousands of bushels of corn is far more efficient than growing a few dozen acres of diverse vegetables. Thus, the owner of a small farm hoping to make a profit off of their hard work cannot charge the low food prices that big farms are able to offer and will become outcompeted without extra support from the community. The government could be a strong force to counter this inequity in order to promote the existence of successful small farms in the U.S., but instead its farm subsidies and regulations magnify the advantages of large farms and inhibit smaller ones.
The help the government does give to farmers goes disproportionally to large farms. In 2018, President Trump signed a bill renewing a $867 billion farm subsidy plan, giving the USDA money to renew its over 80 year old tradition of, among other things, allowing growers to apply for subsidies awarded based on production. These subsidies guarantee growers a minimum revenue per bushel of “program crops,” a term which the USDA Economic Research Service’s 2019 report on America’s farms describes as including “barley, corn, dry edible beans/peas/lentils, oats, peanuts, rice, sorghum (grain), soybeans and other oilseeds, canola, and wheat,” crops usually grown in monocultures and which small farmers are less likely to produce.
Since the money is allocated based on yield size without regard to the financial needs of the farm, it ends up supporting primarily huge agriculture companies which are already making large profit margins. According to the USDA’s 2019 report, 97.9% of U.S. farms are family farms, meaning that the “principal operator and people related to the principal operator…own a majority of the business.” The report shows that 69% of commodity-related payments went to the top 8.5% of these farms, and only 6% of the payments went to occupation farmers with gross cash farm income less than $150,000 (31.7% of U.S. farms fall into that category).
Millions of dollars of farm subsidy money doesn’t even end up going to real farms, but ends up in the hands of local governments, state universities, and even airports, according to data from the Environmental Working Group. The group’s report stated, for example, that between 1996 and 2001, the Walla Walla Regional Airport in Washington state received $67,222 of farm subsidy money. Some people who own land which used to be farmed for rice now get subsidies for their lawns, and historical societies receive tens of thousands of dollars of this money intended for farmers.
Many small farmers simply don’t have time or inclination to apply. The application process for farm subsidy money is necessarily bureaucratic, involving time-consuming paperwork, and while larger companies hire staff to do this kind of work, small farmers are busy doing the actual work of growing food. Moreover, receivers of subsidies have to grow their crops to government standards, using farming practices like antibiotics for animals and specific pesticides which the farmer may not wish to use. | https://medium.com/@satyajohnson/subsidies-and-regulations-hurt-small-farms-7ea8ce10244b | ['Satya Johnson'] | 2020-12-02 18:02:50.402000+00:00 | ['Small Farming', 'Regulation', 'Farm Subsidies', 'Beaurocracy', 'Big Government'] |
Theatre As Commodity: Saving Our Industry By Undoing Our Worst Mistake | Theatre is a shared artistic experience, both in its creation process and in its performance. In human history this shared artistic experience has been framed in a multitude of ways — as ritual, as religious observance, as entertainment, as propaganda, as resistance. And while it has been — and will continue to be — all these things in modern America, what it is primarily for us is a commodity. Framing theatre as a commodity is at the root of every major problem we have.
In 1954, we made a pretense of detaching art from commodification by the establishment of the nonprofit tax category, enabling nonprofit companies to collect tax-deductible donations & generate income without having to pay corporate income tax. Like absolutely everything else, this has primarily benefited the privileged.
Systemic racism, sexism, ableism, and transphobia are inextricably bound to classism and the commodification of the arts. All of these problems need to be addressed at once.
Arisa Bega in What Every Girl Should Know by Monica Byrne at Impact Theatre. Photo by Cheshire Isaacs.
INDIVIDUALS
The number of people making a living in the theatre is vanishingly small, and able-bodied white cis men are widely overrepresented. Most theatre is small, local, and underground, dominated by women and BIPOC who make almost nothing doing it. Well-funded theatres reach into this community occasionally and pluck out its white men while sourcing the majority of its hires from the same tiny handful of MFA programs that are the gated communities of the theatre world. While this has improved somewhat in the past ten(ish) years, it has improved at a glacially slow pace, in part because the commodification of theatre at all levels roadblocks progress and makes gatekeeping the far easier choice.
At every step on that journey, there are roadblocks for women, BIPOC, people with disabilities, and trans people. Economic disenfranchisement has long been a tool to protect privilege, and we have upheld that systemic injustice because the problems seem too big to solve. Whose family can afford theatre tickets, who gets arts education in schools, who can afford to attend an MFA program, who can afford to work for below-poverty-level wages before landing that LORT gig — and for many, especially women, BIPOC, people with disabilities, and trans people, after that LORT gig is over — all gatekeep who is able to become “professional.”
Imagine calling a doctor who runs a free clinic an “amateur doctor” or an attorney who works exclusively pro bono an “amateur attorney.” This is absurd; medicine and law rigorously control who is licensed to practice their craft as a “professional” based on education and experience. In theatre, we base this purely on income. How many weeks you were employed at a theatre with an AEA contract, which itself is based on income, determines who is a “professional.” These “professional” gigs are given disproportionately to white, able-bodied, cis men, weaponizing our art form against women, BIPOC, people with disabilities, and trans/nonbinary/GNC people.
ORGANIZATIONS
A small handful of companies, almost all run by able-bodied cis white men, collect the majority of the available funding. The importance, value, and prominence of a theatre organization is based on its annual budget. If your annual budget is below a certain amount, you quite literally don’t count — your stats are left out of every major study and your needs and concerns are left out of every initiative. Only theatres with a certain level of income qualify for inclusion in “the theatre.”
Theatres with incomes below a certain threshold are considered “amateur,” and beneath consideration. The more money a theatre has, the more power and influence it has. Considerations of quality or artistic experimentation are a distant second behind who is able to pay people the most money. That’s an important consideration — people should be paid fairly for their labor — but it should not be the primary evaluation of an organization’s worth. And of course, which organizations are given funding and how those decisions are made are steeped in the commodification of our art, which is bound to systemic inequities. Studies show that companies run by BIPOC get less funding; boards consider a candidate’s ability to bring in high-level donors a primary (if not THE primary) consideration in hiring and retaining Artistic Directors; grants are often given to white-run and abled-run theatres that do “outreach” to BIPOC and disabled communities rather than give funding to the smaller companies that are already doing that work. And so on.
AUDIENCES
Audiences are hounded for donations after paying an exorbitant amount of money for tickets. It’s shocking to charge $40 for a single ticket to a single performance when $40 will buy you a pair of padded, reclining seats with cupholders in a movie theatre, and no matter how you try to excuse it with “theatre is a unique experience,” “live performance is inherently more valuable,” or “it costs much more to produce than $40 a seat,” that’s a tough sell to the average overworked, underpaid American with very little free time and even less free money and we know it. We all know it. At the end of the movie, no one comes out and asks you to put even more money into a basket; no one emails you once a week forever after asking for money.
Theatre IS a unique experience; it DOES cost more than $40 a seat to produce. And yet the cost to attend is prohibitively high. Half price tickets for people under 30 is an expired Tylenol that theatre found in the bottom of its purse when what it needs is major surgery.
And what are you all thinking right now? You’re thinking, “$40 is cheap; most companies charge much more.”
FUNDING
We charge these kinds of prices because we must in order to survive. The truth is that most of us are barely surviving.
As a producer, I often heard, “If you can’t afford to pay everyone (amount), you shouldn’t be producing theatre.” This is the “let them eat cake” of the arts world. “Only the wealthiest theatres should be producing” is not the solution we need. “Just get more funding,” also something I was told over and over, isn’t a real answer. It’s magical thinking. There is no more funding.
We don’t just need more funding. We need better funding. Funding needs to be more practically and usefully conceptualized.
Right now, funding is based entirely on a for-profit, commodification model. We are supposed to imagine that we are selling a product to an audience. We should charge that audience as much as possible, pushing the limits of what the market will bear, and still work relentlessly to “upsell” them, to convince them to give us even more in donations. We do everything we can — we are forced to do everything we can — to cater to a wealthy audience, to keep them happy, to keep their wallets open.
We are a luxury good. And that? That’s not a compliment. It’s a calamity.
Jonathon Brooks in Of Dice and Men by Cameron McNary. Photo by Chshire Isaacs
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
Systemic problems require systemic solutions. And decoupling our art from commodification requires decoupling our art from the systems of hierarchical privilege that are bound together with it.
We need money to survive, and by “we” I mean both our companies and our individuals. Right now, in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, our industry — along with the rest of the US economy — is contracting, and there’s no way to know who or how many will survive. It’s a terrifying time. In many ways, it feels like now is not the time to address these major, systemic issues. But I think now, while everything is in flux, while most of our industry is paused, is exactly the time to create a better, more sustainable future.
We need to imagine ways in which our art is not valued by its success as a commodity, at every level.
Imagine more equitable funding. Imagine removing financial gatekeeping from grant applications. Imagine not caring if the money is “used well,” defined by the creation of a successful commodity. Imagine paying theatremakers a salary because they are theatremakers, whether they are part of a company, a production, or not. Imagine funding for operating costs, removing the need to lie on grant applications that all funding goes to production costs for that one sexy world premiere. Imagine funding playwrights because they are theatremakers, not because they wrote a sexy world premiere starring a celebrity. Imagine not caring about celebrity. Imagine free college and free MFA programs, including housing, ending MFA gatekeeping, then imagine fully funded arts programming in our public K-12 system, funding that’s centralized and untouchable, unable to be cannibalized for higher admin salaries at the local level by firing teachers and canceling programs. Imagine every child in America having arts classes. Imagine widening the definition of “arts” to include non-European art forms. Imagine kathakali being as valued as ballet. Imagine performance being as valued as STEM. Imagine capping all tickets nationally at the price of a movie. Imagine being able to make a career in theatre even if you didn’t marry an attorney or an engineer, even if your parents aren’t wealthy, even if you have no inheritance. Imagine how the entirety of our industry would change if access to its creation was no longer determined by income.
Imagine the circle of theatremakers, including funders, all looking at each other and saying, “We have decided to care for one another, as one community, to protect theatre as a shared human experience rather than a dog-eat-dog construct that values the privileged only.”
Systemic change is a challenge in theatre because we’re not just one field. We are multiple fields that collaborate to produce our deeply collaborative art form. Systemic change requires buy-in from funders, from donors, and from theatremakers simultaneously.
Every corner of our industry values the economically privileged. Our culture has spent generations disenfranchising people who are not able-bodied cis white men and creating systems based on the values, beliefs, needs, and desires of those able-bodied cis white men. Anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-genderist, anti-ableist work must be done as such, and it must be done in tandem with reshaping the commodification mindset and rejecting economic privilege as a core value, from playwriting to closing night.
Next up: That’s big talk, Melissa. Just how do we achieve this?
YOUR TURN
I have my ideas, but I want this effort to be collaborative. I want to hear from you as well. What are the ways in which you think theatre should be decoupled from commodification? Do you think theatre should be decoupled from commodification? Or is there a different solution? Email [email protected] with your thoughts to include in my follow-up post.
Originally published on bittergertrude.com | https://medium.com/@bittergertrude-66916/theatre-as-commodity-saving-our-industry-by-undoing-our-worst-mistake-71deddb82d3c | ['Bitter Gertrude'] | 2020-12-23 19:53:44.568000+00:00 | ['Performance', 'Theater', 'Nonprofit', 'Theatre', 'Revolution'] |
Pocket Economics for Node Runners | The mission of Pocket Network is to provide reliable, blockchain-agnostic, decentralized infrastructure to web3 applications at a fraction of the cost of centralized competitors. To fulfill this mission, we created an incentive layer that completely changes how nodes are compensated for providing infrastructure services.
We designed Pocket Network with a unique economic model based on the POKT token that benefits all participants. To gain access and benefit from the protocol, POKT is purchased and staked by both developers and node runners, but due to the unique incentives on each side of the market, staking differs between the parties.
This article will focus on the node-specific aspects of the economic model. For a high-level introduction to the entire economic model, please see our Economics Brief. For a full picture of the economic model, see our Economics Paper.
Nodes runners stake once per node to participate in Pocket Network and the protocol’s proof-of-stake consensus. The minimum stake required to run a single node is 15,000 POKT. The initial amount of POKT needed to stake as a node is not dynamic, but can be raised or lowered by the Pocket DAO to ensure a stable barrier to entry and adjust for changes in POKT price. Staking additional POKT beyond the minimum stake increases the probability that a node will be selected as the block producer which comes with an additional reward (more on this later).
The minimum stake keeps nodes honest. If a node is identified as a bad actor, its stake is subject to penalties. If a stake falls below the minimum amount through serving incorrect data or incorrect block validation, 20% of the minimum stake for that node will be slashed and jailed. If a node submits a fraudulent relay batch, 100% of its stake will be slashed.
Once the initial costs of a node are covered (POKT stake and hardware), the only marginal costs are electricity and bandwidth for providing the compute to complete relays. These marginal costs for nodes are extremely low and, most importantly, increase linearly as work increases. Our testing shows that a single node on Pocket Network can serve millions of daily relays.
In exchange for servicing relays for applications, nodes are compensated in POKT. Unlike most traditional block rewards, Pocket Network’s reward is dynamic. POKT rewards are directly proportional to the number of relays and transaction fees in a given block. For every relay that is served on Pocket Network, .01 POKT is minted. Of that .01 POKT, the node who served the relay is rewarded 89% (.0089 POKT), the Pocket DAO receives 10% (.001 POKT), and the block producer receives the remaining 1% (.0001 POKT). All nodes in the network have an opportunity to produce a block, but their chances are proportional to their stake.
For example, if a node serves 100,000 relays they will earn 890 POKT. Additionally, by participating in the proof-of-stake consensus, the node will have an opportunity with each block to be a block producer and earn 1% of the total block reward. If a block has 1,000,000 relays in it the block reward is 100 POKT.
The optimal economic strategy for node runners is to replicate as many nodes as possible with the amount of POKT held. By spreading their stake across multiple nodes, node runners maximize their chances of being chosen in as many sessions as possible, providing them with the most opportunity to serve relays and earn rewards within the network. This strategy provides redundancy if one of the nodes does not get selected for a session.
Using the previous example, if our POKT node runner held 50,000 POKT, instead of staking the entire amount on a single node, the node runner could stake his or her POKT evenly across three different nodes. If each of the three nodes served 100,000 relays, the total reward for this particular node runner would be 2,670 POKT. Each of the three nodes would also have a chance to be the block producer.
While Pocket Network will depend on professional infrastructure providers to provide the bulk of the infrastructure for applications, due to the low marginal cost of running a full node, we expect there to be a long tail of individuals running nodes. Ensuring a low minimum stake to become a node is important to optimize the number of nodes within the network. With that in mind, it is incumbent on Pocket Network (and supporters) to continue to lower the barrier to entry technically and financially for non-technical users to run full nodes. Having a large number of diverse node runners is important to keep the large node runners honest.
To learn more or discuss economics with our team, please join our Discord.
1 This value is subject to change based on DAO resolution to control the amount of POKT inflation. | https://medium.com/pocket-network/pocket-economics-for-node-runners-4f812cc0c18d | ['Pocket Network'] | 2020-07-03 14:01:04.226000+00:00 | ['Blockchain Infrastructure', 'Full Node', 'API', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Pocket Network'] |
Do less | Do less
The second principle of the Tao can be synopsized as do less to do more. For a while now my personal mantra has been: “Do less.” If you know me,you can understand how hard that is for me and also how incredibly productive it has been. It is about reducing busywork, commitments to things and people that you don’t actually care about, and creating space to think and write and act where you believe you can do more. A friend of mine shared a key idea from the Hoffman process: we are human beings, not human doings. Spoiler alert: the overall goal of life is to end suffering by being fully at home in ourselves.
Robert Montgomery creates large-scale, site specific sculptural installations that present texts he writes. They are ideas, poetry, aspirations, thoughts, dreams, and sometimes, for some people, they are truths. I experienced the first one very soon after the death by suicide of my college boyfriend who I still love and it read: The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive. I saw this one last night and I love it also. | https://medium.com/@heidizuckerman/do-less-874ff242e508 | ['Heidi Zuckerman'] | 2020-12-14 14:58:46.024000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Life', 'Wisdom', 'Connection', 'Love'] |
Miriam Serkez — Sherut Leumi is Where the Heart is | Miriam Serkez — Sherut Leumi is Where the Heart is
Miriam Serkez
Sherut Leumi. Two years of my life that I gave all that I could to serve the country that has become my home.
If I would have known what my future would look like 5 years ago, I would have laughed. When I moved to Israel, I completely changed the course of my life, and boy has it been a roller coaster ride. The highs have given me the strength and ability to smile through the hardships of everyday life. The happy, exciting and special moments root within me a deep feeling of trust that I am living my dream and that this is where I am meant to be. The downs test my mind and make me doubt my decision to make this my current reality.
Living in Israel, away from family and the comfort of home brings great challenges every day, but the thing is, even on my hardest days, I know that I wouldn’t trade being here for anything. As a volunteer medic for MDA, Magen David Adom - Israel’s national emergency and ambulance service, I have seen how the hardships during my service has made my experience that much more special and rewarding. I mean let’s be real, if waking up at 5:30 in the morning to run around in the heat all day was enjoyable, then everyone would be doing it.
Most people have heard of Lone Soldiers. They understand the amazing sacrifice that these soldiers go through in order to serve their country. They leave their lives and family behind to come make a difference in our homeland. The term less understood is Lone Bat Sherut. Just like Lone Soldiers, we have left all that we know in order to come serve our country. It may not be with a gun on the battlefield, but we too are giving all that we have to serve Israel and keep civilians safe.
Being a Lone Bat Sherut means that when the apartment empties out for the weekend and everyone returns home to their families to sleep in their bed and get a home-cooked meal from their mother. We need to empty the apartment and search for a place to spend Shabbat, week after week. Don’t get me wrong, I love experiencing Shabbat all over the country. Countless people have opened their hearts and their homes to me and I am eternally grateful to them, but as welcoming as people are, it’s still not my bed or the comfort of my own family.
Just when it starts feeling too difficult to deal with, and I question my decision to be here, I see messages of appreciation and care which makes it all worth it.
I chose to do my service with MDA. When choosing my line of service, it was very important for me to feel as if I was truly giving my all and making a difference and I don’t think that a day has gone by where I have not felt just that. After intensive training, I became a certified medic. My daily requirements for the past two years have been 8+ hour shifts on the ambulance, running the international volunteering program in Jerusalem, restocking equipment, teaching courses when needed, and helping out in the first responder office. There was always something to do or somewhere to be, and I was always ready. I came here to give my all to this country and that is what I did every day.
Being a medic is not only physically exhausting but emotionally draining as well. No-one can prepare you for what it feels like to do CPR on a lifeless baby. No-one can explain what it will feel like to treat victims at the scene of an overturned bus with lifeless bodies inside. These experiences have changed me as a person and have given me a different outlook on life. I have grown to appreciate the little things and I am constantly reminding myself that nothing can be taken for granted.
As a medic, I was also lucky to experience joyous and happy moments throughout my service.
Hearing the sound of a baby’s first cry in the world, or watching a man take in a breath from his previously lifeless body because of the help that we were able to give him, are moments that keep me going and helps me realize that what I am doing is important and this is where I am meant to be. To have had the opportunity to take part in such an amazing organization is truly humbling.
I made the choice to make Aliyah. I made the choice to do Sherut Leumi. I made the choice to come and make a difference in people’s lives. I thought I was choosing my future, but in reality, I had no say in how these experiences would change me. The One ruling all of my choices is a force more powerful than myself. I have spent the past two years trying to understand this concept and whenever I am forgetting it, I am met with a case where I see someone who’s life has changed in the blink of an eye and I am reminded. We plan and plan, but at the end of the day, we land up miles from where our blueprint had us. Even though this is not how I envisioned my journey, all of the disappointments that I thought were going to ruin my plans for the future, landed me in the best of Sherut jobs with the most amazing staff around me and meeting such supportive people that have become friends and family in Israel.
It is hard to think that I am moving on from this point in my life and beginning something new. My service has been everything I knew and thought of for two years, and now my identity is changing. Happiness, sadness, fear, excitement; there is so much I am feeling as I move on to the next chapter of my journey. As overwhelming as it is, I am ready to see what’s in store for me and can’t wait to continue experiencing and writing my story here in Israel.
The saying goes “If you choose a job you love, you will never work a day in your life.”
The past two years have been incredibly challenging, rewarding, exciting and I have experienced disappointments, miracles, healing and joy and I would not change my experiences for anything. | https://medium.com/living-that-bodedah-life/miriam-serkez-sherut-leumi-is-where-the-heart-is-5c421e7e9872 | ['Lone Bnot Sherut'] | 2019-09-09 16:10:24.682000+00:00 | ['Gratitude', 'Giving', 'Volunteering', 'National Service', 'Israel'] |
Counting blessings (Day 2) | Today at 6.51 a.m. my husband and I were over the moon about the fact that our son was one day old. It surely doesn’t seem majestic, but for us it was nothing short of exactly that. We were and of course still are in parent’s heaven even though this little time with him was full of trials and errors.
In this state of bliss, one tends to have higher inclination to count one’s blessings.
For one, we are happy that he is well. An ultrasound during pregnancy did show some thing not just grown right in his little heart, but a quick check-up with the pediatric cardiologist eased our minds by the fact that mother nature took care of our baby’s ticker.
Second, I still can’t fathom the fact it was barely five hours from the first contractions to meeting our precious little boy. With a help from a single pain shot and perfect work from the staff here at Hospital of Novo Mesto, Otto came screaming, getting a perfect ten, while mummy (by my husband’s account) hardly made any noise worth mentioning.
Third, we were fortunate that he decided to be a morning baby, so I didn’t have to wait for my husband to drive back from work. We were all packed and around three a.m. we shot the three minute drive to the hospital.
Fourth, and this is proving to be an important one, is the fact we decided to opt-in for a possibility of my husband staying with the two of us in the hospital during the whole stay. We just can’t imagine doing this any other way now. I’m grateful for the help, support and his company through these completely new experiences and he can attest that the idea of him staying home alone and just seeing us for a couple of visiting hours until he gets to pick-up us up is total violation of fatherly rights. See, I really am blessed with having this wonderful man for a husband. He now lays next to me and our son, who he just put down to sleep after I fed him. And through these small acts our love deepens and grows.
Fifth for the end of this exciting first full day with our baby boy is the fact that even though that some strange motherly instinct is keeping me from sleep, always checking if our son is snug as a bug and sleeping is that I’m fine. I feel amazing in this new role and I hope this account about his first year of life will also prove helpful. I will write about the depression moments I had during my early months of pregnancy, but it will have to wait for a rainy day. I’m just so darn happy all the time.
Motherhood in numbers: | https://medium.com/a-year-in-a-life/counting-blessings-day-2-cecef79dffd1 | ['Sara Tomsic'] | 2019-09-19 21:38:41.640000+00:00 | ['Birth', 'Fatherhood', 'Newborn', 'Blessings', 'Motherhood'] |
Introduction to Data Visualization in Python | Seaborn
Seaborn is a Python data visualization library based on Matplotlib. It provides a high-level interface for creating attractive graphs.
Seaborn has a lot to offer. You can create graphs in one line that would take you multiple tens of lines in Matplotlib. Its standard designs are awesome and it also has a nice interface for working with pandas dataframes.
It can be imported by typing:
import seaborn as sns
Scatter plot
We can use the .scatterplot method for creating a scatterplot, and just as in Pandas we need to pass it the column names of the x and y data, but now we also need to pass the data as an additional argument because we aren’t calling the function on the data directly as we did in Pandas.
Figure 16: Scatterplot
We can also highlight the points by class using the hue argument, which is a lot easier than in Matplotlib.
Figure 17: Scatterplot colored by class
Line chart
To create a line-chart the sns.lineplot method can be used. The only required argument is the data, which in our case are the four numeric columns from the Iris dataset. We could also use the sns.kdeplot method which rounds of the edges of the curves and therefore is cleaner if you have a lot of outliers in your dataset.
Figure 18: Line Chart
Histogram
To create a histogram in Seaborn we use the sns.distplot method. We need to pass it the column we want to plot and it will calculate the occurrences itself. We can also pass it the number of bins, and if we want to plot a gaussian kernel density estimate inside the graph.
Figure 19: Histogram
Figure 20: Histogram with gaussian kernel density estimate
Bar chart
In Seaborn a bar-chart can be created using the sns.countplot method and passing it the data.
Figure 21: Bar-Chart
Other graphs
Now that you have a basic understanding of the Matplotlib, Pandas Visualization and Seaborn syntax I want to show you a few other graph types that are useful for extracting insides.
For most of them, Seaborn is the go-to library because of its high-level interface that allows for the creation of beautiful graphs in just a few lines of code.
Box plots
A Box Plot is a graphical method of displaying the five-number summary. We can create box plots using seaborns sns.boxplot method and passing it the data as well as the x and y column name.
Figure 22: Boxplot
Box Plots, just like bar-charts are great for data with only a few categories but can get messy really quickly.
Heatmap
A Heatmap is a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors. Heatmaps are perfect for exploring the correlation of features in a dataset.
To get the correlation of the features inside a dataset we can call <dataset>.corr() , which is a Pandas dataframe method. This will give us the correlation matrix.
We can now use either Matplotlib or Seaborn to create the heatmap.
Matplotlib:
Figure 23: Heatmap without annotations
To add annotations to the heatmap we need to add two for loops:
Figure 24: Heatmap with annotations
Seaborn makes it way easier to create a heatmap and add annotations:
Figure 25: Heatmap with annotations
Faceting
Faceting is the act of breaking data variables up across multiple subplots and combining those subplots into a single figure.
Faceting is really helpful if you want to quickly explore your dataset.
To use one kind of faceting in Seaborn we can use the FacetGrid . First of all, we need to define the FacetGrid and pass it our data as well as a row or column, which will be used to split the data. Then we need to call the map function on our FacetGrid object and define the plot type we want to use, as well as the column we want to graph.
Figure 26: Facet-plot
You can make plots a lot bigger and more complicated than the example above. You can find a few examples here.
Pairplot
Lastly, I will show you Seaborns pairplot and Pandas scatter_matrix , which enable you to plot a grid of pairwise relationships in a dataset.
Figure 27: Pairplot
Figure 28: Scatter matrix
As you can see in the images above these techniques are always plotting two features with each other. The diagonal of the graph is filled with histograms and the other plots are scatter plots. | https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-data-visualization-in-python-89a54c97fbed | ['Gilbert Tanner'] | 2019-03-06 19:49:56.841000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Pandas', 'Data Science', 'Matplotlib', 'Seaborn'] |
How did the pandemic create a disruptive mindset? | As a rule, associated with new cutting-edge technology, disruption is not necessarily linked to a fantastic discovery. It actually defines a change in the way we do something or how we behave in a situation. And if there’s one thing the pandemic has done is to change our habits and behavior, isn’t it?
The spread of the covid-19 virus almost radically changed many of the things we did leading to new habits, such as social distancing, mask-wearing in the Western world, telemedicine consultations, and remote work. With the pandemic, and the need to preserve our health and that of others, we are constantly thinking about how to carry out our tasks without exposing ourselves to the risk of contagion. In other words, we started to have a disruptive mentality.
Disruption can come with the launch of a new product or service, which considerably changes the way you do, consume or solve something, but it can also happen with a relevant decrease in costs or price. If a service that used to be charged is now offered for free with the same efficiency, it causes disruption, because no one else will be able to charge for it. That is, we can shout “Eureka” without necessarily discovering a theory of physics, like the Greek mathematician Archimedes.
The covid-19 pandemic accelerated the digital transformation. Some trends that were already emerging were accelerated and amplified. We move forward in months what would likely take a few years if there was no global emergency. New solutions and services, digital platforms, startups have multiplied at an impressive speed.
Amid the complex challenges in very different areas, such as science, health, commerce, food, transport, the scenario designed by the new coronavirus has created countless opportunities. Apparently, the changes promoted by the pandemic should shape the main technological trends to be incorporated in the coming years.
We will reunite with friends, travel, and go out on the streets.
We are moving towards an era of XaaS (Everything as a Service), in which companies will offer products and services in increasingly decentralized technological environments, with on-demand and customized solutions. Remote work and virtual collaboration will become the norm (the so-called new normal) in many areas, even when we overcome the uncertainties arising from the pandemic.
Emerging technologies, such as the internet of behaviors (IoB), with increasingly mobile and virtual interactions, systems capable of ensuring privacy and data protection, public cloud services, smarter and more flexible business processes and hyper-automation will shape this new reality. These technologies added to the advancement of innovations such as machine learning, internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence, 5G, digital twins, and the disruptive mindset we’ve developed will take us to the next stage, which some call the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
These changes will have a major impact on the corporate world, the economy, and social behavior. Materials science is one of the areas that must undergo a disruption, with the development of products that, in addition to being recyclable, can be reused, significantly extending their useful life and reducing waste generation. Likewise, the need to substantially reduce gas emissions will lead to significant changes in the areas of energy and transport.
The covid-19 saga will end, and we will certainly return to old habits, such as meeting friends, traveling and taking to the streets without fear, but even so, our reality will be very different from the one we lived until the appearance of the new coronavirus. | https://medium.com/@arie_halpern/how-did-the-pandemic-create-a-disruptive-mindset-dff913dd0dd8 | ['Arie Halpern'] | 2021-06-17 20:35:56.732000+00:00 | ['Disruptive Mindset', 'Pandemic', 'Covid 19', 'Technology', 'Arie Halpern'] |
The Best Way To Learn A New Skill Fast | The Best Way To Learn A New Skill Fast
Why this counter-intuitive process is one of the fastest ways to learn.
Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash
When the pandemic closed offices earlier this year, I was one of the millions who suddenly had to learn how to use video conferencing. I had only ever used video chats a couple of times in my entire life, so I was way behind the curve.
When I first opened Zoom, I had no idea how to connect to a room or turn on my camera. I wasn’t even aware of the more complex tools like annotations and breakout rooms.
I might have been able to fake it if I was just sitting in on meetings, but I was going to have to run them. I needed to master Zoom fast. So, I turned to an unusual tool that’s helped me through these situations before: teaching.
How Teaching Can Help Us Learn
One of the fastest ways that I’ve ever learned to master a new skill is to start teaching it as soon as possible. I’m using the term “teaching” broadly here, to mean any method of instructing others: from conducting a lecture to writing an essay explaining what you learned.
It may sound counter-intuitive at first; after all, how can we teach what we haven’t already learned? The key is to turn teaching and learning into an iterative process.
With Zoom, I began by watching the training videos in the Getting Started guide and following along with the software. As soon as I was done, I wrote down what I had learned in the format of an instructive article. My goal was to write it clearly enough that a total beginner could catch up with everything I had learned so far.
During the writing process, I discovered some steps that I didn’t completely remember. This provided the clue that I needed to go back and refresh my memory.
By experimenting with the software, I also discovered buttons in Zoom that I hadn’t learned yet. This told me that I needed to find additional articles, explaining how those tools worked.
I went back and forth, writing my article and learning the software for myself. In addition to reading guides and watching videos, I spent plenty of time just playing with the software and running demo meetings.
By the time I had to run my first real video conference, I felt confident that I knew Zoom more than well enough to get by. I actually continued to “teach” Zoom by writing more after I got an even better feel for the software.
Through this process, I had essentially mastered Zoom, and I had written about two thousand words explaining what I knew. As a bonus, I even ended up making a couple of hundred bucks through the experience, by editing down the material into a few articles and selling them to a blog.
The Benefits of Teaching
There are several reasons that teaching is such a powerful tool for learning:
You will quickly discover the limits of your knowledge as you run out of material to teach, or are asked questions to which you don’t know the answer.
You can learn an immense amount from your students, particularly if you’re teaching a live class.
Forcing yourself to explain concepts in simple terms will help boost your own comprehension of the material.
New concepts will become more ingrained in your memory through repetition: you’ll be exposed to them once as you learn them, once as you prepare a lesson, and once as you deliver it. Editing and revisions can add even more exposure.
Where to Teach
For many concepts that I’ve learned, I’ve had the benefit of being able to teach in live classrooms, but this option isn’t always available (particularly during a pandemic).
Fortunately, thanks to the internet, there are limitless opportunities for “teaching.” You can write an article, record a YouTube video, or even create an entire online course.
You don’t need to be an expert to start teaching. Some of the best teachers have the least experience, while we all know the stereotype of the professor who leads their field but has terrible lectures. If you’re committed to learning and careful preparing your material, you can help others study while you learn for yourself. | https://benyaclark.medium.com/the-best-way-to-learn-a-new-skill-fast-357d80927b0f | ['Benya Clark'] | 2020-10-30 06:31:18.447000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Teaching', 'Learning', 'Productivity', 'Advice'] |
You Are Your Own Healer | You aren’t just being healed, you’re also the healer.
What do I mean by this? Well, it begins with you learning how to take yourself by the hand and figuring out what you need: What are your triggers? When are you hurting? How are you hurting?
Also, how is your level of self-awareness? Because developing it will enable you to notice what you’re going through and explore the reasons behind it.
Being conscious of how your mind works and how your environment, relationships, and certain activities affect you. For example, are you trying to force yourself to utilise a healing modality like EFT when you’d prefer to be in therapy? Or vice-versa? Knowing these things will make a powerful difference in how you experience your healing journey.
When we try to make ourselves fit within a cookie-cutter version of healing (doing things just because other people say it worked for them), we bring the unhelpful element of frustration into it because our soul is trying to say, “Hey, I know what’s good for me! Listen to me!”
So with all that said: by all means, utilise the resources at your disposal and take the advice that people give you about how to heal. But ULTIMATELY, run it all by your own “inner guidance system” as Abraham Hicks calls it. You have your own wisdom and know inherently what works for you and doesn’t.
Learn to tap into this. | https://medium.com/swanwaters/you-are-your-own-healer-ab9a18684aab | ['Mags Thomson'] | 2020-11-27 10:12:25.220000+00:00 | ['Emotional Health', 'Healing From Trauma', 'Narcissistic Abuse', 'Emotional Abuse', 'Narcissism'] |
Nourishing Health Equity: A New Jersey Health Care System Tackles Food Insecurity | Prioritizing Health Equity
Living conditions have a lot to do with health. Communities without access to healthy foods will invariably have greater health care needs than communities that can easily meet their nutritional requirements. A population saddled with discrimination requires more resources than populations without those obstacles.
“Health equity ensures that everyone, no matter who they are, receives access to the services and supports they need.”
The link between inequitable circumstances and unequal health outcomes may seem clear to today’s public health professionals, but until recent decades, health equity generally wasn’t a significant consideration in health care or public health policymaking.
“Health equity ensures that everyone, no matter who they are, receives access to the services and supports they need,” says Michellene Davis, executive vice president and chief corporate affairs officer at RWJBarnabas Health System (RWJBH).
“In vulnerable communities that have traditionally been underserved, treatment may have been equal, but equal treatment is not always equitable treatment.”
As New Jersey’s largest and most comprehensive health care system, RWJBarnabas Health provides treatment and services to more than 5 million people each year. In 2017, RWJBarnabas launched a Social Impact and Community Investment (SICI) practice aimed at achieving socially engaged, economically thriving communities throughout the state.
The SICI practice quickly identified food insecurity as a significant driver of health inequities in the region.
With a focus on ensuring health equity, the SICI practice spearheads collaborative social impact initiatives. These innovative initiatives address the underlying social, economic, and environmental conditions that generate health outcome disparities between different New Jersey communities.
“The SICI practice is designed to work in tandem with the communities we serve,” says Davis. “It takes all of us to provide the services and sustainable system changes we need to move the needle and ensure improved outcomes.”
Healthy Food, Healthy Communities
One area of the SICI practice that has seen quick progress is food security. Working with the Greater Newark Community Advisory Board (GNCAB), a multidisciplinary group of Newark stakeholders, and using data from its community needs assessment, the SICI practice quickly identified food insecurity as a significant driver of health inequities in the region.
In Essex County — where Newark is the county seat — 17% of the population are food insecure, compared with 10% of individuals who are food insecure in the state of New Jersey as a whole. In Newark’s South Ward alone, more than 5,000 residents receive federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, commonly known as food stamps.
The film Food for Thought investigates the community’s food system from the perspective of young Newark residents, ages 12–21.
A first step for the SICI practice was evaluating the scope of the problem, as well as raising the profile and deepening the understanding of food insecurity as a public concern. After exploring several strategic options, the practice and its community partners decided to focus on improving access to healthy food for low-income residents.
“With food insecurity affecting so many New Jerseyans and strong evidence that food insecurity is directly linked to health and education outcomes, we realized we needed to expand our programmatic and policy efforts,” says Sarah Lechner, senior vice president, policy development and government affairs at RWJBH.
“By streamlining access to important benefit programs such as SNAP and WIC, we can exponentially increase the impact of our collective work.”
Grocery store in North Plainfield, NJ. (Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons, Victor Reynolds)
As part of the larger SICI effort to raise public awareness about food insecurity, the GNCAB produced a documentary film chronicling food insecurity in Newark. The film, Food for Thought: The Path to Food Security in Newark, NJ, investigates the community’s food system from the perspective of young Newark residents, ages 12–21, from area schools and local organizations. Food for Thought highlights community-based assets and explores ideas on how to transform the city’s existing systems, structures, and policies to enhance access to healthy, affordable food. In addition to a citywide premiere, 8 convenings were held throughout the city’s 5 wards, focusing on diverse segments of the community, including seniors, youth, and clergy, among others. These convenings were critical to the SICI practice’s efforts to understand the community’s needs and desires.
One organization featured in the film is Newark Science and Sustainability, Inc. (Newark SAS), a community-driven nonprofit organization that increases awareness of environmental, ecological, and wellness issues through educational programs and hands-on activities.
“We promote fresh produce distribution in urban communities and work to improve residents’ access to healthy food,” explains Tobias Fox, Newark SAS’s founder and managing director. “Our ultimate goal is to empower residents to become actively involved in reshaping their environment while taking back their health and growing our local food system.”
Leveraging Knowledge
The SICI practice is not RWJBarnabas Health’s first foray into improving health equity through a food security approach. Two of the health care system’s hospitals, Newark Beth Israel Medical Center (NBIMC) and Children’s Hospital of New Jersey, border The Beth Greenhouse — a sustainable, hydroponic greenhouse facility that produces more than 5,000 pounds of fresh, locally grown produce annually. The Beth Greenhouse also provides education on healthy eating as well as job training opportunities.
Augmenting the food systems work already in place, ChangeLab Solutions has partnered with the SICI practice, GNCAB, and their community partners to help identify policy options for improving local food systems and addressing food insecurity issues. This collaboration with ChangeLab Solutions leveraged knowledge gained from Food for Thought, guidance provided by the community convenings, and the SICI practice’s own in-house expertise, to develop policy ideas to accelerate changes in New Jersey’s existing food system.
USDA Farm to School program at St. Philip’s Academy in Newark, NJ. Farm to School includes efforts to connect schools with local or regional producers in order to serve local or regionally produced foods in school cafeterias. (Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons, USDA)
On 2 recent trips to Newark, Manel Kappagoda and Katie Michel, staff attorneys at ChangeLab Solutions, witnessed the city’s thriving community food system in action, including urban agriculture plots, farmers markets, and community gardens. In addition, they gave a presentation on food security policy to GNCAB staff and met with city officials to further tailor the technical assistance and resources that ChangeLab Solutions is developing with the Newark stakeholders.
“Newark’s stakeholders are renewing their local food system by relying on their own expertise and understanding,” Kappagoda says. “They have a clear vision of what they want. We’re just helping them get to their goals faster.”
“The work that RWJBH and the GNCAB have accomplished with ChangeLab Solutions is just the beginning,” says Davis. “As we work to address food insecurity, health equity, and other SICI priorities, RWJBH and NBIMC are proactively making our community healthier.”
“We’re looking to serve as a model for other communities with similar issues,” she adds. | https://medium.com/changelab-solutions/nourishing-equity-fa4dbeb22b4f | ['Changelab Solutions'] | 2019-03-22 23:06:25.110000+00:00 | ['Public Health', 'Health Equity', 'Food Insecurity', 'Public Policy', 'New Jersey'] |
Why I used Rails sessions instead of JWTs | After doing my research about JWT tokens, I decided to enable Rails sessions and start using them for my authentication system. What changed my mind was an article I found on cryto.net:
If an attacker manages to inject a malicious script into your front end (which is vulnerable to XSS), then they can use that script to make HTTP requests to your server (directly from the user’s browser) and your precious httpOnly cookie (containing the user’s valid session ID) will be attached to every request so the server will service them without suspecting anything.
How I enabled sessions if my app was using an API Rails app you can find out here: Rails sessions does not persist?
Creating an app that will not be used a large number of users at the same time will not have any problem handling the cookies on the server-side.
That being said, my app is ready to receive users, and they can perform the authentication parts securely. But, no content yet. Web sockets and their implementation fill follow. | https://medium.com/@antonzaharia/why-i-used-rails-sessions-instead-of-jwts-b38a745a161d | ['Zaharia Anton'] | 2020-12-03 16:05:05.826000+00:00 | ['Auth', 'API', 'Jwt', 'Authentication', 'Rails'] |
Start your research on Declan Cobalt Inc. — today! Now is the time to act! | In a world that is constantly changing — investors have to stay ahead of the game to make the big money. Everyone wants to buy a stock that costs mere pennies and watch it soar into dollar land. It looks to us that Declan Cobalt Inc. has that kind of potential. The company which trades on the CSE (https://thecse.com/en/about) in Canada — under the symbol LAN — seems to be on the launchpad for a spike higher. The company also trades on the OTC in the US under the symbol DCNNF and on the Frankfurt Exchange under the symbol DCR1. We think you should start your due diligence on Declan Cobalt Inc. today.
These guys are ready to bring ethical cobalt to the world — straight from the heart of Europe. The operations of LAN are located in Germany and the Czech Republic which makes them a unique proposition for cobalt users like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Skoda. These giants of car manufacturing have intensive EV (electric vehicles) lines and they will see the marketing benefit of using Declan Cobalt Inc. as a source of cobalt (for their Lithium-io batteries) rather than cobalt from the DRC (Democratic of Congo). The DRC can’t always guarantee that their cobalt production is conflict free. EV consumers are savvy buyers and the conflict-free angle for the cobalt in the Lithium-ion batteries in the cars — will help sell cars for the manufacturers. By 2020; 75% of the lithium-io batteries will contain cobalt. It is a clear case of right place — right time for Declan Cobalt Inc. and a great opportunity for LAN shareholders.
The chart on Declan Cobalt Inc. shows the promise of potential upside. The sellers in the stock are nowhere to be found. There are key points on the chart at .19 and .27. If we get through .19 — which is a stone throw away — we are headed to .27. Solid volume on a climb higher and any new flow could result in a super spike which could be a real money maker for anyone who gets in at these prices. As we said earlier. Being first matters and this is your chance to get cheap shares first — before the stock runs on news. People will notice LAN and when they do — the stock will begin to move higher.
In closing, we want to point out that the company is being run by Wayne Tisdale. Mr. Tisdale is a legend in mining and finance circles. He has raised $2 Billion for companies he has been involved with in the past. He is the right man to take Declan Cobalt Inc. all the way to the end zone. He has a platinum reputation and we believe that Bay Street will put a premium on LAN’s share price when they realize that Mr. Tisdale is running the show. Today is a great day to start your due diligence on Declan Cobalt. Go to Google, Yahoo Finance or the company website @ http://declancobalt.com/. We love this stock and we think you will as well. The question is — when will you buy your shares. Will you buy them @ .18, 20, .27 or $1.00. The choice is yours. Stay tuned for more Declan Cobalt Inc. updates and in the meantime trade safe and smart. | https://medium.com/@turbostocks/start-your-research-on-declan-cobalt-inc-today-now-is-the-time-to-act-42dbe510893c | [] | 2019-02-06 17:33:29.092000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Investment', 'Battery', 'Stocks', 'Mining'] |
Hi, I’m Snowflake | Hi, I’m Snowflake
Photo by Carly Kewley on Unsplash
Once more, it’s the season of fleece,
This means it’s now the season I fly.
One and all wrapped up behind frosty panes,
But wrapped first in a warm glow -
The fuzzy kind that love emanates.
Gentle heart smiles that reverberate through,
A drowsy forgetfulness of whatever havoc
The rest of the year wreaked.
My friends and I settle down,
y’all call us snow-folk pure
We are just mirrors,
one flake for each of you,
So much intricacy within ourselves
Sometimes I reach the ground,
and dissipate without even a wisp,
But, it’s the season of togetherness,
and like you lucky ones, we join our families too.
We hold on first resiliently
Onto the needles of each tree,
Hinting at the kind of strength
We want you to carry on,
When this season fades away.
This season of hot chocolate and laughs,
This season of bells and stars,
This season that, quite literally, paints your world red,
This season of giving love and hope,
Even if it’s to yourself. | https://medium.com/scribe/hi-im-snowflake-a4ff28c63343 | ['Amritha Ram'] | 2020-12-27 11:41:46.352000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Xmas', 'Poetry', 'Snowflake', 'Holidays'] |
Advertising Best Practices for CBD Brands | As any hemp-seller worth her weight in sativa knows, earlier this year the much-awaited new Farm Bill passed broadening the legal definition of hemp to include hemp-based CBD. Previously classified as marijuana, this new classification of CBD has been a boom for small businesses and means only good things for future consumers. However — and this is the tricky part — though CBD has been legalized, the rules and regulations surrounding how CBD-related products are advertised haven’t yet changed to reflect that. Advertising restrictions can even prevent ads from running on search and social channels.
Basically, when it comes to paid ads on Facebook and Instagram, CBD still exists in somewhat of a grey area. Depending on the kind of product being marketed (e.g., oral drops vs. topical creams) there are a variety of advertising restrictions that have yet to be updated. To make it worse, no resource seems to agree on exactly what those restrictions are — so working to ensure your ads don’t get blocked can make for a massive headache.
Lucky for you, we’ve compiled three of the best insider tips on how to successfully navigate any CBD ad restrictions, as well as how to make sure the right audience can discover your non-psychoactive cannabis brand.
Highlight Application Over Ingestion
With all of the different ways consumers can introduce CBD into their lives, you might think showcasing that product diversity is a must-do for paid. And it is — to some extent. But Facebook draws the line at highlighting or alluding to ingestion of CBD in paid advertisements — even legal hemp-derived products.
For brands that have topicals such as CBD oils or creams, now is your chance to shine on paid. Save the drops, gummies, and gel capsules for organic posts. In your Facebook and Instagram advertising push topicals in ways that pique user interest. Whether it’s a product-use video that details how and where you can use a CBD lotion, or a thumb-stopping product shot of a CBD face oil, the choice is yours. Just keep your paid content focused on external use and you’ll be in the clear.
Focus On Advocacy
For most e-commerce brands, driving traffic to your online shop is the bowl and grinder of your paid strategy. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to do what you do. But given the confusion around CBD and the differing state-by-state regulations when it comes to hemp-derived vs. marijuana-derived cannabidiol, it might be safer to avoid promoting products in your paid advertisements all together. Despite hemp-based CBD being legal on a national scale, many marketers have reported that Facebook has mistakenly flagged their ads. Rather than spend time on making strategy adjustments, they’re dealing with lengthy review processes.
If going back and forth with the Facebook ads team isn’t your cup of tea, consider utilizing paid to tell a broader story about your brand’s stance on CBD advocacy in order to avoid the conundrum of product promotion altogether.
For example, promoting news around the Farm Bill, how hemp is harvested, or even the benefits of CBD is a great way to attract potential customers and get your brand top of mind. This also hits an important component of healthy social strategy: storytelling. Your brand should have an identifiable story and identity that is recognizable to consumers. Lifestyle brands might be a good sister industry to look to for inspiration. Think of these paid posts as a way to generate the interest of consumers at the top of the marketing funnel. When someone taps into your profile to learn more, they are greeted by all the creative organic content you’ve developed, including details about your brand’s product lineup that you couldn’t promote through paid.
Collaborate With CBD Influencers
While this isn’t a promotion you control through Ads Manager, a strong influencer strategy may be the easiest way around platform restrictions!
Obviously, there are plenty of influencers who are open about their marijuana and CBD use that you could tap into. But you should also consider audiences who, though they might be unlikely to seek you out on their own, are a natural fit with your company’s marketing goals and product lineup.
Think mommy bloggers who need CBD lotions for their aches and pains, beauty and skincare gurus who might love CBD face oils, or lifestyle influencers who use CBD to help quiet their anxieties. Whomever you choose to collaborate with, find the angle that works best for both your brand and their own.
Whichever strategy you choose to deploy for paid content, always remember to test, test, test! In the same way that you wouldn’t want to purchase your legal cannabis flowers without first giving them a sniff, you have to test your ads first before sending them out.
As we mentioned, promoting CBD on Facebook and Instagram is extremely tricky. The last thing you want is for your ad account to be flagged after too many rejections. So when you first begin, think strategically about your audience profile, keep test flight budgets low, and run one or two pieces of creative at a time. Note what works and what doesn’t and adjust your strategy accordingly. | https://medium.com/@dashhudson/advertising-best-practices-for-cbd-brands-4a1a8902c37c | ['Dash Hudson'] | 2019-07-19 19:50:26.078000+00:00 | ['Instagram', 'Cannabis Advertising', 'Cannabis', 'Instagram Marketing', 'Cbd'] |
Setup your cluster on MongoDb Atlas | In this article we will know how to setup your cluster on MongoDb Atlas
If you want to use MongoDb cloud service then you have must MongoDb Atlas account
Complete Signup Form
Create your cluster form the wizard , from here you have to select cloud provider and region.
GCP, lowa (us-central1)
After the selection of cloud provider and region and your cluster name you can can see your cluster i.e
From the network access you have to add IP Address from where you are accessing the cluster
Add IP Address
Create Database user
Connect with your cluster, choose your connection method here i am going to choose mongo shell
Copy the connection string and paste on your terminal enter your user password you will be able to connect with your cluster , now you can see i have switched to db i.e mydatabsae
:)
I hope that you liked this article and if you do , don’t forget about commenting!!! See ya! : 😊 | https://medium.com/@naxir-sheikh/setup-your-cluster-on-mongodb-atlas-cb925351ce06 | ['Naxir Sheikh'] | 2020-12-12 16:57:50.620000+00:00 | ['React', 'Node', 'Mongodb'] |
About Bitcoin — Steemit. Satoshi Nakamoto released a whitepaper… | Satoshi Nakamoto released a whitepaper (a document issued with new blockchain projects) Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in 2008. Nakamoto’s true identity is still unknown but he described a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash.
Peer-to-Peer, also known as P2P is computers acting as a network. The Blockchain technology and Bitcoin are two different things. Blockchain developed over the last decade into one of the biggest technologies and have the potential to impact every industry like Finance, Real Estate, and even the Banking Sector.
In 2009, shortly after Nakamoto’s whitepaper was published, it was offered to the open source community. Open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the public for use of the modification and designing of the program, in this case, the Blockchain and Bitcoin. The programmers can improve upon the source code and share it with each other. In Bitcoin’s case the program source code was made available for any parties for modification and also freely available to users.
Open source in cryptocurrency is essential for building trust and safety into blockchain networks,it is transparent and decentralized.
Bitcoins are generated by a process of mining as a reward by the network. Miners are individuals which enter the Bitcoin economy. Mining creates Bitcoins through a competitive and decentralized process. These individuals are then rewarded by Bitcoins which they then can exchange for other currencies, products, and services.
Bitcoin is a big electronic system which is on the blockchain. Transactions are recorded and verified. The Bitcoin system is considered the first blockchain. People believe it will revolutionize money, government and beyond. Anyone can join Bitcoin — this is for the public.
In time of writing Bitcoin is now trading for $9 303,81 (17.06.2019)
About the Author
Pieter Lategan is the founder of Techno Magazine. He also blogs for the Free Online Magazine. He focuses on the business side of blockchain technology. He writes about businesses which will improve with blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and dApps. | https://medium.com/@Cryptoc69307391/about-bitcoin-steemit-dc3a2a1c6842 | ['Techno Magazine'] | 2019-06-17 15:44:09.880000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin Wallet', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoincash', 'Bitcoin Mining'] |
4 Search Engine Marketing Tips That Benefits Your Busines | Search engine marketing plays a crucial role in increasing the number of clients in your business, as it determines your rank in popular search engines. If your SEM performance is not up to the mark it is always advisable to hire someone for search engine marketing in Pune or anywhere else to improve your SEM score.
However, before hiring this person’s assistance for improving your SEM performance, it is an added advantage to know some of these below-mentioned tips to make a search engine campaign successful.
Few proven ways to make your search engine campaign successful-
serch engine marketing service
Knowing your targeted audience base
Before beginning your search engine marketing campaign you need to know your targeted audience base. It will help you to identify the suitable ads that attract your targeted visitors. The more you know about your targeted market, it will be easier for you to choose and create ads that your visitors like to watch. It will always help you to run ROI driven search engine marketing campaigns for your business.
Be smart while doing your keyword research
Keyword research plays a pivotal role in search engine marketing. By choosing the most relevant keywords that your audiences like to see you. You can either prefer either a short or a long-tail keyword for search engine marketing practice. It will increase your scope to grab a good SERP rank in the popular search engines. At the same time try to prefer a keyword that has maximum search volume and the number of people using it are comparatively less. Such low competitive keywords will help you to determine the volume and competitiveness of the keywords you have preferred for running the ads.
Find out the best search engine marketing tool amongst many
There are plenty of search engine marketing tools available near you. However, you must be smart to shortlist the best amongst those that suit the latest Google Trends. It will eventually help you to get maximum traffic for your website and quickly bring your keywords into the SERP rank. If you are not sure about which search engine marketing tool is suitable for your business, get in touch with an expert search engine marketer. That will always help you to know which keywords are popular enough to show desirable results.
Never ignore the importance of content
According to Bill Gates — ‘Content is the ultimate King!’
As a business owner, you must not forget to overlook the importance of content in search engine marketing. No matter how good your keywords are, if the quality of the content is not good, you will never get a scope to rank in Google. That is why you must include informational attractive content that compels your targeted viewers and readers to think after going through your informative content. If they find your content impressive and engaging you can expect a long-term relationship with your customers.
The Final Words
Before hiring any of the available search engine or digital marketing consulting services for your online business, you must know some of these above-mentioned tips to make your SEM campaign successful. | https://medium.com/@srvmedia_83359/4-search-engine-marketing-tips-that-benefits-your-busines-c45829229fe6 | ['Srv Media'] | 2021-12-24 06:54:07.408000+00:00 | ['SEM', 'Search Engine Marketing', 'Ppc Management', 'Ppc Services', 'PPC Marketing'] |
Best Bet: Bundle Investing | Bundle investing is a term used by many investors who diversify their portfolio by investing in multiple kinds of coins instead of just one. You’ve probably heard of this before, but for those of you who haven’t, bundle investing is largely unavailable in today’s market due to a lack of platforms which give you the opportunity to do so. Well, this is where CoinBundle comes into play, giving you the opportunity to easily and simply invest in bundles of coins. So, what’s the best way to bundle when investing in cryptocurrency? Let’s go over the do’s and don’ts when it comes to bundle investing because it just so happens to be your best bet when investing.
This is not financial investment advice.
This article will touch on key aspects of how to properly execute bundle investing.
In this article
What Is Bundle Investing?
Well, bundle investing is a pretty straightforward concept. It’s exactly what it sounds like, investing in bundles of coins instead of single ones. CoinBundle gives you the opportunity to do this, by providing users with different bundles of coins to invest in. When you invest in cryptocurrency by purchasing single coins, there’s a tedious process that you have to go through involving registration for an online currency exchange and password maintenance. When you invest in crypto by bundle investing, you actually save yourself all the hard work of going through each and every one of those exchanges, and instead can just buy the bundle in one place. This way, not only is your portfolio diversified, but it’s also extremely easy to manage and track since its performance is all in one place.
Each bundle you invest in contains different cryptocurrencies. In fact, some bundles — depending on which one you choose to invest in — contain different tiered coins. By this, we mean that the bundle includes different coins across all market capitalizations. So you can expect some “giants” like Bitcoin and Ethereum to be in the same bundle as smaller and lesser-known coins, again, all depending on which bundle you invest in.
Bundle investing also means that you should be able to create your own bundles, right? Well, this feature of customizable bundles is on the way and will eventually be integrated into the CoinBundle platform, giving this type of investing a social aspect. Why waste time and energy going through numerous exchanges to invest in just a few coins when you can just buy one bundle with all of them in just one place? On top of that, bundle investing makes investing social by pinning specific bundles head to head with each other. Bundle investing — as a whole — relies on the user’s willingness to diversify their portfolio, which is one of the smartest things that you can do as an investor. Bundling has already been implemented by many major companies across the globe in order to more effectively sell their products. Thus, it’s about time that bundle investing made an appearance in the world of cryptocurrency, giving a good indication of where the future of finance is headed.
Bundle investing is exactly what it sounds like, investing in bundles of coins instead of single ones. CoinBundle gives you the opportunity to do this, by providing users with different bundles of coins to invest in.
Why Is Bundle Investing Better?
Now that you know what bundle investing is, let’s analyze why this form of investing happens to be your “best bet” when it comes to cryptocurrency. For starters, bundle investing provides any user with a much more simple and straightforward process. What makes investing in bundles of coins significantly easier than single coins is the user friendly experience that allows anyone to get involved. Before, if you wanted to invest in altcoins not listed in popular exchanges, you’d have to go through a tedious process of registering with multiple exchanges and keeping track of all your account info. Now, thanks to CoinBundle, all your favorite coins can now be accessed in one place!
When you buy ETH, BTC, or any other coin for that matter, you’re basically purchasing fractions (for example, 1.224528157864726124) of the actual coin. As you continue to purchase more coins or even add more money to the original investment, it can get difficult at times to keep track of all your assets. When bundle investing, you can easily just buy 1, 2, or however many bundles you want, and keep track of all your assets in one place. This provides the user with a much easier and simpler experience. Outside of just the user friendly experience, bundle investing also means that you’ll be diversifying your portfolio when investing, which is always a beneficial thing for any person. Why invest in a highly volatile market with just a few specific coins when you can increase your own security by spreading around your money across multiple kinds of coins?
In fact, there are probably tons of coins you’ve been interested in purchasing but haven’t done so because you don’t know where to go. Well, now all of your diversification needs are solved. When purchasing a bundle, 1.54 bundles, or however much of a bundle you want to purchase, you know that all of your cash positions will have a significantly higher chance of being safe from sharp market movements. Let’s face it, the market follows giants like Bitcoin, but just like in any other market, there are always some coins that will move against the market. So, in the event that most coins see drops in prices across the board, you might also just have invested in a coin that’s moving in the opposite direction. Thus, another benefit of bundle investing has to do with the diversification of coins that you purchase through each bundle.
CoinBundle is the easiest way for people to invest in cryptocurrencies responsibly. We take all the hard work out of investing, letting you build your portfolio according to your needs. Bundle investing is more user friendly, straightforward, and efficient than other investing strategies.
How Can I Start?
As mentioned before, there is currently a lack of platforms which give users the ability to invest in a bundle of coins, which is why you probably haven’t heard of too many people doing this. Well, this is where CoinBundle comes into play. Using CoinBundle, you can maximize your gains through investing in a wide variety of coins all in one bundle. Don’t worry about having to keep track of all your passwords for every exchange that you’re registered for, as bundle investing gives you the liberty of viewing your entire portfolio all in one place.
For those who’d like to get a head start on bundle investing, you can start by doing your own research on specific coins which you would like to invest in one day. Keep track of which coins are the most volatile and which coins tend to be more stable over time. Using technical analysis, you can even assess price movements for your favorite coins to determine whether or not you want to invest in that coin. Thus, once you have all your favorite coins listed in one place, you can use CoinBundle to identify where a majority of the coins which you want to invest in lie. All you have to do from there is purchase the bundle with the most shared coins and you’re all good to go.
What you don’t want to do is foolishly begin investing in single coins and keep track of them to call yourself a “bundle investor.” In reality, you’re just investing in single coins through different exchanges, which will become extremely difficult to manage as time goes on. Be patient and get a head start by doing your own research for potential coins to invest in. Again, once you follow these steps, you’ll be ready to start bundle investing through CoinBundle.
You can start by doing your own research on specific coins which you would like to invest in one day. Keep track of which coins are the most volatile and which coins tend to be more stable over time, then buy those coins in bundles provided by CoinBundle.
Do’s & Don’ts
So now that you’re aware of what bundle investing is, what that entails, and how to start, let’s go over some tips on how to maximize your investing experience.
DO: Develop a method to track all the coins in your bundle to make sure that one coin isn’t ruining everything. What most people will do is judge the performance of a bundle based on its overall returns, but further examining the individual coins which make up the bundle will allow you to make better investments when choosing in the future.
DON’T: Buy and sell bundles frequently. Just like with any other investment, you have to wait and be patient with each new cash position you introduce. Instead of continuously buying new bundles, try adding more money to your current bundles. By introducing more cash positions, you have a safer overall investment and more chances of seeing higher returns.
DO: Invest in different bundles. If you invest in multiple bundles but they mainly have overlapping coins, you aren’t maximizing your diversification. In fact, bundle investing is all about getting involved with as many coins as possible, so invest early and often in different kinds of bundles.
DON’T: Check your investment portfolio everyday. Investments should be made without any emotion, focusing solely on the facts and statistics. If you’re following the stock market and your account balances on a daily basis, you’ll be riding a roller coaster of short-term emotions that not a lot of people can handle. Even worse, you’re increasing the likelihood of making a spontaneous decision to sell everything. Find a good pace at which you want to check your portfolio without causing any stress for yourself.
Conclusion
Bundle investing has revolutionized many industries by changing the way assets are bought and managed, so isn’t it time that cryptocurrency does the same? CoinBundle is making investing in crypto accessible and easy for everyone, utilizing bundle investing to do so. If you can remember to follow the advice given in this article, you’ll become a bundle investing pro and maximize your crypto-investing performance. | https://medium.com/coinbundle/best-bet-bundle-investing-724853ca576b | ['Coinbundle Team'] | 2018-10-10 22:49:16.458000+00:00 | ['Investcoinbundle', 'Beginnersoinbundle', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Investing', 'Startup'] |
The Quiet Poems | Photo by Tom Morel on Unsplash
The Quiet Poems
i like quiet poems,
poems which make no noise
but are still fragrant.
poems which are wrapped
with old memories and are
lost in the library.
poems which are waiting
to be rescued by the poet’s pen. | https://medium.com/blueinsight/the-quiet-poems-af190c8491ea | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-12-18 15:38:05.764000+00:00 | ['Writing Life', 'Writers On Writing', 'Blue Insights', 'Writing', 'Poetry'] |
The Core Values Bullseye Framework | The Core Values Bullseye Framework is designed to help you (or your business) to understand the core values that drive you and help you to prioritise.
The Core Values Bullseye Framework begins with a broad list of potential values.
The list serves as a baseline to get you started with potential values; it is not a complete list (and can, therefore, be individually adjusted and expanded).
Begin by initially brainstorming 12 values that are most important to you and that you think drive your actions.
Once you have selected the 12, go ahead and reduce those 12 to 6 according to importance.
Once you have chosen those 6 values, sit back and think about why you chose those particular 6 values and what they mean to you.
Now you’re going to reduce the 6 to the core 3 values.
Take time to consider which value you think drives you the most, in order to rank those 3 in the core of the framework.
Now, these aren’t just THE 3 values you hold, but they are the ones that drive you and are hierarchically more powerful in their relevance in comparison to the other values. They act as tiebreakers between the 6 and in turn the outer 12 to all other non-top 12 values.
1 → 2 → 3 → 6 → 12 → All Others
Determining a value prioritization helps to set up a decision-making process when values are in conflict. In a certain situation, values are examined according to the position in your own individual value hierarchy.
Values are dynamic rather than set and will therefore change/evolve in priority as you progress through life and experience lots of different influencing aspects along the way.
Your top 1 value may move out of being a top 3 altogether and in some cases out of the 12 as you pass through different phases of your life.
This is what the framework is about. It aims to provide understanding and visualisation on your value prioritisation.
As such it is advisable to reassess the value constellation every year or so to notice what has moved in and what has moved out. | https://medium.com/w23-labs/the-core-values-bullseye-framework-39eaef4d8be9 | ['Mitchell Bradley'] | 2019-10-17 11:26:37.715000+00:00 | ['Personal Branding', 'Startup', 'Personal Development', 'Personal Growth', 'Value Proposition'] |
3 Pieces of Relationship Advice to Live By | Sacred Relationships
Here’s some important relationship advice for women (and everyone) because …
Being in an intimate relationship is the most powerful personal development program there is.
This article offers relationship advice for women to live by for supporting the growth of your intimate relationship and ultimately your soul. Though I am addressing this article for women it applies to everyone.
If you don’t live by this relationship advice, your relationship can easily become filled with resentment and you could become a very bitter person, especially if you decided to stay in a relationship that “isn’t working”.
The truth is all relationships “are working”. They are working hard to give you the relationship experiences your soul has signed up for. Intimate relationships give you great opportunities to learn more about yourself. Those that don’t realize this and don’t live by this advice will suffer unnecessary emotional pain.
Ultimately we all want love. The following relationship advice for women will show you how much YOU love YOURSELF.
Here Are Three Pieces of Relationship Advice for Women (And everyone) to Live By
Want to embrace an intimate relationship as a path for your own personal development? This important relationship advice for women is worth implementing.
It’s important to know that this advice applies to all genders and all sexual orientations. In this article, I am specifically addressing
1. Relationships Are Your Mirrors
Every person in your life is your mirror. This means others are reflecting back to you parts of your own consciousness. This gives you an opportunity to see yourself, and through that self-reflection, grow and mature. If you can see it in another that means you have it too. This goes for both good and bad qualities.
This one piece of relationship advice for women is extremely powerful but only when applied. And when applied, blame and judgment go away. Victim energy disappears. The idea that someone is doing something to you, making your life miserable through their actions or words, is no longer a part of your reality. Creative relationship problem-solving becomes more accessible.
Cultivating Deep Intimacy
Instead, when you apply the relationship advice, that your relationships are your mirrors, this gives you an opportunity to cultivate deep love, intimacy, and understanding. Creative relationship problem solving becomes more accessible. And this isn’t just for your most intimate relationships. This is for all your relationships, although it’s in your intimate relationship where you have the opportunity to see, in the greatest detail, who you really are.
And when you really apply this relationship advice for women, I will tell you, it is humbling! A simple way to see how this works is to pay attention to what you complain about regarding your partner. Listen to your words and how you describe the character of his/her personality that bother you. THEN, take those words and ask yourself, “where am I just like that?”
Complaining About A Selfish Partner
Let’s say you are always complaining about how selfish your partner is. Hmmm, selfish. Ask yourself, where are you selfish? You may not be selfish in the exact same way as your partner. Possibly you are saying to yourself, “I can’t possibly be selfish, I am always giving to others.” You more often observe how inconsiderate your man is and therefore label him selfish. And you perceive yourself as a considerate person wanting the same from your mate.
Well maybe, you are too considerate. Maybe you are trying to do for others too much. In all that extra giving and doing for others, do you have an agenda? The agenda might be that you want to feel loved and accepted. You aren’t giving simply to give, you are giving and wanting something in return. And if you don’t get it, you hold back your love. This could be called another form of selfish.
This is just one example. What might it be for you? Start paying attention to what you complain about. You can use those words as a real eye-opener for greater self-awareness. Remember when you have one finger pointing at someone there are three fingers pointing back at you.
Take this one piece of relationship advice and live by it. I guarantee you it will transform your relationships.
2. Take Responsibility for YOUR Part
With that said, it is important to take responsibility for your part. And what I mean by your part is YOUR part. Too many women are the scapegoats for all that goes wrong, well gosh, in life, and in relationships.
Look at the fundamental way society will often look at a rape victim; “she was asking for it”. Even if this isn’t consciously spoken, this attitude is often energetically present. That is why rape victims often don’t even report having been raped. They were already traumatized. They don’t want to risk being blamed for the incident or publicly humiliated.
That is a sad, and all too often, extreme example. But it is happening in intimate relationships, with other things. Women tend to do more personal development than men, buying into the belief that there is something inherently wrong with them.
I want you to know, you are perfect whole and complete just the way you are. You are not less of a person because you are depressed or sad or confused. There is nothing that needs fixing inside of you. You are just being shown something is out of balance for you.
Taking Responsibility for Your Part Is Huge to Experience Fulfilling Relationships
But I want to stress that this does not mean you taking responsibility and the other person not. Though you have no control over another person, if you are in an intimate relationship where you live by the relationship advice of owning your own part and you are doing your work, BUT your partner is not, then you are not really in a relationship. You are “doing” relationship but not “in” relationship.
Maybe this shows up as you are the one who always keeps the house clean to have a nice environment to live in, or maybe you are the one who always suggests date night. In whatever form it shows up, ask yourself, “Am I creating the relationship or are we co-creating it?” In other words, are you over “doing” to hold the relationship together? And if you stopped “doing” what you are doing for the relationship¦ would you still have one?
Owning YOUR part and not taking responsibility for what your partner should be taking responsibility for is a big trap. Women get stuck in dead-end relationships with this type of behavior, thinking “he needs me” or “he didn’t really mean to do that”, or “he is doing the best that he can”. You find yourself over compromising and adjusting more than your partner.
Needing More and Owning It
It is such a fine tightrope to walk in intimate relationships, knowing when to be flexible and when to stand your ground. I believe many more women would be single if they fully took responsibility for their happiness and had the courage to express their truth. Saying to themselves and the relationship, I need more, and really owning it. Owning that they need more love, more nurturing more presence and availability.
Definitely, take responsibility for YOUR part when challenges come up in your intimate relationship but don’t be a scapegoat for what your partner should take responsibility for.
3. Hold Your Relationship as Sacred
An intimate relationship is one of the most profound experiences we can have in life. As I said in the beginning of this article, “Being in an intimate relationship is the most powerful personal development program there is”. By the end of your life, those that you loved will have changed you, and hopefully for the better though sometimes not. And who knows, if you believe in reincarnation, you may have loved them many times before.
When two people come together there is something far greater happening than meets the naked eye. Sharing your life with another whether that be for 2 weeks or 20 years, is special. We cross each other’s paths in the journey of life and I don’t believe any of it is a mistake. I believe it is all divinely orchestrated.
Holding your relationships as sacred is good relationship advice for women to live by. All people for that matter. When you hold your relationships as sacred and special you will navigate them with greater respect and reverence. More compassion will arise within you. Healthy boundary setting will become easier. You will understand that loving another is the same as loving yourself.
When you treat your relationships as sacred you will give them the care and attention they need. What can you do to make your relationships more sacred? Remember to show it with your actions more so than with your words.
Remember that your relationships are your mirrors. What are they showing you? What do you need to take responsibility for and what are you doing that isn’t allowing the relationship to actually be a relationship of co-creation? And lastly no matter what learning process is unfolding in your relationships, know that it is a sacred process on the soul level.
If you are looking for additional relationship advice make sure you also read Who Not To Take Relationship Advice From. I know you’ll find it eye-opening.
I’m Anna-Thea, an author, and Certified Divine Feminine Educator. I educate women in the art of self-love and emotional empowerment. If you’d like to learn more and have more fulfilling relationships check out my online courses.
This article was originally published on my site at: www.annathea.org
If you would like to see the original article please visit: https://annathea.org/relationship-advice-for-women | https://medium.com/@divinefemininecourses/3-pieces-of-relationship-advice-to-live-by-73c42446a226 | [] | 2019-11-14 19:16:39.421000+00:00 | ['Relationship Building', 'Couples', 'Couples Therapy', 'Relationship Advice', 'Relationships'] |
Sadhguru | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/sadhguru-jv/sadhguru-305178a50c44 | [] | 2020-12-25 13:06:07.907000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Yoga', 'Life Lessons', 'Meditation', 'Quotes'] |
Everything you need to know about design principles | As a designer who has worked in the tech industry for over a decade, I’m shocked to see designers still having trouble when it comes to organizing around the work we do, especially when it comes to working with other designers.
This isn’t to say the work we do is easy — far from it. It (usually) involves organizing chaos, translating the wants and needs from various, dissimilar groups of people, and yes, even the occasional PowerPoint prettification.
As a group of professionals who have a myriad of different frameworks, exercises, and toolsets at our disposal, we designers are usually some of the better organized groups within an organization.
This is why I scratch my head whenever I come across a group of designers who don’t know how to work together.
Sure, sometimes a design practice is brand new and lacks the maturity it takes to operate smoothly, but other times, they simply haven’t implemented certain guardrails that makes working together even easier.
After working with dozens of teams of varying sizes over the past decade, I’ve come to realize there is one type of guardrail that can help a design team more than any other.
Enter design principles.
What are design principles?
According to the Nielsen Norman Group (world leaders of research-based user experience), design principles are value statements that frame design decisions and support consistency in decision-making across teams working on the same product or service.
In other words, design principles are words or phrases that act as a shared checklist for designers who are designing the same thing. They tend to be more valuable when used by larger teams, but they can still be useful to a single designer who needs a little guidance while working on their own.
Think of them as guardrails that help keep things consistent when you’re designing multiple parts of one experience.
Why create design principles in the first place?
Creating order out of chaos
Whether you’re a lone designer working with freelance clients or one of many at an international company, you will inevitably face a lot of noise from a lot of different sources: user feedback, business requirements, client input, technical considerations, and by far the worst, subjective opinions from higher-ups who have a tendency to “swoop and poop.” Design principles can help wade through all of this noise and zero in on the signal.
Working faster and smarter
Because you will have a lot thrown at you, design principles help create creative constraints that make daily design decisions easier, quicker, and more informed. Design principles help take some of the guesswork out of these decisions by allowing you to choose the “right” tradeoff. For example, if one of your company’s design principles is “Minimalism,” then you may opt to take out some unnecessary content in a certain view. In this case, you are trading detail and potential clarity for simplicity.
Designing with intention
When left to our own devices, designers can end up overthinking almost anything. Without guiding principles, we can sometimes iterate ourselves into oblivion (think paralysis by analysis, but with pixels). When we spend time and energy upfront to create thoughtful design principles, they can help us move forward with purpose. It one of those “Move slow so you can move fast” sort of things.
Promoting consistency
Whether you’re working with a pre-established design system or designing things from scratch, it can be hard for multiple designers to create a consistent experience across one product, service, or experience. Each person may do things a little differently which, applied to countless design decisions across days/weeks/months, can mean a hodgepodge of experiences within a single product. Design principles help cut down on variability while still giving each designer some amount of autonomy. After all, we’re talking about humans here — not robots…yet.
Increasing influence
Even though design principles are typically made by designers for designers, they can be extremely useful when communicating what you do to other non-designers on your team or across your company. Planting a flag and sharing what you value can set a great example for how other teams and departments can organize and communicate their work. Design principles can also communicate the value of what you do to other co-workers and help you move past answering the one question you will always be asked: “Can you make it prettier?”
How do you create useful design principles?
Make them memorable
By this point, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the phrase, “Move fast and break things.” If you haven’t, you probably don’t work in tech. For those of us that do, we’ve heard these (in)famous words echo through almost every hallway and chatroom over the past decade. This company mantra came from a very young, very immature Facebook as it was first getting off the ground and can be considered as one of their first design principles. Now, many could argue these words have led to some fairly irresponsible decisions that have led to the spread of white supremacy and other hateful ideals, but you can’t deny these five simple words stick with you. I’m sure these words stuck with each and every product designer as they helped build Facebook into the behemoth it is today. This principle told them to focus on speed and always ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
Avoid truisms
Truisms are statements that are obviously true and say nothing new or interesting. A great example of a truism in design is, “Make things user friendly.” This makes for a poor design principle because any designer on any team should strive to make their design easier to use. Period. Sure, there are cases where part of the experience should include a few safety guards, but overall, a user should be able accomplish whatever it is they set out to do. If a design principle isn’t taking a stance, then there’s a good chance it won’t be as valuable when you need it.
Be literal
Imagine sitting down at your desk, diving into your design work, and coming across a decision. For example, let’s say you have to design an error pop up and you’re not sure what it should say. This is the perfect time for you to pull out your handy handy list of design principles and see if any of them address this issue. If you work for Asana, one of your principles just happens to be “Increase confidence through clarity.” Using this as a guide, you opt to include a message like, “Sorry, the promo code you entered has expired. Please try another one.” This gives the user a lot more clarity than, “Invalid promotional code. Try again.”
Revisit them early and often
Like many things in corporate America, design principles are only as useful as you make them. At their best, they can become a list of checkboxes that give you or your team of designers a “definition of done” for the design work that needs to be completed. On the flip side, design principles can become yet another set of empty words a team drafts, puts on the shelf, and leaves to collect dust. Like most strategic tools a team creates, design principles should always be reviewed and updated so that they can stand the test of time.
What are examples of good design principles?
A German-born industrial designer by trade, Dieter Rams was one of the first to indentify and share his list of principles that define good design. Even though his focus was on physical products, each and every one of his principles can be applied to digital design today.
Good design is innovative
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself. Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it. Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful. Good design makes a product understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory. Good design is unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression. Good design is honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept. Good design is long-lasting
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years — even in today’s throwaway society. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user. Good design is environmentally-friendly
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product. Good design is as little design as possible
Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
Unified
Each piece is part of a greater whole and should contribute positively to the system at scale. There should be no isolated features or outliers. Universal
Airbnb is used around the world by a wide global community. Our products and visual language should be welcoming and accessible. Iconic
We’re focused when it comes to both design and functionality. Our work should speak boldly and clearly to this focus. Conversational
Our use of motion breathes life into our products, and allows us to communicate with users in easily understood ways.
Credit: Asana
Allow users to focus on their work without interference.
A user’s focus should be in their control, only distract users with changes that are personally relevant. Increase confidence through clarity.
Within the application, and more broadly within teams, it is unambiguous what is happening and why. Foster productive and emotionally satisfying interpersonal dynamics.
Users feel like they are part of a team, where they can count on each other to do their part, and feel like they’re moving forward towards a common goal. Design for fast, effortless, and intentional interactions.
Simple and common tasks should be frictionless and obvious; complex tasks should feel efficient and delightful. But, speed should not lead to inaccuracies. Empower everyone through progressive discoverability.
Everyone at all levels of experience with Asana should feel like they know how to use the product, regardless of how many features they use. Be consistent and standard, and innovate when it’s worth it.
Users should feel like Asana is familiar, yet modern.
Universal
Our mission is to make the entire world more open, and this means reaching every corner, every person. So our design needs to work for everyone, every culture, every language, every device, every stage of life. This is why we build products that work for 90% of users and cut away features that only work for just a minority, even if we step back in the short term. Human
Users return to our site to be surrounded by friends and other people near to them. This is a central promise of our product, that the people you care about are all in one place. This is why our voice and visual style stay in the background, behind people’s voices, people’s faces, and people’s expression. Clean
Our visual style is clean and understated, to create a blank canvas on which our users live. A minimal, well-lit space encourages participation and honest transparent communication. Clean is the not the easiest approach to visual style. To the contrary, margins and type scale, washes and color become more important as we reduce the number of styles we rely on. Consistent
We invest our time wisely, by embracing patterns, recognizing that our usability is greatly improved when similar parts are expressed in similar ways. Our interactions speak to users with a single voice, building trust. Reduce, reuse, don’t redesign. Useful
Our product is more utility than entertainment, meant for repeated daily use, providing value efficiently. This is why our core interactions, the ones users engage daily, are streamlined, purged of unnecessary clicks and wasted space. Fast
We value our users time more than our own. We recognize faster experiences are more efficient and feel more effortless. As such, site performance is something our users should never notice. Our site should move as fast as we do. Transparent
Users trust us with their identity, their photos, their thoughts and conversation. We reciprocate with the utmost honesty and transparency. We are clear and up front about what’s happening and why.
As you can see, design principles come in all shapes and sizes. It’s up to you to decide how much context you need in order for each principle to be valuable. A list of a few words may not be actionable enough, but a few paragraphs may muddy the waters and dilute the message.
Closing thoughts
As with most thing in the design industry, design principles can fall into the same trap, one where we designers tout them as yet another silver bullet for doing “good” design work as a team. Remember, these aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Design principles are more like training wheels for the designers on your team to put on their bikes so they can all pedal in the same relative direction. This also means you may need to change them out once you get far enough along. The principles that got you from there to here won’t necessarily get you from here to there.
References
Design Kit from Ideo.org — Overview and step-by-step exercise for creating design principles.
Design Principles — An open source collection of design principles and methods.
Interaction Design Foundation — Further reading and resources on design principles
Ten Principles for Good Design — The home of Dieter Rams and his philosophy on good design. | https://uxdesign.cc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-design-principles-32bd60442ae0 | ['Billy Frazier'] | 2021-09-03 21:38:53.091000+00:00 | ['Design Thinking', 'Design', 'Product Design', 'UX', 'Service Design'] |
Sales and Fear cannot go hand in hand | Photo Credit: Thinkstock
Let’s talk about the different fears that we have as salespeople. And then, we will talk about how we build an immunity to those fears.
Spend time around one who has overcome the fear — your sales leader.
It’s easy to say — don’t be afraid, it’s ok. We are in sales, we have to do it!
It is highly unlikely that you are convinced with those lines. If you are afraid, it is likely that there is a real danger attached to that fear. You may fear making cold calls, asking for referrals, asking for commitments, or revealing that you have a higher price early in the sales process. This is very common. When you sit with someone who has overcome such fears, first you will understand that there’s nothing bad that can happen, at least personally. Then, you would learn how they think about what they’re doing, how they approach it, and how they succeed in taking action without fear.
List down your Fears
Pick up a pen and paper, start writing what you fear in descending order — what you fear the most on top and so on! Then write down the dangers invited by those fear factors. Now rate them based on their occurrence as you anticipate. While you do this exercise, you are parting the fear to some extend already. You would start to realize that the dangers aren’t as damaging as you think it would be.
Now, What’s the Real Danger?
Let’s be honest — the real danger is
To let your opportunity run to alternatives Deprive your potential customer from your amazing offering Losing your business and your commission
We fear while we make calls that we will be rejected, we will be questioned about our value, existence, benefits blah blah blah but in reality the real danger is that by not making the call, you don’t produce the results you are capable of, for your company, or for your prospective client.
We are afraid to ask the potential buyer how serious they are about the product/service we’re discussing and whether or not they’re going to be able to get the support and necessary budget. There’s the risk of offending your contact, but the greater risk is in not asking and later finding out that you’ve both spent months on an initiative that’s not going to happen.
There’s no harm in discussing the associated cost beforehand. That helps you and your potential buyer to set expectations and acts like a factor to continue/discontinue the initiative. Remember, it’s a loss on both sides if potential buyer figures out that he/she cannot afford your service at a latter stage.
Fear is a powerful motivator. It can motivate you to avoid taking an action that may harm you. It can also motivate you to act, while not taking the action will harm you. | https://medium.com/applozic-plug-play-messaging/sales-and-fear-cannot-go-hand-in-hand-47cbdbd38fa1 | ['Pravin Singh'] | 2016-03-25 15:20:16.879000+00:00 | ['Salesforce Productivity', 'Sales', 'Fear'] |
Digitalisation of the Private Market | Key Market Enablers
We’re confident that blockchain-based electronic instruments represent a future pillar of the private market financial sector; offering massive operational efficiencies and enabling investment features in ways that are difficult or impossible to achieve in conventional paper-based instruments.
Our analysis found that there are still a number of blockers preventing this new asset class from fulfilling its potential. To achieve our mission of enabling a decentralized economy, we’ve built a platform that addresses these critical obstacles to market acceptance.
Autonomous Investor Rights Enforcement
Our most important and powerful innovation is our solution for enforcement of investor rights — a central challenge to the market adoption of blockchain and smart contract based instruments. We understood that we had little ability to hasten the adoption of legal code that would solve the uncertainty around smart contracts and the handling of investor rights, so instead we looked at how we could bring the real world onto the blockchain.
Through the use of our patent-pending decentralized Sentinel System™, our platform allows issuers of investment instruments to make business-model specific commitments (covenants) to investors, pre-plan and pre-authorize remedies in the case of non-compliance. Our smart contract technology autonomously verifies that issuer commitments are being met and, if they aren’t, executes the remedies that have already been described to investors. It provides investor rights enforcement with previously unimaginable speed, clarity and predictability.
We believe our system doesn’t just match the types of enforcement options available in traditional asset classes, but represents an improvement over them. Faster, cheaper, predictable enforcement of investor rights that are business-model specific.
Regulatory Compliance — Ad Infinitum
Ongoing, long-term regulatory compliance has been costly and operationally challenging, especially if a company has issued investment instruments under a securities registration exemption that has specific limitations.
Even companies like Google and Facebook have experienced organization-altering regulatory challenges. In both cases, Google and Facebook conducted public offerings in the year in which their shareholder bases increased beyond 500 investors due to secondary trading outside of the companies’ control (which breached their regulatory category and required them to start reporting to the SEC similarly to a public company). In both cases, the inability to maintain compliance with their SEC registration exemptions was cited as a primary driver.
With smart contract based compliance rules, an investment is able to assure that any defined compliance requirements are respected indefinitely. In the above example, the investment instrument itself would have prevented any transactions that would have created a 501st shareholder. If an investment instrument is issued with specific rules about investor accreditation or geographic location, smart contract based compliance (and investor identity management) is able to assure ongoing compliance in a dispersed secondary market.
As smart contract based compliance has visibility into its full token holder base, generating mandatory corporate reporting can be fully automated. This brings valuable relief for issuers and their financial service providers from the dual obligations of maintaining control over its regulatory categorization and maintenance of its regulatory reporting.
Investor Identity
Knowing Your Customer (KYC) is mission-critical in a regulated but non-centralized private market. Our approach is to represent an identity (individual or corporation) via a decentralized system where the investor has full control over their personal data — existing in a permissioned distributed ledger (blockchain) outside the control of any centralized party.
Using a decentralized platform for identity management allows for qualified investors to take part in these offerings via a wide ecosystem financial service providers without the need to continually reestablish their identity. This is an important feature of today’s centralized financial model.
This approach also allows for fully decentralized secondary trading, as smart contract based compliance systems can verify that regulatory requirements are being met when instruments are being traded between investors. These systems are further able to generate automated regulatory reporting and distribute investor payments (dividends, royalties, interest coupons). Without decentralized identify management, secondary trading and ongoing token program management are limited to exchanges where buyer and seller identity can be verified from the same database, which negates many of the potential benefits of a decentralized economic model.
Hunit works with external partners, combined with in house technology, to provide investors and issuers with portable identity management under their control. | https://medium.com/@hunit/digitalisation-of-the-private-market-b8f676ef9e17 | [] | 2020-04-20 09:49:10.858000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Compliance', 'Blockchain', 'Hyperledger', 'Tokenization'] |
about instagram in english | Instagram, the image sharing app created with the aid of using Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom from Stanford University, spins the story of achievement capitalized the proper manner. Launched manner again withinside the 12 months 2010, Instagram nowadays boasts of seven hundred million registered customers, with extra than four hundred million human beings touring the webweb page on a everyday basis. Out of the seven hundred million customers, round 17 million are from the UK alone! When the 2 founders began out speakme approximately their concept, they quick realised that they’d one purpose in mind: to make the biggest cell image sharing app. However, earlier than Instagram, the 2 had labored collectively on a comparable platform referred to as Burbn. For Instagram to work, Krieger and Systrom determined to strip Burbn right all the way down to the naked necessities. Burbn became pretty just like Instagram and had functions which allowed customers to feature filters to their pictures. The social networking webweb page Instagram reached 1000000000 energetic customers in 2019. The US-primarily based totally video and image-sharing app is a achievement tale that has spread out because its release in October 2010 with the aid of using Stanford University college students Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. Systrom majored in control technological know-how and engineering, at the same time as Krieger studied symbolic systems — a department of pc research mixed with psychology. When the 2 founders met, they began out discussing their concept for a brand new app and realised they shared a purpose: to create the world’s biggest cell image-sharing app. Budding entrepreneur Fellow college students recalled Systrom as being clearly gregarious and a budding entrepreneur from a younger age. He in short ran a market that became just like Craigslist for fellow Stanford college students. Krieger had exclusive capabilities and one in all his college tasks were designing a pc interface that could gauge human emotions. Prior to Instagram, that they’d collaborated on a comparable platform referred to as Burbn. They determined to strip it down and use it as the premise for Instagram. Burbn had functions that enabled customers to feature filters to their photographs, so the duo studied each famous image app to peer how they might development further. Eventually, they determined it wasn’t operating and scrapped Burbn in favour of making a totally new platform. Their first attempt became Scotch, a predecessor to Instagram, however it wasn’t a achievement, because it didn’t have sufficient filters, had too many insects and became slow. Once Instagram became launched for Android phones, the app became downloaded extra than 1,000,000 instances a day. Interestingly, the web social media platform became ready to get hold of an funding of $ 500 million. Furthermore, Systrom and Zuckerberg had been in talks for a Facebook poised takeover. In April 2012, Facebook made a proposal to buy Instagram for approximately $ 1 billion in coins and stock, with the important thing provision that the enterprise could continue to be independently managed. Shortly thereafter and simply previous to its preliminary public offering, Facebook received the enterprise for the whopping sum of $ 1 billion in coins and stock. After the Facebook acquisition, the Instagram founders have completed little to alternate the consumer phase, sticking to the simplicity of the app. The remarkable upward push of Instagram’s recognition proves that human beings agree with in actual connections as opposed to the ones primarily based totally on simplest words. Since the acquisition, Instagram’s founders haven’t made many adjustments to the consumer experience, who prefer to paste to the app’s simplicity. Its upward push in recognition proves that human beings revel in the manner the app works and just like the image-primarily based totally connections it provides. One of the maximum essential instructions of Instagram’s achievement is that the founders didn’t waste time seeking to keep their authentic concept, Burbn. Once they determined it wasn’t going to work, they moved on quick and invented Instagram. Systrom stated its call became primarily based totally on “immediate telegram”. The app became released at simply the proper time — and with simplest 12 personnel initially, the consumer base had increased to extra than 27 million earlier than Instagram became offered to Facebook. Today, maximum celebrities use it as a platform for promotions and with 1000000000 customers, it keeps to head from power to power. | https://medium.com/@sfame-raya-55/about-instagram-in-english-58ebc9db6e3 | ['Sfame Raya'] | 2020-12-17 11:44:56.777000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Instagram', 'Technews', 'Technology', 'Success Story'] |
How to Get Around Bangkok | Thailand’s capital, Bangkok offers one a very systematic and varied transport system. You can take a sky train or ride the underground, hop in a 4 wheeled taxi or hail a river taxi and whizz across the water. So, how do you get about Bangkok? Read on and decide, either way, you are in for a treat!
1. The BTS — Bangkok’s Sky Train
Guests at a Bangkok city hotel can stay well connected to every part of the city via the Skytrain which offers an elaborate network with stations located at all iconic points in the city. The system is made up of two lines, the BTS Silom line and the BTS Sukhumvit line. The latter connects the south-east district to the northeast district and stops at 22 stations along the way. The most iconic stops along this line include Victory Monument, Mo Chit, Siam Asok, Phaya Thai and Ekkamai. The Sukhumvit line connects to the underground MRT rail system at both Asok and Mo Chit station. The BTS Silom line travels from Bangkok central to the west covering a total of 13 stations; these are Siam, National Stadium, Sala Daeng and Tala Phu. This line connects to the underground MRT at Silom/Daeng and Sala stations. The best option to avoid peak time traffic the BTS Skytrain is modern and efficient; the service operates from 6 am to midnight daily with a new train coming along every 5 to 8 minutes.
2. Bangkok Express Boat Service
If you choose to stay at the popular riverside hotels in Bangkok, the express boat service is a lovely and convenient mode of transport. Easily accessible from tourists resorts like Chatrium Hotel Riverside Bangkok, the service better known as river taxis are easy to use. Colour coded flags denominate the routes, with 5 flags depicting the 5 different routes available. The orange flag is best for tourists opting to explore the lovely Chao Phraya River and visit the popular Grand Palace. A total of 21 piers are reached via these boats, which operate all day from 6 am to 7 pm.
3. The Bangkok MRT — Underground Train
The Bangkok MRT operates on only one line –the Blue MRT Line. Covering 18 stations, this line runs through Phetchaburi, Chatuchak Park, Silom, Sukhumvit, and Hua Lamphong; along these lines are a number of top attractions. You have the option of transferring to a BTS Skytrain from any one of these stops: Sukhumvit/Asok, Chatuchak Park/Mo Chit and Silom/Sala Daeng. The service operates from 6 am to midnight. Trains arrive every 3 to 5 minutes at peak hours and every 10 minutes at non-peak hours. Peak hours range from 6 am to 9 am and 4.30pm to 7.30pm.
4. Bangkok Taxis
Comfortable and inexpensive the taxis of Bangkok are great modes of transport, sans travelling during the rush hours. Taxis are most hailed after midnight when the BTS, MRT and ferry service stop their runs for the day. Taxis can be hailed from just about any point in the city; make sure to ask the driver to turn on the meter, or else you are going to have to pay whatever amount he quotes at the end of the ride.
5. The Tuk-Tuks of Bangkok
The three-wheeled little taxis of Bangkok are great to travel around the city, whizzing in between lines of traffic the tuk-tuks will help get you to your destination in double quick time. They were once a favoured mode of transport; before being replaced by the MRT and BTS. However, tuks are still a favourite amongst tourists who find the experience quite entertaining. They operate 24 hours and can be hailed from stands in front of shopping malls and hotels. | https://medium.com/@peaushan/how-to-get-around-bangkok-d055324d84ce | ['Lucifer Goodman'] | 2019-03-18 06:31:56.793000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Vacation', 'Bangkok', 'Thailand'] |
‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ Shows a Ted Bundy He Would Have Liked | Lily Collins and Zac Efron in ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ (Netflix)
Of all the serial killers who entered the lexicon of American culture over the past half-century, Ted Bundy, who confessed to over two-dozen murders committed in the 1970s and was executed in 1989, remains something of a standout. The likes of the Zodiac Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, or Dennis Rader (aka the BTK) have shocked for many reasons, most particularly their depravity and ability to elude capture. Bundy, or at least the legend of him, followed a different trajectory.
The story on Bundy was that, unlike many more obviously socially maladjusted killers, he was able to live a seemingly normal life while simultaneously killing and raping young women. In this version, he utilized his above-average charm and intelligence to disarm his victims and elude capture, much like the kind of charming fictional psychopaths who repel but more attract in popular culture. That image was crafted first by the somewhat breathless press coverage over his 1979 trial (not coincidentally, the first to be nationally televised) and a little later by The Stranger Beside Me, the 1980 account by his onetime co-worker Ann Rule which both cemented his reputation and launched her true-crime writing career. That take on Bundy has been more critiqued of late, with questions being raised about why some in the media fall for this fannish take on a serial rapist and murderer who was, in all likelihood, of only average intelligence and magnetism.
Joe Berlinger’s competently made but fairly infuriating new Netflix movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile falls right into the charming-killer version of the Bundy. Having already made a docuseries on Bundy — Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes — to avoid repetition, Berlinger likely wanted to pursue a more unique, targeted angle with his narrative take on Bundy. Extremely Wicked is based on The Phantom Prince, Elizabeth Kendall’s account of her years-long relationship with Bundy, who pursued his crimes while keeping her in the dark. Berlinger’s stated intent was to show how Bundy, played by Zac Efron, could be so attractive that he would be able to get away with these brazenly-conducted crimes for so many years. If that’s the case, he may have succeeded, but at a high cost.
The most notable result of Berlinger’s decision to show us the charming side of Bundy — law student and good boyfriend by day, killer by night — is that at almost no point, excepting for a very brief sequence near the end, do we see him committing any of his many horrific crimes. Instead, the movie follows in vague fashion his relationship with Kendall (an unremarkable Lily Collins) from a swooning meet-cute at a college bar in 1969 to a final jailhouse send-off just before his execution. It’s a muddled dramatization. Years are leaped past and states hopped with abandon. Attention is paid to Bundy’s romantic manipulation, after a first seemingly chaste night together, Kendall wakes up to find an apron-wearing Bundy in her kitchen, making breakfast and cooing over her infant son. Afterwards, though, as he is chased down by law enforcement for disappearances in Washington, Utah, and Colorado, we are not shown quite enough of how he is able to keep the wool pulled over her eyes for all those years.
Kaya Scodelario and Efron
Although Michael Werwie’s script seems to track Kendall’s perspective, it cannot help but also include numerous scenes she is not privy to, from Bundy’s various run-ins with the law and his on-the-side relationship with supergroupie Carol Anne Boone (Kaya Scodelario). Berlinger visually hypes Bundy’s attractiveness to an almost laughable degree, particularly in the scene when Bundy has just escaped from a courthouse and is walking the streets of Aspen while being ostentatiously ogled by every woman who walks past. The argument for all these moments is that they show how Efron’s Bundy uses his wiles to elude capture. But all that they ultimately do is reinforce the charming-killer narrative while disassociating it from any acknowledgement of the cold darkness that lay behind that warm grin.
Particularly frustrating is how the filmmakers treat Bundy’s 1979 Dade County trial. Already a circus before it even began by dint of its media-saturated defendant, the trial was turned into even more of a sideshow by it being the first to be nationally televised, not to mention featuring a judge (played in meticulously oily fashion by John Malkovich) so enamored of Bundy that he seemed on the verge of asking for an autograph. Many of the details from this section are true, including Bundy’s showoff decision to fire his defense team and represent himself. However, the movie itself seems just as entranced by the defendant as the judge or his many wide-eyed female fans in the courtroom.
Efron’s skills at presenting an engaging mixture of wily attractiveness that hints at but falls just shy of extreme self-regard make for the kind of appropriately charming character who could entice women to let their guard down and police to overlook him as a suspect. Unfortunately, Berlinger makes the mistake of showing actual footage of Bundy during the credits. Efron successfully mimicked many of Bundy’s mannerisms, but took his assignment a little too far. The real Bundy came across as obviously preening, not to mention jumpy and not particularly eloquent. Presenting the character closer to how he appeared to seem in reality would have been a more interesting gambit. Showing just how low the bar is for educated white males to come across as charming and intelligent, the movie could have been a damning indictment of a particular strain of criminal privilege.
The ultimate result of all this queasy glamorization is not so much a dramatization, but rather something closer to Bundy fan-fiction. | https://medium.com/eyes-wide-open/extremely-wicked-shockingly-evil-and-vile-shows-a-ted-bundy-he-would-have-liked-97d8e501611f | ['Chris Barsanti'] | 2019-05-06 16:33:42.070000+00:00 | ['Joe Berlinger', 'Ted Bundy', 'Movies', 'Netflix', 'True Crime'] |
Preventing Data Forgery with the Encrypted Private Key | Generation and transmission of Signed Message through encrypted private keys
The data generated from MCU is processed to create signed message through unique encryption technology utilizing unique private key of each device and public key of reception device is transferred to ReapChain via ReapMiddleChain.
Since the delivered signed Message requires private key of reception device and public key of transmitting device for decryption, data forgery can be detected even if hackings are occurred on communication devices such as routers and AP.
Also, even if data snapping (interception of data) occurs through a communication device, without a private key, decryption of data is impossible.
★ ReapChain Official Community
Follow the ReapChain official community and have more news!
Homepage: https://reapchain.com/
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Blog: https://blog.naver.com/reapchain
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Investment and Sale Inquiries: [email protected]
Project Inquiries: [email protected] | https://medium.com/reapchain/preventing-data-forgery-with-the-encrypted-private-key-98d6d1106d4a | [] | 2020-12-03 09:01:21.944000+00:00 | ['Reapchain', 'IoT', 'Internet of Things', 'Data', 'Private Key'] |
Working with AWS Secret Manager | In my previous post Exploring AWS Secret Manager, we learned about some key benefits of using AWS Secret Manager. In this post, we will explore how to use it with a practical example.
How it Works
You can use Secret Manager to store, rotate, monitor, and control access to secrets such as database credentials, API keys, and OAuth tokens.
I have discussed the benefits and workflow of Secret Manager in my other post check it out
AWS Secret Manager Workflow
The above slide describes the typical application workflow when working with AWS Secret Manager
The DBA or Service admin creates a service account credential to use the service for a particular app. For example, DBA creates a username and password for MyWebApp to access the database. Administrator (DBA or Service or AWS) creates a record in AWS Secret Manager as a secret for an app for example MyWebAppDBCredentials When an application needs a credential it queries AWS Secret Manager through secure HTTPs and TLS channel, AWS then returns the credentials to the app. for example, the client calls Secret Manager to retrieve entries for MyWebAppDBCredentials. The app or client parse the credentials and use it in the application as required. For example, in a connection string or API call.
Example Overview
In this example, we will store a password of MYSQL RDS database, retrieve it in a Node.js function using AWS SDK
Creating a Secret
The first step is to create a secret open AWS Console and go to AWS Secret Manager
Click on Store a new secret button
Select Secret Type, in our case we are storing credentials for our MySQL RDS database. Enter the username and password and select the RDS database the credentials belong to
Enter secret name and description, optionally enter Tags
Configure rotation function, I have chosen default which is Disable automatic rotation. Enabling rotation is a topic for another post
Review your selections and click Store Secret
Now you have stored the secret, let’s see an example to work with it
Using a Secret
Following Node.js code is reading credentials from AWS Secret Manager then passing credentials info to the Connection string in Node.js function
// Use this code snippet in your app. // If you need more information about configurations or implementing the sample code, visit the AWS docs: // https://aws.amazon.com/developers/getting-started/nodejs/ // Load the AWS SDK var AWS = require(‘aws-sdk’), region = “us-east-1”, //replace with your region secretName = “dev/mysql/mywebappdb”, // replace with your secret ID secret, decodedBinarySecret; // Create a Secrets Manager client var client = new AWS.SecretsManager({ region: region }); // In this sample we only handle the specific exceptions for the ‘GetSecretValue’ API. // See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/secretsmanager/latest/apireference/API_GetSecretValue.html // We rethrow the exception by default. client.getSecretValue({ SecretId: secretName }, function (err, data) { if (err) { if (err.code === ‘DecryptionFailureException’) // Secrets Manager can’t decrypt the protected secret text using the provided KMS key. // Deal with the exception here, and/or rethrow at your discretion. throw err; else if (err.code === ‘InternalServiceErrorException’) // An error occurred on the server side. // Deal with the exception here, and/or rethrow at your discretion. throw err; else if (err.code === ‘InvalidParameterException’) // You provided an invalid value for a parameter. // Deal with the exception here, and/or rethrow at your discretion. throw err; else if (err.code === ‘InvalidRequestException’) // You provided a parameter value that is not valid for the current state of the resource. // Deal with the exception here, and/or rethrow at your discretion. throw err; else if (err.code === ‘ResourceNotFoundException’) // We can’t find the resource that you asked for. // Deal with the exception here, and/or rethrow at your discretion. throw err; } else { // Decrypts secret using the associated KMS CMK. // Depending on whether the secret is a string or binary, one of these fields will be populated. if (‘SecretString’ in data) { secret = data.SecretString; } else { let buff = new Buffer(data.SecretBinary, ‘base64’); decodedBinarySecret = buff.toString(‘ascii’); } } //Parsing secret JSON object const secretJSON = JSON.parse(secret); // Read data from MYSQL database var mysql = require(‘mysql’); //Pass credentials info to connection var con = mysql.createConnection({ host: secretJSON.host, user: secretJSON.username, password: secretJSON.password, database: secretJSON.dbname }); //Query MySQL table con.connect(function (err) { if (err) throw err; con.query(“SELECT * FROM myproducts”, function (err, result, fields) { // change to your table name if (err) throw err; console.log(result); //display data from table process.exit(); //exit node.js server }); }); });
Execute the above code by writing it in a file readsecret.js The output of the above code is as follows
$ node readsecret.js [
RowDataPacket { product_id: 100, product_desc: ‘PC’ },
RowDataPacket { product_id: 200, product_desc: ‘MAC’ },
RowDataPacket { product_id: 300, product_desc: ‘iPHONE’ },
RowDataPacket { product_id: 400, product_desc: ‘iPAD’ },
RowDataPacket { product_id: 500, product_desc: ‘PRINTER’ }
]
Conclusion
In this post, we stored the credentials of our MySQL RDS database in AWS Secret Manager and later retrieved the credentials from a secret manager and use it in our application securely.
I hope you like this post.
@IamZeeshanBaig
About DataNext
DataNext Solutions is a US-based system integrator, specialized in Cloud, Security, and DevOps technologies. As a registered AWS partner, our services comprise of any Cloud Migration, Cost optimization, Integration, Security and Managed Services. Click here and Book a Free assessment call with our experts today or visit our website www.datanextsolutions.com for more info. | https://medium.com/datanextsolutions/working-with-aws-secret-manager-4896a1cb05d7 | ['Zeeshan Baig'] | 2020-02-25 20:42:36.536000+00:00 | ['Amazon Web Services', 'AWS', 'Cloud Security', 'Security', 'Cloud'] |
The Battle For Center Field is Heating Up | As the Cubs barrel through Spring Training one thing has become apparent — the Center Field job is not going to come easy to either of the two candidates (despite this whole baseball thing coming easy to them so far this Spring).
Both Albert Almora and Ian Happ are off to a killer start to the Spring, making David Ross’s job of selecting his everyday CF as hard as it possibly could be. Like seriously, they’ve both been flat out RAKING.
Now you can say, “oh Dan, it’s a clear choice that it should be Ian Happ. Almora sucked last year and he’s a switch hitter!!” and to that I would normally say that you are right. BUT, here’s the thing: after a pretty bad season at the dish last year (.236/.271/.381), Almora has come into Spring with a noticeably different swing, a more refined approach, and a noticeable drive to win back his CF job.
Through his 6 games, Almora has more hits than any Cub on the roster, including 2 long balls and an OPS of 1.588. I know it’s a pretty small sample size, but the guy is hitting for contact and power. Aside from the hits, his approach is what has me the most high on him. Through his 15 ABs Almora has only K’d twice. Again small sample size, but his walks match his strikeouts thus far. At the end of the campaign in 2019 Almora had 1 walk to every 3.8 strikeouts.
With the numbers and the seemingly refined profile, you’d be a bit ignorant to write Almora off, but it gets complicated when it comes to the other option, Ian Happ.
Happ began 2019 in AAA, but made his way back to the big club by July. The switch hitter played a couple positions, but is mainly up for the CF job this spring. Through 2019 Happ slashed .264/.333/.564, numbers that are higher than Almora’s across the board.
Even with Almora’s strong start, the choice isn’t easy.
Ian Happ is having himself quite the Spring. With 15 ABs as well, Happ has a BA of .467, and an OPS sitting at 1.400 (sorry no exact numbers here, they haven’t been logged yet and I suck ass at math). Happ has also hit 2 dingers and has a 1:1 K to walk ratio. Though it’s a super small size, Happ looks to be more contact driven at the plate and has cut down on the Ks he’s been known for over the years.
As it stands now, it’s a pretty even race. Like almost a dead tie even. I think it’ll come down to a couple of things, since platooning (in my opinion) isn’t necessarily fair to either party here. Those things will be: on-base percentage, approach, plate discipline, any wild, incredibly clear troubles in CF, Albert Almora’s ability against RHP and Ian Happ’s ability against LHP. If Almora continues his hot spring and shows that he can handle the bat against same-handed matchups, it’s tough to call him off. On the other hand, if Happ is absolutely crushing both sides of the plate as a switch hitter, you can’t tell the guy no.
If it comes down to it, and one guy is getting on base at a clearly higher clip than the other despite the guy on the mound, I think that’s gotta be your plug there. As either option will likely be hitting near the bottom of the order, OBP is going to huge as the lineup turns over to a leadoff man whose name is Kris Bryant. I could be wrong (I usually am), but the on-base ability has to be standout for whoever is going to see the most time in CF to start the 2020 campaign.
It’s going to be a tough decision for David Ross, but it’ll be a fun battle to follow throughout the rest of Spring Training. Who you got? | https://medium.com/@danschmuldt/the-battle-for-center-field-is-heating-up-31b8b735904b | ['Dan Schmuldt'] | 2020-03-03 23:46:57.629000+00:00 | ['Chicago Cubs', 'Sports', 'Baseball', 'Major League Baseball', 'MLB'] |
The Whole Foods Effect: “Foodie” Culture and Culinary Gentrification | Image: CNBC
Gentrification, the process of economic and cultural redevelopment to appeal to a whiter, wealthier resident base, works by making individual tastes as profitable as possible. Consumers can be catered to through housing, amenities, design aesthetics, and much more — but food commodification is one of the biggest culprits.
Food is key for survival, culture, and community development. Its gentrification involves cultural appropriation, poverty, access to nutrition, and social division, making it a destructive force in rapidly changing communities.
“If you are what you eat,” and if “what you eat is culture that you pay for,” then “you are taste commodified,” writes Sociology professor Joshua Sbicca.
Food can demonstrate a city’s changing demographics, trends, and economic transformation. Food not only facilitates gentrification — it becomes gentrified itself, making it essential for the future of urban policy and the increasing displacement of low-income people of color.
“White people’s omnivorous tastes and economic advantage position them to colonize the tastes and places historically occupied by low-income people and people of color,” Sbicca warns.
Food can, in this way, be a sort of snapshot of urban power relations, as well as a “vehicle for physical displacement” of people and their foodscapes. Specific processes such as ‘supermarket greenlining’ and authenticity marketing catalyze this displacement; stores like Whole Foods are signifiers for higher-income and whiter consumers that a neighborhood’s culture is being redesigned to accommodate them.
“Inequality impacts what reaches your palate, too,” writes Journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr.
Retail options reflect the economic and social fabric of a neighborhood, and food-based marketing and consumption add a layer of cultural appropriation and health disparity to the process of urban renewal.
The concept of “authenticity” plays heavily into the development of food gentrification, becoming a tool for new (wealthier/whiter) residents to ‘cleanse’ and claim the space occupied by an existing community, Sharon Zukin writes in her article “Consuming Authenticity.”
This reclamation of space is enacted through media leveraging and legal zoning changes, as the ‘new class’ of residents mobilize around their alternative consumption practices, especially in direct reaction to the consumption modes of the existing community. These alternative consumption practices most often take the form of modern-style entrepreneurial spaces like bars and restaurants, health-conscious farmers’ markets, and specialty food stores.
These spaces allow new urban consumers to ‘perform’ authenticity by fabricating an aura of “abnormal” taste. They capitalize on the tastes of these young, hip clientele by advertising an ‘authentic’ historical background or ‘genuine’ backstory to the products. This can be one of the first visible steps of gentrification, soon followed by larger stores and luxury real estate development.
“Food is a sort of a ground zero for gentrification… for whose culture is respected and whose is not,” says community activist Levene Harvell.
It becomes clear through food alone that new, ‘alternative’ consumers are complicit in the process of exclusion that transforms a neighborhood by displacing working-class and ethnic minority residents.
These processes of residential conversion, promotion of ‘alternative’ design and cuisine, and the collapse of small businesses have culminated in a new ‘symbolic economy,’ where neighborhoods thrive on a new ‘renewable resource:’ authenticity.
These “reclaimed” spaces are only seen as authentic from the outside; they are judged by external standards, and those who grew up in a neighborhood, and are connected to its community, are unlikely to label it ‘authentic;’ it simply is.
“White people like to live in up-and-coming neighborhoods because they get credibility and respect from other white people for living in a more “authentic” neighborhood where they are exposed to “true culture” every day,” says Sbicca.
These “hip” gentrified neighborhoods form an exclusive, performative economy that capitalizes on the communities it displaces. Food is one of the first signs of this “symbolic economy;” trendy “foodie” culture is like a foot in the door for gentrification. It shows that a community is becoming profitable for investors, largely because it is now palatable for a young, white, wealthy consumer base.
Gentrification also changes food retailers that comprise the local food environment, sometimes creating “food mirages,” with high-quality food purposefully priced for newcomers, not longtime residents.
The available food itself becomes gentrified as well, through marginalized communities’ dispossession of culturally important foods. These dishes and ingredients are resignified as “cool” or “hip,” emerging in new restaurants, grocery stores, bars, cafes, and gardens at unaffordable prices. Foods like ramen, kale, and hummus have always been essential to their respective ethnic groups, but they have been overtaken by the white and wealthy and “reclaimed” as trendy.
Supermarket greenlining is an especially damaging example of food-based displacement. High-end supermarket chains purposefully target inner-city neighborhoods for their growth potential and profitability, establishing ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’ food venues that displace the affordable eateries that have long stood in low-income minority communities.
Health food as a signifier of “authenticity” creates inequality, which favors a wealthier target audience and excludes longtime residents. In their cultural and economic takeover of a neighborhood’s necessary amenities for survival, food gentrifiers become colonizing forces in poor communities.
“At this rate, my kids won’t be able to afford soul food… when we talk about food gentrification, we’re talking about the impact of a traditionally low-income food becoming trendy… Black Americans have been told relentlessly soul food was to blame for obesity. Now collards are the new kale,” blogger Mikki Kendall tweeted in 2014.
Kendall’s experience shows that food gentrification is not only a process of economic exclusion, but of cultural appropriation as well. White and wealthy people are not only displacing but commodifying the cultural foods and food sources of poor communities and communities of color — while those communities bear the consequences of poor health and inadequate access.
This appropriation is purposeful and profitable.
If newcomers reject the food of an existing community it can lead to economic loss, but if gentrifiers refashion these foods, making them trendy and upholding them as ‘authentic’ examples of the neighborhood’s culture, they become both more attractive to affluent people and less accessible to long-standing residents, eventually displacing existing businesses.
Food gentrification does not stand alone: it directly affects the housing gentrification that forces low-income communities out of their neighborhoods.
“Whole Foods is like a gateway for white people to feel that the neighborhood’s culture is being redesigned to accommodate them,” writes Starr.
It’s a process that’s symbolic and tangible at the same time.
City officials and developers are fully aware of the way urban amenities increase the prices of nearby residential units: real estate website Zillow conducted a study showing that the typical home near either Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s costs more and “appreciates twice as much” as the median U.S. home (Cohen 4, Anderson, 2017).
This phenomenon, dubbed the “Whole Foods Effect,” demonstrates the interwoven cycle of food and housing gentrification, and the motivation developers have to invest in “desirable” neighborhoods and redevelop them. This increase in investment is dependent on the modern cultural interest in ‘health’ food and ‘authenticity,’ a change that has motivated cities to adopt supermarket incentive policies framed as “food justice” and “obesity prevention efforts.”
Food retailers marketing sustainable, healthy products to higher-income consumers clearly signal that the community is changing, causing nearby property values to increase. Yes, urban policies that incentivize new supermarkets to set up shop in low-income communities may increase food access, but they will more likely serve to make the neighborhood more attractive for affluent newcomers.
Food, in many ways, is an entry point into the politics and processes of gentrification. It is a sort of microcosm for the broader gentrification process, is enacted by both economic and cultural drivers, existing as both an anchor and a signifier of community development.
There is an inherent inequality in food production and consumption. Because of this, we must be conscious of the impact our food access and spending have on race- and class-based displacement in vulnerable urban communities.
Sources
Anguelovski, Isabelle. “Healthy Food Stores, Greenlining and Food Gentrification: Contesting New Forms Of Privilege, Displacement and Locally Unwanted Land Uses in Racially Mixed Neighborhoods.” International Journal Of Urban And Regional Research, Doi:10.1111/1468–2427.12299
Cohen, Nevin. “Feeding Or Starving Gentrification: The Role of Food Policy.” Policy Brief, Cuny Urban Food Policy Institute. 7 March 2018.
Sbicca, Joshua (2018). Food, Gentrification, And The Changing City, Fuhem Ecosocial, Boletínecos. Ecos 43, Issn-1989–8495
Sharon Zukin (2008). Consuming Authenticity, Cultural Studies, 22:5, 724–748, Doi: 10.1080/09502380802245985
Starr, Terrell Jermaine. “There Goes The Neighborhood: How Food Helps Drive Gentrification.”
‘Food And Gentrification,’ The Root. TheRoot.com. 8 June 2018. | https://medium.com/@daliakramirez/the-whole-foods-effect-foodie-culture-and-culinary-gentrification-acaf7ebbba49 | ['Dalia Ramirez'] | 2020-07-27 07:34:56.241000+00:00 | ['Foodies', 'Politics', 'Whole Foods', 'Gentrification', 'Sociology'] |
LA GALAXY : The football club of West | LA GALAXY : The football club of West
For Americans the football is something different and it is known as American football. The football is known as soccer there. The game is very popular throughout the world but it is considered as a new sport in America. Soccer has become popular in America in the last decade. For bringing life into MLS the major credit can be given to the LA galaxy. The Los Angeles club brought the English football legend David Beckham from Real Madrid and after his introduction in the MLS the club along with the league reached into top level.
Although the club and the league became popular after that the club was seeded in 1994. LA Galaxy is one of the ten founding teams in Major League Soccer. The name "Galaxy" was derived from Los Angeles being home to the "stars" of Hollywood. A couple of times the club finished first in the Western conference but could not make it up to the MLS in the nineties. Their first MLS cup win came in 2002. In 2005, the Galaxy acquired Landon Donovan from San Jose and also bagged the cup in that year defeating the New England Revolution in extra time, 1–0.
The club is on the rise and the arrival of EPL legend David Beckham in 2007 made LA Galaxy as the most popular club in the USA. His debut was made at Home Depot Center before a record crowd of nearly 35,000, including many celebrities. The match brought unprecedented TV coverage from ESPN, who used 19 cameras to cover it, including one trained only on Beckham, even when he was on the bench. Although they lost in the final of that year despite the presence of EPL legend .
Not only players they also appointed Rudd Gullit as their head coach and started the league with a blast. Something is not going with them properly and could not bring the magic in the team. In the 2008 MLS season, LA went on a seven-game winless streak that saw them drop from first place in the Western Conference to outside playoff contention, prompting the resignation of manager Ruud Gullit and firing of general manager Alexi Lalas. Again in 2009 the club captain David Beckham and vice captain Donovan went to Milan and Everton respectively.
In 2013,following the defeat to Seattle Sounders FC in the final game of the season with the Supporters' Shield on the line, the team entered the 2014 MLS playoffs defeating Real Salt Lake, advancing to face Seattle once again in the Western Conference Finals, advancing to the MLS Cup by away goals. They played the New England Revolution in the 2014 MLS Cup and won 2–1 in overtime, thereby becoming five-time champions, a league record.
The club has landed other high-profile international players, who played in top European clubs, including Zlatan Ibrahimović, Robbie Keane, Luis "El Matador" Hernández, Giovani dos Santos, Jonathan dos Santos, Jorge Campos, Steven Gerrard, Ashley Cole, Javier "Chicharito" Hernández, and American Landon Donovan who is the all-time leading scorer for the club. In 2019, Forbes estimated the club is the second most valuable in the league, worth about $480 million. | https://medium.com/@headkickco/la-galaxy-the-football-club-of-west-39427876ddd2 | [] | 2020-12-07 01:29:14.366000+00:00 | ['Football', 'Los Angeles', 'La Galaxy', 'Headkick', 'Soccer'] |
Sikoba November 2019 — Update. This month we have been working on… | isekai 1.0 launch
This month, we have announced the release of isekai 1.0.
isekai is the only tool to support 3 ZKP libraries and 5 proof systems: libsnark (Groth16 and BCTV14a), dalek (Bulletproofs) and libiop (Aurora and Ligero).
isekai is the first tool allowing programmers to take existing C or C++ code and generally require only slight modifications to make it compatible with isekai — we did it for sha256 as described in this post. This is because isekai supports more features of regular programming languages than any other project we know of, without using a domain specific language.
The isekai project can be found at https://github.com/sikoba/isekai
The development of isekai is being supported by the Fantom Foundation. | https://medium.com/sikoba-network/sikoba-november-2019-update-9dfbd82ca5e3 | ['Nimisha Sikoba'] | 2019-12-03 09:32:54.507000+00:00 | ['Itugen', 'Sikoba', 'Blockchain', 'Isekai', 'Financial Inclusion'] |
加拿大禁止英國航班 | A columnist in political development in Greater China region, technology and gadgets, media industry, parenting and other interesting topics. | https://medium.com/@frederickyeung-59743/%E5%8A%A0%E6%8B%BF%E5%A4%A7%E7%A6%81%E6%AD%A2%E8%8B%B1%E5%9C%8B%E8%88%AA%E7%8F%AD-47b564f135ba | ['C Y S'] | 2020-12-21 02:17:24.095000+00:00 | ['Government', 'UK'] |
How to Write your own Flight Controller Software — Part 2 | Adding some necessary hardware…
A Diversion down Hardware Lane
Before proceeding with the flight controller software, we need to sort out a couple of hardware issues. These are, controlling a buzzer (i.e. a passive piezo) and understanding remote control inputs via SBUS.
Figure 1. 3–30V Passive Piezo.
The Buzzer Issue
Why can’t we just connect a piezo to a pin on our Nano and use PWM to create a tone? I’m glad you asked! The biggest problem is current limits on the I/O pins. If you have a look at the pinout information for the Nano 33 IoT, you will see that the maximum current per pin is 7mA. For the Nano 33 BLE, maximum output current is 15 mA, maximum input current is 5 mA and the maximum total current for the MCU and all GPIO’s is 25 mA.
We have selected the PS1440P02BT Piezo (Figure 1) as our noise maker. The data sheet doesn’t provide the current rating for the piezo, possibly because it varies with the voltage used. For 3.3V, the typical maximum current drawn for these devices is 9–14 mA, which is too much for our Nano. Thus we need to drive it via a transistor. Our buzzer driver circuit is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Piezo Driver Circuit.
The piezo acts a bit like a capacitor, so we need to place a 1K resistor in parallel with it, to allow it to discharge. Without this, the volume is barely audible at 3.3V. The transistor is a common PNP BC327, which we are using as a switch. When the base emitter voltage, VBE > 0.6V the transistor turns on (saturation), and when VBE < 0.6V the transistor turns off (cutoff). In our schematic, pin 1 is the emitter and pin 2 is the base, thus VE = 3.3V.
This transistor can handle up to 800 mA of collector current (pin 3), which is heaps for our purposes. We can check this by doing some simple calculations.
If the piezo draws a worst case of 14mA, it has an equivalent DC resistance of:
RP = 3.3 / 0.014 = 236 Ω
Our total transistor resistance (RL) is RP in parallel with R8 = 191 ohms. Thus our collector current will be:
IC = VCC / RL = 3.3 / 191 = 17.3 mA (i.e. no problem).
To work out the base resistor, we can use the following approximation.
R7 = (VCC — VBE) / (IC / 10) = (3.3–0.7) / (0.0173 / 10) = 1503 Ω
So a 1.5k resistor will work. As we are using the transistor as a switch, there is no harm in pumping a bit more base current than we need to ensure sufficient collector current, so we went with a 1k resistor.
Figure 3. Piezo volume vs frequency.
As shown in Figure 3, the volume varies with the frequency. The maximum sound pressure level is around 4 kHz. In the test sketch that we put together, operating near the resonant frequencies makes a significant difference to the volume.
Software to Drive the Piezo
Normally you would use PWM to drive your piezo buzzer, and this is what we did initially. However, the Nano 33 BLE only allows you to connect PWM to four pins. If you attach a fifth pin you get the orange SOS of death. PWM is more important for motor control than driving a buzzer so we came up with an alternative approach.
It took me a while to track down this issue as it isn’t well documented and in fact the Arduino site states that any digital pin can be used for PWM. This may be the case, but only four pins at a time. The Mbed PWM function is where the limitation is arising from, so you could get around this by writing your own PWM function.
To get around this limitation we wrote a function which emulates PWM using bit banging. It is not as good as PWM at higher frequencies but it gets the job done.
UPDATE — While trying to debug the issues we were having decoding SBUS (described in the next section), we came across the Tone class. This uses timers and has a nicer soundthan our version, so we will go with that.
Figure 4. FrSKY X8R Remote Control Receiver.
The SBUS Protocol
In the old days you would take PWM control data from a pin on your radio control receiver, with each pin representing a channel on your remote control transmitter. A channel could be throttle, yaw, pitch, roll, etc. It is now more common to use a digital protocol to transmit this information. An example of this is SBUS (Figure 5). The protocol is designed to condense 16 individual channels into a single data frame.
Figure 5. A portion of an SBUS packet (inverted and un-inverted).
The SBUS protocol was developed by Futaba to control servos with each channel assigned to a different servo. It is based on RS232 but to make life difficult they inverted the signals (i.e. 0 = VCC and 1 = GND), put the most significant bit first (UART has LSB) and used a non-standard baud rate of 100,000. The other configuration details are (8E2):
1 start bit
8 data bits
1 even parity bit
2 stop bits
Each SBUS message is 25 bytes long and takes 3 ms to be transmitted. A Futaba transceiver in analogue mode will send a message every 14 ms, and in high speed mode, every 7 ms. The FrSKY transceivers generally send a message every 10 ms. A message consists of:
A header byte (0x0F);
16 x 11 bit channels (total of 22 bytes);
1 flag byte, which includes two digital channels [0 0 0 0 fail_safe frame_lost ch18 ch17]; and
1 footer byte (0x00).
Each of the 16 channels can have a value in the range of 172–1811, which we will map to 1000–2000.
We are using the FrSKY X8R Remote Control Receiver (Figure 4) which provides 8 channels using PWM or 16 channels via SBUS. It also gives us signal strength via the RSSI pin and we can transmit telemetry over the Smart Port connection. FrSKY SBUS is inverted compared to Futaba SBUS.
Binding the Receiver to the Transmitter
Binding is the process of uniquely associating a particular receiver to a transmitter module. A transmitter module can be bound to multiple receivers. A receiver can only be bound to one transmitter module.
Figure 6. FrSky X8R Transmitter Details.
The steps below are the binding procedure for a FrSky X8R receiver. If you are using a different receiver then the binding procedure will be different (read the manual).
IGNORE the instructions in the X8R manual — they are confusing!! Disconnect the battery from the drone. As shown in Figure 7, insert the jumpers across the signal pins of channels 1 & 2 and channels 3 & 4. This will configure the receiver as mode 4 (Figure 8). The Flight Controller will use SBUS on CH1-CH16 and the 8 PWM outputs exposed on the X8R will be controlled using CH9-CH16 (which we aren’t using at the moment). The different modes of the X8R are set by a combination of the pins with jumpers and whether the F/S button is pressed while powering on. Mode 4 also provides telemetry which is what we want. Alternatively, leave the jumpers off to get mode 5, which will also work for how we want to use the receiver. Power on the Taranis Transmitter and edit the flight model. Select mode D16 and the number of channels that you want to use. The mode names are a bit misleading, D8 refers to the older D series transmitters with up to 8 channels and telemetry, but without Model Match and Failsafe. These features are only available with D16, which offers a maximum of 16 channels. There is no reason for using D8, except if you are using an older transmitter which does not support D16. Otherwise, D16 is the way to go, even if you only transmit 8 channels. The transmitter and the receiver need to be at least 1 m apart or you may get transmission errors. When you are ready, press bind in the transmitter setup menu. Power up the X8R while holding the F/S button on the module (Figure 4 — if you want mode 4). Release the button. The RED LED on the X8R module will flash, indicating the transmitter is ready to bind to the receiver. Turn off both the transmitter and the receiver. Remove the jumpers on the X8R Turn on the transmitter and connect the battery. The GREEN LED on the receiver indicates the receiver is receiving commands from the transmitter. The receiver/transmitter module binding will not have to be repeated, unless one of the two is replaced.
Figure 7. Binding Table from the X8R Manual.
Figure 8. Insert jumpers across the signal pins for channels 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
Inverting SBUS
We captured an SBUS packet from the FrSKY X8R using our protocol analyser (Figure 9). From this you can see that it is the opposite of what Futaba SBUS expects (i.e. normal!), LOW is GND and HIGH is VCC (5V).
Figure 9. FrSKY SBUS Packet.
We need to invert this signal to get a Futaba compatible SBUS packet. In addition, the FrSKY X8R is generating 5V logic and our Nano pins are not 5V tolerant. Consequently, we need to shift the voltage down to 3.3V before feeding the inverted signal to the Nano (Figure 10).
Figure 10. SBUS Inverter and Level Shifting Circuit.
The output of this circuit is shown in Figure 5. The top channel of the protocol analyser is showing the SBUS signal straight out of the FrSKY X8R and the bottom channel is showing the inverted signal from the transistor (INV SBUS in Figure 10). This looks perfect because the protocol analyser is cleaning up the signal and showing a purely digital result. We need to have a look on the oscilloscope to see what is really happening.
Figure 11. FrSKY SBUS on the Oscilloscope.
Figure 11 illustrates the direct FrSKY output on the scope. It isn’t too noisy and the transistions are fairly sharp. Interestingly, even though the X8R is powered from 5V, it seems to be outputting logic at 3.3V (ish). Things are a bit more ropey when we look at the inverted output from the transistor (Figure 12).
Figure 12. Inverted SBUS from Transistor (correct for Futaba SBUS).
In Figure 12 we see that the logic transistions are not quite as crisp as the protocol analyser would have us believe. The rise time has gone from 1 µs to 4 µs, in the next section we will determine whether this matters.
Arduino SBUS Library
There are a number of Arduino SBUS libraries but none compatible with the Nano 33 BLE or Portenta H7. The most complete is the one from BolderFlight. This library works with Teensy 3.x and LC devices, the STM32L4, the Maple Mini, and ESP32. Our mission — to get it working on the Nano 33 BLE and the Portenta H7.
We tried the easy option first, since it looked like it should work. We just added the appropriate board definition in the SBUS::begin() function, as follows:
#elif defined(ARDUINO_ARCH_NRF52840) // Arduino Nano 33 BLE _bus->begin(_sbusBaud, SERIAL_8E2);
We have connected SBUS from the X8R (inverted) to the Rx pin on Serial1 of the Nano 33 BLE. The code above effectively calls Serial1.begin(100000, SERIAL_8E2), thereby setting the baud rate to 100000 and the configuration to 8 data bits, even parity and two stop bits. There are two problems:
Setting a non-standard baud rate will be rounded down to the next lowest standard rate (see Figure 12); and The default serial configuration is 8 data bits, no parity, and one stop bit (8N1). Trying to set anything else will cause Mbed OS to crash. This is a known issue.
if (baudrate < 2400) {new_rate = NRF_UARTE_BAUDRATE_1200;}
else if (baudrate < 4800) {new_rate = NRF_UARTE_BAUDRATE_2400;}
else if (baudrate < 9600) {new_rate = NRF_UARTE_BAUDRATE_4800;}
else if (baudrate < 14400) {new_rate = NRF_UARTE_BAUDRATE_9600… Figure 12. Extract from serial_api.c (reference).
It is possible to set a non-standard baud rate and configuration by accessing the appropriate registers for the nRF52840. For example, to set the configuration:
UART0 Base address 0x40002000
UART CONFIG register address offset 0x56C
Therefore register address we want to modify is 0x4000256C
From page 479 of the Product Secification, we want to set:
STOP = 1 // Two stop bits; and
PARITY = 0x7 // Include even parity bit
So we want CONFIG = 0x0000000F. For the baud rate (reference):
UART0 Base address 0x40002000
UART Baudrate register address offset 0x524
Baudrate formular according Nordic devzone:
Baudrate = desired baudrate * 2³² / 16000000
The relevant updates to the SBUS library are as follows:
#if defined(ARDUINO_ARCH_NRF52840) // Arduino Nano 33 BLE // Serial1.begin() wont set a non-standard baud rate and
// anything but 8N1 crashes Mbed OS. const uint32_t CONFIG = 0x000000F;
const uint32_t sbusBaudRate = 0x19114A7;
uint32_t *baudRateRegister = ( uint32_t * )0x40002524;
uint32_t *configRegister = ( uint32_t * )0x4000256C;
#endif /* starts the serial communication */
void SBUS::begin(){
// initialize parsing state
_parserState = 0;
// initialize default scale factors and biases
for (uint8_t i = 0; i < _numChannels; i++){
setEndPoints(i,_defaultMin,_defaultMax);
}
// begin the serial port for SBUS
#if defined(ARDUINO_ARCH_NRF52840) // Arduino Nano 33 BLE
_bus->begin(9600);
*baudRateRegister = sbusBaudRate;
*configRegister = CONFIG;
#else
#error unsupported device
#endif
}
The SBUS “channels” variable in this library is a zero-based array, so channels[0] is actually SBUS channel 1, and so on. The default channel layout on the Taranis Q X7 controller is TAER, and this is what we will use:
T = Throttle (channel 1); A = Aileron (channel 2); E = Elevator (channel 3); and R = Rudder (channel 4).
Monitoring Battery Voltage
When flying a drone one of the critical parameters is battery voltage. If the battery gets too low our drone will fall out of the sky. Less dramatically, we may want to adjust our motor inputs as voltage decreases. Battery Compensation applies an initial motor output reduction when the battery is full, and boosts motor output upwards from that value during the flight, to compensate for reducing battery voltage. This delivers a more consistent stick feel, both for throttle and PID, over the usable battery voltage range. The drone will not feel super aggressive at the start of a flight, or dull at the end.
Figure 13. Battery Voltage Divider Schematic.
The analog inputs on the Nano 33 BLE can handle a maximum of 3.3V, thus we need a voltage divider to reduce our battery voltage to an acceptable level. Figure 13 illustrates the voltage divider circuit provided on the Magpie Power Distribution Board. The resistor values are appropriate for a 2S LiPo. If you are using something different then you will need to adjust this. The calculation is as follows:
Fully Charged 2S LiPo = 8.4 V Max Pin Voltage = 3.3 V Vbat = Vin x R4 / (R3 + R4)
where:
Vbat is the input to our analogue pin; and Vin is our battery voltage.
If we assign a nominal 10k to R4 then R3 = 15.5k, which we round up to 18k for a safety margin and to get a standard value. For our calculation of Vbat to be accurate, we need these resistor values to be accurate so use 1% resistors for R3 and R4. You can use this online voltage divider calculator to play around with different values.
If we rearrange the equation above, we get:
Vin = Vbat(R3 + R4) / R4 = Vbat * 2.8
We can use this to calculate the current battery voltage but first we need to convert the analog input value read into a voltage.
The Arduino Nano 33 BLE has 8 analog input pins (ADC 12 bit, 200 ksamples). We have assigned pin A0 (nRF52840 pin PA02, ADC0) to measure our battery voltage and will use the Mbed function AnalogIn.
AnalogIn() reads the voltage as a fraction of the system voltage. The value is a floating point number from 0.0(VSS) to 1.0(VCC). For example, if you have a 3.3V system and the applied voltage is 1.65V, then AnalogIn() reads 0.5 as the value.
The resolution for an ADC is the smallest distinguishable change in analog input that causes the digital output to change. For example, a 12-bit ADC in a 3.3V system has 4,096 distinguishable outputs. Therefore, the resolution of a 12-bit ADC is 3.3/4096 = 0.81mV. This is more accuracy than we need.
Rather than do the calculation, there is another Mbed function which returns the value as a voltage, read_voltage()which returns a float. This is what we will use.
There is a diode between Vusb and Vin to stop a reverse voltage into Vusb from Vin. When Vin is larger than Vusb the board is powered by Vin and Vusb is disconnected. You can test out our example sketch called battery voltage by just connecting the Nano via USB and you will get close to 4.9V (which sounds correct). If both the USB and the battery is connected we read 8.45 V, which is correct for a fully charged 2S LiPo.
Stay Tuned…
In Part 3 of our series we will display our radio control inputs in Processing and connect our RC controls to the PWM ESC code so that we can start controlling the motors. This will then be combined with our IMU data and a PID loop to complete our base flight controller software. | https://medium.com/@reefwing/how-to-write-your-own-flight-controller-software-part-2-bc7f27214bb2 | ['David Such'] | 2020-12-26 04:56:21.243000+00:00 | ['Sbus', 'Nano 33 Ble', 'Flight Controller', 'Arduino', 'Drones'] |
Web Scraping TripAdvisor, Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis for Hotel Reviews | The above visualizes the common bigrams in TripAdvisor reviews, showing those that occurred at least 1000 times and where neither word was a stop-word.
The network graph shows strong connections between the top several words (“hawaiian”, “village”, “ocean” and “view”). However, we do not see clear clustering structure in the network.
Trigrams
Bigrams sometimes are not enough, let’s see what are the most common trigrams in Hilton Hawaiian Village’s TripAdvisor reviews?
review_trigrams <- df %>%
unnest_tokens(trigram, review_body, token = "ngrams", n = 3)
trigrams_separated <- review_trigrams %>%
separate(trigram, c("word1", "word2", "word3"), sep = " ")
trigrams_filtered <- trigrams_separated %>%
filter(!word1 %in% stop_words$word) %>%
filter(!word2 %in% stop_words$word) %>%
filter(!word3 %in% stop_words$word)
trigram_counts <- trigrams_filtered %>%
count(word1, word2, word3, sort = TRUE)
trigrams_united <- trigrams_filtered %>%
unite(trigram, word1, word2, word3, sep = " ")
trigrams_united %>%
count(trigram, sort = TRUE)
Figure 7
The most common trigram is “hilton hawaiian village”, followed by “diamond head tower”, and so on.
Important words trending in reviews
What words and topics have become more frequent, or less frequent, over time? These could give us a sense of the hotel changing ecosystem, such as service, renovation, problem solving and let us predict what topics will continue to grow in relevance.
We want to ask questions like: what words have been increasing in frequency over time in TripAdvisor reviews? | https://towardsdatascience.com/scraping-tripadvisor-text-mining-and-sentiment-analysis-for-hotel-reviews-cc4e20aef333 | ['Susan Li'] | 2018-12-06 03:25:31.830000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Sentiment Analysis', 'Text Mining', 'R Programming', 'Data Science'] |
Why .NET isn’t available to deploy on PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Was wondering why I couldn’t deploy .NET applications on Heroku. What gives?
By day, I work in .NET (cSharp) applications for a major university.
By night I freelance in JavaScript (Node, Angular, React, etc.).
PaaS offerings like Heroku are an essential part of my freelancing business. They make it possible for me to spend less time worrying about the complexity of deployment and more time actually writing business logic and code. To understand why application developers like myself choose PaaS, consider the following abstraction based in 🍕:
Homemade pizza (On-Premise deployments) involve a huge amount of complex and tedious decision making. Replace dining table, soda, oven and fire with server hardware, RAM allocation, OS (Operating System) and last but not least, your app(and its data).
So without giving up complete control of everything like you do in a SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS provides:
🚀 Rapid deployment with the use of containers (Heroku marketing calls them Dynos but we know what they really are 📦).
🙂 Simplification- as mentioned previously, less decisions to be made about tiny details that have nothing to do with your app and its data.
However, despite being a big fan boy of PaaS, it isn’t without its weaknesses. When you allow Heroku to make a bunch of decisions for you, you ultimately are giving up…
CONTROL!
Now in newer applications you build for startups where the most important consideration is to get you app out there, the giving up of control is a highly desirable trade off. Anything you can do to reduce the friction of getting started is a big win.
However more mature applications have been battle tested. Their successful deployment to solve old problems has uncovered new problems to solve. These new problems often center around performance or integration.
Consider an admissions application. The system successfully accepts tens of thousands of new applications a semester, stores them in a SQL database and makes it possible for an admissions team to decide what semester they will track accepted applicants. The admission team and others at the university have been using the application for a long time. They know what it can do, what it can’t and what they would like it do in the future. They want to spend less time in front of loading spinners and more time getting their work done. They also want the data from your application more easily shared with the other consuming applications that would benefit from getting your application data.
Could a PaaS deployment help solve these problems?
Perhaps but if you application was written in .NET, you will have a hard time finding PaaS offering that will support .NET. Why?
.NET was written by Microsoft a long time ago, in a world were PaaS didn’t exist. It was written to provide its developers above anything else…
CONTROL!
With ultimate control, you may take on more complexity but with that control you get the ability to really and truly control all the parts impacting the execution and performance of you application. Giving up this control to a predefined list of default decisions goes against the problems .NET was originally created to solve.
For this reason you will not commonly see .NET offered in PaaS offerings. If you are coding in .NET, you generally are rebuilding something that already exist and not rapidly developing something new. (I personally have never seen a startup chose .NET for their application stack from the start if they don’t have something already built).
When building something where decisions outside of your code and data really matter, default decisions made by PaaS will not be sufficient as little or no control of these details is possible. Small wonder the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) of Azure Compute Services, with all of it fine tuned control has emerged as the de facto choice for .NET developers. | https://medium.com/@devguff/why-net-isnt-available-to-deploy-on-heroku-or-other-paas-platform-as-a-service-offerings-34e90a9a4c79 | ['Matthew Mcguff'] | 2020-12-23 20:22:52.396000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Dotnet', 'Heroku', 'DevOps', 'Software Development'] |
Queerness Has Always Been Beautiful to Me | Queerness Has Always Been Beautiful to Me
So why is it so hard to accept myself?
Photo by Bryan Kyed
When the battle over marriage equality in California was happening, I had barely eclipsed my first decade of life.
To my child-brain, it was so stupidly simple. I thought everyone should be able to get married. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s quote, “Love is love is love is love” summed up my stance perfectly. I was too innocent and naive to understand the intricacies of hate and homophobia.
I romanticized the forbidden nature of queer love. To me, it was just a spin on the tale of Romeo and Juliet.
When my local paper published a famous photo of a gay soldier kissing his partner upon his homecoming, I cut it out and tacked it to my bulletin board. It was so beautiful to me.
But when I found myself staring at a woman in a certain way, I was disgusted with myself. I forced myself to push the thoughts down. Queerness was lovely until it came to my own personal identity. Suddenly it was not beautiful or romantic anymore — it terrified me.
As a bisexual woman, it was easy to stifle my sexuality. I figured that if I was attracted to cisgender men, all was well. I was safe. I had options. I had the privilege of staying in the heterosexual world without feeling lost.
As a closeted queer person, it is so easy to be an ally to everyone but yourself. I never saw myself on the other side of the fence. I told myself that it “just wasn’t me.”
At my very first Pride parade this past weekend, the joy was palpable. It wasn’t the rave full of twenty-somethings in glittery booty shorts that I expected it to be. There were families, parents offering hugs to those who didn’t have any accepting family, young kids wearing their respective flags like superhero capes, and elderly couples who might have been out longer than I have been alive.
Walking around with a punny bisexual shirt on, it was the first time I had ever publicly marked myself as queer in a way that didn’t involve PDA with my partner. It felt like a school spirit day for me, and that is a privilege. Others wear their queerness every day without making a conscious decision.
I felt like an outsider looking in. The concept of queerness has always been beautiful to me. When it became a part of my reality, it became natural to me, but still, I doubted myself and my own intentions.
As I marveled at the beauty of the community, I found myself wondering, am I just in love with the idea of queerness? Am I just romanticizing the novelty of it?
As I strolled through the park in the sunshine with one pinky finger wrapped around my partner’s, past impossibly gorgeous drag queens and through a sea of rainbows, I thought to myself:
You’re an imposter. A poser. You are only pretending to be gay because you love her so damn much.
And then I thought, wait:
Say that again but slower. | https://medium.com/th-ink/queerness-has-always-been-beautiful-to-me-8e9babd3c43c | ['Kristen Pizzo'] | 2019-10-30 18:02:51.876000+00:00 | ['Queer', 'Sexuality', 'Bisexual', 'LGBTQ', 'Identity'] |
[LiVeSTrEaM||Official@] “Chiefs vs Highlanders Live” Stream free Super Rugby Reddit | Chiefs vs Highlanders (Livestream) 2021™, TV channel online services. Easily Watch Super Rugby Aotearoa Chiefs vs Highlanders Live Full Match Streaming on Friday 5th March 2021 at FMG Stadium Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand…
It’s a very simple 3 steps process, Signup, Login and starts watching
Watch Super Rugby Live Stream — Click Here
MATCH: Chiefs vs Highlanders Live | Super Rugby Aotearoa
Date: Friday 5th March 2021 — Time: LIVE
Venue: FMG Stadium Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand
How to watch Chiefs vs Highlanders Super Rugby Aotearoa Live Online From Anywhere
Chiefs vs Highlanders Super Rugby Aotearoa writing about his event
Live stream Chiefs vs Highlanders Super Rugby Aotearoa online
You can watch Chiefs vs Highlanders Super Rugby Aotearoa without signing up for a contract. Regular subscribers can also stream matches website or Sport app on a variety of devices including laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
How to watch Chiefs vs Highlanders Super Rugby Aotearoa Live Online From Anywhere
Live stream Chiefs vs Highlanders Super Rugby Aotearoa online
You can watch Chiefs vs Highlanders Super Rugby Aotearoa without signing up for a contract. Regular subscribers can also stream matches website or Sport app on a variety of devices including laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
Livestreaming, what’s in it for us?
Technology has advanced significantly since the first internet Livestream but we still turn to video for almost everything. Let’s take a brief look at why live streaming has been held back so far, and what tech innovations will propel live streaming to the forefront of internet culture. Right now live streaming is limited to just a few applications for mass public use and the rest are targeted towards businesses. Livestreaming is to today what home computers were in the early 1980s. The world of live streaming is waiting for a metaphorical VIC-20, a very popular product that will make live streaming as popular as video through iterations and competition.
Image for post
Shared Video
Do you remember when YouTube wasn’t the YouTube you know today? In 2005, when Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim activated the domain “they had a vision. Inspired by the lack of easily accessible video clips online, the creators of YouTube saw a world where people could instantly access videos on the internet without having to download files or search for hours for the right clip. Allegedly inspired by the site “Hot or Not”, YouTube originally began as a dating site (think 80s video dating), but without a large ingress of dating videos, they opted to accept any video submission. And as we all know, that fateful decision changed all of our lives forever. Because of YouTube, the world that YouTube was born in no longer exists. The ability to share videos on the scale permitted by YouTube has brought us closer to the “global village” than I’d wager anyone thought realistically possible. And now with technologies like Starlink, we are moving closer and closer to that eventuality. Although the shared video will never become a legacy technology, before long it will truly have to share the stage with its sibling, livestreaming. Although livestreaming is over 20 years old, it hasn’t gained the incredible worldwide adoption YouTube has. This is largely due to infrastructure issues such as latency, quality, and cost.
Latency is a priority when it comes to livestreams.
Latency is the time it takes for a video to be captured and point a, and viewed at point b. In livestreaming this is done through an encoder-decoder function. Video and audio are captured and turned into code, the code specifies which colours display, when, for how long, and how bright. The code is then sent to the destination, such as a streaming site, where it is decoded into colours and audio again and then displayed on a device like a cell phone. The delay between the image being captured, the code being generated, transmitted, decoded, and played is consistently decreasing. It is now possible to stream content reliably with less than 3 seconds of latency. Sub-second latency is also common and within the next 20 or so years we may witness the last cable broadcast (or perhaps cable will be relegated to the niche market of CB radios, landlines, and AM transmissions).
On average, the latency associated with a cable broadcast is about 6 seconds. This is mainly due to limitations on broadcasts coming from the FCC or another similar organization in the interests of censorship. In terms of real-life, however, a 6 second delay on a broadcast is not that big of a deal. In all honesty a few hours’ delay wouldn’t spell the doom of mankind. But for certain types of broadcasts such as election results or sporting events, latency must be kept at a minimum to maximize the viability of the broadcast.
Sensitive Content is Hard to Monitor
Advances in AI technologies like computer vision have changed the landscape of internet broadcasting. Before too long, algorithms will be better able to prevent sensitive and inappropriate content from being broadcast across the internet on livestreaming platforms. Due to the sheer volume of streams it is much harder to monitor and contain internet broadcasts than it is cable, but we are very near a point where the ability to reliably detect and interrupt inappropriate broadcasts instantaneously. Currently, the majority of content is monitored by humans. And as we’ve learned over the last 50 or so years, computers and machines are much more reliable and consistent than humans could ever be. Everything is moving to an automated space and content moderation is not far behind. We simply don’t have the human resources to monitor every livestream, but with AI we won’t need it.
Video Quality
In the last decade we have seen video quality move from 720p to 1080p to 4K and beyond. I can personally remember a time when 480p was standard and 720p was considered a luxury reserved for only the most well funded YouTube videos. But times have changed and people expect video quality of at least 720p. Live streaming has always had issues meeting the demands of video quality. When watching streams on platforms like Twitch, the video can cut out, lag, drop in quality, and stutter all within about 45 seconds. Of course this isn’t as rampant now as it once was, however, sudden drops in quality will likely be a thorn in the side of live streams for years to come.
Internet Speeds
Perhaps the most common issue one needs to tackle when watching a live stream is their internet speed. Drops in video quality and connection are often due to the quality of the internet connection between the streamer and the viewer. Depending on the location of the parties involved, their distance from the server, and allocated connection speed the stream may experience some errors. And that’s just annoying. Here is a list of the recommended connection speeds for 3 of the most popular streaming applications:
Facebook Live recommends a max bit rate of 4,000 kbps, plus a max audio bit rate of 128 kbps.
YouTube Live recommends a range between 1,500 and 4,000 kbps for video, plus 128 kbps for audio.
Twitch recommends a range between 2,500 and 4,000 kbps for video, plus up to 160 kbps for audio.
Live streams are typically available for those of us with good internet. Every day more people are enjoying high quality speeds provided by fibre optic lines, but it will be a while until these lines can truly penetrate rural and less populated areas. Perhaps when that day comes we will see an upsurge of streaming coming from these areas.
Language Barrier
You can pause and rewind a video if you didn’t understand or hear something, and many video sharing platforms provide the option for subtitles. But you don’t really get that with a live stream. Pausing and rewinding an ongoing stream defeats the purpose of watching a stream. However, the day is soon approaching where we will be able to watch streams, in our own native language with subtitles, even if the streamer speaks something else. Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Speech Services can give livestreaming platforms an edge in the future as it allows for speech to be automatically translated from language to language. The ability to watch a livestream in real time, with the added benefit of accurate subtitles in one’s own language, will also assist language learners in deciphering spontaneous speech.
Monetization
One of the most damning features of a live stream is the inherent difficulty in monetizing it. As mentioned before, videos can be paused and ads inserted. In videos, sponsored segments can be bought where the creators of the video read lines provided to them. Ads can run before videos etc. But in the case of a spontaneous live stream sponsored content will stick out. In the case of platforms like YouTube there are ways around ads. Ad blockers, the skip ad button, the deplorable premium account, and fast forwarding through sponsored segments all work together to limit the insane amount of ads we see every day. But in the case of a live stream, ads are a bit more difficult.
Live streaming platforms could implement sponsored overlays and borders or a similar graphical method of advertising, but the inclusion of screen shrinking add-ons like that may cause issues on smaller devices where screen size is already limited.
Monthly subscriptions are already the norm, but in the case of a live streaming platform (Twitch Prime not withstanding), it may be difficult for consumers to see the benefit in paying for a service that is by nature unscheduled and unpredictable. Live streams are great for quick entertainment, but as they can go on for hours at a time, re-watching streamed content is inherently time consuming. For this reason, many streamers cut their recorded streams down and upload them to platforms like YouTube where they are monetized through a partnership program. It is likely that for other streaming platforms to really take off, they would need to partner with a larger company and offer services similar to Amazon and Twitch.
What Might the Future of Livestreaming Look Like?
It is difficult to say, as it is with any speculation about the future. Technologies change and advance beyond the scope of our imaginations virtually every decade. But one thing that is almost a certainty is the continued advancement in our communications infrastructure. Fibre optic lines are being run to smaller towns and cities. Services like Google Fiber, which is now only available at 1 gigabit per second, have shown the current capabilities of our internet infrastructure. As services like this expand we can expect to see a large increase in the number of users seeking streams as the service they expect to interact with will be more stable than it currently is now. Livestreaming, at the moment, is used frequently by gamers and Esports and hasn’t yet seen the mass commercial expansion that is coming.
The future of live streaming is on its way. For clues for how it may be in North America we can look to Asia (taobao). Currently, livestreaming is quite popular in the East in terms of a phenomenon that hasn’t quite taken hold on us Westerners, Live Commerce. With retail stores closing left and right, we can’t expect Amazon to pick up all of the slack (as much as I’m sure they would like to)… | https://medium.com/@skysuperrugby/livestream-official-chiefs-vs-highlanders-live-stream-free-super-rugby-reddit-e85f6281c5b | ['How To Watch Au Boxing'] | 2021-03-04 14:10:04.497000+00:00 | ['Watch Online', 'Super Rugby', 'Reddit Tv Channels', 'Chiefs Vs Highlanders', 'Free'] |
Losing sleep can really destroy your emotional wellbeing in 10 days | Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
We become emotionally distracted when we don’t sleep, which can impair our ability to read situations and people.
No one is in a good mood when they haven’t slept well. But beyond feeling crappy, there is evidence that we also become emotionally distracted when we don’t sleep, which can impair our ability to read situations and people.
Researchers in this study found that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that regulates our emotions becomes distorted when transmitting information with the frontal lobe. These inaccurate neurological communications then lead to non-discretionary interpretations of the world around us.
Lack of [S]leep not only impairs our judgement, but also lowers immunity, leads to depression, and can even raise blood glucose levels.
[S]leep, although essential, is also a mystery. While we all do it, no one knows why. In this month’s Scientific American, new research shows that lack of sleep not only impairs our judgment, but also lowers immunity, leads to depression, and can even increase blood glucose levels.
Perhaps these negative effects are the reason why [S]leep — something that should happen to us naturally — is a multi-billion dollar industry. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans say they get enough [S]leep for reasons as varied as [S]leep apnea stress. To combat declining productivity and the propensity for illness, some companies have tried to encourage [S]leep by introducing sleep pods in the workplace.
[S]leeping — something that should come naturally to us — is a multi-billion dollar industry.
If you don’t work at Google, a MetroNaps sleep capsule will cost you between $8,000 and $13,000. Or, you can turn off your phone, TV, and computer and go to bed early because every hour of sleep before midnight is equivalent to two after it.
if you want to protect your brain, you’re going to need to [S]leep.
https://gofasty.com/losing-sleep/ | https://medium.com/@gofasty/losing-sleep-can-really-destroy-your-emotional-wellbeing-in-10-days-2a2877c15413 | [] | 2020-12-27 12:31:55.888000+00:00 | ['Wellbeing', 'Sleep', 'Health'] |
How to Find the Present Value of an Annuity | How to Find the Present Value of an Annuity
Because annuities offer advantages like regular lifetime payments, premium protection, tax-deferred growth, unlimited contributions, and various investment options, they should be a part of your retirement plan. This is especially true if you want to supplement other retirement income streams, like Social Security. Or if you’re losing sleep over whether you’re going to outlive your savings or not. Due.com Follow Aug 9 · 8 min read
There are, however, disadvantages with annuities that you should also be aware of. At the top of the list would be that annuities aren’t liquid. They also come with high fees and penalties, misleading high yield rates. And, overall, annuities are more complex than most other retirement vehicles.
Another drawback? Not always knowing what the total cash value of your future annuity payments will be. Knowing this in advance allows you to plan accordingly, like setting a retirement budget or knowing how much to save each month.
This isn’t the case with all annuities, though. Due, as an example, offers a 3% guaranteed interest rate on your money. As such, the Due Annuity Formula is straightforward depending on;
If you’re making monthly contributions or a lump sum payment.
The interest rate — 1% for Free Accounts, 3% for Pro Due Customers
Current age
The age you want to retire
There’s even a helpful annuity calculator to do the math for you. So, if you were 35 and contributed $500 a month, your payments would be $4,457.44 per month when you retire at 65. But, that’s not the case with all annuities, such as variable, fixed indexed, or multi-year guaranteed annuities. With these types of annuities, you’re going to have to find their present value.
Present Value of Annuity Defined
Before explaining how to find the present value of an annuity, we should first define the present value of an annuity. In simplest terms, this is the cash value of all your future annuity payments. Included in the calculator is the discount rate or rate of return. That’s important to be aware of since the discount rate can rescue an annuity’s future payments. To put that more succinctly, the higher the discount rate, the lower the annuity’s present value.
The present value of an annuity is based on a concept called the time value of money. For the uninformed, this is a widely accepted theory that it’s better to accept a lump sum of money today than waiting for an identical sum in the future. The reason being that future payments aren’t as valuable because of uncertain economic conditions.
For instance, let’s say that you have $10,000 to invest. While you can make money via interest and other return mechanisms, that rate of return you may get in five or ten years won’t be as much as the initial investment. In other words, that $10,000 today is worth more money than what you’re promised in the future.
If you’re considering buying an annuity, you’ll need to know its present value, as this will help you determine if you want to take a lump-sum payment or series of recurring payments.
What is the Formula for Calculating the Present Value of an Annuity?
Hopefully, you feel a little more comfortable with defining the present value of an annuity. Now, let’s discuss how you can find the present value of an annuity. After all, calculating the present value lets you know how much your annuity is worth. And, more important, it helps determine if you’re getting a fair deal or not if/when you sell your payments.
Thankfully, there is a formula that you can use to calculate the present value. It’s not terribly complicated as long as you have the right information. And, here is said formula;
P = PMT x ((1 — (1 / (1 + r) ^ -n)) / r)
The variables in this equation are as follows;
P = the present value of an annuity
PMT = the dollar amount in each annuity payment
R= the interest or discount rate
n= the number of remaining payments that you’ll receive
While not the most complex formula, it can still be tricky to calculate the present value of an annuity. You can thank the number of variables features in the formula for that. However, not all types of annuities are this complicated. And, there are also calendars the can do the math for you.
How to Calculate the Present Value of an Annuity
Whether you do this manually or with a calculator, figuring out the present value of an annuity can be extremely beneficial. Primarily, this can help you decide if you should take a lump sum or annuity payment. But, an example of how this works might illustrate which is the more efficient option.
Similar to winning the lottery, you have two options. In this scenario, you could take a lump sum or $300,000, with a 5% discount rate.
You’ll plug these numbers into the formula as follows:
P = 25,000 x ((1 — (1 / (1 + .05) ^ -20)) / .05)
Once you do a little math, you’ll find out that this will come out to $311,555. As you can tell, the value of the annuity is worth more than the $300,000 lump sum. So, in this case, it makes more financial sense to take the annuity payments.
Can You Use Calculators to Estimate the Present Value of an Annuity?
Suppose math isn’t your strong suit; no worries. You can easily find online calculators that can do the legwork for you. Most of these calculators use a time value of money formula. Specifically, this is used to measure the current worth of a stream of equal payments that will take place at a future period.
Of course, you’ll need the right information to input into the calculator, such as;
Payment type
The date of the next payment
How much each payment is worth
The number of payments you have left
The frequency of payments
All of this information can be found in your annuity contract. And, once you have it in hand, it only takes a couple of minutes for the calculator to generate a quote that will indicate interest rates, market value, and the impact of time.
Just note that what quote the calculator displays isn’t set-in-stone. What’s more, most calculators do not provide accurate estimates if increasing payments or market value adjustments that are determined by fluctuating interest rates are a part of your annuity.
It does, however, give you a ballpark figure on what to expect. With that in mind, you may also want to look at other variables, especially if you’re a secondary market buyer.
Fees and any other additional charges
Current annuity market rates
The annuity company’s specific guidelines
How much money is left in your annuity
When annuity payments started
If you want even more details regarding the present value of your payments, schedule an appointment with your financial advisor. They can review the estimate and give you more information and guidance.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Present Value of an Annuity
What is an annuity table?
Also known as a “present value table,” an annuity table is a tool that simplifies the calculation of the present value of an annuity. It’s also based on the time of the value of money. And, all you have to do is multiply the present value interest factor of an annuity with your recurring payment amount to get the present value of your annuity.
For this to work, though, you’ll need to know if you’ll be receiving payments at the beginning or end of the period. With traditional annuities, however, payments are distributed at the end. So you’ll also need to know your payment amount and discount rate.
While this is a simple and effective way to find the present value of an annuity, it’s not as effective as manual calculations or calculators.
When is the present value of an annuity calculated?
There’s no exact answer. But, in most cases, the present value of an annuity will be used to figure out the cash value of retirement funds like annuities, recurring payments in court settlements, and loans. It can also be used to calculate if a mortgage payment is either above or below its expected value.
Do discount rates affect present value?
Absolutely.
Let’s say that you sell your annuity, or even a structured settlement, to a factoring company. This company will use discount rates to take into account market risks. This can include risks like inflation so that they can turn a small profit. And you’ll be granted early access to your payments. In turn, a discount rate will directly influence the value of an annuity and the amount you’ll receive from the purchasing company.
Discount rates will vary. But, standard discount rates can range between 8% and 15 percent. FYI, the lower the discount rate you receive, the higher the present value your annuity has. Also, low discount rates permit you to keep even more of your hard-earned money.
The Internal Revenue Service states that most states require factoring companies to disclose discount rates. The most also present value during the transaction process. To be on the safe side, always ask for these numbers before selling your payments.
One more thing, distant payments are usually less valuable to purchasing companies. As mentioned in the beginning, that’s because of economic factors. So, the sooner the payment, the more you’ll get. So, for example, an immediate annuity or when that being payouts in five years is worth more than an annuity that will make distributions in twenty years.
What’s the difference between annuity due and ordinary annuity?
Present value calculations are influenced by when payments will be disbursed. That means the payment will begin at the beginning or end of a period.
If payments are disbursed at the beginning of each period, then this type of annuity is called annuity due. A common example of an annuity due would be paying your landlord’s rent on the first of each month.
The other type is an ordinary annuity. This is what we’ll focus more on since this is associated with retirement accounts. In this case, you’ll receive either a fixed or variable payment at the end of each month or quarter. It will also be based on the value of your annuity contract.
The Bottom Line
Regardless of the method, measuring the value of an annuity will help you make the right investment decision for your retirement. While it may sound complex, doing a little math today can go a long way tomorrow. But, you should also work with a trusted financial advisor to ensure that you stay on the right track. | https://medium.com/due/how-to-find-the-present-value-of-an-annuity-ab7d9a8a9aa5 | [] | 2021-08-09 18:06:43.921000+00:00 | ['Value', 'Annuity'] |
Card deck and game play personalization — the future of card games? | Card deck and game play personalization — the future of card games? Nicole Nguyen Follow Aug 10 · 3 min read
The ultimate experiment of card game personalization with Duelist King
Card game industry is a billion USD market that has long been dominated by game distributors who have been reluctant in authenticating game assets, involving the community in game design and most importantly — creating a common ground for all gaming communities to mingle as well as transfer and trade assets among different games.
Blockchain is touted as one of the most prominent technologies to break the silos between games, increase the transferability of game assets and notably facilitate a shared playground and community for all gaming enthusiasts.
Let’s imagine a future of card games where you can creatively construct your own deck, define your own game play and pick the game designs that you like — i.e. a future where you can personalize a single deck and pick your own game play after some of your favorites, such as GWENT or Yu-Gi-Oh, whenever you feel like — not because you have to abide by the rules (cause think about it, it’s not always fun to follow the rules!). Also you can freely trade and transfer your assets from one game to another and completely ditch the so-called “technical” barriers between games.
Duelist King is the next generation of NFT card games that allows you to customize your deck and pick your own game play, or even better, design your own game play and get the community to vote for your favorite one. For the first time a game is actually owned and run by the community from design, game play to tournaments as Duelist King ecosystem is governed following DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) model and community-centric interests.
Better still, your cards as NFTs come with verifiable and untampered ownership certificates on blockchain. As the owner of the card or the next collector or trader, you can easily track and trace the cards to triple check their authenticity. The NFT market has grown 300% to over 250 million USD in 2020 alone so make sure you don’t miss out on this trend this year!
Your card NFTs will come in mystery boxes containing 5 random cards of 6 rareness levels (Legendary, Special Super Rare, Super Rare, Rare, Uncommon, Common). Duelist King offers you the fun of fate — you will not know which cards you will be able to get although the infrastructure in the back, powered by in-house Oracle and Random Number Generator, guarantees fair verifiable distribution on blockchain.
The end game of Duelist King is to transform the way people buy, collect, design game play and card deck and more importantly, earn in card games — where YOU, as the end users, are the biggest stakeholders. Additionally, Duelist King offers dual values for investors from token utilities and card sales (projected at roughly 40 million USD).
Make sure you have first dibs on our premier card sales by late August. Our beta version is scheduled in Q4 so get your deck right and try out our new shiny game soon!
Choose your game and your destiny TODAY!
✅Website: https://duelistking.com/
✅Game trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BUu-EhACyQ
✅Twitter: https://twitter.com/duelistkingnft
✅Telegram group: https://t.me/DuelistKingNFT
✅ Whitepaper https://duelistking.com/Duelist_King_WPP.pdf
✅ Technical Litepaper: https://duelistking.com/DuelistKing_lightpaper.pdf | https://medium.com/duelist-king/card-deck-and-game-play-personalization-the-future-of-card-games-d0b8dd00fba7 | ['Nicole Nguyen'] | 2021-08-10 11:50:29.760000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Nft', 'Blockchain', 'Gaming'] |
IoT Medical Devices Market Trends and Forecast | IoT Medical Devices Market is expected to value over USD 95 billion by 2027 end and register a CAGR of over 25% during the forecast period 2020 to 2027.
FutureWise research has revealed a report that analyzes IoT Medical Devices Market trends that shall have an effect on the market growth. The report includes elaborated data on SWOT analysis, profit, market share, and regional analysis of this market. This report offers competitive landscape insights on the key market players of this market.
As per the analysis done by our analysts, the IoT Medical Devices Market is anticipated to attain substantial growth over the forecast period. The report explains that the market is expected to register a remarkable rate of growth by the forecast period. This report provides data associated with valuation that’s presently held by this market in its business and it additionally lists the market segmentation alongside the growth opportunities present in this business vertical.
The report analyzes market segmentation forecast By Product, By Type, By Connectivity, By End User, By Region, and IoT Medical Devices Market. This report provides elaborated insights on the profit of the market, in-depth SWOT analysis of market trends, key players in conjunction with regional analysis of this market.
Request a Sample Report@ https://www.futurewiseresearch.com/request-sample.aspx?id=3468&page=requestsample
Regional Analysis
The regional outlook of the IoT Medical Devices Market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa
This report delivers data points regarding the projected rate of growth registered by this market in each region during the forecast period.
Key Market Players:
Some of the key market players of this market are Medtronic, GE Healthcare, Philips, Siemens, Abbott Laboratories, Boston Scientific, Honeywell Life Care Solutions, Biotronik, Johnson & Johnson, Omron, Biotechnology, Alivecor, Agamatrix, Ihealth Lab, Stanley Healthcare, Welch Allyn.
(Note: For acomplete list of key players, please visit the report page)
FutureWise Key Takeaways:
Provides data of growth prospects of the market, SWOT analysis, key market trends, and key information points touching market growth throughout the forecast period
Competitive Landscape:
Tier one players — key market players accounting for a significant market share
Tier two players
Rapidly growing players
New Entrants
Competitive Landscape of this report will cover complete company profile, along with the production graph, merchandise offerings, and revenue accounted for by every key player profiled in this report
It additionally, provides the data points of value trends and the gross margins of each manufacturer, in accompanying the market share held by key players within the forecast period.
Browse Corresponding Healthcare Market Research Reports & Consulting
· Bioreactors and Fermenters Market is forecasted to value over USD xx billion by 2027 end and register a CAGR of xx% from the forecast period 2020–2027. FutureWise Market Research has instantiated a report that provides an intricate analysis of Bioreactors and Fermenters Market trends that shall affect the overall market growth.
· Biotechnology Reagents Market is forecasted to value over USD 104.9 billion by 2028 end at a CAGR of over 7.8% during the forecast period 2021 to 2028. FutureWise Market Research has instantiated a report that provides an intricate analysis of Biotechnology Reagents Market trends that shall affect the overall market growth.
· Blood Plasma Derivatives Market is forecasted to value over USD 55 billion by 2027 end and register a CAGR of 9.2% from the forecast period 2020–2027. FutureWise Market Research has illustrated a report that provides an in-depth anatomy of Blood Plasma Derivatives market trends affecting its growth.
Objectives of the Study:
· To offer report with an entire analysis on the IoT Medical Devices Market By Product, By Type, By Connectivity, By End User, and By Region
· To cater comprehensive data and data-points on factors impacting the expansion of the market (drivers, opportunities, and industry-specific restraints)
· To analyze and forecast micro-markets and additionally the scope of the market
· To predict the market forecast, size and share, in key regions — North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa
· To record and evaluate competitive landscape — product launches, mergers and expansions, and technological advancements within the market
Table of Content:
1. Market Introduction and Overview
2. Market Scope, Trends and Competitive Landscape
3. Market Segmentation
4. Regional Analysis
5. Key Market Players
6. Global and Regional Market Share
7. Covid-19 Impact
8. Key Takeaways and Data Points
Some of the key queries addressed in this report are:
1. Key factors influencing the market growth?
2. Anticipated growth-rate of the market throughout the forecast period?
3. Market size value in 2020?
4. What is the expected market size by 2027?
5. Which region holds the biggest market share?
Flexible Delivery Model:
We have a flexible delivery model where you’ll be able to suggest changes within the scope/table of content on the basis of your requirement
Free customization services on the acquisition of any license Type of report.
You can directly share your customization requests to: [email protected]
FutureWise Research:
Contact Person: Vinay T.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: UK: +44 1416289353 | US: +1 3477094931 | https://medium.com/@marketinsight92/iot-medical-devices-market-trends-and-forecast-8cc91295b31c | ['Market Insight'] | 2021-12-30 10:14:05.878000+00:00 | ['Market Research Reports', 'Market Size', 'Market Research', 'Iot Medical Devices', 'Market Research Analysis'] |
Wondershare Filmora 10.0.6.8 Free Download | Filmora X
Filmora X is easy to apply for a video editing software program with an intuitive consumer interface, a wide range of editing gear, and heaps of video outcomes. newbie and intermediate video editors. YouTube creators and anyone considering beginning a YouTube channel. everybody who wishes a simple tool they could study quick.
Features of Wondershare Filmora 10.0.6.8
Video effects
discover creative transitions, filters, titles, and motion elements which are distinctive to Filmora.
green display screen
Reimagine your world by means of changing backgrounds and growing special effects.
cut up display
Multiply your amusing with more than one screens for a completely unique manner to tell your story.
greater functions
extend Your innovative possibilities
speed manipulate
rapid forward to the best part or sluggish down a unique second.
coloration Grading
supply your videos a Hollywood feel and personalize your introduction.
Audio Ducking
fast fade your music so your communicate sticks out.
colour in shape
keep time with the aid of making use of colour correction settings across multiple clips straight away.
Keyboard Shortcut
Edit quicker using hotkey instructions.
System Requirements for Wondershare Filmora 10.0.6.8
Operating System: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 Memory (RAM): 8 GB of RAM required. Hard Disk Space: 500 MB of free space required for full installation. Processor: Intel Pentium i3, Multi-core GHz or higher.
Download Links
Download Portable Setup | https://medium.com/@ezeemjoni/wondershare-filmora-10-0-6-8-free-download-eefb162aae7e | ['Ezeem Joni'] | 2020-12-16 05:32:35.281000+00:00 | ['Filmora', 'Video Editing Software', 'Video Editing', 'Editing'] |
Debugging Rust code on WSL2 | Install Debug Tools
We’ll write a new application to go through the setup steps. You can also clone the application from Github if you don’t want to set it up locally.
cargo init rustapp
cd rustapp
code .
For a linux backend(WSL2 in this case), install the CodeLLDB extension on Visual Studio Code. | https://harsimranmaan.medium.com/debugging-rust-code-on-wsl2-37bdc1aed5cb | ['Harsimran Singh Maan'] | 2020-08-14 01:20:34+00:00 | ['Debugging', 'Vscode', 'Development', 'Productivity', 'Rustlang'] |
Where Did Tom, the Founder of Myspace, Bizarrely Vanish To? | Where Did Tom, the Founder of Myspace, Bizarrely Vanish To?
This is what happens when the concept of money is removed from your life.
Image Credit: Pedestrian/gettyimages
“Myspace changed my life,” said no one.
Well, it changed mine. I was an unknown musician looking for an audience. I set up a Myspace account.
My first friend was this weird guy called Tom. Tom looked freaking happy and he was the co-founder of the site. He looked like someone that could actually be my friend. I was a Myspace prostitute. I made friends with everybody. Myspace was where I published the remixes I created and played in nightclubs as a DJ.
Unfortunately, Myspace didn’t make me a successful musician. I didn’t go viral with my Fleetwood Mac remix while holding a bottle of cranberry juice.
Myspace was fun though. It’s where I met one of my best friends. He randomly messaged me and asked to talk about my music. I met up with him, and his record label ended up publishing all of my electronic dance tracks to sites like Beatport. Without Myspace I would never have become a musician signed to two record labels.
The experience on Myspace later became my foundation and apprenticeship for how to write on the internet.
The online assistance from Myspace wasn’t enough. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from extreme mental illness. Practically speaking, this meant when I went to go on stage and play my set I’d feel physically sick.
It took me hours to prepare for the nerve-racking battle that I faced every night. I loved playing to an audience. What made no sense was my body’s response to my hobby. After a while the stress of mental illness became too much. I gave up DJing and stopped using Myspace.
It’s been years since my experience with Myspace, although my account is still very much alive (see here for a laugh).
Screenshot by me (2020). From Hollywood celebs, to nightclubs, to mixtape cds, to strange long hair…haha
The other day I thought to myself where the heck did Tom from Myspace end up? The answer surprised me, given he is now 50, which is hard to believe. You might be curious too and there’s an awesome lesson in it for you.
The historical importance of Myspace
Myspace was significant because it accidentally paved the way for creative people to release their work into the world without owning a website. Tom made this happen by mistake and it was a happy accident.
Myspace created the social media category of apps. Without Myspace we may never of had Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. Tom started Myspace in 2003 with Chris DeWolfe.
Myspace got eaten for breakfast by Facebook in 2008.
The company eventually pivoted to serving musicians solely. They lost their identity and their mojo. Nobody knew what Myspace was anymore. Now, only people who want to walk through a time warp (like me) visit the site.
Myspace helped the internet unleash its creativity, and that’s historically important regardless of how things ended up.
This is what Myspace Tom is doing now.
Myspace was sold in 2005 for $580 million.
Tom walked away from the experiment a rich human. He attempted to stay on for a few years at the company, but became frustrated with endless meetings and the inability for anybody to make a decision.
He dabbled with a few adviser roles. Then, in 2009 he retired. Since then most people have no idea what happened to him. Here’s what he said about the concept of retirement:
I’ll never say ‘never’ because, more than anything, I like the idea that anything can happen. I don’t know exactly where my life will lead. Adventure and the unknown has always been appealing to me.
Tom was going to travel the world and do nothing. In 2011 Tom visited the Burning Man festival and became inspired by photography, thanks to his friend Troy Ratcliff.
“I’m not necessarily trying to represent nature exactly. I’m trying to make something beautiful like a painter would,” says Tom. Now Tom travels the world as a photographer. He doesn’t make a dollar from his art and that’s intentional. All of his photographs can be found on Instagram.
“I haven’t wanted to take commissions or sell my photos, or do anything commercial with it — that would just feel like work, which I don’t want to do.”
Tom lives an odd life.
It reminds me of the Humans of New York founder, Brandon Stanton. Brandon left behind a high-profile job in finance to take photos of everyday people in the street.
He said in an interview “I’d go out some days and ten people in a row would make me feel like I’m some sort of freak. ‘No you can’t take my photo — get out of here!’ There were days when I couldn’t do it anymore and would go home and lay in bed.”
Brandon burst into tears after sharing that experience. The rejection was overwhelming. What saved him was this: The act of doing his passion rather than thinking about it.
Doing creative work for the sake of it is a deeply fulfilling and odd experience. It’s worth you experimenting with like Tom and Brandon have.
What you can learn from Myspace Tom
Okay, so you may not be retiring on hundreds of millions of dollars. What Tom can teach you about life through his experience is still powerful.
Time is worth more than money.
“I’ll pay a lot to not waste time. Time is the most important thing to me — how can you do all the things you want to do with such limited time. … I’m hoping the science of life extension makes progress.”
The purpose of retirement is not to quit work. It’s to quit the type of work you have to do for money, so you can do whatever work you want and not need to stress about how much it pays.
Retire from work you do for money as soon as you can.
Buy back your time. Buying stuff forces you to work longer for money.
Dumb meetings and indecision aren’t worth it.
It forced Tom to walk away from corporate life. Tom likes to build stuff and explore his creative passions. It’s hard to make progress when you’ve got a corporate giant molding you for their exploitation and benefit.
Real passion keeps you going.
You might think having loads of money and retiring like Tom is a dream. The problem with retirement and loads of money is it gets boring.
$580 million will make you happy for a few months, not a lifetime.
Tom figured this out the hard way. He says his passion for photography keeps him traveling. I reckon that’s a lie. His passion for photography keeps him alive and away from doing enormous amounts of coke and gambling at casinos every day.
When money is taken care of, work changes its meaning. If you’re not intentional about that meaning, then you’ll end up having a new meaning written for you which may not be consistent with living a good life. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/where-did-tom-the-founder-of-myspace-bizarrely-vanish-to-a4ddb3ef50d9 | ['Tim Denning'] | 2020-12-14 16:00:09.551000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Mental Health', 'Social Media', 'Money', 'Work'] |
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot | Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot
Book review reflections from a white woman
Mikki Kendall coined the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which she expands on in her new book, “Hood Feminism”. The book challenges mainstream (white) feminism which tends to focus on white and privileged women. In the book Kendall views feminism through a Black perspective with each chapter of the book broken up into a different intersectional focus: hunger, housing, gun violence, respectability politics, pretty privilege, education systems, etc.
This is a book all white feminists should read, as it reminds mainstream feminism to sit back, and look around at everything it is missing (namely, listening to women from marginalized perspectives). Even when mainstream feminism seems to challenge norms, it is still upholding many other harmful societal norms:
“…when white women help to maintain the status quo in a society that is dripping with white supremacy, they give themselves more power….white women have historically centered their own concerns in every movement.”
But many white feminists aren’t intentionally racist, right?
If you are a “well meaning” white woman reading this book, you might be tempted to think, that’s not me! I don’t want to be grouped in with those racist white women! First off, no white ally is ever going to be perfect, it’s continual work to be actively anti-racist. Second, intentions don’t matter at all, it’s the impact that matters. Third, if you are offended by broad generalizations about white feminism, Kendall challenges you to take it personally then and make change:
“There’s work to do, and the patriarchy won’t break itself. So white feminism is going to have to get comfortable with the idea that until they challenge their racist aunts, parents, cousins, and so on, it is definitely all white women who are responsible.”
But why are white feminists generally more “outspoken” about feminism?
Kenall makes the argument that because Black women are battling many different intersecting issues (including race and gender, constantly), it is a privilege to be able to focus solely on gender. It is also a privilege for white women to be able to call out the white men in their life… it is more complicated for Black women to call out the Black men in their lives, because of the ongoing racist history project called “America”.
“Y et white women see women of color conflicted about the behaviors of men in their own communities, when they observe women of color not publicly hashing out every single feeling in the way that white women think they should, they are often quick to critique women of color… Does this mean that women in the hood don’t have to challenge patriarchal ideas? Absolutely not. It does mean a curious balancing act that often requires solutions outside the carceral state. When you know that oppression comes not from one direction but from many, then you have to develop a framework that allows for not finding safety or solidarity with those who oppress people who look like you.”
Kendall expands on the idea that not only are Black men disproportionately impacted by the prison industrial complex in America, but Black women are also impacted when they speak out:
“We know that carceral feminism (a reliance on policing, prosecution, and imprisonment to resolve gendered or sexual violence) is most likely to be used against women who fight back. Particularly women of color.”
And when Black women do speak out…
Below is a satirical piece by Kendall about the way that the world writes about Black women:
In regards to the upcoming election
Kendall speaks about the problematic behavior of “Bernie Bros” in the past election, who “felt comfortable calling Black and Brown voters ‘low information’ for not supporting their preferred candidate.”
She also makes clear that the assumption that low voter turnout is about “laziness” or “lack of information or motivation” is offensive.
“It almost never comes up in political discourse during an election cycle that for those living in decaying neighborhoods, the years of neglect have left the impression that the party doesn’t matter, that no politician cares enough to try to stem the tide. Nor do we address the way that having a front-row seat to the brutality of poverty and neglect can impact a person emotionally.”
Perhaps white feminists, for every person we enthusiastically encourage to vote this election with our pink “pussy hats”, we also encourage ourselves to be actively anti-racist and make time regularly to listen to the voices that the movement has failed and forgotten. | https://medium.com/swlh/hood-feminism-notes-from-the-women-that-a-movement-forgot-86ba8bec18e3 | ['Annie Windholz'] | 2020-08-28 23:15:53.009000+00:00 | ['Racism', 'Race', 'Feminism', 'White Privilege', 'Elections'] |
Blockchain in Energy Market New Business Opportunities and Investment Research Report by 2026 | Blockchain in Energy Market 2021–2026
Straits Research has recently added a new report to its vast depository titled Global Blockchain in Energy Market. The report studies vital factors about the Global Blockchain in Energy Market that are essential to be understood by existing as well as new market players. The report highlights the essential elements such as market share, profitability, production, sales, manufacturing, advertising, technological advancements, key market players, regional segmentation, and many more crucial aspects related to the Global Blockchain in Energy Market.
Blockchain in Energy Market
The Major Players Covered in this Report:
Microsoft (US), Accenture (Ireland), IBM (US), Infosys (India), SAP (Germany), Accenture (Dublin), Electron (Ukraine), Btl Group Ltd. (Canada), and Kaleido (USA).
Get a Sample PDF Report: Blockchain in Energy Market
Segmentation is as follows: -
By Type,
Private, Public
By Component,
Platform, Service
By Application,
Energy Trading, Grid Management, Payment Schemes, Supply Chain Management
By End User,
Power, Oil and Gas
The report specifically highlights the Blockchain in Energy market share, company profiles, regional outlook, product portfolio, a record of the recent developments, strategic analysis, key players in the market, sales, distribution chain, manufacturing, production, new market entrants as well as existing market players, advertising, brand value, popular products, demand and supply, and other important factors related to the Blockchain in Energy market to help the new entrants understand the market scenario better.
Important factors like strategic developments, government regulations, Blockchain in Energy market analysis, end-users, target audience, distribution network, branding, product portfolio, market share, threats and barriers, growth drivers, latest trends in the industry are also mentioned.
Regional Analysis For Blockchain in Energy Market:
North America (United States, Canada, and Mexico)
Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, and Italy)
Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia)
South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, etc.)
Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa)
In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of the Blockchain in Energy are as follows:
• History Year: 2014–2019
• Base Year: 2019
• Estimated Year: 2020
• Forecast Year 2021 to 2026
The main steps in the investigation process are:
1) The first step in market research is to obtain raw market information from industry experts and direct research analysts using primary and secondary sources.
2) Extracts raw data from these sources to extract valuable insights and analyze them for research purposes.
3) Classify the knowledge gained by qualitative and quantitative data and place it accordingly to make final conclusions.
Key Questions Answered in the Report:
• What is the current scenario of the Global Blockchain in Energy Market? How is the market going to prosper throughout the next 6 years?
• What is the impact of COVID-19 on the market? What are the major steps undertaken by the leading players to mitigate the damage caused by COVID-19?
• What are the emerging technologies that are going to profit the market?
• What are the historical and the current sizes of the Global Blockchain in Energy Market?
• Which segments are the fastest growing and the largest in the market? What is their market potential?
• What are the driving factors contributing to the market growth during the short, medium, and long term? What are the major challenges and shortcomings that the market is likely to face? How can the market solve the challenges?
• What are the lucrative opportunities for the key players in the Blockchain in Energy market?
• Which are the key geographies from the investment perspective?
• What are the major strategies adopted by the leading players to expand their market shares?
• Who are the distributors, traders, and dealers of the Global Blockchain in Energy market?
• What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by types and applications of the market?
For More Details On this Report: Blockchain in Energy Market
About Us:
Regardless of whether you’re looking at business sectors in the next town or crosswise over continents, we understand the significance of being acquainted with what customers purchase. We overcome the issues of our customers by recognizing and deciphering just the target group, while simultaneously generating leads with the highest precision. We seek to collaborate with our customers to deliver a broad spectrum of results through a blend of market and business research approaches. This approach of using various research and analysis strategies enables us to determine greater insights by eliminating the research costs. Moreover, we’re continually developing, not only with regards to where we measure, or who we measure but in how our visions can enable you to drive cost-effective growth.
Contact Us:
Company Name: Straits Research
Email: [email protected]
Phone:
+1 646 480 7505 (U.S.)
+91 8087085354 (India)
+44 208 068 9665 (U.K.)
Blockchain in Energy Market Growth, Blockchain in Energy Forecast, Blockchain in Energy Industry Trends, Blockchain in Energy Market Share, Blockchain in Energy Industry Size, Blockchain in Energy Market Data Analysis, Blockchain in Energy Market Overview” | https://medium.com/@shubhamk.straitsresearch/blockchain-in-energy-market-new-business-opportunities-and-investment-research-report-by-2026-a3f27371792d | ['Shubham K'] | 2021-12-30 07:02:31.988000+00:00 | ['Market Research Reports', 'Energy', 'Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain In Energy'] |
PT/DT will start trading on DragonEx | (Reposted from: https://dragonex.im/news/article/1092?curIdx=0)
Dear Communities,
PT/DT trading pair will open from 15:00 to 17:00 on August 23rd, 2018,Singapore time (UTC+8). The trading between DT and PT is one-way, you can only exchange PT with DT.
During the Private Sale, the trading between DT and PT will be at the rate of 1DT to 203PT. Users who hold no less than 500 DT and trade 500DT AKA 101500PT or above in one single order will gain the opportunity to participate in the Private Sale.
Instructions:
1.Please manually refresh the page of trading PT/DT after PT/DT starts trading, otherwise the buy button may not show up.
2.The total volume of PT is up to 1 billion. 100 million is available for this special private sale. The trading between DT and PT is one-way, you can only exchange PT with DT.
3.The rate of PT/DT depends on the market value of DT (Based on the actual release price of PT on the day of Private Sale).
4. PT will start trading within one week after the end of the Private Sale. Please wait for following announcements for more details.
5.DragonEx promises the responsibility to buy back PT on Private Sale price before the Predict Product launched officially.
All DT bought back by DragonEx will be blocked permanently (based on the actual quantity of DT bought back after PT starts trading ) and not circulate in the market, the dividends from which will be all distributed to DT holders.
Predict Token Profile:
Predict is the first trending prediction platform based on the mining-driven mode. It initiates the deflation mode and provides the service of the price trending prediction of BTC, ETH, etc. More prediction scenarios will be supported in the future.
Predict Token (PT) is the platform Token issued by Predict. Its total volume is 1 billion, with 50% for community mining, 20% for PT Fund, 10% for team, 10% for private sale, 5% for strategic partners and 5 % for DragonEx Institute. For more information, please wait for the following announcement.
Official Website：https://predictit.io/
White Paper：https://predictit.io/files/PT_Whitepaper_CN_v1.0.pdf
DragonEx Website: https://dragonex.im/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dragonex_io
DragonEx Team
August 23rd, 2018 | https://medium.com/dragonex/pt-dt-will-start-trading-on-dragonex-fb865c010546 | [] | 2018-08-23 05:21:08.968000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum'] |
Rajasthani royal wedding | One of the tolerable events of life is a unique form of marriage. Marriage is a ceremony that unites two people, man, and woman, in a strong bond of love, care and commitment. By the way, every wedding couple is very excited to celebrate their wedding in a royal and royal way and Rajasthan is the most favorite place to get married to Rajasthani wedding rituals and customs. Rajasthani wedding dress is an adorable custom as far as marriage is concerned. Lehenga choli is best known and best dressed in a traditional Rajasthani wedding. In addition, a dress reflects the iconic culture and personality of every person as to what his people wear and how he dresses. That’s his identity
Royalty, rich cultural heritage and a luxurious lifestyle are reflections of Rajasthan which we all know and their wedding traditions are no exception. Desert state weddings are truly one of a kind with lavish decorations, vibrant colors, traditional and folk dance forms and music. Here we explore the unique Rajasthani wedding traditions. Read on and find out how you can add some of them to your newlyweds
Rajasthan royal wedding and destination wedding
Rajasthan is known worldwide for its expansive lifestyle and rich cultural heritage. The best place in Rajasthan is famous for a royal wedding. Royalty is a term associated with Rajasthan. Rajasthani royal wedding, be it culture, food, clothes or anything else, Rajasthan is different in terms of style and grandeur. No wonder Rajasthan weddings are a grand affair! People from all over the world come and attend the Royal Rajasthani wedding. Traditional dance, music, grand wedding dress, jewelry, bangles, wedding rituals are attractive for any audience. The wedding dress reflects a special grandeur. Rajasthani weddings include pre-wedding as well as post-wedding customs that are rooted in their oldest traditions.
Pre-wedding rituals in Rajasthani weddings
There are various pre-wedding practices associated with Royal Rajasthani marriage. Some of these customs also include the tilak ceremony, where the bride’s brother places a token of welcome and honor by placing a tilak on the groom’s forehead. After this Ganpati ji is established and peace is established in the house, where the marriage rituals are performed with auspiciousness and with the aim of removing the obstacles in the way. Pithi Dastur ‘is a custom made before the wedding day, in which it is custom to apply turmeric and sandalwood paste on the face and body to enhance the beauty of the bride and groom. Apart from this, there are other customs which are performed by different religions.
The Rajasthani royal wedding is held in a royal and prosperous atmosphere in the Rajasthan desert. Rajasthan, India is an ideal place for planning regal and royal weddings. A treasure trove of royal venues for royal weddings, Rajasthan romanticizes the heart to enter the bond of a lifetime in an exotic locale.
Rajasthani royal weddings are one of the best weddings in Rajasthan, which facilitate marriage organizations in different regions of Rajasthan such as Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Jaipur, Bikaner.
Rajasthani Royal Wedding Panachevents is one of the best wedding planners in Rajasthan that facilitates wedding outfits in different areas of Rajasthan such as Rajasthani royal weddings, Rajasthan Regal weddings, budget weddings in Rajasthan, etc. | https://medium.com/@cavirendra156/rajasthani-royal-wedding-83b856d230d1 | ['Virendra Sharma'] | 2019-10-17 08:40:19.256000+00:00 | ['Weddings', 'Rajasthani Royal Wedding', 'Rajasthani Wedding'] |
5 Reasons to A/B Test Your App Store Product Page | When competition in the app stores is tougher than ever, you might be looking for a nontrivial solution to draw the attention of users and get more downloads for your mobile app.
Search no more. The solution is here: A/B testing your app store product page, which means experimenting with various options of your app’s name, icon, screenshots and other components on the App Store and Google Play.
Why do I need to A/B test my app’s product page on app stores?
1. Learn Your Audience
How does your app look in app stores? You invested so much effort into creating a product page on the App Store and Google Play, analyzed and picked out the best keywords, wrote a catchy description and selected screenshots at your discretion. But no one comes to see all this beauty on your page, let alone downloading your app. Why does this happen?
A/B testing will help you find answers to these and many other questions. Testing your app store product page with a tool like SplitMetrics, tailored to such needs, will open up new opportunities for you. Experiments with the app’s name, icon, screenshots, video frame and subtitles will reveal what attracts users and motivates them to take action (download your app). Consequently, you will adjust your product page elements to target users’ preferences.
2. Increase the Number of Downloads
This is probably one of the most stirring items. The word conversion makes the heart of every marketer beat faster, and within the context of mobile marketing if we do not take in-app purchases into account, app downloads from your app store product page is one of the major goals to focus on.
A/B testing your app’s product page on the App Store or Google Play will enable you to increase its conversion rate. Thanks to experiments you know what works for your potential users and can adjust all the elements to encourage them to press the download button when they are on your app store product page.
3. Improve Conversion Rate from Search
The more relevant your product page elements are, the greater the chance that users will tap on your app when they see it in search results on the App Store or Google Play, or even better, download it right from search.
With the help of A/B testing you are able to check what variations of your title, subtitle and screenshots are relevant for your target audience and which ones do not meet user expectations. You will easily understand: if your app is shown to 1000 users and only 1% of them tap on it, something must be wrong. Furthermore, if you do nothing about it, your app will be lowered in the App Store rankings. Alternatively, relevant and attractive elements of your app’s product page will contribute to increase of conversion rate from search.
4. Use Data to Validate Ideas
A/B testing enables you to exclude guesswork and feel absolutely confident about all concepts you offer for the App Store creatives. Just brainstorm with the team, select a few options and test them with the A/B testing tool.
You will quickly find out which options perform better without spending hours arguing about various ideas with your teammates. So, A/B testing saves you time, money and headache. What is more, it provides you with solid grounds for decision-making when it comes to editing an app store product page.
5. Boost Revenue
Whether your mobile app makes money through in-app advertising, purchases or subscriptions, encouraging users to download the app is your number one priority. A/B testing your app store product page helps you to understand what your target audience likes (and dislikes) and attract as many target users as possible.
The more target users you attract, the more profit your make. Rovio, Finnish game developer, with the help of A/B testing before the Angry Birds 2 launch managed to select best screenshot combination that increased the conversion rate by 13%. That meant 2.5 million additional downloads of the game within a week and significant revenue growth. So, on top of all other benefits, A/B testing your app store page will enable you to raise profits.
OK, got it. What exactly should I test on the App Store / Google Play product page?
There is actually plenty of room for experiments. You can A/B test the app’s name (title), subtitle, screenshots (fonts, colors, characters), video, icon and even localization. A good practice is to test various product page elements for different storefronts: you may be surprised how something works perfectly for one country and does not work at all for another.
Let’s take a look at some elements you can A/B test and specific benefits it could potentially bring to you.
Screenshots
Screenshots is the number one factor that directly affects the app’s tap-through-rate and conversions. Relevant and catchy screenshots may help you hit the bull’s eye and enhance user engagement.
Paper, mobile app for sketching by WeTransfer, got impressive 33% increase in downloads after A/B testing its App Store product page screenshots. Experiments with the screenshots’ colors, order and text localization revealed that the more diverse screenshots are, the bigger the chance that your app will attract users. What is more, the testing showed that screenshots’ localization for the targeted country turns out to be a real driving force for improving the conversion rate.
Another noteworthy case concerns world-famous AI-based app Prisma. The app’s screenshots optimization on the App Store product page following a number of A/B testing experiments triggered almost 20% conversion increase.
Icons
Icon is the face of every app, so it is important that you choose the one that is engaging and captures the essence of your application. Icon’s A/B testing and slightest design change may show amazing results: Mallzee, British fashion shopping app, achieved 10% conversion boost after experimenting with several icon options. What is more, experiments showed that rejecting ineffectual icon options can help you avoid up to 25% reduction in conversion rate. So, A/B testing helps you to not only improve your app’s performance on the App Store, but also prevent disastrous consequences of bad choices.
One more inspiring example. App Family Kids, Swedish developer of apps for children, managed to double its app’s downloads along with revenue after A/B testing icon options and choosing the most effective one for the Google Play product page. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?
Video and Localization
MSQRD, renowned photo and video app developed by eponymous company acquired by Facebook in 2016, leveraged the A/B testing potential to its fullest extent.
The company tested the app’s screenshots with and without localization for various countries. Experiments revealed the substantial advantage of localizing application in terms of not only content but also context.
Another important lesson you can learn by example of MSQRD: try adding video along with screenshots to your app store product page. Then create several video previews that would grab user attention and finally A/B test them. This lifehack increased MSQRD’s conversion rate by 13% meaning thousands of more downloads. However, be careful: latest research shows that two and more videos published on your app store product page decrease the conversion rate. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/https-hackernoon-com-5-reasons-to-a-b-test-your-app-store-product-page-379551f287b4 | ['Lina Danilchik'] | 2019-07-12 08:14:42.025000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'A B Testing', 'App Store Optimization', 'App Store', 'Mobile Marketing'] |
Avanade’s CEO Emeritus Shares What It Takes To Build A Strong Culture | Ask any employee around the world, and they’ll likely tell you that company culture plays a major role in their overall experience.
But what makes a strong and effective culture? Who leads the charge?
In most cases, leaders set the tone for their organizations. As culture becomes more of a defining quality in attracting and retaining top talent, future leaders will play an even more vital role in establishing culture.
Adam Warby has been with business technology company Avanade since its founding in 2000 and became the company’s second CEO in 2008. He played a pivotal role in establishing and growing the company’s culture and turning it into a regularly recognized top employer.
Today, Adam is CEO Emeritus and Avanade has more than 36,000 employees working around the globe. I had the chance to visit Adam in the UK and interview him for my book, The Future Leader. Adam shared three skills leaders need to develop that can help build a strong company culture.
Look Outside And Be Present
For Adam, leadership starts with showing up and being present. As he travels around the world to meet with various teams, Adam throws himself into being present with each person he meets. It’s easy for leaders to get caught up with what’s going on within their own office or within their own company, but Adam believes the most effective leaders look outside themselves to truly understand what is happening in the world and with their clients and employees. They show up every day to be present both inside and outside the company.
A silly example of showing up is when Adam sent an April Fool joke to the company a few years ago that many people fell for. Adam got more than 100 responses from employees, and he took the time to respond to every message.
“That’s it. It’s a connection, it’s showing up in a place where you would necessarily expect the CEO,” he said.
Being present and looking outside themselves builds a culture where everyone matters and is seen by leaders and colleagues. Every member of the team is worth paying attention to and deserves to be seen and respected.
Balance Humans And Technology
Although Adam oversaw a technology company, he realizes that technology isn’t everything. In his mind, technology is a powerful tool because it allows leaders to focus more on what really matters, which is the people of the organization.
Leadership is changing. What are the skills and mindsets you need to master in order to lead in the new world of work? According to over 140 of the world’s top CEOs there are 4 mindsets and 5 skills that leaders need to master. Learn what they are and hear directly from these leaders by downloading the PDF below.
Adam told me this: “I see artificial intelligence and technology as extremely positive for future leaders. It will give them a partner in the decision-making process while allowing them to focus on the most important aspect of leadership: people. I think in a world that is recently driven to technology, balancing that as a leader in humanity is important.”
Finding that elusive balance can come in many ways. As an individual, it often looks like unplugging or finding a non-technical outlet. Adam turns to gardening and calls his daffodils and roses his therapy against the world of technology. As a leader, the balance means finding the right applications for AI to augment traditionally human roles and allowing your people to thrive in other areas. For a company, it means creating cohesive automation and digital systems that help create a better experience for both employees and customers.
As technology grows, the balance between humans and technology will shift. Future leaders must continually re-evaluate how their company uses technology to ensure it is helping customers without taking over. Finding the balance between humans and technology builds a culture that values people and innovation. That culture gives employees the freedom to pursue the ideas and qualities that are uniquely human.
Practice Empathy And Inclusion
Future leaders must be empathetic and inclusive and create a culture where everyone is welcomed and accepted as they are.
“I think it’s important for leaders to be aware and very conscious of the divisive forces in the world,” Adam said. “Our social impact, our impact on underrepresented communities, our diversity — all those things are crucial to our success.”
Adam has long been a proponent of inclusion and diversity. One of the hallmarks of his time as CEO was the creation of Avanade’s corporate citizenship mission to enable young people and their communities to achieve more through the power of digital innovation.
Being an inclusive leader means not only creating diverse teams with employees from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs, but also setting the direction and framework for every voice to be heard and have an impact. Adam believes that the ability to build agile teams creates the right sort of diversity, the right levels of skills in a team, and purpose and direction for employees.
Culture is the foundation to a company’s success. Leaders set the tone for the culture, no matter if they have been there from the beginning or are in their first day on the job. Developing these skills sets the groundwork for leaders to improve and build a strong and supportive culture. | https://medium.com/jacob-morgan/avanades-ceo-emeritus-shares-what-it-takes-to-build-a-strong-culture-72938813d565 | ['Jacob Morgan'] | 2020-12-01 12:58:06.612000+00:00 | ['Leadership Coaching', 'Leadership Development', 'Employee Experience', 'Corporate Culture'] |
5 Essential Cybersecurity & Privacy Tips for Building Your Personal Brand | The Internet is growing up. So are you. And you’re ready to get out there and break it. You’re going to be an influencer, a digital brand expert, a social media marketing guru. The first brand you’re going to build, you’ve decided, is yours.
Welcome to the fray.
Sowing Your Oats
You’re diving into an $8B market, chock full of people just like you who have decided to make being themselves (or whoever their sponsors pay them to be) their full-time gig. You’re voluntarily (and ambitiously) exposing yourself — or at least what the marketeers deem your most valuable parts to be — to the world (and perhaps the highest bidder?). There are over 1 billion users (potential fans!) on Instagram alone.
What could go wrong?
The opportunities are endless — both for you, and for social engineers (like me) that hack humans as targets of interest (and opportunity). Luckily for you, I’m one of the good guys, and I’m here to help you.
First, a story.
But Everyone’s Doing It…
A friend of mine — let’s call him Bob — decided to build his personal brand as an interior designer. He had spent years honing his skills as an enthusiast, decorating homes for his friends and family as a part-time hobby.
Feedback was very positive, and his work became all the rage amongst his circle, and their connections.
Bob was elated — and so were the peeps who got free decorating.
With much excitement, Bob announced that he would harness his gift, along with the power of social media and the Interwebs, to turn his hobby into a career and bring his designs to the (well-paying) masses.
Bob opened a GoDaddy account, bought a domain, created his Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat profiles, and set to work. And he worked hard.
60 days into his adventure, Bob had 10 paying clients — more than he needed to earn gown-up money — and several thousand followers on his social channels.
Bob was elated — and so were the peeps who eventually hacked him and shut him down.
90 days into his adventure, Bob was out of business — or at least out of commission.
Bob was devastated. So were his clients. How could this have happened?
Bob’s downfall was due to a nasty combination of (not so skillful, but persistent) social engineering, and poor cybersecurity hygiene.
Let’s Get to Know Each Other First
Bob’s first Instagram posts were pictures of his most intimate design work — his own downtown apartment — and he blasted them out across all of his channels.
Among the likes, comments, and accolades — there was a “woman” who we’ll call Alice, who stated she and her husband were moving to Bob’s home city, and wanted to know what building he lived in to get such a killer view of the skyline she saw in the pictures.
Bob told Alice the name of the building and told her how great it was to live there. Among the continued small talk (online), she even convinced Bob to tell her the floor he lived on.
Bob’s online admirer asked if the building accepted pets. He told her it did, which was lucky for his cat, Morpheus.
And that’s how it started.
Bob’s new friend was able to keep the conversation going by bringing in small details that only a friend or colleague would know — in this case, she was asking about a design contest entry from an industry fair in Los Angeles that Bob had attended.
Alice obviously wasn’t there but found a photo online and used it to describe Bob’s work and how amazing it was — as if she had seen it in person and was in awe of such amazing talent. Certainly, he deserved better than an honorable mention.
Alice mentioned she’d be willing to have a chat with some of her connections in L.A. and possibly get Bob some meetings with higher profile clients.
She asked for a personal email address so she could send Bob some ideas, and said she’d connect with him on his other social accounts as well. She even mentioned meeting up for coffee when she and her husband got to town.
Bob was elated. And so was Alice, who now had everything she needed to launch her attack.
Your Tests Came Back Positive…
Bob was being doxed, a technique where a bad actor works a target to compile pieces of open source (publicly available) information, along with verification information from the targeted individual, to build a profile and do something bad (as bad actors often do).
In this instance, the bad actor (Alice) was verifying information she was able to find on Bob — and then she went to work.
Alice had the building, even the floor, where Bob lived. Bob told her himself. She easily searched online to reverse-engineer the address. Strike one.
Alice had Bob’s personal email address, which he gave her and she verified with a quick note and an even quicker reply. As you’ve probably already deduced, email addresses are also typically usernames — for almost everything. Strike two.
Morpheus, Bob’s cat? It’s a response for Bob’s “secret” security question — “What’s your favorite pet’s name?” — on his web hosting account (and a ton of other things). Strike three.
Bob’s not tech-savvy. Alice guessed that. She also guessed (cracked) the password for his email account using an online tool. Game over.
While Alice didn’t inflict direct financial damage — thankfully she didn’t get to Bob’s bank accounts or credit cards — she was able to take control of two of his social media accounts and his primary email.
Those thousands of followers? Gone (including Alice). Hours of work in selecting and posting photos and stories and comments? Trashed.
Rather than growing his budding business, Bob spent the next four months cleaning up and becoming hacker-free. But that’s for another article.
Sadly, this is a true (and all too common) story. But happily, Bob learned his lesson, and we can all learn from his mistakes.
Let’s Have the Talk.
Here are five essential steps to consider in securing your personal brand on social media. Don’t be like Bob.
#1. Go Hack Yourself.
Before you launch your world-changing online persona, conduct an audit of your current online footprint. It’s easy to get started — Google yourself and see what’s out there.
Sites like Spokeo, Manta, and others routinely post sensitive information including addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases even spouses, relatives, and business associates. In the security world, we call this OSINT — open source intelligence — and there’s plenty of it available.
Marriage and divorce records, census data and birth certificates, and in some cases more sensitive documents like tax returns, vehicle registration, and credit information are out there online for the picking.
Not only is this information useful for a potential bad actor, it can also be considered by people who are getting to know your brand. You don’t want your first impression to be your DUI arrest from 2001.
In subsequent articles, I’ll teach you how to get your information removed from these databases and lock down your publicly available persona.
#2. Now Clean Yourself Up.
Now it’s time to disinfect your online presence. Your entire digital footprint is in scope here.
In addition to restricting access to sensitive data, you should be reviewing what information is out there that you did intend for people to see. Those revealing spring break pics from Cabo? Take ’em down.
The mildly inappropriate meme about needing a beer before work that your best friend tagged you in? Consider removing the tag.
The nasty Yelp review you left for that nasty taco joint on 3rd Avenue? Delete it.
You see the trend here. Anything that could be used to compromise your brand is fair game for a bad actor, a competitor, or an investigator.
As mentioned in my previous article on social media privacy — be intentional with what you post, even if you think others will never see it.
#3. Be Discreet, and Always Use Protection.
This is where the good security hygiene comes in.
Don’t pass account numbers, financial information, personal data — or anything else that you’d consider sensitive — through email, text, or DM, even with people you trust. There are ways to exchange all of this information securely.
Don’t use weak or common passwords for your online social media accounts. Moreover, don’t use the same passwords between all of your platforms. If one password is compromised, a (proficient) bad actor will try all the sites with that same password.
Put a password or PIN on your phone/tablet, or even better, enable biometrics. Where possible, enable two-factor authentication on your individual social apps (Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) to prevent unauthorized activity, particularly in a scenario where you ignored the first part of this recommendation and then lost your phone.
These are the big three. I could easily write a whole guide on this portion of the process. In fact, I think I will!
#4. Don’t Get Emotional.
As illustrated in our example, it’s very easy to build rapport, and even friendships, with connections you make online as you’re building your brand. It’s exciting to see these relationships develop as you get closer and increase interaction with your fans and admirers — and your haters. Don’t let emotion take over in these scenarios.
If an interaction seems overly friendly, makes you uncomfortable, or seems slightly suspicious, it probably is. A good social engineer who’s marked you as a target of opportunity will intentionally extend the building period of your online connection in order to divert that suspicion — so you should always do some recon of your own.
Who’s this person connected to that you know? Do they have other followers, or follow others in your market? Do they have profiles on other platforms? These are basic but effective verification steps that you can perform fairly easily.
This is another area where I could, and probably will, write a separate guide to help folks stay safe.
#5. Get Checked Regularly.
Monitor all of your platform profiles for strange activity or unauthorized access. Always review posts where you’re mentioned, tagged, or shared. You can usually control this particular feature in the social application’s settings.
Make it a habit to conduct a periodic review of your online footprint, to include public and private information on your social accounts — and stay consistent with your grooming.
Stay smart on how to get support on your various social various platforms if something goes bad. Technical support is usually just a live chat away and these teams will always prioritize potential security issues. | https://cybersage.medium.com/5-essential-cybersecurity-privacy-tips-for-building-your-personal-brand-878ddd4faad6 | ['David Scott'] | 2019-11-06 16:10:14.915000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Security', 'Privacy', 'Social Media', 'Personal Branding'] |
At the Window by Martin Bell | The lights caught her first. They made the window glow with elfin colors, warming the foggy glass, spreading soft light out into the cold street, pulling her in, grabbing her attention, widening her eyes. She pulled her face up against the wet glass, her weight pushing down through her straight arms on to the sill as she balanced on the tip of her toes, resting on the edge of her heavy shoes’ rubber soles. The cold and the snow and the ice seemed to disappear as she peered inside.
The lights were stars in a display of old toys, wispy glints in the sky above a circus parade getting ready to board a huge rust-dented steam ship. Elephants lead the way, their cardboard tusks carving forward as their paper trunks wiggled in the air, proclaiming their exotic music. Next came monkeys, twelve in a row, with long arms past their feet and small red fezzes perched between their big ears; and then there was the ringmaster, round as a pumpkin, and just as bright. More people were dancing behind, acrobats twirling forward hand to ankle and ankle to hand, lion tamers stroking their mustaches and cracking their whips as their dark and furry lions licked their chops.
Behind the lions were tigers, and a small girl in a blue costume balancing on a ball, and a man with no hair throwing balls in the air, and all around were clowns falling and bending, racing and sitting. There were rotund men pulling on ropes, and a horse refusing to be pulled out of its box, and a gorilla, and a giraffe. There were kids watching from the top of cargo boxes, and people in suits and hats climbing down from a Greyhound bus as the porter pulled out their bags.
She saw it all, from end to end, from front to back, from elephant to monkey, from monkey to tiger, from tiger to greyhound. At each new piece she took a short breath and smiled, and she glowed brighter than the stars, and she rubbed away her breath from the glass. Then it was time to go. She took one last glance at the lights, let her weight fall back to her feet, and caught up with her mother at the street corner. | https://medium.com/backhand-stories/at-the-window-by-martin-bell-cefe01d3546c | ['Backhand Stories'] | 2021-02-22 13:35:44.055000+00:00 | ['Fragments', 'Flash Fiction', 'Creative Writing'] |
Is My Idea Good Enough For A Business? | Many of you have probably come up with new ideas on a regular basis and have asked yourself whether there is a business to be created from them. Alternatively you create ideas that could be implemented in your existing business. So how do you decide whether to take them forward or not?
As I have said on many occasions, innovation is a process. And whilst you might think that the process starts with an idea, the process in fact starts with a problem. There are a number of key steps and between each you can decide whether to proceed or not.
Identify and fully understand the problem you are going to solve. You need a deep understanding of the problem from the perspective of potential customers and other beneficiaries, purchasers and the wider market. You have to understand the context in which the problem arises. Determine whether it’s a suitable problem to solve, either via your initial idea or via other possible solutions. Are you the right person with the right expertise and/or team to solve the problem? If you were to solve it, is someone prepared to buy a solution? Who else is solving the same problem already? Build your early stage offer (prototype) so that you can test it within your potential market(s) to demonstrate value and get feedback. Determine your business model, fully understand your value proposition and how your product will be marketed, distributed and used by customers to enter the particular market(s).
At every step of the way it is important to test assumptions and recognise the importance of being rigorous so that you can be sure you don’t waste unnecessary time and resources.
The key thing is to really care about the problem you are attempting to solve. Setting up your business is no easy task so being committed to creating the best outcome for your potential customer is critical. If you care about the problem you will be able to work your way through possible solutions with an open mind and avoid being wedded to the first idea you considered.
“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” Uri Levine | https://medium.com/@bethanbishop/159-is-my-idea-good-enough-for-a-business-40e5b67f3b41 | ['Bethan Bishop'] | 2019-07-19 23:16:34.328000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Design', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business'] |
Drawing up Real time Risk Weighted T&Cs for Merchant Banks | The Cards and payments industry, by dint of sheer operational complexities and significant extraneous stimuli, has always posed special challenges for driving AI actionability.
This extreme complexity stems from the interdependence between various players in the value chain.
Attempted a rough mapping of some of the larger players and their key operations within the industry.
It makes sense to understand this complex value chain. An overly simplistic transactional flow could look like this:
One of the key problem statements I have repeatedly heard some Acquirer and Processor clients raise in the past few years is that of finding a smart, yet expeditious way of acquiring merchants, and making optimum risk-weighted offers to them. The intent is to help expand the acquirer’s market to onboard the maximum number of merchants, while ensuring ‘bad cases’ are filtered out or priced appropriately.
That would entail risk neutral pricing and T&Cs.
But first, it is important to understand the components of the T&C price. This would comprise two key components — Price for “services” and Premium for any risks undertaken by the acquirer.
Pricing of services needs to factor in cost of services such as ‘transaction authorisation’, ‘collection of sales slips’, ‘clearing of transactions to associations or issuers’, ‘helping in settlement of transactions’, ‘reporting’ and other case specific. Risk premium is estimated using various metrics and models to ensure coverage of a broad spectrum of events and market triggers as depicted below:
The key unknown factor for building the personalized T&C is individual level risk scores for each new merchant.
Net risk indexes are created for each new prospect based on identified risks as well as potential of business.
The latter would include indicators such as monthly transaction amount processed, average card transaction value, industry (ex Travel industry normally witnesses higher chargebacks than stable business like FMCG), outlook of the country a business operates in, demand and growth projections for the merchant etc
Various T&C structures can be designed in real time using AI models to recommend the most optimum contract that represents adequately covered interests of both Merchant and Acquirer.
Our solution flow is depicted below:
The process runs on an AWS TPU environment and is built using some native AWS services and Python/Dash programming.
The key outcome is to generate a real time risk weighted T&C for each merchant who signs up, expediting the offer process. Additionally we linked the offer with the closest available ‘advisor’. This allows for interventions in case of counter questions by merchants.
Some of the additional questions answered through this application, for the same project, included the following:
PS: Visuals and workflows are sanitized for all proprietary data and outputs; and meant to be emblematic.
#Risk #Cards #Payments #RiskPricing #Pricing #MerchantRisk | https://medium.com/@tanushree-datta/drawing-up-real-time-risk-weighted-t-cs-for-merchant-banks-e1b89222aba9 | ['Tanushree Datta'] | 2021-07-25 11:24:39.194000+00:00 | ['Merchant Acquiring', 'Cards And Payments', 'Hyper Personalization', 'Risk', 'Pricing Model'] |
The strategic use of images in SEO- Dakshraj Enterprise | When evaluating a page on a website’s structure & layout, there is an always difficult, yet strategic way to use in an SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-friendly manner (beyond ALT tags) that improves your search ranking while enabling you to integrate the essential marketing message(s). Confused? Let’s have a look at an example:
Assume you run a travel website and you need to optimize a particular page for the phrase “Kolkata Hotel”. Suppose that you also need to add an enticing marketing message such as “Book Now & Save 25%!”. The aforementioned tagline demands descriptive text but holds effective elements. That being said, you may require to place the tagline in an image and the key phrase (i.e. Kolkata Hotel) in a header tag. This highlights the desired term, yet still contributes an online marketing opportunity without compromising keyword consistency.
In other terms, images are an exceptional place to include marketing messages that lack the essential keywords and phrases. Leveraging this method will assure that descriptive text is indexed, while less marketing jargon is disregarded. The blend of keyword-rich content and enticing messaging will please both sides of the strategic equalization.
Google also considers text content with images better than content without images. Great image content is, therefore, a major ranking factor for a website. Therefore, you should work with the optimization of images on your website (image SEO) as a component of the optimization of your website as a whole
The purpose of image SEO is to increase the ranking of your images in Google’s image search results and therefore build better visibility for your website. Additionally, image SEO is also an important part of the SEO of your website as a whole, since images can create high-quality content which directly influences the ranking of your website in Google’s general search results. | https://medium.com/@Dakshraj/the-strategic-use-of-images-in-seo-dakshraj-enterprise-c1ae5ffe8a99 | ['Dakshraj Enterprise'] | 2020-03-22 19:00:28.837000+00:00 | ['On Page Seo', 'Image', 'SEO', 'Image Optimization', 'Seo Services'] |
We Design Reality With Words | Before a pandemic chewed through our livelihoods and collective mental health, summer used to be silly season. News slowed down to a crawl, trivia and oddities took their place, and life read a little easier for a while. But now? It’s been surreal season for so long constant overwhelm is the new normal. If words matter to you and you’re concerned about the political climate, you may have come to regard writing with suspicion and doubt. Is there no other way to earn a living with words than by oozing fear, greed, and anger in print or riding the coat tails of celebrities who behaved badly? Recycling the worst of the zeitgeist ad nauseam is no way to improve it, defunding dumb may be more effective.
If there’s no financial incentive to produce garbage then the trash will eventually take itself out. Meanwhile, the internet is a dump, digital detritus abounds, and everyone is scavenging for meaning.
We don’t have to be seagulls. | https://asingularstory.medium.com/we-design-reality-with-words-761e1e89bf77 | ['A Singular Story'] | 2020-08-28 09:24:20.258000+00:00 | ['Media', 'Social Media', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Philosophy'] |
Go: A Pomodoro Timer in 75 Minutes | Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash
I’ve been working with Go professionally for a bit, and I’m still not convinced it's the enterprise language it’s touted as, at least not to a software craftsman. It’s too nuts and bolts. The underdeveloped support for things like encapsulation, composition, and code reuse leads to too much code rot.
That said, looking at its origin at Google, as a response to a growing plague of production Python and Bash scripting, Go is a great nail and hammer for that problem. You can produce decent code that you won’t regret next week pretty damn quickly.
A Pomodoro Timer
In the past, I incorporated the Pomodoro Technique regularly in my workday, but when I started working from home, the mechanical timer I used didn’t fit into my home office (i.e. desk in the living room). The apps I tried were all way too feature busy as though they felt compelled to be more than a timer. I fell out of the habit of using the technique. I decided I needed to pick it up again and looked at my old apps, and alternatives, and decided, instead to whip one up myself in Go. In about 75 minutes (or three timers :-) I had gotimer:
It’s nothing to brag about, it just counts down a duration in the current terminal session:
$ gotimer -time 25m00s
But it was easy in Go to:
Minimally TDD
Produce understandable, readable, formatted, Linted code
Drop into CI/CD
Produce a small, self-contained binary
In a land of agile sprints, I can see why some would view Golang as king. | https://medium.com/@nwillc/go-a-pomodoro-timer-in-75-minutes-7476bb2cbcfd | [] | 2020-12-07 06:56:18.326000+00:00 | ['Pomodoro Technique', 'Go', 'Golang'] |
Less than a simple introduction to Neural Networks (3/4) | Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Weights and parameters
Part 3: Optimization and Backpropagation
Part 4: Hidden Layers and Nonlinearities
The image was taken from this post.
Optimization and Loss
I decided to explain optimization and loss first, before the hidden layers and non-linearities. If you came here before reading the first two parts, then don’t worry. If you are following the post and want the latter, I will try to write it up before next week. If you can leave me feedback in the comments that will be great. If you like the way I explain but interested in a different topic, leave me a comment and I will do my best to cover it.
I will follow the same simplicity for optimization and loss. It was one of the hardest things I had to understand since this is where the complicated calculus and what not takes place. Yet if you are just starting, all the new API’s or libraries like Tensorflow, Keras, Pytorch, etc.. made life so much easier. One line of code and you have the optimization set up.
In part 1, I have explained that you can think of the optimization method as trying combinations of values to learn the weights/parameters (part 2) of the function. However, that’s not the case as you may have guessed.
First of all, the weights are optimized according to how well it is performing. So how do we measure that? In the previous example, we were solving the equation y = wx and we know w=2 (our weight that we are trying to learn), also in my random initialisation of w before the training w = 0.5346. We provided the network with the training examples including the labels or the output that we already know beforehand. For example, we know that if x = 2 then y = 4. The first Iteration/epoch, the network performs an operation called feedforward and it just means calculate the function with the values we have. Let’s take a look at what it might look like in the first iteration:
Iteration 1:
x = 2.0 # One example of input
w = 0.5346 # The weight the network is learning
y = 4 # The real output of the function that we already given. Feedforward:
ŷ(predicted/calculated)= wx = 2 * 0.5346 = 1.0692 #FeedForward
Obviously the answer is not correct, notice that this y is predicted by the network not our labels and it is usually referred to as ŷ (y hat). This is what a feedforward is. Naturally, two questions come up: How does the network know that this is wrong? and How do we make it right?
The first question is easy, you calculate the error as the difference between the expected output and if they are not equal to zero, then it’s wrong. But of course, in real life, there are a number of ways to calculate the error which is out of the scope for this tutorial. For this level, we can think of the loss function as the function that calculated this error: error = y-ŷ.
So far we have:
Feedforward to calculate the ŷ. Loss function to calculate the error.
The second question is a little bit more complicated. This is where the scary backpropagation comes in. I will have to mention the role of derivatives briefly. That is how I think about differentiation, it is measuring the rate of change between let’s say two variables, answering the question of how much did x change when we changed y. To put it into our context, how much did the error change when we changed w? This is what it means by calculating the derivative of the loss function with respect to w (weights). In a larger network, as opposed to the one we used so far, the network will have many weights and layers and all of them contribute to the error. In other words, we have many weights and many layers and one error to be calculated. When the word backpropagation is used, in a nutshell, it means it is integrating the rate of change of error with the rest of the network BUT it starts from the end to the front (bottom to the top depends on how you want to visualise it). If the feedforward is a sequence that goes c = a +b then e = c + d, then backpropagation would go the opposite direction and calculate e = c+d then c = a + b. Of course, it is not doing summation, it is doing partial derivatives and starting with the end of the network to the beginning.
Finally, the magic happens when the weights are optimised by gradient descent. Fundamentally, it takes that rate that was calculated (the gradient/derivative and update (add/subtract ) the weights. That is how the weights are changed. Importantly, it keeps doing that over and over to find what is referred to as the minima of a function which in turn means, finding the values of the weights that have the lowest error. Another important parameter here is called the learning rate. It is a very important number that is multiplied by the calculated rate for updating the weights that tell the network to change the weights fast or slow.
To sum up, the main operations of a neural network are the following:
Feedforward to calculate the ŷ. Loss function to calculate the error. Backpropagation to calculate the rate of change of the loss when changing the values of the weights. Gradient descent to update and optimize the weights.
There are many great tutorials that go in details and explain the mathematics behind it. If you are not interested, at least get familiar with the idea of what it does because that is the core of neural networks. If you can leave some feedback if it needs more simplification or you got the idea. I will edit the post.
The next part, will do some coding and implement a two layers network! | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/less-than-a-simple-introduction-to-neural-networks-3-4-60e60a482eb3 | ['Ahmed Selim'] | 2019-09-23 18:17:51.340000+00:00 | ['Loss Function', 'Backpropagation', 'Optimization', 'Gradient Descent', 'Machine Learning'] |
7 Things You Should Never Do in the Morning | Planning Your Day
If you fail to plan, you’ll also fail to execute. But if you spend the first minutes of your day planning your schedule, you’ll waste enormous amounts of precious energy on that repetitive task.
“Write a to-do list to stay organized” is common productivity advice, but what most people overlook is that you’re too late if you set up your to-do list in the morning.
Yes, being organized is the key to a fulfilled life, but you shouldn’t get organized first thing in the morning.
Your plans should be ready when you get up.
Otherwise, you’ll spend mental energy on prioritizing your tasks and lack that mental power when it comes to doing all these things.
Waking up to a concrete plan for the day will help you be clearer about what you want to achieve and how to get it, but it will also allow you to focus more easily.
What to do instead:
If you want to make the most out of each day, set your priorities before going to bed.
When you wake up, your daily schedule and plan should be ready and waiting for you to tick off your to-dos.
Don’t allow yourself to feel overwhelmed in the early hours of your day. Instead, be well-prepared and set your priorities in the evening.
There’s no better feeling than going to bed knowing that you’re well prepared to tackle the next day.
And when planning your daily schedule and tasks, make sure to keep it to a minimum: Your schedule shouldn’t contain more than a few important tasks per day.
I organize my daily schedule with a simple tool called Todoist and make sure to have no more than 3–5 prioritized tasks per day.
Whenever I tried to get more big tasks done in a day, I ended up feeling overwhelmed and overstressed. This number obviously depends on the tasks you want to get done and can vary depending on your projects but on average, a maximum of 3–5 priorities is a good start. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/7-things-you-should-try-never-to-do-in-the-morning-2ccd8f7ac89d | ['Sinem Günel'] | 2020-11-19 18:00:29.305000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Morning', 'Advice', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Growth'] |
Remote Config with Firebase on Android | Firebase is a powerful Google Platform which helps we build better mobile apps and grow our business. There are many different features are offered by the Firebase. In this article, I will introduce Remote Config feature.
Remote Config
The biggest challenge as a APP developers is getting your users to update their apps. Remote Config lets you change the behavior and appearance of your app without deploying new version and requiring users to download an app update. When you using remote config, you create in-app default value, then you can use Firebase console to control values for various condition. Your App should apply the behavior and appearance according to Remote Config. You can see how does Remote Config work on official document.
The benefits of Remote Config
Testing out new features is very important to the success of your app. You need to quickly adapt to your user’s feedback. Remote Config comes in handy when you want to change the look and feel of your app from Firebase cloud. For example, you want to do experiment on how well a card with image attracts users to click, compared with a card without image does.
As a result, why should I user Remote Config? The most important advantage is you can update your app without deploying you app. It’s useful, right? The other benefit is you can customize value for different condition and track the impact. In addition, Remote Config is very suitable for A/B testing.
How to using Remote Config on Android
1. Add Remote Config in your project
Add the dependency for Remote Config to you app-level build.gradle file
compile 'com.google.firebase:firebase-config:11.8.0'
2. Setting up the parameters in Firebase Console
In Firebase console, set up the following parameter. You just need to filled in Parameter key and default value, then click ADD PARAMETER
and don’t forget to click PUBLISH CHANGES
After adding parameter, you also can add value for condition(optional). A condition is used to target a group of app users. Conditions let you to apply different parameter value based on app, market/region, user in random percentile, device language, etc.
For example, you can add value for condition. The setting of value is true, and this applies to ZA market.
3. Implement Remote Config in your app
First, you need to get a Remote Config object instance and enable developer mode, which you can use to increase the number of fetches available per hour during development.
FirebaseRemoteConfigSettings remoteConfigSettings = new FirebaseRemoteConfigSettings
.Builder()
.setDeveloperModeEnabled(BuildConfig.DEBUG)
.build();
firebaseRemoteConfig.setConfigSettings(remoteConfigSettings);
Then, set in-app default values from an XML file. This XML file is should be put in your .../res/xml directory. An app uses in-app default value, and when fetch Remote Config tasking successful, it will override your in-app default value.
mFirebaseRemoteConfig.setDefaults(R.xml.remote_config_defaults);
About Remote Config XML file, each entry has key and value. The value could be retrieved as long, double, String or boolean. Note that the key have to be same as parameter key which you set on Firebase console.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<defaultsMap>
<entry>
<key>showRecentSearchImage</key>
<value>false</value>
</entry>
</defaultsMap>
After finishing setting default value in app, how should you fetch remote value from Firebase server? Below is the block of code. You can notice that you can set cache expiration when you fetch Remote Config from server. The default cache expiration is 12 hours, you can set 0 if developer mode enabled, it will fetch remote config frequently, it’s very useful for debugging. In addition, when fetched values has succeed, don’t forget to call firebaseRemoteConfig.activateFetched() , it must be activated before newly fetched values are returned.
Finally, let’s go to use values. You need to retrieve the value from FirebaseRemoteConfig object using the same key name.
firebaseRemoteConfig.getBoolean("showRecentSearchImage")
Now, you can use this value for displaying image or not.
Conclusion
Remote Config is very useful for delivering the right user experience to users. You can quickly and easily update your app without deploy your app to play store. Try to use Firebase Remote Config, then MAKE AWESOME APP. | https://medium.com/tech-travelstart/remote-config-with-firebase-on-android-778a600674a3 | ['Hsiangyu Jamie'] | 2017-12-27 08:04:34.160000+00:00 | ['Android App Development', 'Software Development', 'Android Developers', 'Firebase', 'Android'] |
Robots against COVID-19 | In India, the second-most elevated number of Covid-19 cases, a modest bunch of medical clinics began to utilize robots to associate patients with their friends and family, and help medical services laborers on the bleeding edges of the pandemic. Invento Robotics has planned to have robots to do undertakings going from sterilizing surfaces to addressing understanding inquiries and empowering video interviews with specialists. Utilizing facial-acknowledgment innovation, the robot can review the names and faces of patients it has collaborated with. Mitra can meander around an emergency clinic autonomously, helping patients associate with family and specialists through its cameras and a video screen appended to its chest. It’s basically a robot that can draw in patients and additions to their trust. It might sound amusing however we are utilizing robots to carry humankind to clinics that can be one step to seeing what we see in the future with artificial intelligence. | https://medium.com/@10782466/robots-against-covid-19-d09338d291fa | ['Sam Lorenzo'] | 2020-11-12 23:45:50.349000+00:00 | ['Robots'] |
Stop using Redux (with React) ASAP!! | OK, that is a clickbait headline, but there’s a good reason behind it! I want to draw your attention to an important issue: the pros and cons of using Redux. I will also share some other libraries available for use.
What’s Redux?
Before we dive into why you should stop using Redux, let’s first define what it is. According to Wikipedia, redux is “an open source Js library for data state management”. If you are familiar with web development on React you are probably using Redux. This is due to the fact that from day one, state management on React has been very challenging and there was no global built-in store. To solve this issue developers started using Redux to manage the global state of their applications. There were alternatives to redux like Mobx, which served the same purpose but with a different API.
The global state of the application is the one shared between components and pages. It can be accessed and modified by any component connected to it (named the Connected Component).
What are the pros of using Redux?
· It allows management of the global state.
· Time travel debugging using the Redux devtools
· Able to set up middleware: functions that intercept changes in the state and can alter them.
· Able to do lazy loading.
· The reducer pattern.
Here is a code sample of Redux:
Basic example with Redux
But not everything about Redux is good! Here are some of its shortcomings:
· Single global state. Redux stores all data in a single variable called “store.” This is a problem because on large apps the store will grow, making it difficult to find specific values on it.
· Lazy loading is complicated in Redux. When you lazy load the state, you have to deal with partial states and you must destroy and recreate everything when a new portion is loaded. Did I mention why we need to have the full state loaded in memory?
· Lastly and more importantly, redux is overcomplicated (I should have started there), you might think that this complexity is justified, but is it really justified? What if you can achieve more by doing less, not having to declare reducer, actions, action creator, the mapToProps functions… Not to mention the issue with asynchronous calls: the ones you always have when fetching from the server. You will need a new plugin like Redux-thunk.
Then what can we do? Let’s see some alternatives:
Mobx-react: one of the oldest libraries for state management for React, it uses the observable pattern.
Context API: It is the new built-in global state manager, it was introduced with hooks for functional components. I will show this piece of code and you’ll understand why I don’t like it:
Provides multiple contexts
And here is a code samples for Context API:
Atomic state manager (Jotai/Recoil): they are very similar and both prioritize ease-of-use. The idea behind them is to have the state split into different atoms, with each atom handling a different app domain/context, somewhat like the reducers on Redux. The biggest difference is that the atoms can be imported for any specific component without merging everything in a single-entry point.
Atomic state manager diagram
Advantages:
· Lazy loading is done by default, since there is not a single-entry point. Instead, atoms are imported for the specific component where they will be used.
· No dispatching actions, in fact, the syntax can be almost identical to the useState hook.
· Easy to use, small learning curve.
· Support for overriding the getter and setter of atoms.
· Can use reducers and actions, but they’re optional.
Disadvantages:
· Smaller support community.
· No store access outside components (not a huge disadvantage).
· No middleware and plugins.
Here is a code sample for Jotai:
Atom declaration:
usage in the component:
This is the simplest atom that you can create with Jotai. But keep in mind that the library allows for many features not listed in this article. For more information please refer to the official documentation.
Conclusion
So, as is true with most other articles that use clickbait headlines, the real truth never comes through in a pithy headline. Redux doesn’t have so many problems, and its alternatives are not so perfect. In fact, both of them have their own pros and cons.
I personally value ease-of-use and straightforwardness, and with an atomic state manager, you can easily achieve both.
Redux is overcomplicated but “it is easy once you understand it,” or so says a friend of mine. They are not wrong, but having to write all the boilerplates to start coding to then write more boilerplates to introduce modifications and new functionalities… it makes for a painful and time consuming process (do more by doing less).
So in conclusion, maybe you shouldn’t stop using redux ASAP. You shouldn’t change your state manager on your production web application. Instead, consider using an atomic state manager for your new projects. | https://medium.com/@arielbatista7/stop-using-redux-with-react-asap-3cf4fcbedfc3 | ['Ariel Batista'] | 2021-09-16 20:26:41.675000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Front End Development', 'React', 'Redux', 'State Management'] |
10 Useful ML Practices For Python Developers | → ML in production series
Come join Maxpool — A Data Science community to discuss real ML problems!
Sometimes as a data scientist we forget what are we paid for. We are primarily developers, then researchers and then maybe mathematicians. Our first responsibility is to quickly develop solutions which are bug-free.
Just because we can make models doesn’t mean we are gods. It doesn’t give us the freedom to write crap code.
Since my start, I have made tremendous mistakes and thought of sharing what I see to be the most common skills for ML engineering. In my opinion, it’s also the most lacking skill in the industry right now.
I call them software-illiterate data scientists because a lot of them are non-CS Coursera baptised engineers. And, I myself have been that 😅
If it came to hiring between a great data scientist and a great ML engineer, I will hire the later.
Let's get started.
1. Learn to write abstract classes
Once you start writing abstract classes, you will know how much clarity it can bring to your codebase. They enforce the same methods and method names. If many people are working on the same project, everyone starts making different methods. This can create unproductive chaos. | https://medium.com/modern-nlp/10-great-ml-practices-for-python-developers-b089eefc18fc | ['Pratik Bhavsar'] | 2020-09-13 06:13:45.670000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
BINANCE SMART CHAIN PUNJAB | Direct WhatsApp- https://bit.ly/2op0VQr
Website Visit- https://bit.ly/2nJJwBV
Binance Smart Chain?
Binance Smart Chain is independent blockchain that runs tandem and Binance Chain. it’s built on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), integrated with a strong smart contract. thanks to which it’s highly adaptable on a blockchain network. Binance Smart Chain not a layer two or off-chain solution, because it was pretended. It’s an independent blockchain that would run albeit Binance Chain went offline. Both the blockchains bear a robust resemblance from a design standpoint.
As Binance Smart Chain is adaptable with Ethereum Virtual Machine, it proved beneficial for the users and therefore the developers.Also, it’s easy for users to integrate MetaMask on the Binance Smart Chain with a couple of simple settings.
Difference Between Binance Chain And Binance Smart Chain?
1.Binance Chain:
Binance Chain is made on distributed consensus. it’s a highly performing matching engine that works on a quick and secured decentralized digital asset exchange.
Binance Chain
· BEP And Mini-BEP2
BEP may be a technical standard on which tokens are issued.
· Peggy Coins
Peggy Coins like BTC, ETH, XRP, etc are wont to peg the native assets.
· Proof Of Stake And BFT
Through POS consensus, users can stake more high market price tokens. With the assistance of BFT, the BSC system is in a position to work albeit any node fails.
· Binance Chain Governance
Binance Chain has its own in-built governance chain that permits the BNB holders to supply proposals for addition of trading pairs.
· Match Engine
A match engine executes the trading process just one occasion in each block, while the execution price may vary from buyer to seller.
2. Binance Smart Chain:
Binance Smart Chain could also be a dual-chain architecture that empowers its users to make decentralized applications and digital assets on one blockchain and take advantage of fast trading to exchange and other .
EVM Compatible
As Binance Smart Chain is made on Ethereum Virtual Machine, For developers, it had been easy to integrate their projects over Ethereum and for users it had been ebay to integrate Metamask on the Binance Smart Chain with a couple of simple settings.
Proof Of Stake
Authority Through POS consensus, users can stake more high market price tokens.
Cross-Chain Contact Event (Trade, Transfer, And Support) Binance smart chain has lower transaction fees. for instance , for an easy money transfer, it costs only 0.01 USD.
Binance Chain Governance
Binance Chain has its own in-built governance chain that permits the BNB holders to supply proposals for addition of trading pairs.
Growth (1)
it’s interoperable with a Binance coin. it’s also compatible with apps that are initially coded for Ethereum.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
Binance Chain, the house of the BNB currency. It’s optimized for ultra-fast trading well, Binance Smart Chain is here to vary that, a replacement blockchain with a full-fledged environment for developing high-performance decentralized applications. it had been built for cross-chain compatibility with Binance Chain to make sure that users get the simplest of both worlds.
Introduction
Binance Chain was launched by Binance in April 2019. Its primary focus is to facilitate fast, decentralized (or non-custodial) trading. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most important decentralized application (or DApp) thereon is Binance DEX, one among the friendliest decentralized exchanges out there. you’ll use it via an internet interface at binance.org or through its native integration with Trust Wallet.
Due to limitations inherent to blockchain systems, however, the chain doesn’t have much flexibility — smart contracts during a system optimized for fast trading could significantly congest the network. Remember CryptoKitties? At the peak of its popularity, it brought the Ethereum blockchain to a standstill. Scalability remains one among the foremost challenging hurdles to blockchain development.
How does Binance Smart Chain work?
Consensus
Binance Smart Chain achieves ~3 second block times with a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. Specifically, it uses something called Proof of Staked Authority (or PoSA), where participants stake BNB to become validators. If they propose a legitimate block, they’ll receive transaction fees from the transactions included in it. Note that, unlike many protocols, there’s no block subsidy of freshly-minted BNB, as BNB isn’t inflationary. On the contrary, the availability of BNB decreases over time, because the Binance team regularly conducts coin burns.
Cross-chain compatibility
Binance Smart Chain was envisioned as an independent but complementary system to the prevailing Binance Chain. Dual-chain architecture is employed , with the thought being that users can seamlessly transfer assets from one blockchain to a different . during this way, rapid trading are often enjoyed on Binance Chain, while powerful decentralized apps are often built on BSC. With this interoperability, users are exposed to a huge ecosystem which will cater to a myriad of use cases.
BEP-2 and BEP-8 tokens from Binance Chain are often swapped for BEP-20 tokens, the new standard introduced for Binance Smart Chain. have you ever read An Introduction to ERC-20 Tokens? Then you’ll already be conversant in the format of BEP-20. It uses an equivalent functions as its Ethereum counterpart.
To move tokens from one chain to a different (i.e., BEP-2 to BEP-20 or vice versa), the only method is probably to use the Binance Chain Wallet, available on Chrome and Firefox. inspect Use Binance Chain Extension Wallet for a guide to the present .
Decentralized Finance on Binance Smart Chain
You may know that variety of digital assets — like BTC, LTC, ETH, EOS, or XRP — exist already on Binance Chain as “Peggy coins.” These are tokens that are pegged to assets on their native chains. as an example , you would possibly plan to lock up 10 BTC so as to receive 10 BTCB on Binance Chain. At any time, you’ll trade your 10 BTCB for 10 BTC, meaning that the worth of BTCB should closely track that of native BTC.
By doing this, you effectively port these assets on to Binance Chain. Curious about how this type of thing are often achieved? inspect Tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum Explained.
Because of the pliability afforded by Binance Smart Chain, assets from variety of various chains are often utilized in the growing DeFi space. as an example , applications like PancakeSwap allow users to trustlessly exchange assets (much like Uniswap), engage in yield farming, and vote on proposals. Similar projects include BurgerSwap and BakerySwap (if you’re new crypto, hi! We’re big fans of decentralized exchanges named after foods).
Closing thoughts
Binance Smart Chain greatly extends the functionality of the first Binance Chain and joins a variety of cutting-edge protocols designed to bridge the gap between various blockchains. Though still in its infancy, the promise of BNB staking alongside EVM compatibility makes the platform a perfect engine for developers building powerful decentralized applications.
Features of Binance Smart Chain Development
· High-Performance Business Platform
· Create/ Unlock Wallet
· Lower Transaction Fees
· Synthetix
· Cross-Chain Asset Transfer
· BNB Staking
· Compatibility With (EVM) Ethereum Virtual Machine
· Trustworthiness
· High Transparency
· Immutability
· Accelerated Transactions
Create/ Unlock Wallet: Binance Chain browser extension mainly wont to send and receive funds on Binance Smart Chain, Binance Chain & Ethereum. Binance Chain browser extension are often integrated with other Binance Chain products, which may be more beneficial for transactions and authorizations with none access to customers, private keys.
Lower Transaction Fees: Binance smart chain (BSC) has lower transaction fees. for instance , For an easy money transfer, it price only 0.01 USD. The transaction fees are paid in BNB tokens
Synthetix: Synthetix is primarily a DEX (Decentralized Exchange) but also a big platform for the issuance of synthetic-assets & it enables users to lend SNX — Synthetix Network Token. Synthetix permits users to use a special of asset type as their preferred lending method on the Decentralized Finance DeFi platform.
Binance Staking: it’s a big business opportunity to stake Binance. Annually, a user can earn approximately 60 percentage rewards on the staked Binance BNB. The minimum locked cost is 10 BNB.
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The staking business process may be a flexible one.
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WhatsApp no:- +91–7985202681 | https://medium.com/@aiyersaurabh/binance-smart-chain-punjab-b6a82cd96b12 | ['Saurabh Aiyer'] | 2021-06-08 07:10:41.760000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Binance', 'Binance Chain', 'Binance Coin', 'Binance Dex'] |
If You’re Not Using Dildos, You’re Missing Out | A year ago, I had acquired almost every kind of sex toy. Except a dildo.
I don’t think of masturbation as a substitute for sex. It’s why I do it even when I’m not really in the mood to jump my husband. It’s why I miss jilling off if I haven’t done it for a while, no matter how much sex I’ve been having.
It’s also the reason I’ve never felt the need to masturbate the same way I fuck.
Fucking my husband involves a lot of foreplay. It involves some bondage, a few sex toys, and plenty of dirty talk. But penetration is the centerpiece.
As much as I love all of the other things we do and as essential as they are, I almost always want to end things on a good hard fuck.
The initial penetration is brief but it’s one of the best experiences there is. The thrusts that bring me to an orgasm are exquisite. And all of the fucking that happens in between overwhelms me with pleasure so much that I can’t help but moan and shout.
But I never bothered with penetrative play when I was by myself. I come the hardest from clit stimulation, so I didn’t really see the point in using anything but vibrators to get myself off.
It didn’t help that my first experience with dildos was kind of lackluster.
I was excited when I discovered an online sex shop, but some of the color drained out of that excitement once I started clicking through page after page of sex toys. There were so many options and I didn’t have a clue where to begin.
I decided to narrow down my selection by making a list of my criteria.
It should be shaped like a cock, because at least I kind of knew how to use a cock.
It should vibrate because that’s what sex toys do, right?
It should also be big, because most young girls are naive enough to think that this is an extremely important feature.
And I wanted it to be cute, because nothing makes me giddier than something adorable.
I ordered the only toy that fit that description. A sparkly purple vibrating dildo that was as long as a forearm and thicker than a first sex toy has any right to be.
Using it was a challenge to say the least. I could get the tip of the toy inside me, but anything beyond that was a bit of a challenge. The slow, shallow thrusts I managed to give myself felt good but took so much effort.
What didn’t, though, was resting the toy on my clit. The best part of fucking myself with it wasn’t the fucking at all — it was the moments I spent rubbing the toy against my pussy to warm myself up. The way the purple silicone felt when it moved across my pink lips was better than the way it felt when I pushed it inside me.
Then I turned it on and I felt like I was being electrified with pleasure. Feeling the toy’s vibrations against my clit was a life-changing moment. It was an entirely new sensation and one that I already didn’t want to give up.
I didn’t care how dong-shaped my toy was, it only had one function to me.
I did away with the phallic toys completely. All of my next purchases were bullet vibrators. The vibrations were all I wanted, so I bought toys that didn’t do anything but pack a lot of motorized buzzing in a small package.
I eventually decided to treat myself to a bunny vibrator. It was a little more expensive but I was curious about what those little silicone ears could do.
Turns out they could do a lot. The vibrations were the perfect strength. The toy spread out the stimulation very nicely. But most importantly, its shape meant I could ride it the same way I used to hump pillows and stuffed animals to orgasm.
Even though this one was perfect, I knew I would buy more sex toys in the future. Curiosity would get the better of me and I would want to try out a few new things. But I was absolutely certain that I would never buy a dildo. There just wasn’t any point.
Then the Ghost Dick made its way into my life.
The Dildo That Wobbled Its Way Into My Life
The Ghost Dick is just a regular dildo. It’s shaped like a cock, with a modest head and a veiny texture, and a pair of silicone balls at the base to complete the picture.
But it’s a sex toy that had a lot of significance because it was meant to represent someone.
At the time I bought it, I had been involved with a guy who sent me lots of flirty, sexual emails often with highly appealing and aesthetically pleasing dick pics attached to them.
Those exchanges made me extremely horny. I fantasized about him a lot and I wanted a way to make those fantasies even more vivid.
So, I asked him for his measurements and ordered a dildo that fit them.
It was something I could put my mouth on when I thought about what it would be like to blow him. It would give me a sense of what stroking him would feel like. And more importantly, I could read his dirty emails and thrust the toy inside me, feeling the exact dimensions of his cock while I dreamt about fucking him.
The postal service moves quickly, but unfortunately for me it’s no match for how fast an emotionally unavailable guy can change his mind.
By the time the dildo showed up at my doorstep, my flirty friend had moved on. He was done with whatever we had.
I was heartbroken, sad, and the owner of a toy that didn’t really make sense anymore.
I dubbed it the Ghost Dick because the cock it was meant to represent wasn’t part of my life anymore.
The thrill of using it was gone. The fantasies it was meant to make more authentic were gone. The person I was going to use it to feel closer to is someone I needed to learn to distance myself from. I didn’t see any point in it anymore.
I stuck it in the back of my dresser drawer where I wouldn’t see it anymore. And that’s where it stayed until I started paying attention to my strongest orgasms.
Chasing Those Blended Orgasms
If there’s one thing that changed my mind about dildos, it’s blended orgasms.
Clitoral orgasms have always been my jam — still are. But I started realizing that there were a few things that made them better.
The slow and steady buildup I got from pussy massages made me come really hard.
So did the first orgasm I was allowed to have after being edged a few times.
But a lot of my strongest, most satisfying orgasms weren’t exactly from clitoral stimulation. They were blended orgasms I got from enjoying multiple types of sexual stimulation at once.
They’re the ones I get when my husband sucks on my nipples while crooking his fingers to rub against my G-spot.
They’re the ones I get when his tongue runs circles around my clit while his finger gently thrusts into my ass.
And I get them very reliably when both his hands are at work, fingering and rubbing my pussy at the same time.
Some of my absolute favorite blended orgasms, though, came from getting fucked. It wasn’t him pounding into me that got me off the hardest. It’s when he found a good tempo with his cock and reached around to slowly rub circles around my clit with his fingers.
It felt so much better than getting fucked. But more impressively, it made the clit stimulation feel even more intense.
I started wondering if there was a way for me to recreate that powerful sensation when I was on my own.
That was the Ghost Dick’s time to shine.
Enough time had passed since the Ghost Dick earned its name. It had gone from a toy that made me feel sad, to one that made me feel weird, and now it was just a silicone cock without a whole lot of feelings attached to it.
When I had an hour to myself, I locked the bedroom door and reached in the back of the drawer for it and a few other sex toys.
I found some really hot porn and touched my body softly while I watched it. Once I was horny enough to play, I dripped a thin stream of lube on the dildo and stroked it to run the slick liquid all over it.
Running my hand over it felt arousing, like it was activating the parts of my brain that light up when I’m giving an actual handjob.
I rubbed my pussy with the fingers that were wet with lube and then rubbed the dildo against my vulva. The bumpy ridges from the veiny texture were surprisingly stimulating and I got even more excited about having it in me.
I was wet and ready when it slid into me. I didn’t feel the same exhilaration that I do from the initial thrust of a cock, but I felt a jolt of pleasure that kept intensifying as I fucked myself with the toy.
I picked up my phone, slid my finger up the screen, and tapped the camera app. I hovered it over my waist, angling it so I could get a good look at the action. And what I saw was really fucking hot. Watching that wet dildo thrusting into me was such an arousing sight, I could’ve spent all my me-time staring at that little screen.
But I put down the phone after a few minutes. I wanted to get back to business.
I thrust the dildo faster, letting my instincts guide the pace and depth. I felt the pleasure mounting and bucked my hips while pushing the toy into me some more.
After hiding in the dark for a couple of months, the Ghost Dick had finally made me come.
I was already impressed. It wasn’t as strong or as satisfying as a clitoral orgasm would’ve been, but it was definitely something that was worth working for.
I half-watched the stepdad scenario that was playing out on my laptop while I tried to give myself even more pleasure. This time, I had both hands involved — fucking myself with the dildo while rubbing my clit.
Getting both going is harder than it looks, and I found myself slowing down one hand when I didn’t mean to and almost forgetting to push the dildo into my pussy when I got lost in all the fun my clit was having.
All that faltering didn’t matter, because I got there and I got there fast. I breathed a surprised and highly satisfied sigh once my breath came back.
I reached for a vibrator to see just how far I could take this little experiment.
This was a lot easier. The buzzing on the clit did its magic and all I had to do was hold the little bunny in place. My other hand did all the work — gripping the dildo around its firm balls and fucking myself faster than I thought I could manage.
I felt my forearm getting sore but I also felt myself not giving a goddamn fuck. I wasn’t going to stop now. I powered through the discomfort until all I could feel was pure pleasure. My entire pussy was getting stimulated inside and out and the pleasure built up fast.
My hand only slowed down when all my muscles started tensing. I tried my best to keep the pace going, but it was hopeless. My hips were twisting and bucking and all I could do was try give myself a few slow half-thrusts while I came.
That was it. It wasn’t just an incredible orgasm. It wasn’t just one of the best masturbation sessions I had in a very long time. It was the moment I broke my monogamous relationship with vibrators and fell in love with dildos.
A Year of Dildos
I haven’t stopped experimenting. After years without even owning a dildo, I’ve been acquiring new ones, appreciating how different they all are, and make very frequent use of them.
When I line up my sex toys for a really fine masturbation session, there’s always at least one that’s designed for penetration.
They came especially handy when I started shooting porn as an occasional hobby.
Filming myself undressing, using vibrators, and going at myself with my fingers is a lot of fun. But nothing beats the visuals I get with a dildo. I can suck on them, use one to give myself a pussyjob, and the aesthetics of penetration are incredible.
I even found myself buying something I never thought I would even consider — an absolutely massive dildo.
I could ride my suction cup dildos just fine, but I wasn’t getting good angles when I filmed it. So, I wanted something long. Like, over a foot long.
Turns out you can’t get a dildo that long without it also being intimidatingly thick. To my surprise, even that one has been great to use. It takes more work to get it in, but visually the results are fantastic. I can’t get it in very far, it makes me feel very stretched out, but it still felt good. Though I still can’t imagine reaching for that one unless there’s a camera rolling.
I also got a squishy, floppy, slim blue dildo for ass play. I had buttplugs and I loved them, but I found myself missing the deep thrusts that I get to enjoy when my ass is getting fucked. With this wobbly one, I can give myself the same kind of sensation when I’m on my own.
I’ve also incorporated them into my couple play.
My husband bought me a popsicle-style dildo because I’m still the girl who insisted that her first sex toy be a purple sparkly cock. It’s adorable, and it feels even better than it looks. My husband will fuck me with it while I try to imagine how many of its rainbow colored stripes are going inside me.
Having him use it on me makes the pleasure even stronger. He can also thrust faster and harder than his cock can or than I can manage when playing with dildos on my own.
It also enabled some threesome roleplay that’s been really fucking hot. I have a recurring fantasy of having someone eat me out while someone else fucks me. With a dildo and his tongue, Mr. Austin can make that daydream turn into a physically intense reality.
My fanciest dildos, though, are the ones that fuck me without much assistance from myself.
One is a thrusting dildo that does all the physical work for me. The other is a full sex machine that is even more versatile. Being able to use them hands-free is a luxury I’d rather not have to give up. If my other dildos hadn’t won me over, I’m certain these would have.
Add Variety to Your Solo Play
Rediscovering dildos completely changed the way I masturbate.
I’ll sometimes use penetration to get myself started. Other times, I’ll fuck myself until I come.
Other times, I’ll go all out and use a dildo and vibrator at once, like they’re both racing to see who can make me come first. It doesn’t matter in the end, though, because every single time the result is the same — an incredible and highly satisfying climax.
And I almost missed out on this because of a bogus experience with a thick silicone dong back when I was younger.
What I didn’t realize back then is that you don’t have to pick a type of sex toy.
Using a dildo doesn’t mean you don’t get to use a vibrator. It doesn’t mean your clit won’t get any action. All it means is that you’re leveling up the way you jill off.
If you haven’t played with dildos, I strongly recommend you give it a try.
If you can get off from it, give yourself a marathon session with your new toy. Or use it back to back with your vibrator. Better yet, use them together — it takes a bit of coordination but it’s worth it.
You deserve as much pleasure as you can give yourself. So, don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t overthink it. Just fuck yourself well and good with all the toys you want.
This article contains affiliate links to products I love. If you’re only going to own one dildo, I would get the Velvet Mini Thruster Teddy — it’s versatile, automatic, and the texture is unbelievable soft. That’s an affiliate link, too, by the way. If you click on it and make a purchase, I earn a small commission and you will be supporting my work! ❤ | https://medium.com/love-emma/if-youre-not-using-dildos-you-re-missing-out-a6fd10052d26 | ['Emma Austin'] | 2020-11-22 12:24:35.454000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Life', 'Sex', 'Self', 'Women'] |
Raising funds for charity with Portis and RadiCards | Sharing is caring
RadiCards lets people buy and send e-cards in the form of NFTs to themselves, or their friends and families. When someone buys one of those NFTs, the funds raised are donated to activists and charities supporting the fight for freedom around the world.
The RadiCards team is not only enabling charitable donations to worthwhile causes around the world. It is also speeding up the adoption of Web3 technologies. Two worthy causes we’re proud to stand behind.
We are thrilled to announce that you can now use your Portis account to do your part and fight for good!
Check it out on RadiCards (https://radi.cards/) and make your contribution today.
Gonna sock it to ya!
The Portis team has something special planned for ETH Denver, together with RadiCards. Every person in the hackathon that shows up at our booth will get a voucher from us, which will let them:
💰 Receive a few dollars worth of ETH into their new Portis account
🦄 Buy an NFT on RadiCards, donating that ETH to charity
🧦 Get an awesome pair of socks from us for being such a good person!
To get your socks, you will need to use Portis to show us the NFT you just received (or donated) after letting us make a donation in your name. A “Proof-of-Charity” if you will.
We aim to demonstrate how easy it can be to engage people in this way, allowing anyone to make a charitable donation while enjoying an immutable and everlasting proof of doing so.
“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.” — Maya Angelou
The Portis Team
Have any questions? Join the conversation on our Telegram and Twitter | https://medium.com/portis/raising-funds-for-charity-with-portis-and-radicards-97e882ac15a9 | [] | 2019-01-20 18:24:35.453000+00:00 | ['Erc721', 'Charity', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Nft'] |
Dan’s Weeknotes s07e20 | Dan’s Weeknotes s07e20
Oh, hi
It was a couple of weeks of things winding down and people maybe celebrating just the prospect of having a break rather than excitement for Christmas itself.
Last year I was struck by how strong the Christmas game is at Citizens Advice. The quiz last year was really something (see season 5 episode 11). Even with everything remote this year my colleagues put on some special things.
What was good?
I met Jonathan in a nearby park to play a game of chess outdoors¹. It was so lovely. A couple of Eastern European workmen were so impressed with us, sounds like the boards don’t get used that much — let alone in winter. I lost the game, as usual.
I had a video call with Sam which was great. I always appreciate catching up with her.
I liked my colleague Giulia (Head of User Research and Design)’s reflections on 3 months at Citizens Advice:
For our Christmas party Tom (chief analyst) and my teams did an online escape room and it was superb.
I did a collaborative baking session and cake quiz over Zoom. We made gingerbread biscuits. It worked pretty well although I’m glad I practiced the recipe the night before. And 20 minutes before the call I realised I didn’t have any eggs. Thank goodness for corner shops. And also one of my colleagues Vicky was doing a vegan version and I’d like to practice my vegan baking chops next year because I don’t really have any to speak of.
Will Myddelton’s blog post about fixing problems with oral cultures was really thought-provoking. I think particularly because I know that I need to evolve and improve my own ways of working:
This blog post was a good summary and public recognition of some incredible work done by my colleagues:
Tracey Gyateng published a couple of posts based on her recent research:
Tom had an idea — a new finding and theory from patterns in our data — and then wrote a Workplace post the next day. I contributed some suggestions. Would either of us have done such a thing at the start of 2020? I don’t think so. Plus Tom writes really well about our data.
In this blog post by Vicky Houghton-Price I loved the point about content designers being able to indicate how good your service is. I too am a big fan of content designers:
I really liked Natalie (digital workplace lead)’s blog post about team culture. The ingenious use of emojis is great:
Ireti (data architect) and Pooja (data scientist) are coming to the end of their contracts and I can honestly say that their handover has been the best I’ve ever had from contractors. For the data architecture it’s been great to have Josh (data architect) join so he can build on Ireti’s work. And Pooja made a breakthrough in making her machine learning model sustainable, and has really put the effort in to documenting her work on Confluence. Next year I’m going to be encouraging documentation on Confluence in a big way.
I took part in a kick off workshop with Emily Webber for work that Giulia is leading on establishing a capability framework across our part of the directorate. I’m looking forward to working on this in the new year.
I ran an internal interview process for a short term opportunity and I was really glad to get it done before Christmas, plus I think I did a thorough and fair job of it.
Our regular open data dashboard session (now fortnightly) where we discuss data trends was one of the most significant in a long time. I was really struck by how different the topic patterns of advice we’re giving to clients are compared with the period after the first lockdown, and before lockdown.
I won the ‘star baker’ award at this year’s staff awards for our part of the directorate².
What could have been better?
I wish I had finished more things.
What are you looking forward to next week? | https://weeknot.es/dans-weeknotes-s07e20-d86c7c967e0a | ['Dan Barrett'] | 2020-12-22 12:53:32.078000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Data Science', 'Data', 'Charity', 'Weeknotes'] |
4 Life Lessons From Tweenage Boys | Why do all 90s baseball movies have a similar plot?
Last summer, I rewatched the classics The Sandlot, Rookie of the Year, and Little Big League with my nine-year-old son. The common thread in these feature films is the young boys enamored with the world of Major League Baseball.
In their story arc, these little boys of summer lust after the Big Leagues, only to realize that their friendships and being kids are what truly makes them happy. They play for the love of the game, not the recognition.
You know what — I want that vibe, too. I want to show up for life for the love of the game.
After the 90s movie marathon, I concluded that tweenage boys are the role models for living a life with inner purpose. I started paying more attention to my own kids’ wisdom, and it turns out they are smart AF. Here are four life lessons I learned from my tween son. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/4-life-lessons-from-tweenage-boys-8ebb2853d58c | ['Kristina Jancar'] | 2020-12-28 19:32:24.699000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Family', 'Life', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons'] |
7 New Dash Apps Made by the Dash Community | We are always looking for new and creative ways that the community is utilizing Dash and Plotly to make their web apps.
If you’re interested in learning to make these apps yourself, a great starting point is our workshop series. Our next workshops, in Boston, will offer advanced training for Dash and R Shiny April 14–15. Chris Parmer, the creator of Dash, will be discussing this open source library for creating analytic web apps with Python. You’ll learn how to create Dash apps like the ones in this post, plus more advanced ones and the best usage of the latest Dash features.
In the meantime, check out these 7 fresh Dash apps made by the Dash community. Alternatively, you can view a variety of apps at the Dash Gallery maintained by Plotly.
Dash: build beautiful web-based interfaces in Python
1. Great Balls of Fire: NASA Fireballs Open API
This Dash app was made using fireball data from 1988 to 2017 from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Dash app | Dash author: Ivan Nieto | BitBucket code
2. Zika Outbreak Explorer
This is a Dash that utilizes Plotly’s crossfilter to look at Zika incidents over time.
Dash app | Dash author: Charley Ferrari | GitHub code
3. Finding Bigfoot
Here’s an exploratory Dash app based on a Bigfoot Sightings from data.world. It demonstrates several plots (including a map), a grid layout built with Bootstrap, interactions with an input field, and caching.
Dash app | Dash author: Timothy Renner | GitHub code
4. Climate Change Life Events
Climate history and possible futures showing your important life events, inspired by Sophie Lewis.
Dash app | Dash author: Greg Schivley | GitHub code
5. Earthquake Explorer
A Plotly Dash application showing earthquake data from the US Geological Survey.
Dash app | Dash author: Giacomo Debidda | GitHub code
6. Street Quality Identification Device
The technology consists of taking pictures of the streets (with a camera installed on a vehicle) every second, and combine this information with an accelerometer data, measuring the ride quality of the streets. The first city to use this technology is the city of Syracuse and the result is below.
Dash app | Dash author: Adriano M. Yoshino| GitHub Code
7. Visualizing MRI Data
Visualization tool for (f)MRI data-sets using Plotly Dash. Submitted to the TransIP VPS competition — and it won the 1st prize!
Dash app | Dash author: Lukas Snoek | GitHub Code | https://medium.com/plotly/7-new-dash-apps-made-by-the-dash-community-196998112ce3 | [] | 2018-03-28 14:39:52.097000+00:00 | ['Rstats', 'Data Visualization', 'Rstudio', 'Dash'] |
Human Activity Tracker System | Photo by Chander R on Unsplash
Motivation
With the advent and now ubiquitous presence of smart devices such as cellular phones and fitness watches around us, an exciting new area of data mining research and data mining applications have been opened up. These devices have powerful sensors like GPS sensors, audio sensors, direction and acceleration sensors like accelerometers and gyro meter, which are capable of reading and processing the data quite accurately and in real time.
I have always wondered how the smartphones and fitness watches know when I am running, walking, cycling or just have been lethargic for a while . The project is aimed to demystify this and build a system which can accurately detect the activity using some of the sensor data from the accelerometer and gyro meter in particular.
A lot of previous work has been done in this regard like Human Activity Recognition using LSTMs on Android — TensorFlow for Hackers (Part VI) and this Activity Recognition using Cell Phone Accelerometers, to quote a few.
This has a large number of applications. There is a possibility of providing a highly personalised and customised experience of smart devices like phones and watches. Also it can be determined if the user is following a healthy exercise routine or not. Let’s see how accurately our model is able to predict the activity based on the sensor data.Excited to explore this!
Dataset link — https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/00507/
Problem Statement
The task is bucket the user activity in one of the 3 groups (Non-hand-oriented activities like running, jogging, Hand-oriented activities-General like clapping, folding clothes, Hand-oriented activities — Eating like eating food, drinking) which consists of the 18 given activities based on sensor data. In the machine learning domain this is a multi-class classification and a supervised learning problem. The idea is to build a system (model) which takes inputs from sensors like accelerometers and gyro meter present in watches and mobile phones and accurately predict the user activity group.
Evaluation Metrics
Classification model will be evaluated on Accuracy. Accuracy is an important factor while detecting the human activity. The system is expected to predict the activity with as high accuracy as possible so that appropriate action can be taken in response by other system dependent on it. Accuracy measures how often the classifier makes the correct prediction. It is the ratio of the number of correct predictions to the total number of predictions (the number of test data points). In the case of multi class classification problem, the accuracy can be calculated from the confusion matrix using the formula below.
Accuracy = sum(diagonal(matrix)) / sum(matrix))
Dataset Features and Description
The raw accelerometer and gyroscope sensor data is collected from the smartphone and smartwatch at a rate of 20Hz. It is collected from 51 test subjects as they perform 18 activities for 3 minutes apiece. The sensor data is represented using a 10-second window.
For more information this file can be referenced — Transaction / Regular Paper Title
Data Exploration
The files are spread across phone and watch folder and further segregated as gyro and accelerometer folder. As a first step, I had to assemble all the files present in these folders in a single data frame. Based on preliminary data analysis following were the observed meta information.
● Total number of records: 75,099
● Total number of features: 93
● Total number of categories: 18
● Number of Blank rows: None
● Type of data: Float and String and mix of positive and negative values
Glimpse of Activity Dataset
Data Cleaning
The ACTIVITY column and class column needs to be formatted to remove unnecessary quotes and variable(b) appended to it. Also the ACTIViTY column has the activity code associated with , we create a new column activity_name to better visualise the dataset.
The mapping is read from the activity_key.txt file. The mapping is activty_map = { ‘A’: ‘walking’, ‘B’: ‘jogging’, ‘C’: ‘stairs’, ‘D’: ‘sitting’,’E’: ‘standing’,’F’: ‘typing’, ‘G’: ‘teeth’,’H’: ‘soup’, ‘I’: ‘chips’,’J’: ‘pasta’, ‘K’: ‘drinking’,’L’: ‘sandwich’,’M’: ‘kicking’,’O’: ‘catch’, ‘P’: ‘dribbling’, ‘Q’: ‘writing’,’R’: ‘clapping’, ‘S’: ‘folding’ }
Data Visualisation
Activity Data Distribution
Count of activities by Individuals
The individual with subject id as 1610 seems to be very active during the data collection phase while individual with subject id 1616 seems to have not been paid enough to participate.
Algorithms and Techniques
Choosing the right model for any data science task is a tricky job. Based on the previous works and experience we can make an educated move in deciding the correct technique for getting insights from the dataset and thus make decisions. The features in the dataset is numerical data while the label is categorical variable.
Following algorithms were explored for dealing with this classification problem.
Linear Learner Linear SVC KNeighborsClassifier
Amazon sagemaker was used for building, training, deployment and inference of the results. Scikit-learn library was used for implementing the different other classifiers. Amazon sagemaker provides out of the box support for the same.
Linear learner works on the principle of one vs all principle. This strategy consists of fitting one classifier per class and is thus computational feasible. Linear learner uses a softmax loss function to train multiclass classifiers. The algorithm learns a set of weights for each class, and predicts a probability for each class. The algorithm is relatively fast and easy to implement. Earlier it was used for binary classification but now sagemaker has hyperparameters which can specified to make it be used for multiclass classifier as well. Thus it became a natural choice to be picked up for creating base model.
As per the past experience and researches done, Support Vector Machines (SVM) are known to perform good in terms of multiclass classification. Linear SVC and KNeighborsClassifier were further explored to improve the accuracy over the base model.
Linear SVC again works on one vs all principle. It is similar to SVC with parameter kernel=’linear’, but implemented in terms of liblinear rather than libsvm, so it has more flexibility in the choice of penalties and loss functions and scales better to large numbers of samples .( ~75000 in our case) as compared to SVC.
KNeighborsClassifier seemed to be an excellent choice in terms of classification. KNeighborsClassifier is a non-parametric and lazy learning algorithm. What it essentially means is that it doesn’t make any assumption on the dataset distribution, which closely mimics the real world data. Also it does not need any training data points for model generation. All training data used in the testing phase. We play with the hyperparameter n_neighbors during the tuning phase to achieve good accuracy
Benchmark
For this problem, the benchmark model was Linear Learner model. It was trained with training data and with setting the hyperparameter of predictor_type as ‘multiclass_classifier’. Further algorithms were explored then to have a better accuracy than this model.
Sagemaker estimator
Confusion Matrix for Linear Learner Model
The benchmark accuracy score was ~56%
Data Preprocessing
This involved some column names cleaning in terms of removing unnecessary characters like “”, ‘’, b from the column values. There are 18 distinct classes or number of activities in which the data points have been categorised into.
For this project these classes were further grouped into the 3 Classes as following.
0: (Non-hand-oriented activities) {walking, jogging, stairs, standing, kicking}
1: (Hand-oriented activities- General): {dribbling, playing catch, typing, writing, clapping, brushing teeth, folding clothes}
2: (Hand-oriented activities -eating): {eating pasta, eating soup, eating sandwich, eating chips, drinking} Target Variable is ACTIVITY, whose value can be 0, 1 or 2. which is further mapped to the respective group.
Human Activity Label Distribution
Data Normalisation
During the exploration phase we discovered the range of column values or features is large. The values ranged from negative numbers to large positive numbers. For good models, It was imperative to scale the features such that the values are between 0 and 1.
MinMaxScaler from scikit-learn was used to scale and translate each feature individually such that it is in the given range on the training set, e.g. between zero and one.
Feature Selection
Since in this case there are too many features — 91 in total, feature selection was required.It enables to select those features which contribute most to the prediction category.
Univariate Selection was used to select the 10 most important features. It works by selecting the best features based on univariate statistical tests. It can be seen as a preprocessing step to an estimator. SelectKBest algorithm removes all but the 10 highest scoring features. Following were the top 10 important features based on score.
chi-squared stats score can be used to select the n_features features with the highest values for the test chi-squared statistic from feature list, which must contain only non-negative features such as booleans or frequencies (e.g., term counts in document classification), relative to the classes. The test measures dependence between stochastic variables, so using this function “weeds out” the features that are the most likely to be independent of class and therefore irrelevant for classification.
Following was the output of feature selection:
Implementation
The workflow was implemented in jupyter notebook and amazon sagemaker.
Sagemaker Workflow
The implementation can be broken down into above steps
Base Model Implementation
First we implement the base model that is implement the multiclass using Amazon SageMaker linear learner
● Split the training, validation and test data: Train_test_split utility from sckit-learn library was used to split the data into 80% training data, 10%validation data and 10% test data.
● Creating the sagemaker estimator for linear learner: We provide the execution role , instance types using which the model will be trained, specify predictor_type as multiclass_classifier to tell the algorithm it is the case of multiclass classification, and num_classes as 3 which is the number of classes/labels.
● Fit the model(Train) and deploy: We create the record sets for training, validation and test and train the model and finally deploy it using the sagemaker
● Check for accuracy: The accuracy of the model was 56%.
SKLearn Model Implementation ( Linear SVC AND KNeighborsClassifier)
Next we implement the improvement over the current base model using the scikit-learn library and linear svc and KNeighborsClassifier provided by the library.
The process is:
● Saving the training and testing data in local library using the create_csv function.
● Upload the data to S3 bucket as sagemaker estimator reads data from the s3 bucket.
● Creating a sagemaker estimator specifying the entry point of the training script which would be different in either of those algorithms.
● The training script (train.py) has the model_fn for loading the trained model and __name__ == ‘__main__’ block where we use the hyperparameters for model training.
● The training data is used to train the model and deployed to the sagemaker endpoint which is further used to make prediction on test data
Sagemaker Estimator
Refinement
The base model linear learner was based on vs rest strategy and predicted the class with an accuracy of 56%. We then moved on to use Linear SVC to check if the earlier model could be refined or improved but didn’t get an improvement. The accuracy was 46%.
Linear SVC score was not good compared to base model. I then evaluated KNeighborsClassifier.
In case of KNeighborsClassifier instead of using the default hyperparameters, we tweak the hyperparameters like n_neighbors to improve the model performance.
There was an improvement which could be seen as n_neighbors was changed from 3 to 5 to 7.
Results
The trained models were tested on the test data stored in the test directory. Accuracy score for each algorithm was found and confusion matrix was made depicting the results.
Accuracy Score for different models
Confusion Matrix and Algorithm Accuracy Score
Notes:
● The final model made using the KNeighborsClassifier with n_neighbours =13 performs better than our benchmark model in terms of accuracy. We will treat this as our final model.
● This model has a 10% improvement over the base model in terms of accuracy.
Conclusion
The idea of tracking user activity based on the sensor data is an interesting domain as we have our cell phones and watches with us every time giving us access to an abundance of data. It is just about making the right inferences out of it.
The process started with collecting and refinement of the sensor data. The data was preprocess to make it in a normalized form and also feature selection was done to retain most relevant features.
The model was trained using the sagemaker estimator and deployed to the endpoint. The endpoint was further used to make predictions on the test data on which we finally validated our model in terms of accuracy.
Amazon Sagemaker is a handy tool especially for someone who is just starting off in ML. Using sagemaker we get access to powerful resources, dashboards, insights etc. which makes the process of training, deployment and prediction a breeze.
There were some difficult aspects of the projects in terms of identifying the correct features. Also there was a problem of overlapping classes in the 2D space while using tsne , so the prediction might not be highly accurate.
The final model KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbours=13) has accuracy as 62.2% which is good enough to be used in device as we collect more data and make further refinements. For future enhancement this model can be considered as the base model.
Improvements
● I see further improvements in the current setup by using neural networks for modelling.
● Sagemakere Hypertuning jobs can be used to further fine tune the model.
● The transformed data was used for this project, we can use the time series data or raw data to build an even better model.
References
● https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.php
● http://www.cis.fordham.edu/wisdm/includes/files/sensorKDD-2010.pdf
● https://towardsdatascience.com/feature-selection-techniques-in-machine-learning-with-python-f24e7da3f36e
● Smartphone and Smartwatch-Based Biometrics Using Activities of Daily Living. IEEE Access, 7:133190–133202, Sept. 2019
You can find the code on the Github link : https://github.com/anshul2209/Human-Activity-Tracker
If you found this useful don’t forget to hit 👏. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/human-activity-tracker-system-2435b532b05e | ['Anshul Bansal'] | 2020-02-04 12:29:49.374000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Sagemaker', 'Knn Algorithm', 'Activity Tracking', 'Multiclass Classification'] |
Why You Should Love Your Body | I hear people complaing about their body all the time.
I am too fat.
I am too short.
I am too tall.
I am too big.
My boobs are too small, too saggy, too big.
I am too thin.
I am too wobbly.
My skin is too wrinkly.
My hair is too grey, bold, curly, flat.
My nose is too big.
My muscles are wrong.
All these sentences tell “I hate my body”.
Listening to those sentences subconsciously all your life makes me want to heal all the pain coming from it.
Of course, you can say “I love my body” while not believing and feeling what you say.
There is a little detour I can offer, with that formulation:
Why SHOULD I love my body?
If you ask yourself, why you should love your body, your answers become more true and more empathic. Your answers might sound like:
I should love my body, because
I can walk with it
I can draw with it
I can sing with it
I can play with it
I can eat with it
I can drink with it
I can think with it
I can talk with it
I can hug with it
I can make art with it
I can learn with it
I can feel with it
I can see with it
I can listen with it
I can taste with it
I can move with it
I can dance with it
I can smell with it
I can make love with it
And can do everything I can do with it…
I shall love my body, because my body gives me my life!
*****
This article originally was published on 22. August 2019 on my blog ichkreierealsobinich.com
Feel free to snoop in and to subscribe. | https://medium.com/an-idea/why-you-should-love-your-body-cea126901025 | ['Karmen Jurela'] | 2020-09-22 04:08:15.839000+00:00 | ['Love For Life', 'Self Acceptance', 'Body Positive', 'A Little Detour', 'Selflove'] |
How much do I care about climate change? | Show me where you spend your time, money and energy and I’ll tell you what you worship — John Wimber
I find it more and more difficult to prioritise what it is I care about, certainly in terms of local and national politics. It’s easy to complete a checklist of things — just tell the friendly pollster you care about everything! but it’s more of a challenge to make an ordered list.
The issues arising from anthropogenic climate change dominate the political agenda. The main parties in the UK trip over themselves to prove how important they think it is and this is driven, or at least supported by polling.
I care about it. I think we should try to avoid it. I think it will be a ‘bad’ thing, and if we can’t stop it we should alleviate as much as possible. But how much to do care? I don’t know. It seems hard to quantify.
We can take it to the extremes of course. Say someone told me that avoiding climate change was zero cost or effort, there’s just a big switch to press. I’d say — ok, fine, go for it. Conversely if Iwas told that we can avoid climate change but everyone you know and love will be brutally killed today. I’d say — no thanks, I’ll take the climate change please. I love my family and friends more than I hate the idea of climate change.
Perhaps let’s get back to some less crazy examples. Assuming that in your country, taxation and government is set up as fairly as you’d like it. You’re 100% happy with how much your government is borrowing and repaying, and you wouldn't adjust the tax code in anyway. Of course no one is, but just for the sake of argument. Let’s also make the reasonable assumption that tackling climate change has a cost in terms of time, money and energy. How much are you willing to cut from the health, education, welfare, pension budget to pay for it?
For me, i think it comes down to timescales. I think there’s something quite ridiculous, abstract and quite arrogant for us to worry about what will be happening on earth in hundreds of years. It’s quite likely we’ll have long since reached the point of Singularly between man and machine at which point all bets are off. It’s unlikely we’ll even need oxygen to breathe, and frankly, we’ll have more pressing problems than the climate. So let’s talk about our children’s children. Thats less abstract.
If I could be convinced that life would be a whole lot worse in 50–100 years based on our actions today ,then I’m on board. I’d be happy to have less money spent on education and health and welfare in order to transition the world to a carbon neutral economy. I’d like it to expressly put in those terms though, i’d like it to be clear that we are letting people die earlier or get sicker or have worse education to the benefit of our grandchildren. If it was put in those terms it might help to focus minds.
So on to my great grandchildren. 120–150 years time. For me, this is the point where it gets abstract. It’s the point where i think — “hey a massive asteroid could hit the earth in 2142, who knows?!” We shouldn't be denying people better cancer treatment in 2022 to alleviate the lives of people, who’s circumstances and wishes we know nothing about.
So i guess thats how much I care. Certainly not zero. But i require the debate to be put in terms I can connect with, and at the moment the discussion seems disappointingly naive. | https://medium.com/@jonnygibson/how-much-do-i-care-about-climate-change-17acedef0181 | ['Jonny Gibson'] | 2021-11-28 18:13:06.807000+00:00 | ['Public Speaking', 'Climate Change', 'Family'] |
MAKE MONEY ONLINE/VidSnatcher Commercial | MAKE MONEY ONLINE/VidSnatcher Commercial
VidSnatcher is a new cloud-based video tool that helps you to edit your videos through a variety of powerful features easily. Also, the tool enables you to create your beautiful videos in the cloud.
PRICE:$28.92
AFFILIATE LINK:https://jvz1.com/c/1101129/342585https://jvz1.com/c/1101129/342585 | https://medium.com/@davidabrahamgopal/make-money-online-vidsnatcher-commercial-4e307e502d65 | ['Ramachandran Gopal'] | 2020-12-21 17:53:59.142000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Work From Home', 'Money Management', 'Money', 'Make Money Online'] |
Monochrome | In all the rainbows
that break in waves
across the sky,
and all the smiles
that stretch for miles
and into each horizon
racing faster than the sun,
are there fewer storms
that swallow
all the colors whole
than when we’d first begun? | https://medium.com/where-my-poems-go/monochrome-59dd12dbe7bd | ['Elle Rogers'] | 2020-06-24 12:34:46.247000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Humanity', 'Culture', 'Injustice'] |
Zion learns through drawing | Zion learns through drawing
By Emily Rossing | Reporter
Zion stares at the blank paper. What will she draw today? She gets inspiration everywhere. Landscapes, things in her house, or whatever imagination can concoct. Zion likes drawing, and she’s good at it.
“Zion’s one of the best leaders in the class,” — Teacher, Elizabeth Earnest
But she’s good at other things too: solving math equations, writing essays and helping other students understand what’s going on in class. Her teacher, Elizabeth Earnest, recognizes the talent Zion has and shares with her classmates.
“Zion’s one of the best leaders in the class,” Earnest said.
She’s also good at balancing the many aspects of her life. Growing up as the second youngest of five siblings, 10-year-old Zion has learned how to be both a sister and a student. She said she gets the most annoyed when her two older brothers talk too much and annoy her. Still, family is the most important thing to her.
“I love my family,” Zion said.
Being a middle child, it may seem like Zion just blends in, but that’s hardly the case. She’s taller than the average fifth grade girl, standing at five feet two inches, which helps her out when she’s playing basketball against her two older brothers. She also likes to do things well, especially in drawing. She puts more time into it than other students might. She doesn’t keep her talents to herself though — instead, she often helps other students when they are struggling.
“She is a helper; she takes care of everyone,” Earnest said.
Maybe one day she’ll stand tall and proud in front of a class just like Ms. Earnest does, teaching students how to unlock their own potentials. An art teacher, that’s what she thinks she’ll be. But with all her interests in math, science, writing and art, the possibilities are limitless.
For now, though, she’ll stick to what’s in front of her. She’ll pick up a pencil and let her mind take over her hand, creating whatever it wants in this moment.
Zion’s favorites:
Food: cheese pizza
Dessert: vanilla cake
Book: El Deafo
Animal: dogs
Games: Monopoly and Uno
Holiday: Thanksgiving
TV show: Spongebob | https://medium.com/maxfield-times/zion-learns-through-drawing-4d33494de014 | ['Emily Rossing'] | 2020-12-09 22:08:17.801000+00:00 | ['Drawing', 'Maxfield Elementary', 'Art', 'Bethel University', 'Profile'] |
5 things I hate about Scrum | 5 things I hate about Scrum
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Scrum
When I started with Scrum, I was a fanboy, fawning over the promise of a better way of working. Back then, I was a QA and painfully aware of all the limitations of Waterfall. With testing being one of the last phases, all the problems of others ultimately ended up on my plate. I always was short on time and often had to work overtime to make up for the time lost by others. I believed Scrum offered a far better alternative than the way I was used to working.
As I gained more experience, my view of Scrum has become more balanced. After 7 years of working with Scrum, I start to see the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Scrum.
Over time, the amount of things I dislike about Scrum has grown. I’ve written many articles on the things I like about Scrum, now the time is ripe to provide a more balanced perspective.
This article will focus more on the Bad and Ugly parts, since I have written so much about the Good already.
1. Scrum is relentless — Bad
We just finished a Sprint, everyone is exuberant and happy that we met the Sprint Goal. And then, the next Sprint starts, and a new goal is crafted. Then, the cycle begins again. Sprint after Sprint after Sprint: Wash, rinse, repeat.
Every Sprint, a Sprint Goal is looming over your head. And you can do whatever you want, chill, do pair programming or try some fancy Liberating Structures, as long as you meet the Sprint Goal. And then, there will be a new one waiting for you, ad infinitum.
But the Sprint Goal isn’t the only goal you are aiming for each Sprint. Every day you need to create a new sub-goal. At the Daily Scrum, the Development Team creates a plan for the next 24 hours. And at the subsequent Daily Scrum, progress towards this plan is reviewed, and a new plan is created for the upcoming 24 hours.
All this focus on following daily plans and reaching Sprint Goals stresses people out. Scrum Teams become prone to enter Feature Factory mode, where the only thing that matters is delivering what was promised. It prevents Scrum Teams from taking a step back and reflecting on what we can do to make an actual difference.
And if you weren’t stressed enough already, it’s called a Sprint and not a Stroll.
2. Scrum puts too much responsibility in a single person — Bad
The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product. One Product, one Product Backlog, one Product Owner. Break this rule, and you’re not doing Scrum. It doesn’t matter if you are running a start-up or a 300 million dollar business. That’s putting a lot of responsibility and faith in a single person!
Companies are not willing to give so much responsibility to a single person. And even if they are willing, the moment you have to deal with more than 2 Development Teams as a Product Owner, you will become overwhelmed. You will be so occupied keeping the Scrum train chugging along that you won’t have time to think about your Product Vision, Product Strategy, or participate in discovery.
I’ve never worked at a company where they had Product Owners as intended by Scrum. Every Product Owner was a Feature Owner, working together with many other Feature Owners on the same Product. This is not how it is supposed to be, but it is how many companies try to make the demanding Product Owner role scalable.
3. Whenever Scrum fails, you’re not doing Scrum — Ugly
It’s easy to find articles where people describe that Scrum doesn’t work for them. When you read comments on these articles, you will always find someone that says:“But you weren’t doing Scrum. Of course it didn’t work out, duh!”
I am guilty as charged, as I’ve said this many times before as well. Recently someone wrote an article about Scrum not working out that went viral: Scrum Is Dead. All Hail Kanban, the New King. I even wrote a response to show how the team of the author wasn’t doing Scrum. However, the fact of the matter is, many people loved the original article. Even though it was utterly inaccurate about both Scrum and Kanban. What can we conclude from an article receiving so much praise yet nothing about it was even remotely true?
My conclusion is that most people and companies don’t get Scrum. Scrum is explained the wrong way to them. Scrum seems deceptively simple, yet it is hard to understand and implement the right way. Every company I have joined, I can easily point all the things they are doing wrong in the realm of Scrum and the problems this leads to. The question then becomes: whose interpretation of Scrum is correct? And why are so few able to get it right?
A troubling weakness of Scrum is that few companies get it and can implement it with success. You can blame it on the people, but if many companies suck with Scrum, part of the blame should shift to the framework itself. Apparently, Scrum’s simplicity and the fact you need to connect and add many of the dots yourself makes Scrum confusing and difficult to roll-out successfully.
Scrum requires a deep understanding and willingness to change the status quo to work out. Few companies are motivated enough to dive in the deep end and do the hard work necessary to pull through with it. Much easier to put on a Scrum facade or roll out SAFe instead.
Are all Scrum Masters in eternal pursuit of a Fata Morgana?
4. Most Scrum Masters struggle in their role — Ugly
Most Scrum Masters are ill-equipped to succeed in their role. Being a Scrum Master is demanding and challenging. It requires a deep understanding of Scrum, excellent soft skills, situational leadership, and the ability to make others understand Scrum. Many Development Team members get assigned the role of Scrum Master without adequate training, sufficient soft skills, or even knowledge of Scrum.
These Scrum Masters struggle, and fall back pointing to the rules without understanding why these rules matter. The end result is a dogmatic, inflexible interpretation of Scrum that totally misses the point. Scrum is never the point, delivering products of the highest possible value is.
Luckily, as Scrum is becoming more popular, we’re seeing more and more capable and skilled Scrum Masters available in the job market. Companies should take the role seriously and stop believing that any Development Team member or Project Manager is capable of fulfilling the role. That doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the Scrum Master role, and how different it is compared to being a member of the Development Team. A good Development Team member isn’t necessarily a good Scrum Master and vice versa.
5. Scrum is difficult to scale — Bad
Many companies struggle to apply Scrum in an environment where many Scrum Teams need to work together in the same product. If you aren’t convinced of this fact, just realize how many scaling frameworks exist to help companies scale Scrum:
Scrum of Scrums
LeSS
Nexus
Scrum@Scale
Spotify model (Don’t use it, it didn’t even work for Spotify, and I’ve never seen it work either)
SAFe
And there are many more approaches I didn’t even mention. Companies are looking for a boilerplate solution to make Scrum scale with many teams working on the same product. The fact so many approaches exist seems to suggest that vanilla Scrum just isn’t cutting it with many teams. This is a shame, as most companies with successful products work with multiple teams on the same product.
Scrum’s greatest strength is its biggest flaw — The Good, Bad & Ugly
Scrum is a process framework. It is purposefully incomplete. Scrum leaves it up to the people who do the work to enrich Scrum with the additional process necessary to deliver valuable products. This is part of the reason why Scrum is so simple and seems to be implemented differently at each company. It is also why there are so many ineffective adaptations out there.
The Scrum Guide isn’t enough to use Scrum to deliver valuable products. The parts that you add are what make it a success or a failure. I hope that in the future, there will be many more patterns and anti-patterns available to help Scrum Teams figure out better ways of working depending on their context.
Scrum doesn’t tell you what to do but shows you what is going on. However, sometimes even when you know what is going on, you have no clue what to do next to make things better. This is where many Scrum Teams need more help than Scrum Masters, Product Owners, or the Scrum Guide can provide.
The strongest and weakest link of Scrum is how the people working are empowered to implement and complement the process framework. But do they have the knowledge and capabilities to carry that burden? Companies need to be able to handle the weight of that great responsibility. Most companies unfortunately aren’t up for the difficult job of enriching Scrum so it can deliver on its promise of making products of the highest possible value. These companies end up doing what they did before, with a slight twist.
Picture by velkr0
I still love Scrum, like a favorite mug where the porcelain is starting to show some cracks. But I can understand why many companies are struggling with Scrum. We need to do a better job as Scrum practitioners to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
We need rum fewer Scrum fanatics and less Scrum bureaucracy. If you are doing Scrum for more than a year and your main focus is still talking about the rules of Scrum, then you’re definitely doing something wrong. We need more people who understand and adapt Scrum based on what is required to make it a success in the organisation.
We need to meet people where they are, not where we want them to be. We need to gently hold their hand and nudge them to embark together on an Agile journey in the right direction.
Do you want to write for Serious Scrum or seriously discuss Scrum? | https://medium.com/serious-scrum/5-things-i-hate-about-scrum-aa52908dcd78 | ['Maarten Dalmijn'] | 2020-08-13 11:47:57.898000+00:00 | ['Scrum', 'Software Development', 'Product Management', 'Programming', 'Agile'] |
Ali Abdaal offers to get a password manager with a unique coupon code! | Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber with almost 6K subscribers. Ali has graduated from Cambridge University, where he studied medicine. He previously created videos about a day to day life of a medical student. However, now he is vlogging his life as a doctor. Ali also does study videos, tech reviews, etc. The viewers can find multiple videos on how to study productively or how to read 100 books in a year. The YouTuber as well helps students to apply to medical school.
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Get premium NordPass password manager with a special coupon code GREATNPASS. | https://medium.com/@charliesholl6/ali-abdaal-offers-getting-password-manager-with-a-coupon-code-2a90941c3256 | ['Charlie Sholl'] | 2020-05-27 13:47:52.433000+00:00 | ['Password Manager', 'Special Coupon', 'Coupon', 'Password Security', 'Deal'] |
@Reviw Curricular Practical Training (CPT) | California | Free Automated Malware Analysis Service - powered by Falcon Sandbox
Submit malware for free analysis with Falcon Sandbox and Hybrid Analysis technology. Hybrid Analysis develops and… | https://medium.com/@games-reviws-and-hacks/reviw-curricular-practical-training-cpt-california-e9335e72ad8f | [] | 2020-12-22 22:05:10.374000+00:00 | ['Robotics', 'Earth'] |
🦉Zombie Detecting Smart Security Owl | In this Halloween tutorial, we’ll be showing you how we put a super spooky twist on a mundane household classic: the security camera. How?! We’ve made a night vision owl which uses image processing to track people. Oh, and it hoots, just like the real thing!
We’ve been super excited about this project and we’ve been waiting to do it ever since the new Raspberry Pi 4 dropped. It’s got 4GB RAM, which opens the door to loads of really exciting possibilities, including doing some image processing with deep learning models in real time.
If you want to keep an eye out for approaching zombies on Halloween, or just check your garden the rest of the year round, this is the one for you. Security doesn’t have to be boring to be effective!
Supplies
For this build, you will need:
Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB Ram) Amazon
Night Vision Camera Amazon
Micro Servo Amazon
Fake Owl Amazon
Glue Amazon
Paint Amazon
Screws Amazon
USB speaker Amazon
Large (5v+) portable power supply Amazon
3D printer Amazon
Build 🛠️
Decapitate
a. Pull the head off the owl (sometimes you just have to be brutal) by pulling hard on its head where it attaches to the spring.
b. The owl’s head connects to the body by a cylinder which sits on top of a large spring. Remove this cylinder by taking out the screw.
c. The cylinder you just removed is made of two parts, a plastic cup and a bearing which sits inside it. Remove the bearing from the cylinder using a screwdriver (or similar tool).
d. Remove the spring by unscrewing the three screws that secure it to the body.
e. Make a hole in the top of the owl’s body which is large enough to fit some wires and the camera cable. We used an inelegant combination of a drill and a screwdriver to do this.
Add Smart 🧠
a. 3D print the camera case and paint it to match the owl — we used some cheap acrylic paints. Painting isn’t a vital step, but it does dramatically improve the overall look!
b. With the owl’s head upside down, screw the top of the camera case into the inside of its head, where the beak protrudes.
c. Put the camera into the case and connect the camera cable.
d. Glue the servo to the top panel of the spring.
e. Connect long wires to the servo pins (5V, GND, Signal)
f. Feed the camera cable and wires for the servo through the spring and through the hole you made in the top of the body so they are inside the owl’s hollow body.
g. Screw the neck back together and push the head on.
Fill Her Up 🤖
a. Remove the plug from the bottom of the owl and increase the size of this hole by cutting the plastic. Continue increasing the size until the Raspberry Pi and speaker can fit through into the body of the owl.
b. Once the hole is big enough for all the components to fit inside, pull the camera cable which you fed through the top of the owl out of the base and plug it into the Raspberry Pi.
c. Similarly, pull the servo wires through and plug them into the Raspberry Pi:
+5V Servo => +5V Pi
GND Servo => GND Pi
Signal Servo => Pin 12 Pi
d. Plug the USB speaker into the Pi.
e. Insert the SD card into the Pi.
f. Power Pi using portable power supply.
g. Insert the Pi, power supply and speaker into owl through the hole in the base.
4. Setup the Pi 🥧
a. Download Raspian and upload it to your SD card using Balena Etcher.
b. To access your pi remotely:
Add a file called ssh to your boot sd card
Add a file called wpa_supplicant.conf and put your wifi credentials in
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev update_config=1
network={
ssid="MySSID"
psk="MyPassword"
}
c. Insert the SD card in the pi and try an access via ssh.
Moving the Head ⚙️
Code tutorial for moving the head (controlling a servo with a raspberry pi) — github
To control a servo running on the Pi we are going to create script that controls the GPIO pins which the servo is connected to.
a. Ensure connections between the servo to the Pi:
+5V Servo => +5V Pi
GND Servo => GND Pi
Signal Servo => Pin 12 Pi
b. You must first set up the gpio pins to use PWM on the signal pin of the servo.
c. Then, it is as simple as selecting the duty cycle (explained here) of the signal pin to move the servo from 90 degrees with a duty cycle of 7.5 to 0 degrees when the duty cycle is 2.5 and to 180 degrees with a duty cycle of 12.5
Making It Hoot 🔉
Code tutorial for making the owl hoot (playing audio with a raspberry pi)-github
a. Plug in the USB speaker.
b. Download a sound — we chose a spooky hoot.
c. Play the sound by running this command: omxplayer -o alsa:hw:1,0 owl_sound.mp3
[d. If this doesn’t work, check what output your Pi is using and at what volume by using the command alsamixer — you will be greeted with the mixer screen where you can change the volume and select your media device. To increase the volume of your sound, do the command like this omgxplayer -o alsa:hw:1,0 owl_sound.mp3 -vol 500 to play this sound using Python, have a look at our test script.]
Stream the Video From the Pi 🎦
Code tutorial creating a raspberry pi camera stream — github
a. Run python app.py and view on your local network at http://raspberrypi.local:5000 .
b. This code was taken and slightly adapted from Miguel Grinberg blog post, he explains nicely how it’s done and his tutorials are great — deffo check him out! The basic concept is that we use threading and generators to improve the streaming speed.
The camera works in both night and dark.
Body Detection 🕵️♀️
Code for body detection(ImageNetSSD on a video stream with raspberry pi) — github
a. Since we’re using the Raspberry Pi 4, we thought it was best to try out some deep learning models on it instead of the basic HaarCascade method we’ve been limited to so far.
b. We had a look at some of the pre-trained models out there, like YOLOv3 which looks super cool. YOLOv3 tiny weights, which would have been perfect for the Pi, but we couldn’t get it running :(
c. Instead, we opted for the MobileSSD model which we can run using openCVs DNN (deep neural net) module, as we learnt from this code: and from the hero of image processing tutorials, Adrian Rosebrock.
d. However, as we are trying to stream this content and run models on every frame, this results in a laggy, fragmented video. We learnt again from Adrian Rosebrock and used the Python multiprocessing module to put our images into queues where they can be processed without blocking the camera stream so heavily.
e. Try running the code yourself
Sending Zombie Notifications
Code for sending a notification (python to phone) — github
a. We decided to use https://pushed.co notification service.
b. You can get a free account and download the app and really quickly get set up making mobile notifications. We created the notifications using a python script like this.
What a Hoot!
We hope you enjoyed our Smart Security Owl project! This has been a super fun make and I feel a whole lot safer knowing my house is being guarded by our trusty owl. Checkout the Youtube Video.
Thanks For Reading
I hope you have enjoyed this article. If you like the style, check out T3chFlicks.org for more tech focused educational content (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). | https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/zombie-detecting-smart-security-owl-deep-learning-e3f3c861dd6a | [] | 2021-03-16 01:54:55.294000+00:00 | ['Security Camera', 'Audio', 'Raspberry Pi 4', 'Tech Flicks', 'Tracking'] |
How long does it take to learn SEO — Academy365 | SEO — Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing your website to rank high on a Search Engine (esp. Google the most famous search engine).
Now when it comes to learning something so open ended as SEO, it requires not only dedication but also an open mindset to adapt yourself to the new updates coming every now & then.
So, one may say that learning SEO is a lifetime process (mainly due to the regular algorithm updates). But there is a stage where your learning journey will hit zero & it will seem easier than before. So how do we reach that point when it comes to SEO.
So before we answer that question let’s break the SEO process into different stages & tentative time to learn the theory. SEO is divided into the following
Keyword Strategy — 10 Days On-Page SEO — 20 Days Off-Page SEO (Link Building Activities) — Theory 15 Days SEO Tools — 20 Days
Total Number of Days: 65 Days
The above 4-steps can further be divided into different segments (e.g. on-page SEO can be divided into Technical SEO, Content Optimization etc.) but for a beginner this should be good to go.
Each point will take at least 12 to 20 days of continuous learning to master the theory, I am not talking about the practical side since some thing like “link building” can take years to master. So let’s look at each of the above sections in details.
1) Keyword Strategy
Keywords are the base for any SEO project, approach any SEO agency and their first question will be about “What are you keywords? or what keywords do you want your website to rank for?”. So what is so much that you have to learn in this section.
Some important concepts to learn when it comes Keyword Planning/ Strategy are:
What keywords should you targets? How many people will or are looking for this keyword? What is the intension of the user when he is searching a specific keyword & what action is the user likely to take? What are long-tail & short-tail keywords? What are business & traffic keywords? What Tools should you use for Keyword Planning?
Once you learn the above concepts you can move to the next section i.e. On-Page SEO.
2) On-Page SEO
Once you know how to find the best keywords for your SEO Project, the next step is to integrate those with the website & that is called On-Page SEO also known as On Page Optimization (On as in On The Website).
Some important concepts to learn when it comes to On-Page Optimization
What are meta tags (meta title, description, canonical etc.)? What are heading tags & why are they important? What is image optimization? What is schema markup? What is sitemaps? What is website load-time? What is keyword optimized content? Is your website Responsive? Do you have outbound links on your website? Are your website internal links in place?
& many more.
Now if your website is a CMS system (a website with admin where you can make all the changes) something like WordPress than you will need a WordPress Tutorial to make the On-Page SEO changes, otherwise you will need help from your developer to make the changes to the website.
3) Off-Page SEO
Off-Page Optimization means or includes activities which will increase the reputation of your website on the internet and in the eye of Google. It includes building backlinks (incoming links from other websites) from websites which have a good reputation.
Some important concepts to learn when it comes to Off-Page Optimization
How to get quality backlinks? What is link juice? What are no-follow and do-follow links? What is linking root domains? What are low quality backlinks? What is an anchor text? How to do Article Submission How to do social bookmarking? What is local citation and how to do it? What is social profile creation? What is classified posting? What is Syndication Submission?
& many more.
If you have never heard of any of those terms than, all the above may sound complex but eventually once you get well versed with these terms you will not have a tough time understanding & relating to those.
4) SEO Tools
Now, that you are aware about Keyword Planning, On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO the next step will be the level up your game and move to the SEO Tools. There are many tools out there and getting a hang of the ones that suit you will be a challenge. There are many factors in choosing the tool such as cost, complexity, benefits that provide.
Free vs Paid tools, if you are a start-up and not having a great budget it is always recommended to start with the free SEO tools.
Keyword Research Tools Website Audit Tools Analytics Tools Competitor Analysis Tools Backlink Checker Tools Plagiarism Tools Website Speed Test Tools
& many more
Now that we know the things that we need to know in SEO, let’s look at the factors that will influence the time you will take the learn SEO.
Factors influencing the SEO Learning Journey
1) Time in Hand
How much free time do you have in a day? If you can give 30 to 60 mins every day in your learning journey, you will have a good hands-on knowledge in the first month of your learning journey. On the other hand if you have time only during weekends than you may take a couple of months to get hang of the basics of the SEO.
2) Background
Though SEO can be learnt by anyone, the time and efforts depend on your background. For e.g. someone who is a content writer will find it easier to deal with keywords and various use cases. A web developer will easily pick up the On-Page SEO activities etc. But, if you are well-versed with using internet you should not find it tough to grab the concepts.
3) Persistence
Believe it or not, there are tons of people who pick up tons of courses but don’t complete those. Udemy has a course completion rate of 5% i.e. out of all the people who purchase a specific course only 5% complete the entire course. This indicates the lack of persistency when it comes to learning new things. So it is highly recommended that you are persistence in your learning journey.
4) Resources
When it comes to resources, unlike a decade ago, there are tons of videos, materials, blogs, online paid courses to learn SEO. But that brings a different problem up, which one should you start with and which one is the right one. Some best websites to start with are moz.com, backlinko.com, searchenginejournal.com & many others. If you like watching videos YouTube & Udemy are good learning sources. But yes there is no one place to learn the entire SEO, you will need to follow multiple blogs and buy 2–3 courses to learn SEO.
5) Practice
How much of that you learn can you practice, the best way to do that is start your own website and do SEO on it. If you are working somewhere you can start implementing whatever you learn on the company website (if they already are not doing SEO).
Learn how to make your website using WordPress
6) Mentor
Getting a mentor always helps it is not just to coach you but motivate as well, you can easily get solutions to your problems with their experience. Having a mentor is a big plus in whatever you do. Again, it is not easy to find the right mentor you need someone who knows stuff & you believe in him. It’s always good to have someone who is reachable & not just someone you follow on YouTube, Twitter or LinkedIn.
7) SEO Tools
Starting without tools is good but eventually it makes more sense to take advantage of the various SEO tools. It doesn’t mean you end up buying tools of expensive SEO tools but at least start working with the free tools or freemium tools. In the long run the tools reduce a lot of manual work & can give you edge over competitors. Some good tools that you can to use: Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, Keywords Everywhere (Chrome Extension), AskThePublic & Google Trends.
Conclusion
Learning anything is a challenge that you need to take up with dedication and determination, the timelines will greatly differ from one person to another so don’t judge your progress by looking at others. It takes 4 to 5 months for your website to start ranking on Google so it is like planting a seed and waiting it to grow but you need to water it to ensure it grows as a tree, same applies to your SEO learning journey as well.
All The Best | https://medium.com/@agency7.xyz/how-long-does-it-take-to-learn-seo-academy365-40d6b04883bf | [] | 2021-12-30 13:13:08.336000+00:00 | ['Seo Services', 'Seo Tips For Beginners', 'SEO'] |
Bigg Boss 15: Vip members split! Umar Riya and Karan Kundrra clash in the affair of sending Jai Prateek to jail | Bigg Boss 15: Vip members split! Umar Riya and Karan Kundrra clash in the affair of sending Jai Prateek to jail
The ‘Bigg Boss’ house is currently divided into two parts. One part is of VIP members and the other is of common householders. The VIP members are Karan Kundrra, Tejashwi, Umar Riaz, Nishant Bhatt, and Vishal Kotian. At the same time, among the common householders are Jai Bhanushali, Neha Bhasin, Prateek Sahajpal, Rajiv, Simba, and Shamita Shetty.
Also Read: Parineeti Chopra, who was shooting in the snowy plains, remembered the Maldives, shared a picture of wearing a yellow monokini
Recently, Bigg Boss gave a task to the family members in which the VIP members do not have to do any household work and have to get all their work done by the common householders. Yesterday, a lot of heat was seen between VIP and non-VIP members in getting this work done, but today this heat will be between VIP members only when Karan Kundra will cut off Umar’s talk.
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A post shared by ColorsTV (@colorstv)
Colors have shared the promo of today’s episode on his Instagram in which VIP members are seen giving some punishment to Jai and Prateek, during this time Umar gives his feedback, only then Karan cuts his words and starts speaking. Umar does not like this action of Karan at all and he gets angry with Karan and Tejashwi. Meanwhile, Vishal tries to convince them, but Umar does not listen to anyone. Seeing Umar reacting like this, Karan’s mercury also gets high and he kicks the table in anger. Watch video.
Also Read: Nusrat Bharucha adopted such a unique method to look pregnant in the film ‘Chhori’, the actress did this work for 25 days
Apart from this, Colors has shared another video on its Insta, in which Neh and Tejashwi seem to be fighting over ration. It is seen in the video that Bigg Boss gives only two minutes to the family members to bring ration and this is where Tejashwi and Neha get into an argument. | https://medium.com/@thebollywoodbaba/bigg-boss-15-vip-members-split-92a2c1dc5ed1 | ['The Bollywood Baba'] | 2021-11-16 18:08:50.068000+00:00 | ['Biggboss15', 'Bollywood', 'Entertainment'] |
The best design tool of 2020 is not what you expect | The best design tool of 2020 is not what you expect
For a while, I’ve been thinking about design tools and how much the design community becomes obsessed with them, myself included, of course. And because it’s that time of the year, I decided to write about it, more specifically, pick what I think is the best design tool. Spoiler alert, it’s not what you expect. José Torre Dec 15, 2020·5 min read
Many contenders…
When I first experienced design software I was astounded. A new world of opportunities had just opened in front of my eyes.
I couldn’t believe what was possible thanks to the magic of technology and tools like Photoshop, Corel Draw, and my personal favourites, at the time, Macromedia Freehand and Flash
17 years later I’m even more amazed, computers and digital tools have evolved to incredible levels, enabling creatives not just to put their ideas into practice faster, but also to make things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
And the best part of it all is that we can only go up from here, tools will get even better, faster, and more accessible.
Now when I try to think about which one is best, my mind runs through a bunch of candidates like Adobe Creative Cloud, and their wide range of amazing tools, recently made even better by leveraging some of the iPad native capabilities.
Speaking of the iPad, Procreate along with many other drawing and animation apps have made digital drawing and animation so much easier, and enjoyable.
Figma and Sketch continue helping design teams across the world become faster and more efficient.
Framer, Principle, Origami and so many others help designers transform their designs into high fidelity interactive prototypes that allow them to test and validate their ideas.
Tools like Webflow empower designers to create not just a prototype but actually deliver a final product.
And let’s not forget things like Icons8, Unsplash, Blush and so many other useful libraries that help designers to pull together high-fidelity solutions faster than ever, or the uncountable amount of websites you can get mock-up templates from, that help designer get a feel to what their ideas would look like in the real world.
Lastly the classics, pen and paper, and any other equivalent, because for ages they’ve been crucial tools of ideation, sketching, and low fidelity design, and I think they will always be.
So… a lot of contenders. So many, that you may be thinking it’s impossible to just pick one, but actually it isn’t.
The winner
It’s pretty obvious what’s the best tool we have at our disposal, that just happens to be behind all the tools mentioned above, and more.
The best design tool is *drum rolls* by far *more drum rolls* your brain.
your brain. | https://uxdesign.cc/the-best-design-tool-of-2020-is-a207dc23063b | ['José Torre'] | 2020-12-15 12:26:26.535000+00:00 | ['Prototyping', 'Design', 'Tools', 'UX', 'UI'] |
Introduction to Bayesian Statistics for Data Science and Analytics (Part -1). | Over the years, the data science domain has assumed great significance with the exponential growth of data. A solid foundation in the underlying mathematical concepts and statistics is vital to master data science and analytics. Bayesian statistics is a must-know for all data science and analytics professionals since data science has deep roots in the Bayesian approach.
In this article, we will look into:
1) What is Bayesian Statistics?
2) Bayesian statistics vs. Frequentist (Classical) statistics
3) Bayes’ theorem
The next article (Part-2) will deal with Bayesian inference and the diverse applications of Bayesian statistics in data science and analytics.
1. What is Bayesian Statistics?
Bayesian statistics is a mathematical approach that involves the application of probability (mostly conditional probability) to solve statistical problems.
This approach involves initial “prior” beliefs (or probabilities) about an event which is updated when new evidence emerges through data collection. This results in ‘posterior’ beliefs which form the basis for Bayesian inferences. Often, people tend to overlook the prior probability of an event whereas posterior probability is always considered.
Before we actually delve deeper into Bayesian Statistics, let us briefly discuss Frequentist Statistics, the more popular version of statistics and the distinction between these two statistical philosophies.
2. Bayesian statistics vs. Frequentist (Classical) statistics
Firstly, we have to realize that there is a thin line between these two alternative approaches.
a) What is Frequentist (Classical) statistics?
It is the most widely used inferential method in statistics.
According to Frequentist approach, the probability of an event is the frequency of occurrence of that particular event in the long run of the experiment (i.e., it involves repeated trials under the same conditions).
Let’s consider the example of tossing a coin to determine whether it’s fair or not. (Theoretically, the experiment is supposed to be repeated infinite number of times but practically it can only be repeated a large (finite) number of times).
The following table represents the frequency of heads and tails
We can conclude that this is a fair coin since the probability of getting a head is 0.5.
It is evident from this observation that the result of an experiment is dependent on the number of times the experiment is repeated. This is a major drawback of the Frequentist approach.
b) Distinction between Frequentist and Bayesian approach
We have seen that the Frequentist definition of probability is based on the long-term frequency of the event occurring when the same experiment is repeated multiple times. This is in contrast to the Bayesian definition according to which probability is measured by the belief of the likelihood of a particular outcome.
In case of some events, one approach makes more sense than the other. Frequentist statistics is applicable to events such as flipping of a coin, rolling a die, picking a card from a deck etc. that are random as well as repeatable whereas Bayesian approach allows to assign probabilities to events that are neither random nor repeatable. For instance, according to Bayesian approach, it is acceptable to assign a probability to an event like Joe Biden winning the 2020 U.S. presidential race. But, if Frequentist approach is followed, this wouldn’t make much sense since we cannot perform repeated trials (the candidate only ever contests once for this particular election) unless we go for virtual trials.
One major advantage that Bayesian approach has is that it takes the prior knowledge into consideration while calculating probability by applying Bayes’ rule.
Most of us are familiar with Bayes’ Theorem in probability. Let’s delve deeper into this concept.
3. Bayes’ theorem
a) Conditional probability
A good grasp of the concept of conditional probability is essential to understand Bayes’ theorem.
Conditional probability is the probability of an event A, given that another event B has already occurred. This is represented by P(A|B) and can be defined as:
where P(B) ≠ 0
Example: In a card game, suppose a player needs to draw a black card which is a King in order to win. It is given that Lily has drawn a black card. What is the probability of her winning the game?
Solution:
P (A ∩ B) = P (Obtaining a black card which is a King) = 2/52
P(B) = P (Picking a black card) = 1/2
Thus, P(A|B) = 4/52.
b) What is Bayes’ Theorem?
Let’s consider the following equations:
and
From these two equations, we can conclude that:
This is the Bayes’ Theorem.
Here,
Prior (the probability of event A to occur) refers to the preconceived beliefs we hold.
Likelihood (the probability of event B being true given that event A is true) refers to the probability of observing what we did given that our priors are true.
Posterior (the probability of A to occur given event B already occurred) refers to the updated prior based on what has been observed.
We can actually write
This can be substituted in Bayes’ theorem to obtain an alternative version, which is applied a lot in Bayesian inference:
Example: A situation where Bayesian analysis is routinely used is the spam filter in your mail server. The message is scrutinized for the appearance of key words which make it likely that the message is spam. Imagine that the evidence for spam is that the subject message of the meal contains the sentence “check this out”. We define events:
• S which means the message is spam.
• C which means the subject line contains the sentence “check this out”.
Compute the conditional probability P(S|C) when 40% of emails are spam and 1% of spam email have “check this out” in the subject line while 0 .4% of non-spam emails have this sentence in the subject line.
Solution: Using Bayes’ formula,
P(S|C) = P(C|S). P(S) / P(C)
Now we have P(S) = 0.4 and P(C|S) = 0.01.
P(C) = P(C|S). P(S) + P(C|S’). P(S’) = 0.01 x 0.4 + 0.004 x 0.6 = 0.0064 where S’ stands for the event which means that the message is not spam.
Thus, P(S|C) = 0.01 x 0.4 / 0.0064 = 5/8 = 0.625
I’ll be back soon with the next article (Part-2) that deals with Bayesian inference and the diverse applications of Bayesian statistics in data science and analytics. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/introduction-to-bayesian-statistics-for-data-science-and-analytics-part-1-93e38d67fab5 | ['Lekshmi S. Sunil'] | 2020-11-03 12:39:02.381000+00:00 | ['Bayesian Statistics', 'Data Science', 'Statistics', 'Probability', 'Data Analytics'] |
Outsourcing Your Copywriting Is Costing You Money & Time. Here’s Why | One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given was by Tom Bilyeu. I was a guest on his show Startup Theory…
He said “Nick, keep your marketing in house and to yourself for as long as you can. Only you know what you’re creating, your message and how you want to say it — nobody can copy or do that for you as good as you can”…
Tom then went on to express that in the future, if we did outsource it to still stay in a co-creation relationship with the marketing agency or freelancer so we could keep control of the reigns and what is happening
We’ve been led to believe that it’s a smart move to delegate the things we suck at. It’s true — to a point. It does save us time, energy and money to offload the things that are energy vampires for us to people who are unique genius’ at tie. But, it’s also a trap — here’s why…
Aside from Tom’s truth about those people never knowing your own message as well as you will, there’s 2 main points to keep in mind here:
If you don’t have a basic understanding of what constitutes good marketing and copywriting — your freelancer can walk all over you. They could end up writing shit and you’ll never know until you test it. What this does is a. cost you money on the copy itself, and b. cost you extra money on the testing. They’ll simply say “you need to test copy and marketing to see if it works” — which is true, but you can also test your own creations for free AND develop the skill at the same time. Plus, you save time from having to communicate with the freelancer, making edits to their work and bringing them up to speed on everything… You’re limiting your future growth and earning potential. Copywriting is the skill that keeps on giving. It’s one of the only skills where what you receive back from your input can be astronomically higher than your input. You could spend a day working on a single piece of copy, only for it to work for you for YEARS and bring in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. All that from a few hours work… That’s leverage and a skill you can use for for remainder of your life
Let’s say you do develop the skill and use it for yourself for the rest of your life. Think about not only how much you’ll receive back from the skill financially, but also how much you’ll save (and therefore keep in profit) if you never outsource to a freelancer or company ever again…
That is a thought to give energy and attention to
Journaling Prompt: do I really need to hire a freelancer and outsource my copywriting/marketing OR do I simply need to up skill myself? If I’m against learning it myself, why? What story am I telling myself about why this is a bad move? Is it time, my abilities, or something else?
Want to learn to copywrite? Check out Skillshare, Udemy or Copywriting University
Nick Maier
@nickmaier__ | https://medium.com/@nick-maier/outsourcing-your-copywriting-is-costing-you-money-time-heres-why-7a6fbe83b99a | ['Nick Maier'] | 2020-12-12 22:00:49.708000+00:00 | ['Copywriting Tips', 'Words', 'Marketing Communication', 'Copywriting', 'Copywriting Services'] |
Civic irresponsibility in Burkina Faso: example of the anarchical construction of speed bumps | Speed bump made of clay
In popular jargon in Burkina Faso, they are called in french “gendarmes couchés” which literal translation is ‘lying police officers’. These are speed bumps, these bumps on the road to force users, especially motorists to slow down. They make it possible to limit accidents and save human lives when they are implemented in the state of the art. However, they can be very dangerous and lethal when the people themselves take the initiative to install them
In Burkina, Decree №2012–1111 of 31/12/2012 issued by the Council of Ministers sets the design and construction standards for speed bumps. It makes an inventory of the different types of speed bumps and establishes the construction methods. The speed bumps market is offered to professionals who do the work in the state of the art. However, non-standard speed bumps sprout like mushrooms on roads in Burkina Faso. They are most often encountered on unpaved roads. They are illegally installed by people who do not take into account the normal dimensions of construction or who do not take care to install a sign to warn users. Consequences: frequent road accidents with the result of many loss of life. Even if the Burkinabè government had begun in May 2018, an operation of demolition of speed bumps built anarchically on asphalted roads or not, it is clear that the continuous populations to erect them.
“Speed bumps to reduce dust”: is this a valid reason?
Speed bump in a city entrance
For some inhabitants of Ouagadougou, the installation of these speed bumps acts as a breath of fresh air. “I live in Guikofê [neighborhood of the city of Ouagadougou]. There is too much dust; people are spinning with their gear. Yet the roads pass people’s courts. If there were no speed bumps, we would not be able to keep up. The speed bumps that the government sets up are only located on the national roads. We cannot do otherwise”.
The speed of users combined with the unpaved road structure can only cause a permanent state of dust. On the other hand, installing speed bumps anarchically is also the cause of many accidents. It is a dilemma situation that only the government can solve. It’s up to them to deploy their technicians in the cities of Burkina to set up quality speed bumps to the delight of the inhabitants, while securing the lives of users. Otherwise, equipped with their shovels and picks, the populations will continue to do as they wish, to the great displeasure of road users… | https://medium.com/@achillesawadogo/civic-irresponsibility-in-burkina-faso-example-of-the-anarchical-construction-of-speed-bumps-54e04ebbc5ff | ['Achille Sawadogo'] | 2019-06-17 05:39:46.951000+00:00 | ['Burkina Faso', 'Civic Engagement', 'Road Safety', 'Infrastructure'] |
2020: The Year To Remember Yet To Forget | Before I start, I would like to thank everything and everyone who contributed even a bit to help me keep going throughout the year.
Looking back in January 2020, when we all were so filled with hopes, happiness, and smiles. But before we could start the year, the most challenging time begun.
The pandemic wave already knocked the world.
And then each one of us has had a list of struggles. Our lives turned 360 degrees during the lockdown.
Some of us were fighting with the COVID-19. Many of us were losing our control over our emotional, mental, and financial health.
Some were losing their families and friends.
Some were losing their jobs.
Some were suffering the domestic violence.
And some were depressed with all the negativity around.
With time, we all are getting distorted, devastated, and depressed.
This year has shown us almost everything — from the lowest to the strongest.
Everyone, you’ll meet after will have their version of 2020.
The coming time will demand us to be more kind, more loving, and most importantly, more understanding. Probably, we all will be able to understand the other’s battle. That’s the kind of place we all deserve.
I salute everyone who is fighting endless battles every day.
We are not dead yet. No matter how hard the situation might get, we all will keep rising again and again, stronger and stronger, braver and braver — till we reach the other side.
The other side is full of happiness, success, and smiles.
We all have some light, hope, love, and laughter left within us.
Time to bring it out.
The time will pass.
Better time is on its way.
With every fight we lose, we win another one.
Time to let all the toxicity go with the year. And follow the learnings to lead a beautiful life ahead.
Wishing you all life full of Hope, Happiness, and Health. | https://medium.com/@letstalkwithshweta/2020-the-year-to-remember-yet-to-forget-c5a977e25b7f | ['Shweta Singh'] | 2020-12-27 15:22:31.479000+00:00 | ['2020', 'Life', 'Motivation', 'Lockdown', 'Freelance Writing'] |
How Men Can Support Breastfeeding Moms and Be Their Allies | When it comes to breastfeeding, the first thing to know is that it’s not just about feeding a hungry little belly, but also about responsive parenting — allowing and assisting a new mom and baby to develop that trusting bond, reassurance, and closeness during those early weeks.
For some moms, nursing comes easy and naturally while for others, the struggle is very real! Partners play a critical role in breastfeeding outcomes and therefore it is important for them to understand how breastfeeding works — not just to support their breastfeeding partner, but also so that they can be vocal allies for breastfeeding women in general. Here’s a worthwhile read that breaks it all down — everything from the benefits of nursing to the key things you should know if your partner is having difficulties, to why there is still a stigma around nursing in public.
When a new mom has a significant other who is educated about and supports her choice to breastfeed, she is much more likely to be successful at it!
Here are a few ways dads and allies can be lactation cheerleaders and help out:
1. Be the Gatekeeper at Home
Set limits with visitors, especially during those first few weeks when everyone is eager to meet the new family addition. It’s more than okay to reschedule visits to allow mom to settle into her new role and have that extra time to recover from birth and establish a nursing routine.
2. Pay Attention
Learn your baby’s hunger cues so when you see them, you can bring your baby to your partner for a nursing session.
3. Feed Mom Too
Though it doesn’t look like much, nursing is an around-the-clock job and often moms are so busy keeping their babies happy and full, they forget to feed themselves. Help out by cooking and nourishing her with healthy meals and ensure she is well hydrated too!
4. Take Your Paternity Leave (and Enjoy It)
Research finds that while half of fathers think men should take paternity leave, only 36% actually take all their permitted time off. When fathers take leave, it not only gives them a chance to bond with their child, it also supports gender equality in the workplace. Here’s a great article on how mandated equal parental leave benefits us all.
5. Accommodate
If there are new moms at your office and you are planning a long meeting, make sure to provide a 30-minute break to give moms a chance to pump. If work is done offsite, don’t wait for breastfeeding moms to ask for support— instead, find out — in advance — where lactation rooms will be located and share this information with all attendees. This ensures that those who need to pump know where to go and also helps normalize breastfeeding.
6. Advocate
Speak with HR and show your support when it comes to lactation at work. Advocate for safe and comfortable spaces to pump, adequate time for mothers to pump, and hospital-grade breast pumps.
7. Squash the Criticism
Offer encouragement to pumping moms and speak up when things are wrong. If you notice that someone is pumping in a closet or having to pump in their car during work hours — speak up! — so those moms don’t have to. If you see a mom being forced to dump her milk at airport security — speak up! — so that mom isn’t on her own. If you see a woman being ogled or shamed for breastfeeding in public is wrong — speak up! — so that mom doesn’t have to breastfeed and defend herself.
Partners and dads play an incredibly important role in a child’s life from the very beginning and should be empowered and encouraged to be a part of the breastfeeding team! Their support is essential. And, when it comes to normalizing breastfeeding, we need men as allies.
Is your partner on board when it comes to supporting your decision to breastfeed? Let us know how best they can help! | https://medium.com/milkstork/how-men-can-support-breastfeeding-moms-and-be-their-allies-df6bdc54e86f | ['Milk Stork'] | 2021-06-17 19:33:16.369000+00:00 | ['Family', 'Fatherhood', 'Parenthood', 'Breastfeeding', 'Parenting'] |
DeFi 2.0 — separating the signal from the noise | DeFi 2.0 — separating the signal from the noise
As ETH gas fees soared in the last month, affecting DeFi applications and NFT enthusiasts around the space, many conversations reverted to the initial challenges decentralized exchanges faced — scalability and security. While the NFT market was booming and making headlines, some found the gas fees so prohibitive for “cheaper” NFTs that selling them became an issue. Yet while the sale of a single NFT would affect the end user directly, the DeFi community saw it within the larger framework, once again revitalizing the discussion surrounding Layer 2 solutions or platforms like Solana or Polkadot, which offer alternatives to ETH at much lower cost. And within this dialogue, a new topic is increasingly capturing attention: DeFi 2.0.
Although this new buzzword is not yet clearly defined, it has become a catch-all for a range of developments in crypto and blockchain circles, spanning various developments from next-gen decentralised financial services to an enabler of the metaverse. What is clear is that Defi 2.0 isn’t throwing out the old and starting afresh: the term is applied to a range of initiatives dedicated to expanding existing DeFi systems, working within a changing marketplace and how it interacts with ongoing DeFi developments.
Perhaps the best summary is that DeFi 2.0 sets out to solve the negative effects of existing incentives and hype on investments into new blockchain-based projects which lead to the phenomenon of liquidity mining. Liquidity mining happens when protocols provide their native token to users in exchange for depositing assets that other users can borrow or trade. Miners make put assets into a new service’s governance token to capitalise on incentives rather than to support the concept for the long term. New projects now accept that some backers will do this and that it will increase a project’s TVL, providing on-chain liquidity.
This process relies on hype — ‘memification’ of the new service — to attract liquidity in their token. Because this new liquidity comes for the incentive benefits, projects will repeatedly increase or add new incentives — an unsustainable trend: when incentives stop, the capital leaves again, hurting the valuations of bona fide backers’ — or hodlers’ — tokens.
This can be a self-fuelling cycle as hodlers get out alongside miners to protect their stake. This means the vast proportion of early liquidity is not ‘sticky’ — in other words, new start-up protocols are forced to dilute the supply of their tokens in exchange for capital deposits, which are very often temporary.
So one of the commonest definitions of DeFi 2.0 covers efforts that seek to balance liquidity with incentives — to reduce or overcome the negative ueffects of yield farming. In this connection, the key to achieving longer-term ‘sticky’ liquidity is to add benefits alongside mere returns to incentivise token buyers. The thinking goes that adding more utility to already-attractive returns will give participants greater reason to stay invested in a project.
OpenSwap, a new decentralized exchange (DEX) currently under development, has developed a utility-added incentive program for buyers of its OSWAP token. OpenSwap aims to provide on-chain liquidity aggregated from any liquidity source using their yet-to-be-launched Open Interchain Protocol, a cross-chain bridging solution. To make it work, the interchain protocol uses ‘Bridge Trolls’ to verify and action transactions across different blockchains using Bridge Troll NFTs to participate. To earn these, OpenSwap has created a gamified system which requires prospective trolls to stake OSWAP: the more they stake, the greater the incentives they will be awarded.
This system combines enhanced returns with an ongoing — and rewarding — role in the running of the OpenSwap platform, as well as promising future benefits that keep participants engaged. OpenSwap says its scaled staking mechanism places its incentivisation deals on a longer-term, cumulative basis.
In a different take on tackling the same issues, OlympusDAO sells its token at a discount in exchange for tokens like DAI, but also for liquidity-provider (LP) tokens including its own OHM token. A user can trade their OHM-DAI LP token, which represents a liquidity position in the decentralised exchange Sushiswap, for OHM. This means the liquidity is ‘owned’ by OlympusDAO. In addition, it offers a staking mechanism where users get more OHM tokens if they commit to locking them in, which helps to balance out selling pressure.
This kind of incentive is called protocol-controlled value (PCV) — a source of sustainable liquidity and a way of protecting the worth of tokens deposited in new protocols. It also promises to offer lower gas fees for transactions on the chain — one of the sought-after benefits that DeFi has yet to deliver.
And while regulations surrounding the DeFi industry are still unconfirmed, the industry has rightfully begun focusing on risk-monitoring, if not for impending regulatory changes, then for the practicality and development of this space. Our long-term partners at Solidus Labs recently announced another successful $15 million strategic funding round. As an early stage investor in this project, our team has long believed that their approach and development is absolutely crucial in the advancement of DeFi 2.0.
The answer to ‘what’s new about DeFi 2.0?’ is perhaps not much — DeFi 2.0 builds on existing trends within DeFi to take another step toward a more long-term, sustainable model for decentralised applications — and further progress toward fulfilling the promise of blockchain technology.
More about OAX Foundation:
Website: www.oax.org
Reach out to OAX Foundation via e-mail:
[email protected]
Social Media:
Twitter: www.twitter.com/OAX_Foundation
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/oax-foundation/
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/OpenANX/
Telegram English: http://bit.ly/OAXTGEn | https://medium.com/@oax-foundation/defi-2-0-separating-the-signal-from-the-noise-69b8f133b3bc | [] | 2021-12-30 21:41:13.910000+00:00 | ['Metaverse', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Decentralized Finance', 'Nft', 'Ethereum Blockchain'] |
5 Reasons I Was Broke As a Beginner Freelancer | 5 Reasons I Was Broke As a Beginner Freelancer
It wasn’t a lack of work. It was my mentality.
Photo: Tim Gouw/Unsplash
Have you seen the articles about people quitting their jobs and then earning $100k in their first year of freelancing?
Yeah, I’m not one of those people.
For the first 2 years after quitting my job and going freelance, I was barely making ends meet. I had plenty of work, but somehow that didn’t mean lots of money. I had to work all types of side-jobs to survive (which was a positive experience, but another story).
I think it takes a certain type of person to run a successful business. No, it’s not ‘talent’ — you aren’t born that way, but you do need to grow into that person at some point in your life. Some may take to business naturally, others, like myself, need to make a lot of mistakes to get there.
I’m going to share everything I did wrong in the beginning of my freelance career. Some of these may be just my personality, but I’m sure I’m not the only one.
I hope this helps someone that’s struggling like I was.
1. I was terrified of video and voice calls
I always hated talking on the phone when I was a kid. And despite being 23 years old when I started my freelance journey, I was still very anxious about calls with clients.
A call scheduled in the evening would be a dark stormcloud over my head all day. During the call, I would stumble over my words and sometimes even forget normal English grammar. After a call, my shirt was drenched in sweat.
I know I’m not the only person that is like this. Telephobia is a real thing for many people — becoming even more common in our modern age of instant messaging and no voice calls — and it will kill your freelance career if you don’t overcome it.
Does this freak you out? | Image from pxfuel.com.
The thing is, freelancing is so often a long-distance thing, and you need to earn your clients trust. Nobody wants to pay someone thousands or even hundreds of dollars if they’ve never even heard their voice or seen their face.
You have to put yourself out there, let a person get to know you, show some personality on your website, and yes, you must overcome your fear of voice and video calls.
How do you do that? Practice. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I can tell you that each call will be just a bit easier than the last. If each call is just 1% easier, after 100 calls you will have no fear at all. For me it took around 20–30 calls to stop being stressed about them.
2. I was uncomfortable talking about money
Clients always request extra features, projects always change in scope. It’s a fact of life.
In these situations, you just need to remind the client of the agreed-upon scope of work, and tell them that extra work will cost extra. No problem, right?
Except it’s an awkward and potentially confrontational conversation. So instead of saying that something was going to cost extra, or that it was out of scope, I found it easier to just do that extra bit of work without saying anything. I also felt like I was being greedy asking for more money.
This was a loser’s mentality. I was realistically giving away 5–10 hours a week in free work, simply because I was uncomfortable asking for more money.
Freelancing is a business. There is no such thing as being greedy, there’s only the numbers you need to keep the lights on. You need to start acting like a real business, and to do that, you need to think about your pricing as a company policy, not your personal desire.
What I mean is, imagine if it wasn’t your business. If you were just an employee of a company — you would have no problem talking about the costs of the company’s services, right? Try to keep that mentality when you talk to a client about money.
3. I had a ‘poor mindset’
For the majority of westerners, being more money-conscious is a good thing. The common issue is that they earn a lot of money, but overspend and don’t have any left over.
I had kind of the opposite problem. Since a very young age, I knew that money didn’t grow on trees. My family were immigrants in an expensive country, we weren’t ‘poor’, but definitely quite money-conscious and frugal in our spending habits. Whereas someone else might have spent $100 on a night out, for me this was crazy. It should be carefully budgeted on groceries for the week.
Now fast forward about 15 years to the beginning of my freelance career (and my first years living alone and paying rent), and $100 still seemed like a lot of money for me. I subconsciously thought that everyone else was broke like me, and I was genuinely concerned about overcharging my clients. I would feel very guilty if they had to pay me an extra $20 or so.
The reality is, people with businesses that are hiring web developer, don’t think much of $100. It took me a long time to realize this. But with experience, I saw how some of my clients treated their money. I saw how they viewed $2000 as not a big deal, and I realized, damn, people actually have money. I don’t need to feel guilty about doing my job.
You can’t run a business while thinking that $100 is a lot of money. The world is a very scary and expensive place when you think that way. You have to think bigger.
4. I didn’t value my time
Let’s say I charged $40/hour. This is on the low end for web development work, but ok for a beginner, right? It can work if you are effective in charging for your time.
Here’s how you make it not work.
I would charge $20 for a task because it should only take 30 mins. In reality, it would take 1 hour, and the time spent communicating with the client would be another hour. Two hours of work for $20? So I was effectively working at $10/hr.
Did I adjust my rates after realizing that? No, not for a long time! Because I stuck to the idea that it should only take half an hour, and if it took me an hour, it was because I was sh*t at my job. So I should have to pay for that, and not my client.
It was much later that I realized my estimations were just unrealistic. When I saw the work of other web developers — the poor quality of it, how long they took, and how much they charged — I realized that my clients were getting an absolute bargain!
I was actually good at my job. Better than 90% of the competition, and I was undercharging, not just in my hourly rate but in my time estimations.
This wasn’t one realization either. It happened in several stages, with me gaining confidence each time. So if you doubt yourself and your skills, try to look at yourself objectively, and compare to someone of your own level (not the top bloggers in your industry).
5. I didn’t want to take on responsibility
At the beginning, I was focused on ‘small tasks’ and maintenance work. This is a type of work common in web development.
The reason I started with this kind of work is because you don’t need to promise anything big. And often, you don’t even need to have a call with the client.
The problem is that its cheap work. You will never be able to pack so many small tasks into your day to make a decent income.
The way to bigger money is bigger projects. And with bigger projects, you need to promise that you can actually do something, and you need to deliver what you promise.
It can be a daunting thing, to take responsibility for the success of a client’s website, and for a long time, I avoided it.
Eventually, you will just need to step up your game. People need a professional that can solve their problems for them. Not just a pixel pusher.
Once I actually started thinking about my client’s problems — instead of what they told me to do — I found that I could steer a project towards more simple and elegant solutions.
If you just do what your client asks you to do, you will often find yourself completing very difficult and awkward tasks. You have to be the expert and take the lead.
Taking responsibility over a project actually made my job easier. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/5-reasons-i-was-broke-as-a-beginner-freelancer-a4d5d8981ef3 | ['Eduard Fastovski'] | 2020-05-19 09:19:27.304000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Freelancing', 'Money', 'Business', 'Life Lessons'] |
10 Fruits, Nuts, And Vegetables You Did Not Know Were Man-Made | 10 Fruits, Nuts, And Vegetables You Did Not Know Were Man-Made
Believe it or not, some of the popular fruits, nuts, and vegetables we eat today are man-made hybrids. They were created in laboratories through selective breeding, a process whereby only plants with favourable traits are replanted. That said, there have been rare instances where insects were responsible for creating the hybrid plants through cross-pollination.
Of course, these insects would never have been able to cross-pollinate the plants if humans hadn’t planted at least one of them in the area. Most of the entries on this list are surprising because the majority are fruits, nuts, and vegetables that we consider to be natural.
10 | Cabbage, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kale, And More
Cabbage, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kale, And More
Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts, collard greens, kohlrabi, and several closely related vegetables originated from the same plant species: Brassica oleracea. Its original form is known as wild mustard and still exists today.
About 2,500 years ago, wild mustard only grew in some parts of Europe and the Mediterranean; its taste varied greatly depending on where it grew. Ancient Romans and Greeks soon realized that they could plant it for food so they engaged in selective breeding by planting seeds from wild mustard with larger leaves. The result was the vegetables that we now call kale and collard greens.
Selective breeding continued in the 1600s when people bred wild mustard with bigger leaf buds. The result was a new vegetable covered with lots of leaves — this was the first cabbage. Wild mustard selected for its bigger stems became kohlrabi, the ones with small heads became brussels sprouts, and the ones with big flowers became broccoli and cauliflower.
The hybridization of wild mustard and its derivatives continued up to the 20th century. In 1928, Russian biologist Georgii Dmintrievich Karpechenko crossed a radish with a cabbage to produce what he called the rabbage. The rabbage should have been impossible because the radish is not related to the cabbage. However, the plant never caught on because it failed at being either a radish or a cabbage.
Later in 1993, the Sakata Seed Company of Yokohama, Japan crossbred broccoli with kai-lan to create broccolini, or as some call it, baby broccoli, aspiration, asparations, broccoletti, broccolette, and Italian sprouting broccoli. It’s a derivative of wild mustard and is the Chinese version of broccoli.
9 | Orange
Orange
Many varieties of the orange exist today. However, every variety traces its roots to the man-made hybrid when the pomelo was crossed with the mandarin. The pomelo is almost as bitter as the grapefruit, while the mandarin is sweet. The mandarin has an orange color, which is why many people misidentify it as a variety of the orange. Wrong! The mandarin is an ancestor of the orange.
The history of the orange is unclear, but it is believed to have first appeared in southern China. Over the years, humans have selectively bred oranges to create many varieties, making it easy to confuse the orange with other citrus fruits. To be clear, a fruit needs to have evolved from the pomelo and mandarin to be considered an orange.
That said, the tangerine is not considered an orange because it evolved from the mandarin but not the pomelo. However, the tangelo, which we’ll get to shortly, is in a gray area. It’s a cross between a tangerine and a pomelo. And as we mentioned already, the tangerine was created from the mandarin.
8 | Peanut
Peanut
The modern peanut is a hybrid of two earlier types of peanuts, the Arachis ipaensis and the Arachis duranensis. The Arachis duranensis grows in the Andean valleys between Bolivia and Argentina, while the Arachis ipaensis grows inside Bolivia.
Both plants were found so far away from each other, they couldn’t have crossbred naturally. Researchers ultimately discovered that the earliest settlers in South America took the Arachis duranensis from the Andean valleys as they migrated into today’s Bolivia 10,000 years ago.
However, the settlers did not quickly realize the potential of their new crop and it was the bees that actually cross-pollinated both peanuts. The result was a new peanut that is the ancestor of today’s peanuts.
7 | Banana
Banana
The modern, common banana is a man-made hybrid of the wild Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana banana species. Musa acuminata has a fleshy inside, but it has a very unpleasant taste. Musa balbisiana has a pleasant-tasting inside but contains too many seeds.
Both bananas naturally crossbred in the forests of South Asia. However, the resultant banana, which is the ancestor of the modern banana, was sterile. About 10,000 years ago, early humans discovered the hybrid and learned that they could replant the shoots to create new trees. They engaged in selective breeding and only replanted bananas with favorable traits. This led to the creation of the modern banana.
Although we’ve managed to create the perfect banana, we could not figure out a way to grow bananas from seeds. So, bananas will become extinct if we stop planting them. The absence of a seed also means that all bananas have the same genetic properties as they are replanted from the shoot of another tree. As a result, all the world’s banana trees could be wiped out by a single disease.
6 | Almond
Almond
The almond is a man-made hybrid of the wild almond, which is notoriously bitter and could be deadly when consumed in considerable amounts. The history of the modern almond is unclear, and scientists still can’t determine which variant of the wild almond was selectively bred to create the modern almond.
Scientists have their theories though. They suspect that the wild ancestor of the almond is the Amygdalus fenzliana (Fritsch) Lipsky because its trees, seeds, and fruits resemble the modern almond. It’s also found in Armenia and Azerbaijan, where today’s almond is believed to have been selectively bred by humans. Besides the origin, scientists cannot determine how our ancestors managed to create a perfect, sweet almond because the almond is poisonous.
5 | Grapefruit
Grapefruit
The grapefruit is a relatively new hybrid. It’s believed, although not confirmed that the grapefruit first appeared around 1693 when Captain Shaddock transported pomelo (Citrus maxima) seeds to the West Indies and planted them close to some orange trees. The pomelo and orange later cross-pollinated to create the grapefruit (then called shaddocks). However, the grapefruit was still unknown outside the Caribbean.
Europeans eventually learned of this citrus fruit in 1750 when Reverend Griffith Hughes encountered one. Hughes was so surprised with the discovery that he named the grapefruit “the forbidden fruit.” That was its name until 1814 when John Lunan, a planter and Jamaica magistrate, called it a grapefruit because they resembled the smaller and unrelated grapes when they were still growing.
The grapefruit finally reached the United States in 1823, but was mistaken for the pomelo. It was only determined to be a distinct fruit in 1837. However, botanists were still confused about its origin. It wasn’t until 1948 that they discovered it was a hybrid of the pomelo and the orange.
4 | Boysenberry
Boysenberry
The boysenberry was created by Rudolph Boysen of Orange County, California in 1923. Boysen, a horticulturist, planted grafted berry vines on his in-law’s farm in Anaheim, eventually cultivating a successful hybrid. Unfortunately, Boysen’s berries never found commercial success and it seemed like his unique vine would go the way of the dodo bird.
Several years later, a fellow farmer from California named Walter Knott heard about the berry and asked its creator if he could try to make something of it. Knott successfully brought the dying hybrid back to life at his Buena Park, California farm. Knott then named the fruit after Boysen, and Knott’s Berry Farm eventually became the would famous amusement park we know today.
The boysenberry is considered to be a variant of the blackberry, although it’s actually a hybrid of a blackberry and either the loganberry or the red raspberry. For all we know, Boysen could have created the berry from of all three vines.
That said, there are claims that the boysenberry is actually a cross between the Eastern dewberry and the man-made loganberry. The loganberry was created in 1881 when James Logan crossed a raspberry with a wild blackberry. However, the early boysenberry was not a commercial success due to its short shelf life. It decays just two days after harvest.
3 | Tangelo
Tangelo
As we mentioned earlier, the tangelo is a man-made hybrid of the tangerine and the pomelo. In fact, that’s where the tangelo got its name. However, it is common for people to confuse the tangelo with the tangerine, mandarin, and orange.
To add to the confusion, there are different varieties of tangelos and all are not necessarily created from tangerines and pomelos. One common variant, the Minneola tangelo, is a hybrid of the tangerine and the Duncan grapefruit. Another variant was created by crossing a mandarin with a pomelo, which technically makes it an orange.
The tangelo is believed to have first appeared in the forests of Southeast Asia 3,500 years ago when insects cross-pollinated the mandarin with a fruit that is closely related to the grapefruit. However, today’s tangelos are the result of a selective breeding program that started in the 1800s.
At the forefront of the tangelo project was the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which created the popular Minneola tangelo sold across the United States. The USDA released the seeds of the Minneola tangelo in 1931. It’s named after the city of Minneola, Florida.
2 | Carrots
Carrots
Carrots haven’t always been orange. Natural carrots were either white or purple and probably inedible. There are even accounts that white carrots were eaten in the Roman Empire, but historians believe that they could have been parsnips, white carrots, or both. Ultimately, the modern orange carrot we eat today is a hybrid of the yellow carrot, which is a hybrid of the white carrot.
The earliest-known ancestor of the modern consumable carrot appeared in Persia in the 10th century. Some accounts say it was white, and others say it was purple. Unlike today’s carrots, those vegetables had lots of smaller roots of varying sizes. The Persians selectively bred the carrots with the biggest roots to create bigger roots and, ultimately, a big single root.
As the selective breeding continued, the carrots mutated from white or purple to yellow and finally orange. Selective breeding of carrots continued until modern times to improve their flavor and color.
1 | Strawberry
Strawberry
The modern strawberry is a man-made hybrid of the smaller wild strawberry, which has a shorter shelf life as well as a better flavor and aroma. The modern strawberry first appeared in France in the 18th century. However, the hybridization program began much earlier.
In the 1300s, French botanists started planting wild strawberries in their gardens when they realized that wild strawberries reproduced by cloning. Strangely, some strawberries never produced fruits and half of the ones that did suddenly stopped cloning and making fruits after some years.
The French managed to create wild strawberries that were 15 to 20 times their normal size, but they were still incredibly small. Antoine Nicolas Duchesne created the modern strawberry on July 6, 1764, when he crossed a male Fragaria moschata with a female Fragaria chiloensis from Chile.
Before Duchesne created his strawberry, French botanists had never realized that strawberries had male and female parts. This was the reason some never produced fruits as some botanists had planted either males or females. Duchesne continued working on the strawberry until the French Revolution, leaving American and British botanists to perfect the modern strawberry.
If you liked this piece why not check out some of my other pieces here. | https://medium.com/@everythingcj/10-fruits-nuts-and-vegetables-you-did-not-know-were-man-made-543618099053 | ['Everything Cj'] | 2021-02-06 20:43:43.634000+00:00 | ['Vegetables', 'Nuts', 'Knowledge', 'Fruits'] |
Two Ships, One Sun — A Look at a Romantic English Painting | As I’ve written in previous posts, it can be hard to look at a piece of art and have something to say about it. Fortunately, having system to categorize information is also useful when it comes to talking about a painting — and thinking about what it means.
In this post, I want to take a look at The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838. Wow, that’s certainly a long title for a painting. This work of art was painted during a stylistic period called Romanticism by the English landscape artist, Joseph Mallord William Turner in 1838, and exhibited at the Royal Academy just one year later (so you can see that Turner was an artist who achieved critical acclaim during his lifetime).
A brief low-down on Romanticism: Poets, painters, and musicians of this era celebrated nature over the man-made, turning to landscapes for inspiration. Works of art emphasized an emotional approach to the world, in reaction against the cold and calculated intellectualism that was the hallmark of the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, and the violently failed French Revolution.
Artists celebrated that moment when a person gets in touch with something beyond themselves — The Sublime — such as an inspiring view.
Artists from this time period include the composer Beethoven, writer Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and the poet John Keats. Then there were painters, one of which was Turner, our artist under discussion today.
So let’s take a look at his painting of these two ships — and one sun.
There are 8 different things you can think about and discuss when looking at a painting, and many of them are really just based on what you see. They are:
Composition
Movement
Unity and Balance
Color and Lighting
Mood
History
Biography
Symbolism
Let’s take a look right now at each one.
Composition:
This canvas is an assortment of contrasts. A setting sun occupies the right side of the canvas, and we see a small rising moon above the ships on the left. The whitish, tall, sailing vessel contrasts with the dark and squat paddle-wheeler that tows it. The warm tones around the setting sun contrast with the cool tones on the remainder of the canvas, but the colors are blended so expertly that the contrasts do not overpower the viewer. Of course, in terms of contrasts, there is also the clear reference to steam power versus sail power, which we will discuss more below.
Motion:
Immediately we see that there are two ships on the left side of the canvas, one behind the other, which implies that the larger ship — a sailing vessel — is being towed somewhere. In the lower right corner there appears to a dark object in the water, which is probably a buoy. The buoy makes a set of diagonal lines, one stretching out to the tips of the masts on the white sailing ship, and the other stretching out toward the equally dark steamboat. These diagonal lines, coupled with the obvious cloud of smoke coming from the smokestack, implies that the ships are moving toward that bottom right corner. Incidentally, Turner took some poetic license with the smokestack and moved it further toward the front of the boat, so the cloud would be elongated and more noticeable.
Unity and Balance:
The diagonal lines stretching from the buoy to the tips of the masts bisect the canvas, creating a dividing line between the warm colors of the setting sun and the cooler tones of the water and clouds. The ships are off to one side, the imbalance of which only heightens the sense that we are witnessing the scene in action — a point of style that was particularly popular in Romantic paintings and latter with the work of the Impressionists, who sought to capture the fleeting moments of life in one-sitting works of strong brushstrokes. There is also an interesting contrast between the stillness of the water, and vigorous strokes around the sun and clouds, which breaks up the uniformity of the texture. A sense of balance is achieved by positioning the horizon line approximately one third up from the bottom of the canvas.
Color and Lighting:
The lighting of this scene is very much driven by the setting sun. In actuality, the Temeraire was not towed in the direction we see it traveling to; Turner took poetic license to position the sunset in the background (why that is, we will see later). Turner was particularly fascinated with the effects of color, and many of his canvases are strongly driven by one hue. In this case, he has given careful attention to the yellow and shades of yellow around the sun; capturing yellow light was one of his special preoccupations. The yellow is dotted with a variety of red shades to give it some extra complexity. The ships are also an interesting study in colors. The white sailing vessel is ghostly in its appearance. Though it would have been black and gold in reality, Turner depicts the Temeraire in grays, browns, and ivories to give it an insubstantial appearance, along with giving it skeleton-like look with the visible timbers of the hull . This is all in contrast to the black steamboat that pulls it, which is fairly solid, especially its smokestack, which even has a white line along the front to indicate the reflection of light (which further implies its very solid state).
Mood:
As mentioned, this painting is driven by contrasts, and preeminent among them thematically is the contrast between steam power and sail power. To understand the mood of this painting, it’s important to take that historical detail into account. Sail power was associated with a certain sense of glory, adventure, excitement, and romance. The setting sun, combined with the shell of a boat being towed to shore to be taken apart and sold as scrap, might invoke a certain sense of sadness, loss, or wistfulness. To viewers unaware of that fact, and even for those who are, the sun-washed sky and calm waters appear peaceful — but our curiosity cannot help but be evoked by the two ships on the right side of the canvas. As it turns out, the Temeraire’s masts would have been removed before it was towed to its final berth, but Turner left them in the painting, perhaps to further evoke a sense of melancholy about its demise — a feeling that is only heightened by the vessel under full sail we see moving in the opposite direction, just to the right of the black tugboat; it might allude to the glory days of the Temeraire.
History:
The Temeraire was a British warship that played an important role in the Battle of Trafalagar, which was fought off the coast of Spain between Napoleon’s navy and the British Fleet. It was at this battle that Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated the French Navy and effectively made the British Empire the preeminent naval power for the next century. As such, the Temeraire was a symbol for the glory days of sail, adventure, and the romantic notions that went with it. What loomed ahead on the horizon was a new era of a steam-powered world, inhabited by new machines like this steamboat, and trains (which also fascinated Turner, and appear in another famous painting of his, Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway).
Biography:
Turner was one of the two greatest landscape painters in his day; the other was John Constable. While Constable’s work was very much driven by the actual appearance of the English countryside, Turner’s work increasingly became more and more abstract as his career went on. He started out painting classically inspired landscapes and watercolors, and then turned toward a focus on capturing the power of nature, especially the sea, storms, and in particular, storms at sea. From there, his paintings became a more free-form style of swirling light and color, and this painting seems to fall into the beginning of that more abstract leg of his life’s journey.
Symbolism:
As mentioned, the preeminent contrast of this painting is that of sail power versus steam power. The setting sun, which Turner took some poetic license to include in the painting, and the ghostly appearance of the Temeraire, are like a mournful song to the end of an era. In its place is something far less endearing — the dark, squat, and purely functional tugboat that represents the new and predominant force of steam. High above the tugboat, a white flag flies, the symbol of surrender. The Temeraire would not go down at Trafalgar, which became symbolic of British resolve and the Empire. But here the white flag flies, as if to imply that the glorious era of sail has given up, and willingly goes to its death. In this way, Turner’s canvas — though painted in a very expressive and emotive Romantic style — alludes to the passing of Romanticism and the entry of the world into something yet unseen and unknown.
A final word…
As you can see, many of the points we raised were just based on looking at the painting. As we moved into the later points, we did need a little deeper understanding of the artist, the time period, and possible symbolic meanings. But for the most part, discussing a painting does not have to be so difficult. You can just point out the things you see and start talking about them.
I’ll be writing more of these types of posts, so if there is a painting that you particularly want to discuss, please put it in the comments, along with anything else you see in this painting.
If you’ve read this far, I would also ask that you please follow me on Medium and show some support for these types of articles about the arts. Thanks so much! | https://medium.com/carre4/two-ships-one-sun-a-look-at-a-romantic-english-painting-21ec7fd41e66 | ['Charles Hanna'] | 2020-09-24 23:03:26.024000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Arts And Culture', 'Design', 'Culture', 'Arts And Entertainment'] |
The Great City of God | Follow series, Letters to the Church (2)
As a sinner seeking Truth, I have regularly returned to the story of Jonah…maybe as a matter of vain identification with a person who literally threw himself in the middle of a raging sea to avoid what he heard as a commandment from God. It is a stark account that God’s Will is greater than ours, no matter how far we may stray from the idea that our own wills are lesser. I’ve often read this story (more like skimmed thoroughly) to remind myself that God will save us when we endanger ourselves trying to escape that Will. I have taken great comfort in that idea — no matter how much I fight, I can be rescued (after being allowed to tiptoe up to certain harm) if I only will turn back to the path I am called to walk.
It’s imperative to confess here that I have never been as angry as a follower of Christ than I was over the past year. I became quite justified in pointing fingers at everything I saw around me falling apart. It won’t do to dive into all of the good things I had or had given to me, because (of course) that would mean I was in an unselfish and objective place to recognize True Good. Oh no, I took to just wallowing along indignant depths of despair because it was and is much easier to just react react react. Anger is a much easier emotion to grab and ride.
In a recent and less hostile moment, I returned to the habit of perusing Bible verses in the middle of sleepless nights. I’m a creature of semi-erratic habit, so I flipped over to the book of Jonah again…but this time, I read it a little more thoroughly.
The very abridged version of the story of Jonah is this: Jonah is commanded by God to go to the neighboring city of Nineveh and call its citizens (Gentiles) to repent in order to be saved by the Lord. Jonah had already prophesied Nineveh would be destroyed, so he willfully disobeys and decides another course of action. He believes the Lord’s command for them to repent is pointless because they don’t even know or respect God, and proudly believes them to be wicked. Jonah decides to skip town altogether, so he goes south to one town so he can board a ship and cross what is now the Mediterranean Sea to get to a town as far away as possible from Nineveh. He succeeds in boarding a ship and proceeds to sail across the sea to his destination. One night, a huge storm threatens to destroy the ship and all of its crew. After the terrified crew cries out to God and figures out Jonah is the one who brought on the storm, Jonah understands that his disobedience has led to this wrathful act of God. Jonah commands the crew to throw him overboard and into the sea so that the storm will abate and the ship and her crew will be spared. He is willing to die — and almost does — but no. God hears Jonah crying out in his moment of death and sends a large fish to swallow him. When Jonah confesses that God has spared him, the fish throws him up and he is washed back ashore, three full days from Nineveh. God then commands Jonah again to go to Nineveh and command their repentance. Jonah finally obeys and makes the days-long journey. To his surprise, Nineveh does indeed repent as the Lord commands and is spared the destruction first promised to them and all within the city are saved.
Instead of Jonah rejoicing, he is “exceedingly displeased” and angry. He prays to the Lord, and laments that it is because the Lord is so gracious, slow to anger, abounding in Love…Jonah justifies that’s exactly why he fled across the sea in the first place. Even then, Jonah still holds tightly to the notion he had to leave and disobey because he knew he did not have the love for Nineveh that the Lord did. He wanted to see Nineveh destroyed as he had prophesied before, believing it to be evil. Jonah still harbors uncharitable judgment against Nineveh in his heart…and he feels this conviction and anger throughout his entire being. In anguish, Jonah asks God to take his life because it would be better for him to die than to live. He gives into wallowing in despair.
(Somehow I missed what I now am convinced the entire book of Jonah really is about. It hit me hard, and I continue to feel the waves of conviction wash over me. It continues to break my hardened heart.)
God asks Jonah in his moment of suffering:
“Does it do you well to be angry?”
At this moment in my life, this is the most powerful question I think can be asked, and God asks it here with loving compassion. He knows that Jonah’s anger is blinding. After God asks him this question, Jonah leaves the city and sits upon a hill so he can view Nineveh from afar to see what will happen. Again in loving compassion, God grows a plant to shade him “to save him from his discomfort.”
Jonah becomes extremely happy with this gesture of the plant and falls asleep. But by the very next morning, worms eat the plant and it withers and dies. In the heat of the day, Jonah becomes faint from the sun and (again) asks God to die rather than live. He seems to view the gesture of the plant being provided for him then taken away as a punishment.
God isn’t done. He asks Jonah again: “Does it do you well to be angry for the plant?” Jonah replies he is, enough to burn in the sun and die.
Then God says, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”
It’s a body blow to realize how shortsighted Jonah’s view of the world is, how selfish it is instead of looking at Nineveh and even simple things like plants and trees through God’s lens of Love. | https://medium.com/@ericajanine/nineveh-revisited-390704a5c50 | ['Erica Janine Henson'] | 2021-02-24 15:17:12.369000+00:00 | ['Church', 'Anger', 'Great Cities', 'Love Letters', 'Christianity'] |
A New You for the New Year | by Randy Gage
Posted By: Randy Gage / December 31, 2020
What would you do if you woke up one day to discover you were living the wrong life? What if you woke up and realized you didn’t really like yourself…or actually hated yourself? (It usually does work this way. You live in denial or delusion for months or years, and suddenly snap into awareness about how you actually feel inside.) I don’t know what you would do, but I can tell you what you should do…
Celebrate the moment in tremendous gratitude. Because you’re on the cusp of an exponential breakthrough… Because what you are experiencing may be the greatest gift you’ve ever received… Because you can only come to a realization like this by developing a rare gift of self-awareness, critical thinking ability, and a level of consciousness that far too many people never allow themselves to access.
This experience is required to allow you to transcend from mere existence to a state I like to call “divine discontent.” This is an extremely spiritual state where you live in gratitude for what you already possess, but still desire to do…have…and become…more. This state permits you to discover the mysterious secret of a purposeful life:
Becoming the highest possible version of yourself.
If I could shout out only one self-development truth from the rooftops, it would be this: You can’t really create a Happy New Year without first creating a Happy New You. And that’s where the process of reinvention comes in…
Reinvention isn’t about setting new goals or making New Year’s resolutions. Goals express a desire but have no pathway designated to achieve them. Usually resolutions are about abstract behaviors (“I will be kinder.”) or killing old habits (“I will quit smoking.”). Nothing inherently wrong about either of these choices. But reinvention goes higher, focusing on the bigger picture of becoming a certain kind of person who lives in a certain kind of way. You essentially kill off the old you and create a new, improved version.
Your life won’t lead you to meaningful purpose, happiness, and prosperity unless you live it in continuous evolution and reinvention. Anything less is you hibernating in a neutral state of stasis, or even sliding backward toward mediocrity. To live the highest possible version of your life means intentionally seeking out a continuous progression of escalating challenges — then doing the difficult work of trial, growth, and self-development to overcome them.
Perhaps the most liberating day of your life will be the one that you realize some bridges are meant to be burned. Real happiness can be attained only by the examination and eventual mastery of self. The things you get from introspection and evolution are great. But the best reward is who you become.
If you’re living a small life, it’s not the life you were meant to live. Ultimately, living small will lead you to a defining moment: You either hate change enough to stay mediocre or you hate being mediocre enough to change. When you’re brave enough to change, you get to make one of the most monumental choices possible: who you want to become. This is where the breakthroughs live. And if you are ready to experience this kind of breakthrough living, you’re going to hallucinate when you get your hands on my next book…
Radical Rebirth
It’s the book that took me my entire life up to this point to write. It felt like I was communing with the cosmos as it poured forth from my fingers to the keyboard. This book could only come to term because of the multiple rebirths I have experienced personally.
The first rebirths came from running away from being a person I hated: languishing as a teen in a jail cell for armed robbery and deciding that wasn’t who I really was. Having my business seized and auctioned off by the tax authorities, choosing to take personal responsibility instead of blaming them.
In each case, I had to kill off the old me…
Those were difficult experiences, but they allowed me to create my next rebirths operating at a much higher level of consciousness. Instead of running from a version of me I despised, I was blessed to run to a higher version of me that I desired. Whether you are running from an old you, or seeking a new you, Radical Rebirth will guide you along a journey of challenge, adventure and growth. The book will help you recreate or reinvent yourself, to live the life you’ve always dreamed of. You’ll discover the limiting beliefs that are holding you back, blow them up, and replace them with empowering ones. You will begin a perpetual cycle of incremental improvement — an ongoing quest to evolve into the highest possible version of yourself.
You’re surrounded by people who give you permission to stay where you are. You need someone who challenges that. You need someone who believes in the you that you’re meant to become. You need someone who believes and cares about you enough to say…
It’s go-time. It’s time to let go of the safe, embrace the challenge, and step into your greatness.
That’s the sacred responsibility I accepted when I wrote the book. If you’re experiencing “divine discontent” with your life — you’re ready to create a new and better version of you — this is the book you never knew you needed.
You’re a candidate for a Radical Rebirth if you:
Keep beating yourself up
Are powerless over an addiction
Can’t seem to ever forgive yourself
Went into a career to make your parents or someone else happy
Are stuck in a negative, dysfunctional relationship(s)
Have high levels of credit card or other debts
Make decisions based on social signaling instead of the real merits
Feel like there is no purpose or meaning in your life
Please. Give yourself another chance. It’s never too late to release an old version of yourself and replace it with an upgraded version. Let me help you do that.
WARNING: Radical Rebirth could cause you to quit your job, divorce your spouse, open a record store, fall in love with yourself, hitchhike across a continent, accept your true sexuality, change your career, get a tattoo, renounce your religion, leave a relationship, start a movement, end a movement, become a tech billionaire, move to an ashram in India, forgive someone, forgive your parents, forgive yourself, or…all of the above.
Please grab a couple copies and gift one to a library or loved one. Amazon Kindle Personally inscribed and international orders
Remember it doesn’t release until January 12th. For some reason the Amazon page isn’t showing the cover yet, but you know what they say: “You can’t judge a book by the cover that Amazon can’t find”
This book is really the culmination of my life’s work thus far and it’s my wish that it reaches everyone who is ready for the message. If my work has been helpful to you at any time in your life, I’m humbly requesting that you please tap dance across the “share” buttons above and spread the message about this book to your world.
Peace,
- RG
P.S. January 2 nd will be the inaugural weekly sermon in my new “un-church!” If you missed the announcement, read the details here. | https://medium.com/prosperity-success/a-new-you-for-the-new-year-29f03d7b7c51 | ['Randy Gage'] | 2020-12-31 17:10:46.626000+00:00 | ['Goals', 'Prosperity', 'New Years Reflections', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Goal Setting'] |
The Night Before Christmas: | 7 Ideas for Getting Your Kids (And Yourself) Sleep on Christmas Eve
by Michael A. Grandner PhD MTR
https://michaelgrandner.com
As the poem goes, “’Twas the night before Christmas and, all through the house, not a creature was stirring…” But often that’s not the case.
Christmas morning is a time loaded with anticipation and that often means restless sleep the night before. And this is a problem because on Christmas Day — along with the joy of gifts — there are often numerous sources of stress. Whether it’s because of frustrating family members, cranky kids, or batteries not included, all of these issues might be made worse after a night of terrible sleep.
For these reasons, consider these suggestions for optimizing Christmas Eve sleep and Christmas Day stress.
1. Wake up early on Christmas Eve
Don’t sleep in on the morning of Christmas Eve! Once our body wakes up, we start building up “hunger” for sleep that builds across the day. The later you wake up, the less “hunger” for sleep you will have at bedtime. If you know you’re already more likely to have a tough time falling asleep, getting an early start to the day will help your body be ready for sleep when you want it to be.
2. Get plenty of light and activity during the day
Getting yourself (and the kids!) plenty of physical activity will help set them up for optimal sleep at night. Try to get some outside time if the weather permits — natural sunlight (especially in the earlier part of the day) can help energize you and help your circadian rhythms stay in sync with the day. Not only will the activity tire everyone out a little, but it will help prepare the body for sleep at night. Often, when we lounge around indoors all day, it can sometimes be harder to send a “night” signal when it is bedtime since there was no strong “day” signal to balance it out.
3. Start winding down with relaxing activities in the evening
After dinnertime but before bedtime, try to plan more relaxing activities in anticipation of a big day tomorrow. Now is a great time for a Christmas family movie or reading or just sitting around and chatting. You should consider putting handheld screens to bed earlier than usual, to allow for plenty of wind-down time.
Dim the lights and relax in the evening to help clear your mind and allow your body to let go of the day. Plan ahead for being a little more wound up than usual, which may require more settling in than a typical night.
Some people open presents on Christmas Eve. Opening one or multiple presents may be a great way to diffuse the tension, but it can be frustrating to open a present that you don’t get to enjoy. Avoid opening anything that would be too exciting or activating.
Giving kids (or yourself) a warm bath at night may also help relax the body and mind, and help body temperature drop to prepare you for sleep.
4. Consider sleep-friendly foods during the day and in the evening
During the day, avoid pushing too many sugary foods — even though with all the holiday treats it may be very tempting. Make sure that everyone (adults and kids) eat balanced meals so that when nighttime comes, everyone can fall asleep in comfort.
Adults should take care to avoid any stimulants like coffee in the afternoon and excessive alcohol in the evening. Both of these can disrupt sleep.
Kids may consider a warm drink like hot chocolate (especially if made with warm milk) — though chocolate contains caffeine and hot cocoa has a bit of sugar, it’s likely not enough to cause a huge problem on its own.
5. Stick to the usual bedtime routine
It is important to stick to the usual bedtime routine as much as possible. Any additions should occur before the start of the routine. If you are leaving out milk and cookies, saying extra prayers, reading extra stories, or talking about what will happen tomorrow, all that should occur before the bedtime routine starts.
Once the routine starts, it should be as familiar as possible. This is because a bedtime routine (especially for kids) is an important part of the wind-down process and a disruption can make it harder to fall asleep.
6. Have a plan for presents, and make sure everyone knows what it is
Have the plan for Christmas morning clearly communicated multiple times during the day. Every family has its own traditions, but it may be a good idea to set those traditions around healthy habits that will make the day go smoother. This will help reduce anticipation and uncertainty.
If the morning plan includes provisions for healthy sleep, then it may actually encourage better sleep that night. For example, if kids know that presents don’t get opened right away, they will be less inclined to wake up as early as possible.
Families may have traditions around kids waking in the middle of the night to, as the song says, “see if reindeer really know how to fly.” Some families may want to enforce a “stay in bed” rule, whereas others may prefer a more flexible approach. Either should be fine as long as it is communicated ahead of time.
7. Begin the morning right, and have a plan for the day in place
Kids will often wake up extra early on Christmas morning. Many adults do too! This is OK and part of the magic of happy anticipation. They should be allowed to wake as early as they need to.
In fact, if you are awake and are unable to get back to sleep, you might as well get up. This is an underlying principle to “stimulus control” and developing healthy sleep habits in general. For this reason, getting up whenever sleep is finished should be perfectly permissible.
However, things may go much smoother if this was accompanied by the rule that everyone can wake up whenever their body naturally wants them to. This means that anyone who wakes early is not allowed to wake anyone else. Only when everyone wakes on their own will Christmas morning begin.
This way, everyone gets the rest they need! Another consideration is to plan out meals so that the distractions of gift-giving and other activities don’t leave kids (and adults) cranky and out-of-sorts. Perhaps delaying most of the presents until after a healthy breakfast will help the day go smoother.
Christmas Day can be a fun and joyous time, but it can also be stressful. By getting good sleep, you can help your mind and body be prepared for the day. It can help you (and your kids!) be more emotionally balanced and centered, more patient, and more able to enjoy the day. By starting out Christmas Eve bright and early, you set yourself up for good sleep later. This is helped by getting plenty of light and activity during the day, you set up everyone’s body for better sleep at night. At the end of the day, winding down early will give everyone time to settle down and get ready to let go of the day. This is helped by healthy meals during the day and avoiding excess sugar and caffeine. Then, when getting ready for bed, they should stick to the usual bedtime routine. When the morning comes, there should be a plan in place that was clearly communicated the day before. Ideally, Christmas morning should start when everyone wakes up on their own, so that everyone is rested (at least as much as they can be).
Dr. Michael Grandner is a licensed clinical psychologist, board-certified in Behavioral Sleep Medicine. He is the Director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona and Director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the Banner-University Medical Center in Tucson. Dr. Grandner is Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, Medicine, Nutritional Sciences, and Clinical Translational Science at the University of Arizona. He is an internationally-recognized expert in sleep health, has over 175 academic publications, and frequently consults with health, technology, athletics, and nutritional companies and organizations regarding sleep, health, and performance. Read more about him at https://michaelgrandner.com. | https://medium.com/@grandner/the-night-before-christmas-5d4c5e13a80d | ['Dr. Michael A. Grandner'] | 2020-12-22 23:48:30.446000+00:00 | ['Insomnia', 'Sleep', 'Kids', 'Christmas'] |
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