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Your Crazy Nocturnal Covid Schedule is Actually Kind of Normal | Your Crazy Nocturnal Covid Schedule is Actually Kind of Normal
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels
As we approach the shortest day of the year, the struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy is rapidly falling by the wayside—and our feral tendencies are emerging. The exhaustion of a sustained crisis that has dragged on for nearly a year and the cold darkness of winter mean that ambitious efforts to maintain some sense of normalcy have given way to stress, anxiety, depression, and a full-fledged metal health crisis even among those lucky enough not to be struggling with food insecurity or economic catastrophe. Especially for those who are unemployed or working from remote, the absence of a commute, workplace, and school run that used to structure the day has left a void many are struggling to fill. Self-motivation can only go so far — instead, the patterns of the day have slipped into a new more fluid reality.
Nowhere is this disruption more evident than in our sleep, the most basic of human needs. Studies have linked sleep to mental health and wellness. Yet during this tumultuous time, wake times have shifted, bedtimes are creeping back. Others have embraced going nocturnal. While sleep is always a struggle (see insomnia, newborns, etc.), the upheaval of the pandemic that has come for so much this year has also, it seems, come for the myth of the eight-hour sleep. For those who worry about whether they sleep too little, too much, or at the “wrong” times, it might be comforting to know that the notion of an uninterrupted eight-hour stretch is a modern contrivance — a relatively short-lived phenomenon that traces its origin to electrification.
In his book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the historian Robert Ekirch documents this phenomenon as he chronicles the history of sleep. Without the widespread use of gas or electric lighting, the night was often dark and (to quote Game of Thrones) “full of terror.” People went to bed when it got dark, and stayed inside to avoid common fears of the time, which included demons, cutthroats and robbers, or even just stumbling into a ditch. Of particular comfort are Ekirch’s findings that over the course of human history, segmented sleep was not only common but an accepted practice:
…Before the industrial age, people often slept for a few hours after dinner, then woke after midnight to engage in restful contemplation and prayer, conversation or sex, and then resumed sleeping until daybreak.
Supporting these findings, which Ekirch found evidenced in journals and terms such as first and second sleep, are modern sleep studies. Scientists have observed that humans, when kept in perpetual darkness, eventually revert to a biphasic sleep cycle, resting for four hours only to wake for an hour or two, then sleep for another four hours. Sometimes participants took as long as two hours to fall asleep. All of it calls into question the very concept of insomnia as a modern concept, inconvenient as it may be.
It shouldn’t be surprising that during the pandemic sleep is yet another aspect of life being renegotiated. Biphasic or polyphasic sleep is something humans have long experimented with, albeit usually with an eye toward increasing productivity. Ben Franklin, Nikolai Tesla and Thomas Jefferson are all rumored to have been polyphasic sleepers, employing rigid schedules of napping every two hours for 45 minutes to radically reduce the amount of sleep necessary. More recently, Silicon Valley life hackers have dabbled in polyphasic sleep as a means of training their bodies to accept less sleep and free up additional hours in the day. If 2020 finds us less worried about increasing productivity than just surviving, relaxing your sleep standards to get through the day seems ambitious enough.
As we spend another season sheltering at home, shut away indoors during the dark of winter it’s little wonder that our sleep habits are starting to resemble the patterns of the pre- industrial era. It might even help us relax a bit if we learn to embrace it. So if COVID-19 has you tossing and turning at night, let go of the myth of the eight hour sleep. Cut yourself and your teen some slack, and when you wake from first sleep, know there is a second sleep waiting for you. In the meantime, spend some quiet time in the dark listening to Nocturne about how the residents of Tromso get through the long Polar Night, or try Ekirch’s NPR interview, A Fitful History of Sleep. | https://medium.com/an-idea/your-crazy-nocturnal-covid-schedule-is-actually-kind-of-normal-af5dc8b01f75 | ['K. Holland'] | 2020-12-22 16:32:24.927000+00:00 | ['Sleep', 'Covid 19', 'Health', 'Pandemic', 'Productivity'] |
The most important news of the cryptoindustry | 1. Western Union tests Ripple technology ENG
Western Union began testing cross-border transfers based on XRP cryptocurrency.
According to Molly Shi, senior vice president of Western Union Digital, the company is trying to remain competitive and as efficient as possible. Moreover, employees of the company admit the possibility that the future of the industry will be cryptocurrencies oriented.
“When you think about cryptocurrencies, the first thing that comes to mind is that you need to be ready for their takeoff. We need to be prepared for this from a technological point of view, ”she shares her thoughts. “We must constantly identify trends that customers are paying attention to and ensure that they are ready to meet their needs.”
2. New vulnerability of Constantinople hard fork
According to Trustnodes, another vulnerability was discovered in the Ethereum network in a hard fork. This vulnerability affects some smart contracts with a self-destruct function. The Create2 function is able to replace a self-destruct contract, changing the rules so it could potentially lead to loss of funds. The forthcoming removal of the bug should not affect the launch date of the Constantinople hard fork, which is scheduled for February 26–28.
It is worth mentioning that in the middle of last month, the Ethereum network upgrade was also postponed due to the EIP-1283 vulnerability, which could enable fraudsters to steal users’ funds.
3. Huobi US launched new trading pairs
The US division of Huobi launched trading pairs with a dollar (USD), which was reported on the company’s website. Now verified users can trade Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT paired with the US dollar. Support for this function has been implemented through the partnership of Huobi.com with the Prime Trust escrow-service. thanks to which users can deposit/withdraw funds in fiat currency, starting from $100.
4. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Believes in Bitcoin
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, reiterated his position regarding Bitcoin, saying that the only cryptocurrency he owns is BTC. Bitcoin is resilient. Bitcoin is principled. Bitcoin is native to internet ideals. And it’s a great brand,” — wrote Jack. He mentioned that Bitcoin has every chance of becoming the number 1 Internet currency. According to him, “it (Bitcoin) has the greatest chance of being the Internet’s native currency. If you think of the internet as you would a country, that’s huge.”
5. Gram Could Be Worth $29.5 Billion
By the end of 2019, the cryptocurrency Gram from the creators of Telegram can reach a market capitalization of $29.5 billion, which will bring considerable income to its investors.
The Bell declares that the forecasts made by Hash Crypto Investment Bank said that “the rational cost” of a single Gram is $5.9. This price is 4,4 times higher than the price investors paid during the second round of the ICO.
The TON blockchain platform allows solving problems associated with the use of a variety of terms, including “infinite sharding” and “hypercube routing”. | https://medium.com/socialmedia-market/the-most-important-news-of-the-cryptoindustry-777d8403e47f | [] | 2019-02-15 15:03:21.041000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum'] |
Volunteer Diaries — Xiang Wei. “Volunteering is a very simple action… | “Volunteering is a very simple action but it can create such a big impact on someone. You may not get to see the impact on the person forever, but at least you can tell that the person is really enjoying the moment and this kind of moment is being captured in their mind.”
Everyone, at one point, would think about what he or she wants to achieve in life. For some, it might be a sudden thought that popped up one day, and for 24-year old Xiang Wei, a final-year Business student at Nanyang Technological University, it was during his army stint. While serving National Service, Xiang Wei started thinking about what he wanted to do in life. Not wanting to spend his life merely studying, he decided to be more active in volunteering after entering university.
Like many other Singaporean students, Xiang Wei started volunteering through compulsory community involvement programmes held in school. Back then, volunteering was simply a process of instructions and actions. However, as time passed, Xiang Wei discovered the significance of volunteering. “The kind of feeling that you get from volunteering is very hard to describe in words. You just feel happy when you see that people are smiling and enjoying the activities you planned!” he explained. Xiang Wei mentioned that his volunteering experiences better solidified the passion that he carried towards volunteering, which he claims is something that is very amazing. He then went on to do various volunteering activities, including a skills-based volunteering project with Skills For Good.
Xiang Wei’s project with Lakeside Family Services saw him unleashing his creativity skills and experience gained from his professional attachment to create orientation slides for e-volunteers. In addition, Xiang Wei also helped redesign some orientation activities which the volunteers took part in. Although the organisation staff members were. busy with their own coordination plans, he was grateful that the coordinators were supportive and receptive to his ideas. “It’s nice to know that I can further value-add to their service.” Xiang Wei explained as he, too, discovered his interest in designing while executing the project.
The volunteering landscape has changed over time. One discovery that Xiang Wei made is the difference in availability of volunteering opportunities that grew over time. In the past, finding a volunteering avenue was not easy as volunteering was not common. However, as time passed, Xiang Wei noticed that volunteering opportunities became more readily available for all. This includes the establishment of volunteering Telegram groups which have opportunities listings and organisations such as Skills For Good that matches volunteers’ skills to the different projects from various social organisations in need of help.
Having gained such a positive experience with Skills For Good, Xiang Wei went on to join the volunteering management team in the hope of inspiring more volunteers to take the leap in volunteering more often. “There is a very big supply of volunteering opportunities out there to choose from. The first thing you should do – identify one that resonates well with yourself.”
About Skills for Good
Skills for Good, a local volunteer-matching organisation, with a base of eclectic volunteers with skills ranging from marketing and communications to information technology to fundraising. We seek to empower volunteers through convenient and meaningful skills-based volunteering opportunities that help social organisations to achieve their mission. Volunteer with us today and wake up tomorrow with the warm and fuzzy sensation of ‘volunesia’.
Read our previous post to learn more about our volunteer stories!
Some exciting news
For our upcoming stories, we will be featuring first-hand accounts of volunteers. If you have been positively shaped by Skills-Based Volunteering, drop us an email to share about it with us!
Author: Kok Nee Tsu & Nur Laili | https://medium.com/@skillsforgd/volunteer-diaries-xiang-wei-eacf2605ea63 | ['The Skills For Good Team'] | 2020-12-05 08:36:17.513000+00:00 | ['Volunteering', 'Youth', 'Skills', 'Singapore', 'Virtual Volunteering'] |
How to Have a Growthful Christmas | (Even when your family is absent or tricky)
I found myself talking with a friend this morning about “Christmas”, who was a bit lost. I think many of us feel this way at Christmas, particularly this year.
For many 1000s of years in the Northern Hemisphere this was a winter festival: Solstice or Yule. It was a time to gather close with those in your tribe, your family, your community. Nearly every culture has important festivals to celebrate the changing of the seasons, to give life more meaning, to strengthen our connections, not divide us — and they were never about consumption until quite recently: Hanukkah, Ramadan, Diwali, fill in the gap.
Gifts have always been exchanged to strengthen alliances but they didn’t need to be expensive. The best gifts I have ever received have been poems, tasty homemade things, donations in my name. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift is a great book for exploring this.
Due to the global dominance of the forces like Western Imperialism, colonialism, Christianity and capitalism, physical and electronic colonialism, the world has been held hostage and made to swallow the media stories that put us under pressure to conform to the old paradigm that is dying. To feel perhaps individually responsible for propping up the broken systems which need structural and systemic change at every level. Filling the void left by our loss of connection by spending to the max on stuff we don’t need, especially at Christmas, to replace time together we will never get back.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, or worse still. It takes only a split second to see how the old stories are dying and The New is being called in.
Think just for a moment, of every comment, every media image you have ever seen, every song lyric, every expression of culture amplified that has led you to think, feel and act at this time of year in a certain way. Think about your use of Netflix, Facebook, the music industry, celebrity culture, memes and tropes and other forms of visual culture. Then remember that is all being filtered through a system designed to keep you poor, scared and trapped.
There is an old saying in the personal growth world: “The Bishop and the King got together a long time ago. The King said, I’ll keep them poor and you keep them guilty. Then we have the whole thing sorted.”
Think about What If? What if this Christmas could be different? What if this global moosh we are in could seed new beginnings? What if a new possibility was arising?
Before Christianity came along, before capitalism; Winter Solstice for the Northern people was a time of sacred communion with the earth and each other. Not because one great teacher was born under a star and his words co-opted by those wanting power (and yes, by some to heal and serve), or because shareholders were baying for even higher dividends. But because we were all born, and one day, would die. Because life and connection was sacred. Connection to self, other and earth.
We would celebrate the abundance of what we had harvested, feasting with our nearest and dearest to say “Look! We are still here! You matter to me. I want to break bread and share my abundance with you. You are in my tribe. You are in my heart. Let’s go through the long dark nights ahead together, support one another, and hopefully survive another year.”
As we separated from the earth and each other, from ourselves, the nuclear family became the primary consumption unit, the place of social support. It worked for a while, kind of. But then women were allowed an education and even a vote! Strangers and even husbands (as was usually the case) could no longer legally rape. Almost overnight, in terms of deep time, women had agency again. Never forget how recently this happened. My father could legally rape my mother. He didn’t but he could. There was no law to stop him. Can you imagine?
So the family started to break down, for many reasons, partly because women no longer had to put up with being treated like shit. Because the old dying paradigm of patriarchy, capitalism, materialism and many other forces have been pulling us apart for too long.
Strong women with wisdom and magic a.ka. witches could no longer be burned at the stake and vilified as Eve had been from the beginning of the Christian / Patriarchal plot.
So many have suffered and been smothered by their family: men, women, children and elders. Mobility, for better or worse, has allowed many of us to choose where we live and play, with whom, and how. We are social creatures, we need each other. Often we end up far from the people we love or indeed those who cannot love us at this time — our families.
So many have been held in intergenerational cycles of trauma and dysfunction that would not allow us to heal, while being made to feel guilty if we do not perform and fit the norms of what these forces demand. For many of my clients, it has been essential to separate, and indeed we must all go forth and find ourselves, before being able to return to our people and places of origin as true individuals. That is the hero/ine’s journey. But unlike Joseph Campbell’s popular telling of the story, it is not to become individualistic in the way of the lone wolf against the odds, but in interbeing with all that is as Sharon Blackie, Thich Nhat Hanh and many others lead us towards. We are all one, with the family of humankind.
So many families have broken down, some have thrived (or at least pretended to on their Facebook feeds) and new forms are emerging. This Christmas or Solstice, more than 1 in 3 families will be blended from post-divorce and other scenarios. Many more will gather away from their family of origin and many only online or in very small numbers due to the pandemic. | https://medium.com/@libbydavy/how-to-have-a-growthful-christmas-e6b99243c84e | [] | 2020-12-25 02:30:39.996000+00:00 | ['Gay', 'Christmas', 'Personal Development', 'Depression', 'Coaching'] |
Reading the Bible, Genesis Chapter 10 | Interestingly, Faroe also renames yosef as “Tzofnat Paanach” (in Hebrew, Tzofnat = hidden, secret; Paanach = solves a riddle). Faroe also gives him a wife to marry. Osnat is a daughter of a priest (which is a jewish name, but at this time it’s a little unclear how they arrived there). We are also told of Efraim and Menashe, the sons of Yosef, who were born in Egypt.
Yosef goes to travel the country. Organizes a stack of food in the outskirts of each city.
And then the famine starts, exactly as Yosef predicted. All other countries suffer while Egypt has food. At some point in time, also civilians finish the food, and they come asking for food from Faroe. He directs them all to Yosef, giving full responsibility. As a king this is quite a weird move. Trusting a person that came out of nowhere with the future of the entire kingdom. But at this point, it’s probably a leadership test. If it were to fail, he would have been removed from duty. But Yosef turned out to be a great manager as he was a planner. He sells out the food back and makes the nation richer.
Not long time passes, and other people hear about the richness of Egypt. Yaakov and his sons as well. Yaakov sends his sons to go buy food from Egypt.
Interestingly the bible uses the Hebrew word “shever” (meaning Break), to describe the fact that one has food. We use it when we want to say that we start eating after a long fasting time. Break the fast. Therefore — breakfast…
So, 10 brothers go to Egypt (Benyamin, the youngest, was left with his father since he was worried something will happen to him as well. Since both Yosef and Benyamin came from Rachel).
They get to the leader, Yosef, asking for food. They don’t recognize him, while he recognizes them… And now he starts with his revenge. He immediately calls them spies. They reject the strong claims, and tell the story about their family. He jails them for three days, and says that one of them will be sent back home to bring the young brother as proof of their truthfulness. Otherwise, they will be accounted as spies.
Three days later Yosef changes his mind. I think this is a weird move for such a strong leader. Something must have happened during these days, but we are not told of it. Yosef says that only one brother will stay in prison, while the other nine will take the food back home. They will come back with the young brother as proof for their truthfulness.
At this point, the brothers start feeling sorry about the sorrow they caused Yosef all these years. And it says that they felt guilty for it, and that this is their punishment. They didn’t know that Yosef actually heard them, and he went to cry in his room about all this, while staying strong in front of them.
Then, Shimon is being taken to prison, while the others take loads of food and pay money for it. Yosef commands his servant to hide the money back into their packages. Later on, during their journey back home, they found that all the money was still there and they actually didn’t pay for it. They actually felt scared now, since they can be blamed for stealing…
When Yaakov hears the entire story, and grieves. “Not only Yosef and Shimon, now you want to take also Benyamin?”. Reuven, the eldest, promises that his two sons should be killed if Benyamin and Shimon will not be returned safely. But Yaakov refuses to let them take Benyamin to Egypt.
Things hult until food depleted again…
Yaakov asks the brothers to go there again. For some reason, Reuven is removed from being the leader. Probably his last trip has brought this as a punishment for him. Yehuda now responds, saying “if you don’t give us Benyamin, we will all be dead. So we prefer not to even make the travel”. Yehuda promises that he will get responsible for Benyamin. And finally Yaakov caves and allows that. But I guess he didn’t really had any other option.
So they arrive again to Yosef. He prepares a lunch for them in his house. They thought they were put there in order to get punished for stealing the food, and immediately start apologizing.
They say they have returned the previous payment as well as brought another one to pay for the new purchase. But the home manager said that he received payment, so perhaps God helped them and gave them more money, meaning they don’t owe anything to Egypt… He gives Shimon back to the party and they all go to the house of Yosef to prepare for the lunch. They clean up, and prepare the presents they brought.
Yosef couldn’t bear eating with the group, since he got so emotional from seeing Benyamin after so long. So he ate alone. The Egyptians ate by themselves as well, and the 11 brothers were left to eat by themselves. Although it was very weird for them at first, eventually they got drunk a lot. This was only lunch…
Anyway, Yosef commands his servant to load their cattle with as much food as it can, return their money once again, but also hide a silver cup under the young one’s horse.
In the morning the party is let loose. A few hours later, they are stopped by Yosef’s soldiers. The lead servant says that they stole something from the house. The brothers say that the one that is found as a thief will die, and the rest of the brothers will become slaves. The servant changes that, and says that only the thief shall become a slave. You can see that this servant was not only very loyal to Yosef, he also had a lot of power since he was independent and knew that Yosef don't want to kill the brothers.
Obviously, when they found Benyamin Is the thief, the brothers know they can’t return to Yaakov this way.
They go back to Yosef trying to convince him to give them Benyamin back. But they don’t know what to say. Yehuda says that they will all remain slaves together with Benyamin. But Yosef says that he cannot allow that sadly. They all must go to bring the food to their home and their father. Only Benyamin will stay here.
They obviously can’t object. And this the chapter ends…
the bible text in hebrew. | https://medium.com/bible-stories/reading-the-bible-genesis-chapter-10-f4ac27067a51 | ['Shachar Oz'] | 2020-12-30 00:11:41.225000+00:00 | ['Bible', 'History'] |
America’s Problem With Acceptance | America’s Problem With Acceptance
We are not getting back last year. Let’s concentrate on surviving this one.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
We walk. It seems we alone know the secret of the Old Croton Aqueduct.
We rarely run into anyone. It’s too cold in New York for many walkers. I call this time Cold Violet because the violets come up in the grass when I still need a coat.
The natural world has a sublime beauty, this time of year. The palest of greens inspire tenderness. I start calling it The Shire, and half expect Bilbo Baggins himself to make an appearance, inviting us in for a second breakfast.
It’s a mirage, of course. The thought of Tolkien is intermingled with another literary reference. The T.S. Eliot line,
April is the cruelest month
seems permanently stuck in my head.
My husband and I are taking our long, daily trek. It’s early April of this year. He just lost his job, and with it, our health insurance; one of the millions of people left unemployed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
As luck would have it, I happen to be particularly broke as well. I am a recent hire of the U.S. Census but know I won’t be knocking on doors anytime soon. Not with the quarantine in effect.
We walk so we don’t go insane with worry. We walk until we are too tired to care about financial disasters, or ending up on a ventilator.
I don’t like to be suckered. I am not letting the ache of early spring dazzle me. Another reason April is the cruelest month is it’s a good time to starve. Historically, farmers are out of winter supplies, and it’s too soon for anything to grow.
I think of Little House on the Prairie. Then, I think of my Aunt Sally, who lives on a prairie herself.
My late father and she had another sister, Bittie, the youngest of the trio. Like my father, Bittie was diagnosed with terminal cancer very young in life. She and Sally were exceptionally close.
Sally traveled to Florida from Texas to be with her. She walked into the hospital room. Bittie’s greeting to her was,
How in the cornbread hell did this happen?
Sally told me that Bittie did one round of chemo, and declared herself finished. There would be no more chemotherapy. Being sickened by medicine was not for her. They left the hospital.
We thought we had some time, Sally said. What we didn’t realize was that these were the good days.
I am with Sally and my cousin Jenny during the last three days of Bittie’s life. She quits eating and drinking to speed along her death, but her body won’t cooperate. I am stunned at the ferocity with which her body holds on. She isn’t breathing so much as panting. For three days, I think every breath she takes is her last.
Those good days were the ones early on when she was simply bedridden.
Right now, as we walk, the idea that we could lose our house is weighing on each of us. It’s too awful to speak about, but the fear is growing. I feel it.
These are the good days.
Suddenly, I make a decision. I open my mouth to tell him.
Look. We just have to survive this. That’s our only goal. We just have to stay healthy and live through it. If we lose everything, so be it. We start over.
That became our pact. Stay healthy. Live through it. So far, we have done just that. The decision was a good one.
I look back at that moment and know I received some real grace. I got lucky.
The ability to frame what is happening in the world as a simple challenge to our existence helps me enormously. I let go of hoping for a fancy future. I let go of ever being able to travel again. I let go of being a homeowner. I learned to stay in the moment, for real.
All those years of meditating never put me in the moment the way this pandemic does.
I know a lot of people are more than worried right now, about all the aspects of change thrust upon us. I don’t have a single friend whose life isn’t turned upside down by the coronavirus. Most of them manage just fine, but then there are the days that the anxiety feels like it might kill them.
I have a friend who was just widowed, during the quarantine. She’s now alone, after losing her husband of over thirty years. Another has two children in middle school, with no idea of where or what their remaining school years will look like.
Most of my close friends are teachers. A week ago, one of them was considering early retirement, as opposed to having to go back into a building with thousands of children. Her local school board narrowly passed a decision to let the first semester be virtual learning, so she’s safe for now.
These are some tough calls that teachers are being forced to make.
I am not a teacher, so I don’t have these problems. I couldn’t even teach kindergarten, now. I didn’t get a computer until I was thirty years old. As a member of Generation X, I am in the awkward adolescent section of human development.
I may have a bad moment or two, but I have given up fighting what’s happening. I know my life will never look like it did before.
I know these are the good days. It’s a very strange time in human evolution. I try not to take it all so personally.
Evolution is not a choice. We evolve whether we want to or not; it doesn’t matter if we are ready, or prepared. I doubt there was a single dinosaur all those millions of years ago who dreamt his progeny would be chickens.
We adapt, or we die. We surrender, or we are crushed.
However, I notice this is not a widely embraced idea.
If I told you the one thing I hear people say most frequently, whether it’s politicians or fellow citizens, it’s some version of this:
I cannot wait till things get back to normal again!
Normal, as the kids say, is canceled. There is no going back. It may seem painful to accept this. Fighting it is worse.
A mother at home, praying that she won’t be responsible for home-schooling two adolescents, is one thing. She isn’t responsible for her city, or state, or nation. Hoping that things will get back to normal will not have a negative effect on our society.
I expect better critical thinking from our leaders.
Every problem we face now, personally, and as a nation, has to do with acceptance. We are in the first wave of a global pandemic. The coronavirus didn’t come back — it never left. We must act accordingly. Old approaches will not work.
Hanging on to the past, especially last year’s economy, is going to get people killed. Insisting that we reopen too quickly has already had disastrous consequences. Pining for yesterday is not only pointless, it hurts us.
If it doesn’t bother you that people will die, please consider this: a refusal to deal with data-based models of infection rates will ultimately always be more expensive. Going back to the drawing board, time and time again is not a cost-effective strategy.
It would have been cheaper to cancel the Republican convention a few months ago than to move it from North Carolina to Florida. It’s canceled anyway.
It might have been expensive to shut down the entire nation for a month or two, then assess where we are. It might have been expensive to supplement the income of every American adequately or to grant Medicare to every unemployed person.
It can only be more expensive to do what we are doing.
Today, the powers that be at the CDC have suddenly changed their minds about the danger of children going back to school. It’s terribly disappointing to learn they’ve caved to Trump, but probably shouldn’t be a surprise, as they are under the control of the Executive Branch.
Of course, it would be better to have kids in school. Of course, they are missing out on socialization. Of course, it’s harder to learn online.
Do we really want to send these kids and my friends, their teachers — into school, just to have them close down again after too many of them die?
I do not know how in the cornbread hell we got here. But here we are. I would greatly appreciate it if my own government dealt in reality, and not fantasy. What’s important now is to make sound decisions based on science.
Instead, our president wants last year back.
To use another literary analogy, President Trump reminds me most of the Tennessee Williams character Amanda Wingfield, from The Glass Menagerie; only with none of her charm. It’s embarrassing to watch him pine for last year’s economy. It has nothing to do with the enormous problem at hand.
He might as well be wishing for seventeen gentleman callers on Blue Mountain. The longer he fantasizes, these good days will turn quickly to our worst.
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/americas-problem-with-acceptance-87033460f564 | ['Elizabeth Grey'] | 2020-07-27 16:26:39.150000+00:00 | ['Teaching', 'Health', 'Politics', 'Society', 'Covid-19'] |
Supporting Women Scientists | Tinuke Adebanji leads workshops for mid-career women scientists who seek to advance their careers through USAID’s Accelerating Local Potential program at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (KNUST-LISA). The workshops teach them skills that will help them advance — data management, statistical analysis, and leadership skills. Tinuke is also the coordinator of KNUST-LISA. No one is more surprised by this than Tinuke herself.
Growing up in Nigeria, she did not envision a career in statistics or academics. She gained admission to study Agriculture Engineering for her undergraduate studies, but opted for a statistics degree after realizing her flair for data. Following graduation, Tinuke secured a job in the private sector but had to quit after her daughter was born. However, this did not deter Tinuke from her dream of working in academics.
“I knew that when I was going to come back, I had to go to academics. It was like you don’t get this chance twice,” she said.
Tinuke encountered challenges when she began to pursue graduate studies. But that didn’t stop her. / Courtesy of Tinuke Adebanji
Two kids and about 10 years later, Tinuke returned to the classroom in pursuit of a master’s degree. She did not meet a particularly warm reception. She remembers an incident with a senior lecturer who had heard she had been out of class for about a decade.
She recalls him telling her in front of her entire class that she “had no business being in his class.”
Despite this disheartening beginning to her graduate studies, Tinuke persevered and went on to finish at the top of her class. She earned her Ph.D. in Statistics, and the respect of the professor who felt a woman her age should be at home with her family — not pursuing an advanced degree.
Tinuke couldn’t help but wonder how many other women in the system were like her but had dropped out of similar programs.
The Making of A Mentor
That led her to help create a new department of statistics at the University of Agriculture, Abeokuta in Nigeria. She then moved to KNUST in Ghana where she also facilitated the creation of a department of statistics and actuarial science, and eventually became the KNUST- LISA coordinator to advance both the field of statistics and women in STEM.
Statistics tends to be lumped in with mathematics and often “ treated like a standalone entity,” according to Tinuke, and that limits how it is viewed and used. Instead Tinuke believes that statistics is a “service center that supports research and helps people make better meaning of what they’re doing.” Her project at KNUST-LISA is doing just that.
Tinuke believes it is important for more women to work in STEM fields. / Courtesy Tinuke Adebanji
Recalling her own struggles in restarting her career after a decade gap, Tinuke sought to use KNUST-LISA to help women who were qualified but in need of better data analysis and leadership skills for progression in their careers.
She has led a series of workshops that uses statistics to help women advance in their careers. The first workshop was held with funding from USAID through LISA 2020 and offered free to 24 women who already report positive effects in their careers as a result. LISA 2020 trains the next generation of statisticians in USAID partner counties to apply statistics to global development challenges and collaborate with governments, NGOs, and other development actors to make informed decisions.
Tinuke believes mentoring makes a big difference. Her mentors had seen potential in her and pushed her when she may have stopped after receiving her master’s degree. And mentoring proved successful in keeping one of her talented students on track. This student almost dropped out of the undergraduate Actuarial Science program at the behest of her spiritual adviser but now works for Microsoft, as a programs manager.
Tinuke has seen the power of mentorship and encouragement in the young women she meets who are pursuing advanced degrees. / Courtesy Tinuke Adebanji
The LISA network also fosters mentorship and fellowship among its labs, giving participants the opportunity to learn and collaborate with statisticians in their region and beyond. Tinuke received mentorship from the University of Ibadan LISA (UI-LISA), where she studied as a postgraduate student in Nigeria when establishing KNUST-LISA. She and others have also written joint publications with their fellow members of the LISA network, connections who they would never have met otherwise.
Tinuke believes in mentoring the next generation of African scientists and so does USAID. / Courtesy Tinuke Adebanji
Ghanaians are gradually seeing statistics as an everyday tool, which was also one of Tinuke’s goals in establishing KNUST-LISA. “Statistics is something you have to come to love because you’ll either live with it or be miserable without it in your research,” she says.
When the COVID-19 pandemic spread to Ghana, the government set up teams to conduct modeling and interpreting the incidence data, with Tinuke serving on a team. These teams did some of the early research and analysis on climatic effects and advised on air-conditioning increasing the risk of spreading COVID-19.
“I really want to make a difference in people’s lives,” Tinuke says, “and give them a skill that they can use wherever they go.” And that’s exactly what she is doing. | https://medium.com/usaid-2030/supporting-women-scientists-edab01628e69 | [] | 2020-11-10 14:34:33.955000+00:00 | ['World Science Day', 'Women', 'Mentorship', 'STEM', 'Statistics'] |
We All Need More Yellow in Our Lives | CULTURAL MOOD
We All Need More Yellow in Our Lives
Pantone’s colors of the year, 2021: Illuminating and Ultimate Gray. (Image/Pantone Color Institute)
When we moved into our last house, one of the 1950s bathrooms was completely yellow. Every surface. Walls, counter, floor, tub, sink, toilet, toilet paper holder,…you name it. It was too much. And I still contend that decorating a bathroom solely in the color of urine is not a good idea.
So, we remodeled it…to cobalt blue and white.
I never used yellow in any decorating. I found it too dated, too garish, too, well, sunny.
Let the sun shine in
About 10 years ago, home design started heading down a path of ubiquitous “warm gray” walls, white kitchens, and “modern farmhouse.” People actually started nailing cheap wood from pallets to their walls to create the look.
From what I hear, those trends, which were spurred on by popular home decorating TV shows, are going away, along with “word art,” which can’t come soon enough for me. (No, I’m not ever going to put inspirational decals on my walls or label rooms. Why do we need laundry rooms to be captioned “LAUNDRY”? Do we think we’ll forget what room we’re in? I love words more than most people, but words are not art. Not to me, anyhow.)
Gray has overtaken room decor and held a stranglehold on it for too long. Yes, it can be calming and neutral, but a house full of gray is boring. Whereas the early 2000s brought us a little toooooo much color (remember the weekly travesties that took place on the TV show Trading Spaces, with blood red dining rooms and dark green kitchens?), the 2010s brought us a whole lot of blah. No interesting woodgrains, no vibrancy, no appreciation of brick, which had to be painted over.
Quintessential 2016 kitchen: more cowbell, er, gray! (Photo/The RTA Store)
Maybe it reflected something about us, this need for basic gray, the deletion of color. Maybe it was a time of rebellion from over-saturation of color, or a time of retreat from boldness. Maybe a need for restfulness. Who knows. All I know is it was dull.
It’s time for some balance. And it’s time for some sunshine.
Yellow + gray suits us
The Pantone Color Institute (the organization behind official color designations for the print industry since 1963) has named Illuminating (bright yellow) and Ultimate Gray as colors of the year for 2021.
According to Pantone’s press statement, Illuminating is associated with optimism and vivacity, while Ultimate Gray encourages “feelings of composure, steadiness and resilience.” In her own research into color associations, Eiseman has found that yellow is often associated with “cheer” and “happiness,” due to its correlation with the sun. A small peer-reviewed study from 2019, led by Swiss psychologist Domicele Jonauskaite, came to a similar conclusion. The study used music and images to induce particular moods in its 125 subjects, then asked them to choose colors to match their moods. Participants most often associated the color yellow with joy.
— CNN Style website, December 9, 2020
While Pantone kindly claims that gray elicits “resilience,” we all know what they mean. For much of the world, 2020 was the epitome of gray…gloomy, tragic, and lacking vibrancy. In fact, most mornings of my work-from-home adventure, I’ve felt exactly like gray. I think I’ve even started to look gray.
And 2021 won’t begin any differently. Although a vaccine is on its way, most of us won’t see that shot in our arm until spring or later. So the gray continues.
But now there’s hope. Our world will begin to return to normal in 2021. We will come out of our homes, see people, hug, reunite, rejoice. That’s the yellow. Warm, happy, brazen, joyful, and unapologetically bright. | https://medium.com/bigger-picture/we-all-need-more-yellow-in-our-lives-5bf074d05c26 | ['Tina L. Smith'] | 2020-12-11 12:11:47.488000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Visual Design', 'Home', 'Style', 'Culture'] |
JK Rowling Complicates My Love for Harry Potter | This past summer Rowling took it upon herself to enter the debate on transgender rights and penned a transphobic article on the matter. I won’t bother to summarize the piece because it makes me deeply uncomfortable, but one part of the piece that shows my disgust for it goes,
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman — and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones — then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
The blatant disregard and lack of compassion for trans women are made obvious when Rowling in one moment makes an attempt to say she cares for these women in one sentence but then follows up with calling them men in the next.
After reading the piece, I couldn’t help but take away from it that Rowling is transphobic and harmful to the LGBTQ movement. | https://medium.com/curious/jk-rowling-complicates-my-love-for-harry-potter-a333d8b03d0 | ['James Woods'] | 2020-12-29 08:05:28.833000+00:00 | ['Jk Rowling', 'Race', 'Equality', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Harry Potter'] |
Windows 11 is here! | This is a meme but it's really true where bill gates teach us how to count to 10.
And now its time for Windows 11
There were rumors about what will be the next version of Windows after 10 but now the ISO Image of Windows 11 is leaked before the official announcement.
Let's see what are the new features offered.
New Features
Change In Logo
The logo is the heart of any brand. Windows has changed the logo quite frequently and it's necessary to be in the race. The new logo is quite simple. A blue-colored box.
Setup
The setup is improved with animations. It is neat and clean and looks advanced.
UI
The UI has been updated. The icons, wallpaper, and themes are changed.
Start menu
The Start menu is now in the center. The lives boxes in Windows 10 are removed. There were many things in the Start menu of Windows 10 which were of no use but here the design is simple and options are few.
Icons in File Explorer
Most of the icons of the options in the file manager or a file explorer are updated.
Maximize button
When you will click on maximize button you can arrange your window in 4 ways.
Windows Powershell
In Windows 10 you need to manually install the Powershell terminal but here in Windows 11, you will get it pre-installed.
We will get an update about all the features after Windows 11 officially launches.
Give a clap because it's free! | https://medium.com/@vancharwadkar/windows-11-is-here-513acb19cbc0 | ['Viranchi Ancharwadkar'] | 2021-06-17 11:41:04.240000+00:00 | ['Windows', 'Windows 11', 'Leaked', 'Windows 10', 'Microsoft Windows'] |
Marketing Analysis Reports Regarding By PPC Improvement In 2019–25 | Marketing Analysis Reports Regarding By PPC Improvement In 2019–25
How to Growth In PPC By Advertising Market In 2019–25
Pay-per-clickAdvertising Market Research Report presents an unjust plan to key contributors operating in it. This report emphasizes thorough analysis into key Of Advertising markets with helpful and current business choices, additionally as current and projected market eventualities. This report study describes the projected growth of the worldwide marketplace for approaching years from 2019 to 2025. PPC is related to Level one search engines. A PPC is an on-line advertising model that An advertiser pays user clicks on one amongst their online ads.
ThePPC Advertising report provides growing historic additionally as current growth parameters of the complete market, growth prospects of the market area unit gained with most exactitude. specialists of this report throw light-weight on totally different attributes like, recent developments, technological platforms, tools and techniques that facilitate to grasp the prevailing market effectively. It additionally comes opportunities that may show an appreciable rate of growth in close to future.
Geographically, the worldwide Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising Market might extend 5 key regions Europe, North America, South America, and also the Middle East and Africa. The Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness vital growth thanks to evolving market players and their market growth ways. North America has anticipated the dominant position within the market per click, thanks to the bureau approved product will increase within the region over the forecast amount.
The Global PPC Advertising Market Report practices Analysis tools SWOT analysis for analyzing the market information and additionally determines a thoroughgoing examination of the trade scenario and observation background of the worldwide market. The market study additionally covers the market across all segments.
Report Highlights:
*A comprehensive outline of the general market
*The report offers to alter market dynamics within the trade
*It provides complete market segmentation
*It offers historical, present, and probable market size in terms of volume and worth
*Recent trade trends and growths
*Gives a competitive landscape
*Strategies of vital vendors and merchandise offered | https://medium.com/@kbhatta514/marketing-analysis-reports-regarding-by-ppc-improvement-in-2019-25-52bac5ab9c85 | ['Kabita Bhatta'] | 2019-12-19 06:32:30.167000+00:00 | ['PPC Marketing'] |
One of the Greatest Cons of All Time | As of Monday, December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, it has been 32 days since Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. During this time, the president’s team of lawyers and GOP attorneys are at least 1–34 in their quest to overturn the outcome of elections in battle-ground states.¹ (The lone win was in Pennsylvania, where a judge granted a motion to move up the voter ID deadline.) A recount in Wisconsin² and a second recount in Georgia confirmed Biden’s wins in those state.³ Nearly every state has certified its election results. Late last Friday, December 4, Nevada District Judge James Russell rejected the Republican Party’s attempt to overturn the results of his state’s election and declare Trump the winner. In his opinion, Russell wrote, “the contestant did not prove under any standard of proof” the many accusations made about the Biden-Harris campaign, including paying voters to cast ballots.⁴ Turns out that evidence is a requirement in Nevada courts. The same can be said for courts in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, where the Trump campaign lost bids late last Friday to overturn the results of those states’ elections.⁵
The outcome of the election is clear. A winner has been declared. It is over. Even so, the president has yet to concede. Many wonder why.
Might it be due to an unwillingness to accept defeat? A stubbornness to confront disappointment? Excessive pride? Egocentrism? A belief, despite any supporting evidence whatsoever, that the election was truly rigged? A need to keep his base intact and angry?
All are possible. Even so, there is a more likely explanation, one based on the president’s personality and one consistent with his business practices.
That explanation? Money. Piles of it.
Which, by the way, is what he is amassing. The latest tally of donations to the president since the election is upward of $207.5 million.⁶ It is unknown whether that amount includes the many Christmas gifts the campaign is selling (e.g., ties, ornaments, mugs). And, remember, the guy lost.
What we are witnessing firsthand is one of the great cons of all time. Perpetrated by the president of the United States. He is playing his own loyal supporters for fools.
Here’s how the con works:
The president fails to concede and, instead, proclaims loudly and repeatedly that his win was ‘stolen’ because the election was rigged. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, his messages reach millions instantly, a key to the con.
His hired legal cronies find their way onto television near-daily to promote and expand on the president’s insistence that the election was a fraud. Significant credit goes to Fox News, OAN and Rush Limbaugh. Television and radio coverage validates the president’s position, which is essential to the con.
Nearly all Republican senators either support the president’s claim or remain silent, thus tacitly endorsing his wild assertions. In a poll released last Saturday, the Washington Post reported that of the 249 Republicans in the Senate and the House, only 25 said that Biden had won the election, with 2 stating that the president had been reelected. The remaining 222 chose not to answer.⁷ Whether intentionally or otherwise, there are 224 elected members of Congress abetting the president’s con. They know better than to get in the way of his money-making scam.
That few have recognized Biden as the president-elect is vital, as it provides hope to his base. Hope of upending the election is a critical ingredient to the con, as is time. The longer Biden is unrecognized as the president-elect, the longer the life of the con, the greater the opportunity to reap its potentially massive rewards.
One must be ready to act immediately should someone attempt to gum up the works. Attorney General William Barr nearly derailed it when he admitted that no evidence exists of widespread voter fraud. Needing to avoid the undoing of his magnificent con, the president categorically dismissed Barr’s claim and, in the process, demeaned Barr by suggesting that he will be fired, which seems likely. Problem solved, crisis averted. The money continues to roll in.
Many lawsuits are filed, some promoting unhinged conspiracy theories. None are successful, as all lack what attorneys call ‘evidence.’ But all receive publicity, which is more important than court wins and is essential to the con.
Supporters of the president receive a deluge of emails and texts daily — including me because of a donation made to the 2016 campaign by a ‘friend’ — each begging for donations to support the legal efforts to overturn the election. (On average, I receive between 10–20 texts and emails daily from the campaign.) Most read like the one I received last Friday:
Friend, the situation is dire but IT’S NOT OVER. If all Trump Patriots give $35 now Republicans win! This is our LAST CHANCE. We’ll 500% match.
The emails are equally urgent and go beyond the texts. They claim that the money is needed for an ‘Election Defense Fund’ to help finance recounts and legal action to overturn the election. If you read the fine print — who does? — you would learn that the first 75 cents of every dollar donated goes to a new political action committee, Save America, that Trump established in mid-November. Funds in Save America can be used to finance Trump’s political activities, his staff and his travel. Translation: Trump can spend the Save America money just about any way he chooses, as the funds are essentially his. The other 25 cents of every donated dollar goes to the Republican National Committee. Only a donation in excess of $5,000 supports recount or legal activity.⁸ Thus, donors are being purposefully misled. Which, of course, is the con. But it gets better.
supports recount or legal activity.⁸ Thus, donors are being purposefully misled. Which, of course, is the con. But it gets better. The default mode for all donations is ‘monthly’ not ‘one time only.’ This is likely new information to the vast majority of his donors, as one would have to be quite attentive to notice. That every donation recurs monthly makes the con efficient and, frankly, quite clever. Why take only one payment when you can take one each and every month until time ends? A professional, highly-experienced con artist knows the value of automatically recurring payments.
It is also difficult, if not impossible, to opt out of a donation and/or unsubscribe entirely. (I can attest to this.) Once in, always in. No wonder, then, that money continues to pour into Save America.
This is how an unsuccessful presidential candidate bilks his most loyal, most passionate supporters out of their hard-earned money. To the tune of over $200 million in little over a month. With no end in sight.
The president has figured out that there is money to be made by losing an election. This sounds familiar. Might it be a page taken from The Producers, in which Mel Brooks showed us that it is possible to make more money with a Broadway flop than with a hit? If so, the president should remember that one of those producers ended up in jail.
Say what you will about the president. He knows how to run a good con. And this, my friends, is a very good con.
¹ https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/biden-trump-us-election-news-12-04-20/h_4f2870efb83296ad887e28887652c3af
² https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/29/completed-wisconsin-election-recount-confirms-bidens-win-over-trump.html
³ https://news.yahoo.com/biden-carry-georgia-second-recount-145826017.html
⁴ https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/biden-trump-us-election-news-12-04-20/h_4f2870efb83296ad887e28887652c3af
⁵ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nevada-trump-lawsuit-dismissed/2020/12/04/844d420a-3682-11eb-a997-1f4c53d2a747_story.html
⁶ https://news.yahoo.com/trump-lost-2020-election-raised-132359279.html
⁷ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/survey-who-won-election-republicans-congress/2020/12/04/1a1011f6-3650-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html
⁸ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/us/politics/trump-campaign-donations.html?referringSource=articleShare | https://medium.com/@alanschnur/one-of-the-greatest-cons-of-all-time-662f5b808f73 | ['Alan Schnur'] | 2020-12-07 16:29:48.205000+00:00 | ['Organized Crime', 'Crime', 'Trump', 'Republican Party', '2020 Presidential Race'] |
Medium’s Creator Workshop Series Is Back | Medium’s Creator Workshop Series Is Back
Four free workshops to help you improve your writing, earn money on Medium, and find your niche Medium Creators 2 days ago·2 min read
Medium is hosting four new, free workshops for creators this fall. We hope they’ll help you hone your writing and self-editing skills, earn money for your work, and move a few steps closer to publishing your next story. No matter your level of experience, you’re welcome to join.
Immediately Improve Any Story: Let’s Make Your Draft or Published Post Even Better
September 29th, 1:30 p.m. PT/4:30 p.m. ET. Register here.
Writing is a process of constant rewriting. And on the internet, nothing is ever finished. In this workshop, we’ll explore five tactical ways to improve anything you’ve written (whether you’ve already published it or not). We encourage you to bring a Medium draft so you can apply these tips in real time.
Your Guide to Monetization on Medium: Getting Paid for the Stories You Publish and the Audiences You Build
October 14th, 12 p.m. PT/3 p.m. ET. Register here.
On Medium, anyone with a perspective to share can build an audience and eventually earn money for their work. Here, we’ll break down the two ways you can monetize your stories: the Partner Program and Referred Memberships. We’ll also share best practices for growing your earnings over time. Please bring your questions!
Write What You Know: Turn Your Professional Experience Into Stories Readers Want
October 26th, 10:30 a.m. PT/1:30 p.m. ET. Register here.
No matter what your career may be, chances are you’ve honed a particular area of expertise (or 12) over the years. Medium is the perfect place to share what you know with a broader audience — and to connect with other thinkers and leaders in your field. Join us for a workshop that will inspire you to deliver your knowledge and experience to a new audience in fresh ways.
Write With Us: An Hour of Dedicated Writing Time for Medium Creators
November 9th, 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET. Register here.
Bring a draft, an outline, or that story idea you’ve been kicking around for the last few months. In this session, we’ll share a few optional prompts and spend most of our time just writing. By the end, you should be a few steps closer to pressing “publish.”
If you can’t make it, we’ll share recordings of each workshop in Creators Hub as soon as they’re ready. And in case you missed it, our summer workshop series was a hit — here are the highlights:
Got ideas for future creator events? Drop a line in the responses. | https://medium.com/creators-hub/mediums-creator-workshop-series-is-back-c0b8dfd6e4ae | ['Medium Creators'] | 2021-09-17 23:10:07.854000+00:00 | ['Medium 101', 'Workshop', 'Creators', 'Writing', 'Medium'] |
Benefits of Bank Reconciliation | Benefits of Bank Reconciliation
Bank reconciliations are an important accounting procedure, performed by companies of all sizes, to match the cash balance of the bank with the balance found on the company’s financial records. Reconciliations can detect and prevent intentional fraud, along with errors by bank tellers, accountants, employees, and management. Although bank reconciliation is typically a month-end procedure, companies with smaller cash resources might perform it daily.
Detects Fraud:
Because bank reconciliations match a company’s disbursed checks with the cleared checks on the company’s bank statement, a careful review based on appropriate controls and procedures helps to reveal fraudulent activities. These could include payments for illegitimate business purposes, payments to unauthorized employees or unauthorized vendors, and amended check amounts and details.
Prevents Overdraft:
The lag time between cash outflows — to vendors and employees — and payments coming in — from clients and customers — can vary considerably. This is especially important when a company is operating on very low cash reserves. Regular bank reconciliations can help management postpone payments that would result in company overdrafts, bounced checks and insufficient-fund fees and interest. | https://medium.com/@kevinsanghani.ca/benefits-of-bank-reconciliation-1c89cbd3de5f | ['Rose Milken'] | 2019-11-26 10:07:59.239000+00:00 | ['Accounting'] |
7 навыков крутого оратора. Как выступать лучше | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/propitch-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B8-%D0%B8-%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B3/7-%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%BE-%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%85-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B2-%D0%B4%D0%BB%D1%8F-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B9-5ebbc055908a | ['Стас Гуревский'] | 2017-02-04 12:13:02.286000+00:00 | ['Presentation', 'Public Speaking', 'Storytelling'] |
MSSQL Spatial Çizgi İle Hat Kırma | Aşağıdaki kod ile bir hat başka bir hat ile iki parçaya bölünebilir.
USE [AKMERCAN]
GO
/****** Object: UserDefinedFunction [dbo].[STSplitLine] Script Date: 26.02.2021 11:58:44 ******/
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
ALTER function [dbo].[STSplitLine](@orjLineString nvarchar(MAX),@cutGeomString nvarchar(MAX),@srid int)
returns nvarchar(MAX)
as
begin
declare @cutGeom geometry;
declare @orjGeom geometry;
declare @intersectionGeom geometry;
declare @nodeCount int=0;
declare @i int=1;
declare @intersectedNodeIndex int=-1;
declare @newLine nvarchar(MAX)='';
declare @line1 nvarchar(MAX)='';
declare @line2 nvarchar(MAX)='';
declare @returnData nvarchar(MAX)='';
declare @geom1 geometry;
declare @geom2 geometry;
declare @segmentIndex int =0;
declare @tmpLine nvarchar(MAX);
declare @cur cursor;
declare @tbl_segments table(
StartPoint geometry,
EndPoint geometry,
NewPoint geometry,
Segment geometry,
SegmentIndex int
);
Set @orjGeom=geometry::STGeomFromText(@orjLineString,@srid);
set @cutGeom=geometry::STGeomFromText(@cutGeomString,@srid);
Set @[email protected](@cutGeom);
if @intersectionGeom.STGeometryType()='MultiPoint' begin
set @returnData='{Status:false,StatusMessage:"Çiziminiz kırmak istediğiniz hattın birden fazla noktası ile kesişiyor",Line1Wkt:"'+@line1+'",Line2Wkt:"'+@line2+'"}';
return @returnData;
end;
if @orjGeom.STStartPoint().STIntersects(@intersectionGeom.STBuffer(0.001))=1 begin
set @returnData='{Status:false,StatusMessage:"Kırmak istediğiniz hattın başlangıç noktasından kıramazsınız..",Line1Wkt:"'+@line1+'",Line2Wkt:"'+@line2+'"}';
return @returnData;
end;
if @orjGeom.STEndPoint().STIntersects(@intersectionGeom.STBuffer(0.001))=1 begin
set @returnData='{Status:false,StatusMessage:"Kırmak istediğiniz hattın bitiş noktasından kıramazsınız..",Line1Wkt:"'+@line1+'",Line2Wkt:"'+@line2+'"}';
return @returnData;
end;
Set @[email protected] ();
set @i=1;
while (@i<@nodeCount)
begin
insert into @tbl_segments(StartPoint,EndPoint,Segment,SegmentIndex)
Values(@orjGeom.STPointN(@i),
@orjGeom.STPointN(@i+1),
geometry::STGeomFromText('LINESTRING('+STR(@orjGeom.STPointN(@i).STX,18,8)+' '+STR(@orjGeom.STPointN(@i).STY,18,8)+','+STR(@orjGeom.STPointN(@i+1).STX,18,8)+' '+STR(@orjGeom.STPointN(@i+1).STY,18,8)+')',@srid),
@i);
set @i=@i+1;
end;
select @segmentIndex=t.SegmentIndex from @tbl_segments t where t.Segment.STBuffer(0.01).STIntersects(@intersectionGeom)=1;
if (Select Count(*) from @tbl_segments t
where t.SegmentIndex=@segmentIndex
and (t.StartPoint.STBuffer(0.1).STIntersects(@intersectionGeom)=1 or t.EndPoint.STBuffer(0.1).STIntersects(@intersectionGeom)=1))<=0
begin
update @tbl_segments set NewPoint=@intersectionGeom where SegmentIndex=@segmentIndex;
end
else
begin
if (Select Count(*) from @tbl_segments t
where t.SegmentIndex=@segmentIndex
and t.StartPoint.STBuffer(0.1).STIntersects(@intersectionGeom)=1)>0
begin
update @tbl_segments set NewPoint=StartPoint where SegmentIndex=@segmentIndex;
end
else
begin
update @tbl_segments set NewPoint=EndPoint where SegmentIndex=@segmentIndex;
end
end
set @i=1;
set @cur=cursor for
(select case
when t.NewPoint is null then
STR(t.StartPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.StartPoint.STY,18,8)+','+STR(t.EndPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.EndPoint.STY,18,8)
else
STR(t.StartPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.StartPoint.STY,18,8)+','+STR(t.NewPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.NewPoint.STY,18,8)
end as LineWkt
from @tbl_segments t where t.SegmentIndex<=@segmentIndex)
open @cur
FETCH NEXT
from @cur into @tmpLine
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS=0
BEGIN
set @line1=@line1+','+TRIM(@tmpLine);
FETCH NEXT
FROM @cur into @tmpLine
END
close @cur;
set @cur=cursor for
(select case
when t.NewPoint is null then
STR(t.StartPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.StartPoint.STY,18,8)+','+STR(t.EndPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.EndPoint.STY,18,8)
else
+STR(t.NewPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.NewPoint.STY,18,8)+','+STR(t.EndPoint.STX,18,8)+' '+STR(t.EndPoint.STY,18,8)
end as LineWkt
from @tbl_segments t where t.SegmentIndex>=@segmentIndex)
open @cur
FETCH NEXT
from @cur into @tmpLine
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS=0
BEGIN
set @line2=@line2+','+TRIM(@tmpLine);
FETCH NEXT
FROM @cur into @tmpLine
END
close @cur;
set @line1= 'LINESTRING ('+SUBSTRING(@line1,2,LEN(@line1)-1)+')';
set @line2= 'LINESTRING ('+SUBSTRING(@line2,2,LEN(@line2)-1)+')';
set @geom1=geometry::STGeomFromText(@line1,@srid).MakeValid().Reduce(0);
set @geom2=geometry::STGeomFromText(@line2,@srid).MakeValid().Reduce(0);
set @[email protected]();
set @[email protected]();
set @returnData='{Status:true,StatusMessage:"İşlem Başarılı",Line1Wkt:"'+@line1+'",Line2Wkt:"'+@line2+'"}';
return @returnData;
end;
Aşağıdaki örnek ile denendiğinde ekran görüntüsündeki gibi sonuç elde edilmektedir.
Select dbo.STSplitLine('LINESTRING (3918330.9493079544 5131284.8657211363, 3918329.6669074208 5131285.4668463869)',
'LINESTRING(3918331.024705282 5131286.203856818,3918329.41982627 5131283.777876917)',3857)
Resimdeki mavi çizgi hat kırmanın yapılacağı çizgi.
Mor ve yeşil çizgiler kırma işlemi sonrasında oluşan çizgileri göstermektedir. | https://medium.com/@omar-uygun105/mssql-spatial-%C3%A7izgi-i%CC%87le-hat-k%C4%B1rma-3e3f241084e5 | ['Ömer Uygun'] | 2021-03-16 12:21:14.752000+00:00 | ['Cutting', 'Line', 'Spatial', 'Mssql'] |
Foresting Featured Among The 13 Most Promising Blockchain Startups in Korea | Promising Blockchain Startups
Foresting is truly honoured to be featured among the top 13 blockchain startups in Korea. The list was curated and published by Fintech News Singapore.
It listed Foresting among other blockchain businesses likely to disrupt the industry.
Blockchain is a bit of a divided subject in Korea. With a few national controversies hitting the headlines such the controversial ban on ICOs and two crypto exchange hacks in as many weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is a volatile country for blockchain startups.
However, with the Korea’s expertise in advanced tech, it should be no surprise that there have been so many blockchain startups popping up in Korea. These startups come from a wide range of industries, including real estate, fintech and more.
Read more about the article here: 13 Most Promising Blockchain Startups in Korea. | https://medium.com/foresting/foresting-featured-among-the-13-most-promising-blockchain-startups-in-korea-2e18b6fceb2c | [] | 2018-07-11 08:40:37.304000+00:00 | ['Blockchain Startup', 'Startup', 'South Korea', 'Blog', 'Fintech'] |
My Personal Autobiography: The Untold Story of my Life | I promised you in the last article that I will give all the information related to my personal life.It is my untold story that is called my autobiography. As much as I know and my memories are settled, I will bring them out today and all those things in this blog. I will mention. Let me go on with my
autobiography. I was born in Unified Bihar which is now part of Jharkhand state. As soon as the name of Jharkhand comes into your mind, the same water land will be seen as forest mines, but the district where I was born was very backward, although it is currently a border district of Bihar, so that both the Bihari and Jharkhand culture is dominating in the current context.
My birthplace has made its mark as a highly developed district, although the district seems to be losing its historical identity in this phase of development. Is. Like all places, the capitalist trend has been dominated in this district and due to revenue collection, administrative staff also seems helpless.
The exploitation of sand mafia, forest mafia and mine mafia is so dominating that the district is seen crying over its helplessness. Due to which there has been a huge difference in the ancient condition of the district and leaving its cultural values and heritage, breathes its last Is showing Let us assume here that change is the rule of the world and all is justified in evolutionary culture.
33 spring days have passed since my life. It has been a long time, yet such things have been captured in the mind to a great extent. Those Palash trees, Gulmohar trees, beautiful ponds, trees, every greenery, birds, tweets are all over when I used to go to a government school with friends. I used to read in secret all the childhood idiots, devils have slowly disappeared somewhere, today’s children will hardly ever get that age and they will be Dream-ray can not imagine they ever dream has not received the right to come when we slightest felt.
You are reading can understand the importance of each and every word, perhaps how much I am reading by stressing my mind to extract everything related to my childhood. These human beings are also very strange beings, because every human has a different nature here, many people do not want to go into their past.
But it is not the case that every person’s life has some sweet and sweet memories, which is also a big thing in itself.
Therefore, you are also requested to the readers that life is met only once. Therefore every moment of life should be spent very seriously after 8400000 vagaries, it is difficult for human beings to get this form i.e. human beings get life as much as possible. It is a very difficult time for a human being that you can remove such old things with full readiness and patience.
My childhood — Autobiography
When I was born, I used to live in a mud house with my family in my childhood, thatch with thatch tile, what was that clay house, it was probably a hostel of the British era which was later allotted to my grandfather. In which he lived with his family and used to do his daily routine and used to spend his time in that hut in his hut, for us he would be able to do any five star hot Had had no less because Grandpa her hut in ever possible in the hut because us not have any problem had become much they had provided everything comforts. you read my childhood
autobiography.
Mr. teacher to be a nobody at all the big dreams everyone today government teacher wants to be because more money in people’s eyes and relaxing job will hardly. He was a rich man of multifaceted talent, social service writing, education, leadership and know how many qualities were present within him, he was a great writer and a good poet, he was also a good speaker, he also established his identity and also honored him with many honors. A person like Professor Yashpal was also recognized his talent and he also got a chance to work for a long time with
Yashpal . Mr. gave him, he set an example.
Best part of Autobiography
In the present times, only such rare personalities are seen who discharge their works sincerely.
It was perhaps not his nature to flatter.
A lthough, That period was a period of failure because the responsibility of building a large family was also on my grandfather’s shoulder. Out of the four children of grandfather’s grandfather, there were two boys and two girls. He was not and he had the responsibility of teaching them to his younger son, as well as the education of two girls, from their marriage to their marriage and to their gym. Were responsible. Yet I have never seen him worried about this, the all-rounder was a man of temperament and it was in his nature to remain optimistic.
Let me tell you that when I was maybe 2 years old my mother died. After this, my grandmother became my mother and always stayed with me as long as she lived.
I lived my childhood as a grandparent, so I was the star of his eyes. Both of them had a very special contribution in my life and it was only because of them that I could get the courage to live life.
Every Parents’ Dream
Every parent and guardian dreams that their children are enrolled in a school, so at the age of 4, they enrolled me in the most prestigious school and the only private school in the district.
Grandpa did not have enough money to pay the fees continuously and at the right time, yet he cut his important expenses and got his primary education in a reputed private school. Due to financial problem, it was not possible to do so for a long time, so he wished that I could succeed in the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Entrance Examination conducted by the Government of India so that my better education up to 12th standard could be done through government expenditure.
His heartfelt desire was that I should go to study in Jawahar you read my Navodaya Vidyalaya life — My
Navodaya Vidyalaya, so he enrolled me in a government school. For admission in Navodaya Vidyalaya, it is a rule that the child’s education from the third to the fifth has been initiated in a government school, that is, this school The main basis of the poor and meritorious students of the district can get the basis of good education so that poverty is their talent This was the dream of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Navodaya Vidyalaya was a form of that dream.
Dadaji removed my enrollment from child development and got it done in board middle school school, I was also very passionate to fulfill my grandfather’s dream, so I finally passed the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya entrance exam and got enrolled in Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in class VI.
Keeping this test in mind, Grandpa promised me that if I pass this exam
It was like a dream come true because in my eyes I had that dream from the beginning and I was able to fulfill it, after that I started having a bad experience of being away from home. You can guess that someone If the child has been so attached to his home since childhood, and if he has to go to hostel, what will happen on his life?
Autobiography.
The hostel life started from the sixth grade, however it is very sad for any child leaving their home and going to hostel because being away from home is a new experience for a child who enjoys living with his family and loved ones. The child is saddened by the idea of separation from his family.
Dear sister and brothers gave me a lot of love.
Especially the senior class didi made me sit on my eyes and my eyes, due to which my classmates were jealous of me because it was not possible for everyone to enter inside the girls hostel. And it was cherished that often during break time my senior sister used to take me inside the hostel, feed me and give me lots of love. They were probably seen them in my spitting image of his brother. In boys’ dormitory I too had become very cherished of all senior brothers. Well children are children and the habits of all children are also different from each other. Something is different inside every child, which motivates children to do something different. I also had a special hobby in me because I have been crazing a lot of bikes and vehicles since childhood, I used to collect posters of such vehicles and put them on the walls in my room.
Everyone was shocked to know what such demand was, because I have told you that I Grandpa did not want to break his commitments under any circumstances, that is, he did not want to annoy me at all. He also did not want me to ask for anything from him and he could not fulfill it.
I remember how his hairlessness must have been so much because of my hair, today I have understood this very well. Although many people explained to me for this and asked for some more in its option, but where was I going to believe my victory, I was adamant and I kept the new Bajaj Super FE that too navy blue color Agreed with I had talked to my grandfather, who is a minor teacher, as if I had brought the moon out of the sky, but he had fulfilled my stubbornness by getting me a scooter. Grandfather’s friend and many people who heard such demand explained to me in turn, but I did not listen to anyone, but maybe this is like.
Stubbornness for scooter
I do not know how much struggle my grandfather must have had to buy a scooter , because today I am a parent even today. Currently I have become the father of two children today, so I can feel that if a child insists for something, then how many struggles the parents have to give him and how much he can cut his expenses. I have fully understood this fact, because I have come to talk today, I myself understand this very well, children who do not understand a lot and Ni hair turn out and eventually put much trouble to their parents this child when will grow and he can understand this only themselves become parents.
Dear brothers and sisters,
In the sequel of the blog, I will bring my true story in the life of my Navodaya Vidyalaya and in the role of a Navodayan , I will also talk about untouched aspects related to life as far as possible. Doing this, I get very thrilled, often thinking that if there was a time machine, I would return to the same period of time. But at the time, someone has control, the time keeps increasing in its speed and we too go on getting entangled in the fissure of life.
Did you like this episode of my Autobiography?
Dear siblings, after reading this how you like my writing, you will definitely give me your thoughts through comments and if possible, you will also share it, wait, I will be present with you soon. Stay connected and follow us
Amit | https://medium.com/@arpitasharma_88728/my-personal-autobiography-the-untold-story-of-my-life-58e74675cf84 | [] | 2020-04-26 06:57:41.250000+00:00 | ['Autobiography', 'Life Lessons', 'The Untold Story', 'Lifestyle', 'Life'] |
Hold Me Close | I hold me close
for my fear is great
I hold me close
for I feel the panic
My mind ignites
with every little worry
My body shakes
for the world that’s ending
Imagined or not
the threat is real
The little girl inside of me
braces for the impact
A soothing world
she didn’t have
I have to be the voice of reason
that soothes her fears
I hold me close
because I am the one
that can give rest
to the trembling heart.
(365 Days of Poetry — Day 255) | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/hold-me-close-b708e816ed4e | ['Afiyah The Poet'] | 2020-09-23 14:52:07.309000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Love Yourself', '365 Days Of Poetry', 'Poetry', 'Spiritual Secrets'] |
Two Practical Uses for "Creepy" Quantum Mechanics: | Quantum mechanics is abnormal. The hypothesis, which portrays the activities of little particles and powers, famously made Albert Einstein so uncomfortable that in 1935 he and his associates claimed that it should be inadequate—it was too "creepy" to ever be genuine.
The difficulty is that quantum material science appears to oppose the good judgment ideas of causality, area and authenticity. For instance, you realize that the moon exists in any event, when you're not seeing it—that is authenticity. Causality discloses to us that on the off chance that you flick a light switch, the bulb will enlighten. Furthermore, because of a hard breaking point on the speed of light, in the event that you flick a switch now, the connected impact couldn't happen in a flash 1,000,000 light-years away according to area.
In any case, these standards separate in the quantum domain. Maybe the most acclaimed model is quantum snare, which says that particles on inverse sides of the universe can be inherently connected so they share data immediately—a thought that made Einstein sneer.
However, in 1964, physicist John Stewart Bell demonstrated that quantum material science was indeed a total and useful hypothesis. His outcomes, presently called Bell's Theorem, successfully demonstrated that quantum properties like ensnarement are as genuine as the moon, and today the strange practices of quantum frameworks are being bridled for use in an assortment of true applications. Here are two of the most interesting:
Natural compasses :
People aren't the solitary ones utilizing quantum mechanics. One driving hypothesis recommends that flying creatures like the European robin utilize the creepy activity to keep on track when they relocate. The technique includes a light-delicate protein called cryptochrome, which may contain snared electrons. As photons enter the eye, they hit the cryptochrome particles and can convey enough energy to split them up, shaping two receptive atoms, or revolutionaries, with unpaired yet at the same time caught electrons.
The attractive field encompassing the feathered creature impacts how long these cryptochrome extremists last. Cells in the fowl's retina are believed to be touchy to the presence of the entrapped revolutionaries, permitting the creatures to adequately 'see' an attractive guide dependent on the atoms.
This cycle isn't full seen, however, and there is another choice: Birds' attractive affectability could be because of little precious stones of attractive minerals in their noses. In any case, if entrapment truly is at play, tests propose that the sensitive state must last much longer in a superior than in even the best counterfeit frameworks. The attractive compass could likewise be relevant to specific reptiles, scavangers, creepy crawlies and even a few warm blooded creatures. For example, a type of cryptochrome utilized for attractive route in flies has likewise been found in the natural eye, in spite of the fact that it's muddled on the off chance that it is or used to be helpful for a comparable reason.
Very Powerful PCs :
A standard PC encodes data as a line of double digits, or bits. Quantum computers supercharge handling power since they use quantum bits, or qubits, which exist in a superposition of states—until they are estimated, qubits can be both "1" and "0" simultaneously.
This field is as yet being developed, however there have been positive developments. In 2011, D-Wave Systems uncovered the D-Wave One, a 128-qubit processor, followed a year later by the 512-qubit D-Wave Two.
The organization says these are the world's first economically accessible quantum PCs. Notwithstanding, this case has been met with distrust, to a limited extent since it's as yet hazy whether D-Wave's qubits are trapped. Studies delivered in May found evidence of entanglement but just in a little subset of the PC's qubits.
There's additionally vulnerability about whether the chips show any reliable quantum speedup. In any case, NASA and Google have collaborated to shape the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on a D-Wave Two. Furthermore, researchers at the University of Bristol last year hooked up one of their traditional quantum chips to the Internet so anybody with an internet browser can learn quantum coding. | https://medium.com/@tajamulfayaz621/two-practical-uses-for-creepy-quantum-mechanics-1bcf3c0660ec | ['Tajamul Fayaz'] | 2020-12-20 17:58:51.934000+00:00 | ['Mechanics', 'Articles', 'Physics', 'Concept', 'Quantum Physics'] |
Basics of Apache Spark Configuration Settings | Spark Architecture — In a simple fashion
Before continuing further, I will mention Spark architecture and terminology in brief. Spark uses a master/slave architecture with a central coordinator called Driver and a set of executable workflows called Executors that are located at various nodes in the cluster.
Resource Manager is the decision-maker unit about the allocation of resources between all applications in the cluster, and it is a part of Cluster Manager. Cluster Manager is a process that controls, governs, and reserves computing resources in the form of containers on the cluster. There are lots of cluster manager options for Spark applications, one of them is Hadoop YARN.
When a Spark application launches, Resource Manager starts Application Master(AM) and allocates one container for it. AM coordinates the execution of all tasks within its application. AM can be considered as a non-executor container with the special capability of requesting containers from YARN, takes up resources of its own.
Once AM launches, it asks for containers and resource requests of containers from Resource Manager. After successfully receiving the containers, AM launches them. Inside the containers, it runs the user application code via Driver. After completion of the application, AM releases the resources back to Resource Manager. If AM crashes or becomes unavailable, Resource Manager can create another container and restart AM on it.
Driver is placed inside AM in cluster mode and responsible for converting a user application to smaller execution units called tasks and then schedules them to run on executors. These tasks are executed on the worker nodes and then return results to the Driver. Driver also informs AM of the executor’s needs for the application. It runs in its own JVM. Executors are the processes(computing units) at the worker’s nodes, whose job is to complete the assigned tasks. One executor container is just one JVM.
Spark Context is the main entry point into Spark functionality. Spark Context also tracks executors in real-time by sending regular heartbeat messages. Spark Context is created by Driver for each Spark application when it is first submitted by the user. It exists throughout the lifetime of the Spark application. Spark Context stops working after the Spark application is finished.
There are two different running modes available for Spark jobs — client mode and cluster mode. The difference basically depends on where Driver is running. While it runs in the client process in client mode, it runs in the AM in cluster mode. In production, cluster mode makes sense, the client can go away after initializing the application.
YARN Dependent Parameters
One of the leading cluster management frameworks for Spark is YARN. In YARN terminology, executors and AM run inside containers. A container is an allocation of memory and CPU simply. When a Spark application is submitted through YARN in the cluster mode, the resources will be allocated in the form of containers by the Resource Manager.
In the yarn-site.xml file, adjusting the following parameters is a good starting point if Spark is used together with YARN as a cluster management framework. In the case of running Spark applications with non-spark applications in the same cluster, firstly setting these YARN parameters correctly is very important. In a way, these parameters will define the borders of your Spark applications within the cluster. The followings are the basic YARN parameters to be set correctly.
yarn.nodemanager.resource.memory-mb
yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-mb
yarn.scheduler.minimum-allocation-mb
yarn.nodemanager.resource.cpu-vcores
yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-vcores
yarn.scheduler.minimum-allocation-vcores
yarn.nodemanager.resource.memory-mb simply refers to the amount of physical memory that can be allocated for containers in a single node. It must be something lower than the total RAM value of the node considering the OS daemons and other running processes in the node. yarn.scheduler.minimum-allocation-mb and yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-mb parameters state minimum and maximum memory allocation values respectively a single container can get.
Similar reasoning is valid for CPU allocation of containers. yarn.nodemanager.resource.cpu-vcores determines total available vcores allocated for all containers in a single node. And each container gets vcores within the values of yarn.scheduler.minimum-allocation-vcores and yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-vcores parameters as the lower and upper limit.
Memory Management in Spark
Memory utilization is a bit more tricky compared to CPU utilization in Spark. Before deep dive into the configuration tuning, it would be useful to look at what is going on under the hood in memory management. A good summarization for memory management in Spark is depicted in the following diagram. | https://towardsdatascience.com/basics-of-apache-spark-configuration-settings-ca4faff40d45 | ['Halil Ertan'] | 2021-02-09 15:17:21.022000+00:00 | ['Yarn', 'Hadoop', 'Pyspark', 'Apache Spark', 'Configuration Management'] |
Engineering For Failure | Not so long ago, our systems were simple: we had one machine, with one process, probably no more than one external datastore, and the entire request lifecycle was processed and handled within this simple world.
Our users were also accustomed to a certain SLA standard — a 2-second page load time could have been acceptable a few years ago, but waiting more than a second for an Instagram post is unthinkable nowadays.
(Warning: buzzwords ahead)
When systems get more complex, with strict latency requirements and a distributed infrastructure, an uninvited guest crawls up our systems — request failure.
With each additional request to an external service within the lifecycle of a user request, we’re adding another chance for failure. With every additional datastore, we’re open to an increased risk of failure. With every feature we add, we risk increasing our latency long-tail, resulting in a degraded user experience in some portion of the requests.
In this article, I’ll cover some of the basic ways we at Riskified handle failures in order to provide maximal uptime and optimal service to our customers.
Failure by example
Every external service, no matter how good and reliable, will fail at some point. We at Riskified learned this the hard way when we experienced short failures with a managed, highly available service that almost resulted in data loss. That incident taught us the hard lesson that request failures should be handled gracefully.
In Google’s superbly written Site Reliability Engineering Book, they describe The Global Chubby Planned Outage, in which a service was so reliable, that its customers were using it without taking into account the possibility of failure, and even using it without a real essential need, just because it was so reliable.
As a result, Chubby, Google’s distributed locking system, was set a Service Level Objective (SLO) for service uptime, and for each quarter this SLO is met, the team responsible for the service intentionally takes it down. Their goal is to educate users that the service is not fail-safe and that they need to account for external service failures in their products.
So how should engineers handle request failures? Let’s cover some comment patterns:
Retrying
Retrying a failed request can, in many cases, solve the problem. This is the obvious solution, assuming network failures are sporadic and unpredictable. Just set a reasonable timeout for each request you send out to an external resource, and the number of retries you want, and you’re done! Your system is now more reliable.
Something to consider, however, is that additional retries can cause additional load on the system you’re calling, and make an already failing system fail harder.
Implementing and configuring short-circuiting mechanisms might be a thing to consider. You can read more about it in this interesting Shopify engineering blog post.
Prefetching — Fail outside of the main flow
One of the best ways to avoid failure while calling an external service is to avoid calling this service at all.
Let’s say we’re implementing an online store — we have a user service and an order service, and the order service needs the current user’s email address in order to send them an invoice for their last purchase.
The fact that we need the email address, doesn’t mean we have to query the user service while the user is logged in and waiting for order confirmation. It just means that an email address should be available.
In cases of fairly static data, we can easily pre-fetch all (or some) user details from the user service in a background process. This way, the email is already available during order processing, and we don’t need to call the external service. In the event the service fails to fetch user details, that failure remains outside of the main processing flow and is “hidden” from the user.
In his talk, Jimmy Bogard explains it better than I do (the link starts from his explanation about prefetching, although the whole talk is great!)
Best efforting
In some cases, we should just embrace failure, and continue processing without the data we were trying to get. You’re probably wondering — if we don’t need the data, why are we querying it at all?
The best example we have for this in Riskified is a Redis-based distributed locking mechanism that we use to block concurrent transactions in some cases. Since we’re a low-latency oriented service, we didn’t want a latency surge in lock acquiring to cause us to exceed the SLA requirements of our customers. We set a very strict timeout on lock acquiring so that when the timeout is reached, we continue unlocked — i.e we prefer race conditions over the increase in latency for our customers. In other words, the locking feature is a “nice to have” feature in our process.
Falling back to previous or estimated results
In some cases, you may be able to use previous results or sub-optimal estimations to handle a request while other services are unavailable.
Let’s say we’re implementing a navigation system, and one of the features we want is traffic jam predictions.
We’d probably have a JammingService (not to be confused with the Bob Marley song), that we’d call with our route to estimate the probability of traffic jams. When this service is failing, we might choose a sub-optimal course of action, while still serving the request:
Using previous results: we might cache some “common” jam predictions and serve them, we might even pre-fetch the jam estimation for the most commonly used routes of some of our users. Estimate a result: Our service can hold a mapping of mean jam estimation per region and serve that estimation for all requests for routes in the region.
In both examples, the solution is obviously not optimal, but probably be better than failing a request. The general idea here is to make a simple estimation of the result we’re trying to get from the external resource.
Delaying a response
If the business of the product allows it, it’s possible to delay the processing of the request until the problem with the external resource is solved.
As an example, let’s take the JammingService from the previous solution — when it fails we can decide to queue all requests in some internal queue, return a response to the user that the request cannot be processed at the moment, but a response will be available as soon as possible via push notification to the user’s phone, or via webhook for example.
This is possible mostly in asynchronous services, where we can separate between the request and the response. (If you can design the service to be asynchronous to begin with, that’s even better!)
Implement simplified fallback logic
On some mission-critical features, a more complex solution is needed. In some cases, the external service is so critical to our services, that we’d have to fail a request if the external service fails.
One of the solutions we devised for such critical external resources, is to use “simplified” in-process versions of them. In other words, we’re re-implementing a simplified version of the external service as a fallback within our service, so that in the event the external service fails, we still have some data to work with, and can successfully process the request.
As an example, let’s go back to our navigation system. It might be such an important feature of our system, that we want each request to have a fairly good traffic jam estimation, even if our JammingService is down.
Our JammingService probably uses various complex machine learning algorithms and external data sources. In our simplified fallback version of it, we might choose, for example, to implement it using a simple greedy best-first algorithm, with simple optimizations.
In this case, even if there’s a failure of the JammingService, some fairly good traffic jam estimation is available within our navigation system.
This isn’t optimal since now we need to maintain two versions of the same feature, but when the feature is critical enough, and may be unstable enough — it could be worth it.
Closing thoughts — Failing as a way of life
At school, I was quite a bad student, so failing is not new to me. This taught me that as an engineer, anything I lay my hands on might fail, and simply catching the exception is not enough — we need to do something when we catch it, we still need to provide some level of service.
I encourage you to dedicate a big part of your time to failure handling, and to make it a habit to announce your systems are production-ready only when you handle your failures in a safe and business-oriented way.
As always, you’re welcome to find me at my Twitter handle: @cherkaskyb | https://medium.com/riskified-technology/engineering-for-failure-f73bc8bc2e87 | ['Boris Cherkasky'] | 2020-09-24 11:59:52.253000+00:00 | ['Scale', 'Backend', 'Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Cloud'] |
MOAC Workshop at Blockchain Lab NYU with Principal Engineer Martin MA | Blockchain has been growing and evolving rapidly since the release of the first whitepaper about the technology in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. One of the best ways to aid the growth of the developer community is to offer students access to the latest technology. On Wednesday October 9th 2019, the MOAC Foundation hosted a workshop with the Blockchain Lab at NYU. MOAC Principal Engineer, Martin Ma, presented the MOAC platform and several use cases to a group of engineering students and blockchain industry professionals at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Martin Ma began by sharing his impressive background with over 25 years experience, working for large companies like Amazon and Huawei as a software engineer. Over the course of his career, Ma has also worked for Verifone, China Construction Bank, and CCFE (China Commodity Futures Exchange).
Cherie Liu, Head of US for the MOAC Foundation and Managing Partner at Outpost VC, introduces MOAC and Principal Engineer Martin Ma to the audience.
Ma then described how blockchain technology is still in its early days and compared it with the first web sites, dial-up internet and the first emails. He expressed to the crowd what an opportunity they have in front of them and encouraged them to build a startup or project on top of MOAC. “MOAC is like Android Operating System. If you can do a better application on top of it, you can change the world. A small change can impact a lot of people around the world,” said Ma.
Ma went on to explain how blockchain provides value by preventing double-spending using proof of ownership, with the example of sending a Bitcoin versus forwarding an email. He elaborated on how MOAC is a decentralized network versus how the web currently operates with central servers. He went on to differentiate MOAC from a private chain like Facebook’s Libra, because anyone can join and form a node of the MOAC public chain.
Ma then described how MOAC is uniquely suited to solve the “Trilemma” of Security, Scalability and Decentralization with the use of micro-chains, sharding and a hybrid consensus, which enables different combinations of Proof Of Work and Proof Of Stake. He also spoke about the other things that set MOAC apart from competitors, like it’s ease of use, high transaction speed, and fee-less smart contract transactions.
After going into detail on the multi-layer architecture of MOAC and explaining how Micro-Chains and Sharding work, Mathen introduced several use cases, some live on the MOAC Mainnet and others still in production. For example, “One Click One Chain” makes it incredibly easy to create new chains off the MOAC main chain.
Martin MA, MOAC Principal Engineer
MOAC’s “Product Tracing Solution” takes supply chain management to a new level of efficiency, tracking a product every step from creation to point of sale and can be easily applied to many different industries. “Filestorm” is a decentralized file storage solution that allows users to access their files from anywhere, as well as incentivizing users to become nodes and offer use of their hard drive space to earn tokens.
Another example is the “Big Data Exchange Solution” which creates a platform for Data Providers and Data Buyers to exchange information, using tokens for access, ensuring the providers are paid for their data. Data providers in the current state of the internet suffer from how easy it is to copy information without paying and blockchain can solve this problem with the exchange of tokens for data.
After Ma’s presentation, the audience had the opportunity to hear about more live use case examples from Leon Wu, CEO of of BriskPoint, a current MOAC partner company.
Briskpoint is an Enterprise AI and Blockchain company that serves oil & gas companies, power utility companies, EV charging networks, and real estate companies. BriskPoint’s blockchain offerings to enterprise clients are built on the MOAC blockchain.
Leon Wu, CEO of of BriskPoint
“We have started to collaborate with the MOAC team,” said Wu. “Their technology, I would say, is cutting edge… We have full confidence in their future development because their platform is very robust and also easy to use.”
Mr. Wu went on to describe BriskPoint’s current blockchain projects. “We developed a blockchain based data exchange for the oil and gas customers to do data swap. The other product we are currently developing is an energy commodity trading platform. We are currently using MOAC to develop it.”
The evening concluded with Martin Ma answering a variety of questions from the audience about blockchain technology, MOAC’s tech stack, and positioning as a company. The full workshop can be viewed on the MOAC YouTube channel: MOAC Martin Ma at NYU Workshop. | https://medium.com/moac/moac-workshop-at-blockchain-lab-nyu-with-principal-engineer-martin-ma-d60dc92a3c0e | [] | 2019-11-02 17:58:39.893000+00:00 | ['Sharding', 'Microchain', 'Public Chain', 'Blockchain', 'Hybrid Consensus'] |
Stacking machine learning models for speech sentiment analysis | How to build a model that recognizes human sentiment from audio and text recordings. Co-authors: Qianwen Guan, Alexandre Laurent.
In the context of the final project of Le Wagon’s bootcamp, my team and I decided to take on a fascinating task: Speech sentiment recognition.
It is a great challenge to take up because emotions are subjective on the lines of culture, gender, language and even down to the individual person, it is therefore difficult to universally classify human sentiment.
Our data
We found a data set from Carnegie Melon University called CMU-MOSEI¹ which is the largest dataset of sentence level sentiment analysis and emotion recognition in online videos. It contains more than 65 hours of annotated video from more than 1,000 speakers and 250 topics.
The data was divided between segments of variable lengths, each representing a full spoken sentence (features), and the sentiment, our target, which varied between the values -3 to 3 (from negative to positive, 0 being neutral).
We decided to analyse both audio recordings and text transcripts to predict the sentiment behind a person’ sentence. Our intuition was that combining two models with two different sources, using multi-modal learning, could improve our performance.
Data preprocessing
The first step our work what to clean both text and audio data.
While the text was already extracted from the videos, the editing there essentially consisted in doing basic formatting for the text files (removal of punctuation, numbers and uppercase). However, in Natural Language Processing (NLP), it is difficult to chose what parts of text to remove and what parts are to be kept (single words, sentences, whole conversations). I attempted to lemmatize and stem words but no improvements in performance were found.
Audio format was slightly more complex, we tried two approaches:
1. The first was audio feature extraction using Python’s library librosa. It enables to extract 5 major features (mean values) from each recording: MFCC, Chroma, Mel Spectrogram, Spectral Centroid & Tonnetz. From those, I obtained around 190 features which could then be used for modelling as tabular data.
2. The second was audio to Mel spectrogram which allowed us to interpret audio as an image and to model it from a visual point of view. Looking at the following figure, the x-axis represents time (s), the y-axis frequency (Hz), and the color intensity represents the amplitude of the signal (dB). In this case, the images allowed for feature extraction to occur in a deep learning setting (convolutional network). | https://towardsdatascience.com/stacking-machine-learning-models-for-speech-sentiment-analysis-adf433488845 | ['Corentin Garet'] | 2021-04-09 06:58:37.993000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Sentiment Analysis', 'Stacking', 'Data Science'] |
12 Website Design Strategies that will help you get Conversions | Web Design Strategies
No sales on your website? Fewer visitors? Worried about the bounce rates?
It is definitely a thing that needs immediate attention.
And we are here to tell you how to get more visitors and convert them into customers.
The quality of your web design is what helps you to convert a visitor into a potential customer. Have a relook at your website.
Your website design may be the culprit that is stopping your viewers from definitive action.
Here, we list out 12 essential website design strategies & tips that will help you get visitors to your site and turn them into potential customers.
1. Good attractive images of high-quality-
We suggest you invest in high-quality images for your website. A good image with high resolution attracts viewers immediately. Use unique images that are simple, subtle, yet beautiful and impresses the audience.
2. Minimal but good content in web page-
Avoid too much of descriptive content. Let it be simple and precise. It has to convey the message directly to the viewer. Avoid long paragraphs or lengthy sentences. Use simple words. Let it adequately convey the message.
3. Simple minimalistic design-
Keep your website design simple. The visitors, for sure, will not appreciate complex designs no matter how creative it is. Stick to standard layouts and if you still want to stand out from the crowd, be creative with the images and subtle animations.
4. Good use of colors and font styles in web design-
Experimenting with colors and fonts is good as long as it gels well with your website design. Your font has to be easily readable and complement the background color. It should not strain the user’s eyes.
5. Use of Whitespace on the website-
Whitespace increases readability. This negative space is for content prioritization and element positioning. Lack of whitespace makes your website look disorganized and full that may make the visitor abandon your site.
6. Clear Navigation-
Your website navigation has to help the visitor to go into the detailed pages as well as easily and quickly come out of it. Ensure that the visitors find what they are looking for in your website without confusing them.
7. Scrolling is in-
It is proven that people prefer scrolling to clicks. It does not mean that you have a single-page website. But, avoid too many clicks that may distract the viewer. For instance, let all the details about a product be on a single web page.
8. Videos-
Videos, of late, have become a useful and most desired supplement to the content in a website. But create videos that help users to relate to the product. This will increase brand perception. Remember, if a video does not fit a functional purpose, omit it, otherwise it slows down the loading speed of your website.
9. Animated Navigation-
Animated navigations help drive visitors through the conversion funnel. The navigational transitions help users move from a high-level view to a detailed view. A fine animated navigation in a unique style helps to create a truly memorable experience for the users on your website.
10. Dominant Call-to-actions(CTAs)-
Your purpose to create the ecommerce website is not to show how beautifully you have designed it but to convert the visitors to customers. CTAs come into the picture here. CTAs perform different actions like sign-up for newsletters, buy, fill in name, emails, contact number and so on.
11. Responsive website-
Design a responsive website to provide a seamless mobile experience to your users. With 80% of the internet search coming for the mobile devices, its optimization is something that cannot be missed.
12. Website Optimization-
Website design can be optimized for conversions through some important SEO techniques.
· Induce keyword-related website content.
· Blogs and articles are a must to rank organically
· Headlines, URL slugs, meta descriptions, title tags- Build specific pages that are search engine optimized.
· Work on backlinks to your website and internal links within it.
· Build a responsive website
· Optimize image size
· Tag the images properly using the alt attribute
· Speed up the pages
· Add a sitemap to your website for easy crawling of bots
· Add Schema markup to the HTML of your pages
· Add social links & testimonials
Your on-page SEO is important when you design a website and this is what gets you ranked in the search engine page results (SERPs).
Conclusion
It is always better to get professional help from a reputed web developer to design your website.
A website is the first impression of your business for any visitor. Let your website design do the talking. What is your say on it? | https://medium.com/@daddyscodeinfo/12-website-design-strategies-that-will-help-you-get-conversions-75f28b87b264 | ['Daddys Code'] | 2019-11-27 10:49:00.091000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'SEO', 'Website Development', 'Website', 'Website Design'] |
Paper Review: Neural Collaborative Filtering Explanation & Implementation | Essentially, each user and item is projected onto a latent space, represented by a latent vector. The more similar the two latent vectors are, the more related the corresponding users’ preference. Since we factorize the utility matrix into the same latent space, we can measure the similarity of any two latent vectors with cosine-similarity or dot product. In fact, the prediction for each user/ item entry is computed by the dot product of the corresponding latent vectors.
The prediction equals the inner product of latent vectors
However, the paper argued that dot product limits the expressiveness of user and item latent vectors. Let’s consider the following case. We first focus on the top three rows of this utility matrix.
Let S{x,y} denotes the similarity between user x and user y. By computing the cosine-similarity between users 1, 2, and 3, we know that S{2, 3} > S{1, 2} > S{1, 3}. Without loss of generality, we map the users onto a latent space of two dimensions as the following.
Now, we take into account user 4. Comparing the similarity with the others, we obtain S{1,4} > S{3,4} > S{2,4}. However, no matter we place the latent vector P4 to the right or left of P1, it will inevitably be closer to P2 than P3.
Therefore, this example shows the limitation of inner product to fully model the interactions between user and items in the latent space.
Neural Collaborative Filtering
The paper proposed Neural Collaborative Filtering as shown in the graph below. In the input layer, the user and item are one-hot encoded. Then, they are mapped to the hidden space with embedding layers accordingly. The Neural FC layer can be any kind neuron connections. Multiple layer perceptron, for example, can be placed here. It claims that with the complicated connection and non-linearity in the Neural CF layers, this model is capable of properly estimating the complex interactions between user and item in the latent space.
NCF architecture
So, how NCF is a generalization of Matrix Factorization? Let me show you in the graph below. We first replace Neural CF layer with a multiplication layer, which performs element-wise multiplication on the two inputs. Then, we set the weight from the multiplication layer to the output layer to be a fixed unit matrix (matrix of all ones ) of dimension K by 1 with linear activation function.
Then , we have the following equations.
The prediction of the unobserved interaction ŷ_ui denotes the predicted value of the (u, i) entry on the reconstructed utility matrix. L is the linear activation function, while ⊙ denotes the element-wise multiplication operation. p_u and q_i are the latent vector of user and item, respectively, and J is the unit matrix of dimension (K,1). Since J is a unit matrix, inside the linear function becomes the inner product between latent vector p_u and q_i. Furthermore, because the input and output are the same for linear function, it boils down to the last line. The predicted label is the inner product of the corresponding user and item latent vector. This equation is identical to that shown in the Matrix Factorization section. Thus, this proves that Matrix Factorization is a special case of NCF.
NeuMF
In order to introduce additional non-linearity, the final model proposed, NeuMF, includes a Mutliple-layer Perceptron (MLP) module apart from the Generalized Matrix Factorization (GMP) layer.
The output of GMF and MLP modules are concatenated and connected with the sigmoid activation output layer.
Performance
The paper evaluates NCF models and other models with the Leave-One-Out schema. That is, the last interaction for each user is held out for evaluation. Two evaluation metrics are being considered, Hit Ratio @ 10, and NDCG @ 10. Hit Ratio @ K denotes the fraction of prediction hits given 10 recommendation for each user. Let’s say if we recommend 10 items for each user, and 4 of the 10 users interact the items matching our recommendation, then Hit Ratio@ 10 = 0.4. NDCG, on the other hand, can be viewed as an extension of Hit Ratio, except that it considers the order of the hit. This means that if you the hit occurs at the higher recommendation, NDCG will be higher.
The performance comparison is shown in the figure below. In all cases, NeuMF performs better than the other models. | https://towardsdatascience.com/paper-review-neural-collaborative-filtering-explanation-implementation-ea3e031b7f96 | ['Kung-Hsiang', 'Huang', 'Steeve'] | 2019-11-18 14:04:56.693000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Neural Networks', 'Pytorch', 'Recommender Systems', 'Deep Learning'] |
Understand O.O.P. in Python with One Article | 1. Introduction to Object-oriented programming
In order to begin understanding the intuition behind this programming technique, let’s take a look at an initial example. Imagine that you have to describe a car to someone who’s never seen one before, how would you do it?
Photo by vaea Garrido on Unsplash
You might want to start saying that it’s a wheeled motor vehicle used for transportation. Also, you might say that there are several brands of car-maker companies, which make different types of cars that fulfill various needs. In an even more basic level you might say that it has four tires, that they carry up to five people in most cases and that they are mainly used to transport people, not goods.
When explaining to a computer what kind of object this is, it’s a good idea to approach it in a similar way. Computers have no innate idea of what a car is, why were they created or who uses them. And if you want your computer to correctly understand the object, a car in this case, you have to clearly explain which are its attributes.
To make it easier for computers to understand these new concepts, Python uses a programming pattern called object-oriented programming, which models concepts using classes and objects. This is a flexible, powerful paradigm where classes represent and define concepts, while objects are instances of classes. In the car example, we can create a class called car that defines its characteristics to the computer. We would be able to create thousands of instances of that class car, which are the individual objects of that class.
The idea of object-oriented programming might sound abstract and complex, but if you’ve programmed any software you might have already used objects without even realizing it. Almost everything in Python is an object, all of the numbers, strings, lists, and dictionaries are included in this type of element. The core concept of object-oriented programming comes down to attributes and methods associated with a type:
Attributes are the characteristics associated to a type.
are the characteristics associated to a type. Methods are the functions associated to a type.
In the car example, color and brand are two attributes associated with every instance, or car, created with the program. On the other hand, methods would be actions performed with or by the car, such as driving. A more computer-oriented example would be a file in a directory, as every file has a name, a size and a date of when it was created.
As you can see in the image above, when we use the type function as we just did here, Python tells us which class the value or variable belongs to. And since integers and strings are classes, they have a bunch of attributes and methods associated with them. You can access attributes and methods of a class with the dir function in Python, as shown below:
In my previous article about strings, I explored a bunch of methods and attributes of the string class. Take a look at it for further insights about how to treat strings objects, which in that case will be a different instance of the string class. This means that they all have the same methods, although the content in the string is different.
Why are there a bunch of methods that begin and end with double underscores?
These are called special methods and they aren’t usually called by those weird names. Instead, they’re called by some of the internal Python functions. for example, the __len__ method is called by the len function.
If you want to know what a specific method does, you should use the help function:
When we use the help function on any variable or value, we’re accessing all the documentation for the corresponding class. In this case, we’re looking at the documentation for the str and the int class.
Although Python comes with a lot of predefined classes for us, the power of object-oriented programming comes when we define our own classes with their own attributes and methods.
2. Defining a New Class
As mentioned earlier, the point of object oriented programming is to help define a real-world concept in a way that the computer understands. Let’s get hands on to build a new class with the car example:
Let’s clarify specific elements of the code:
In Python, we use the class reserved keyword to tell the computer that we’re starting a new class. We follow this with the name of the class and a colon. Python style guidelines recommend that class names should start with a capital letter . In my case, the class is called Car.
reserved keyword to tell the computer that we’re starting a new class. We follow this with the name of the class and a colon. Python style guidelines recommend that class names should start with a . In my case, the class is called Car. After the line with the class definition comes the body of the class, which is indented to the right, following the pattern of loops or functions.
We’ll get to the special methods init and repr in the fourth section of this article.
How might we expand our definition of the Car class? It would probably have the same attributes that represent the information we want to associate with a car like brand and color.
Now, let’s proceed with the creation of an instance of the class Car, and assign it to a variable called “my_car”. To create a new instance of any class, we call the name of the class as if it were a function:
As you can see, I’m passing as an argument the brand and the color as I’ve configured my class to require both items in the creation of a new object of the class. As a result, we can call the attributes of the created instance and receive the value previously assigned:
The syntax used to access the attributes is called dot notation because of the dot used in the expression. Dot notation lets you access any of the abilities that the object might have, such as brand or color.
The attributes and methods of some objects can be other objects and can have attributes and methods of their own. For example, we could use the upper or the capitalize methods to modify both string attributes of my instance:
So far we’ve created one instance of the Car class and set its attributes. Now, we could create a new instance of the the class with different attributes:
3. Instance Methods
Methods are essentially called to make objects do stuff. For example, upper and capitalize for strings. The key to learn the intuition of methods in O.O.P. is to understand that methods are functions that operate on the attributes of a specific instance of a class. When we call the lower method on the string, we’re making the contents of that specific string lowercase.
Let’s take a closer look by creating a new class called Dog and defining our own methods. First, we need to define the class and create an instance of it like we’ve done before with the Car class. While my dog might be great, it can’t perform any actions as long as I don’t define methods for them. Take a look at the example:
As shown in the image, we must start defining a method with the def keyword just like we would for a function, and indent to the right the body of the method, also as we would for a function.
The function is receiving a parameter called “self”. This parameter represents the instance that the method is being executed on.
Even though my dog barks, it will always do it in the same way. We can change how it will bark with a simple modification in the code, in order to gain flexibility in the attributes and methods that we configure to our classes:
4. Defining Constructors and Other Special Methods
Both classes created up to this paragraph contain default values as attributes and methods. This is not an ideal scenario as it creates redundant code for each attribute, and more importantly, as it makes it really easy to forget to set an important value.
So, when writing code it's a good idea to set attributes and methods that will vary with instances upon creating the class, in order to make sure that each instance contains the same important attributes. To do this, we need to use a special method called Constructor.
The constructor of the class is the method that's called when you call the name of the class. It's always named init.
It contains the keyword self, which refers to the instance being created, and the arguments that will be passed as attributes by the programmer once the instance is created, like we do in the example below:
The second method of the class is the repr method, which tells Python to print a predetermined statement every time an instance of the class is called, as in the image above.
Want to know which is a specific method’s function? Refer to the help function introduced previously. As built-in classes include a guide to help users understand the intuition behind each method or attribute, we could also do this on our own classes, methods, and functions. We can do that by adding a Docstring.
A Docstring is a brief text that explains what something does.
Once you include documentation to your classes and objects, you’ll get much more information about the methods created that will facilitate re-usability of the code and help other users to understand it. Remember that the docstring always has to be indented at the same level of the block it’s documenting.
5. Code Reuse
Another important aspect of object-oriented programming is Inheritance. Just like people have parents, grandparents, and so on, objects have an ancestry. The principle of inheritance lets a programmer build relationships between concepts and group them together. In particular, this allows us to reduce code duplication by generalizing our code.
For example, how can we define a representation of “other means of transport” apart from the car that we already created, or other pets apart from my dog. This grouping characteristic allows us to create other classes that share some of the attributes of the existing classes, but not all of them, in order to add other similar instances without rewriting existing code.
In Python, we use parentheses in the class declaration to show an inheritance relationship. In the transportation example above, I’ve used Python’s syntax to tell the computer that both the car and the train inherit from the MyTransports class. Because of this, they automatically have the same constructor, which sets the color and brand attributes.
With the inheritance technique, we can use the transportation class to store information that applies to all kinds of transports available, and keep car or train specific attributes in their own classes. You can think of the MyTransports class as the parent class, and the Car and Train classes as siblings.
An example that is closer to the tasks you would perform in an IT department would be a system that handles the employees at your company. You may have a class called employee, which could have the attributes for things like full name of the person, the username used in company systems, the groups the employee belongs to, and so on. The system could also have a manager class which also is an employee, but additional information associated with it, like the employees that report to a specific manager. | https://towardsdatascience.com/understand-o-o-p-in-python-with-one-article-bfa76f3ba48c | ['Julian Herrera'] | 2020-11-14 17:48:54.166000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python', 'Object Oriented', 'Learning To Code', 'Data Science'] |
Blueground’s Joshua Hezghia On Leading A High Performing Sales Team | Joshua Hezghia is Blueground’s Director of Sales whose work, at its core, is to ensure that the company’s 2200+ tech-powered, move-in ready and beautifully designed apartments are being matched to tenants looking for a stay of a month, year, or longer. According to Josh, “the fun of scaling a startup is having different teams working towards a common goal. Blueground is growing 3x YoY and leveraging technology to scale effectively. We will reach $1B in revenue by 2022 with long term potential being 30x that amount.”
Promoting growth, curiosity, collaboration, authenticity, and hard work are all part of the orbit that forms Josh’s leadership style.“I want to share the lessons learned along the way to groom and inspire the future generation of successful sales professionals.”
The power of people
Simply put, the Sales team at Blueground is the sum and synergy of its individual members. With this belief, Josh puts a particular emphasis on setting the right environment where people are proud to work.
To start, he builds and continues to foster an environment where transparency is key. He shares, “trusting your colleagues to try new things enables new ideas to be brought to the table.” When transparency is present, it enforces a culture of lifelong learners who take risks in their daily work. It is also the idea that it’s okay to fail as long as you are learning from it and improving.
As one of Blueground’s values, transparency is ingrained into the company’s culture. It’s a reflection of the company’s beliefs along with being conscientious of time, being driven by excellence, and caring deeply for clients and colleagues.
“In a startup world, it’s easy to be siloed when working in a fast-paced environment. You can forget to interact with others. For me, inclusion is heavily encouraged at Blueground because you can learn so much from your peers.”
With a team spread out across Blueground’s offices around the world, it takes a conscious effort to maintain a team spirit at all hours of the day. Blueground’s employees regularly check in with other offices in person, in addition to the employee perk of 14 nights of complimentary personal accommodation in apartments from Dubai, to Greece, to L.A.
Blueground’s mission is to make people feel at home wherever they choose to live. In leasing carefully selected, ideally located apartments, the real estate tech startup upgrades them to fully-furnished homes. What that means for clients is a move-in ready apartment where they can simply show up and start living from day one, with WiFi running, Marshall speakers hooked up, tableware stocked and beds made.
In his team, he seeks out “incredible talent where people are intellectually curious, hard-working, and team players.” The fact remains that Sales can be stressful at times. Being able to stay calm when the pressure is on and to then over-perform takes a special kind of talent. Therefore, the ability to manage the highs and lows is paramount. Retaining satisfied clients like Coca-Cola, Samsung and Oracle, whose employees rent with Blueground, is balanced with expanding a client portfolio of individual and enterprise clients. “We’re constantly raising the bar!”
Knowing your inputs to arrive and exceed your target outputs
As Director of Sales, Josh has set out a few key initiatives. The first of which is mathematical. Knowing your equation, as he puts it, means creating a sales model to better understand how to maximize revenue. From the company level all the way down to the individual level. He adds, “The inputs are your efficiency metrics such as time to first response rate, gross touches per lead, missed call %, and connect to close. In addition, understanding the volume of inbound leads and the proper coverage needed per market is critical.” Though many companies have access to a trove of valuable data, it always comes down to putting it to its optimal use! “ It’s important for Sales leaders to be innovative and proactive when identifying new opportunities for revenue to help accelerate future growth.” | https://medium.com/blueground/bluegrounds-joshua-hezghia-on-leading-a-high-performing-sales-team-ba1dfac20c61 | ['Keenan Wong'] | 2020-01-24 14:57:10.494000+00:00 | ['Sales', 'Business Development', 'Real Estate', 'Leadership', 'Proptech'] |
5 Secrets to Get Me to Pay for Your Products | 5 Secrets to Get Me to Pay for Your Products
I might be an annoying user, but I do pay if you touch on these things
Photo by Shane on Unsplash
In my previous article, I wrote about why I start paying for apps. It talks about how much I hate advertisement, and my desire to get the advanced features of the apps. And this month, I newly joined Busuu and Grammarly for their premium membership.
Interestingly, I found there are five key considerations that I examine during my decision. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/5-secrets-to-get-me-paying-for-your-digital-service-and-products-2e6cf2a2cbd1 | ['Julia Tsoi'] | 2020-03-23 23:14:28.427000+00:00 | ['Apps', 'Platform', 'Design', 'Digital', 'Marketing'] |
Work and all that | C asked on twitter, “Hi hoomans who are happy with their profession/career path, did you always know what you wanted to do? How did you get here?”
I responded, “not happy but not sad either. no i did not. got here by LOT of luck, some hustle, some grind and LOT of help.”
She asked me to elaborate. I thought 140 chars is too less. And thus, here is a longish explanation.
So, am I happy with my profession / career path?
Sort of. I am very happy at the place I am at. I run two small businesses. One I know will become big — I have someone partnering me on it and giving me direction. The other, I am not sure. There’s just me and a few friends that help as and when they get time. None of them is a well-oiled cash-churning machinery — I need to constantly work on them, think on them, invest time and resources and money and all that to be able to make ends meet. But then, I work for myself. And that makes me happy.
Can I make more money if I worked in a job? Of course.
Can I be happier? Of course.
Can I do better? Of course.
Could I’ve had a better career path? Of course.
Do I have regrets about what I do? No way!
Will I achieve my #lifeGoals? I believe I would. I am actually on my way!
Next, did I always know that I’d end up here? And how did I get here?
Let me club the two questions.
No I did not.
How requires the long answer. So, I did computer science before I did my MBA (from MDI, Gurgaon). And my first job post MBA was with GE Money where I was supposed to sell credit cards. I did it for three months (after a 11-month “training”) and I quit. In fact I knew in the first month itself that I had to quit. And I did. Back then, I was still fresh out of b-school and I still believed that I could change the world. I was still hopeful. I was dreamy. And I knew I loved advertisements. And thus I decided that I had to join an advertising agency. With no portfolio to speak of (I did not even know what a portfolio meant), I approached a recruiter and asked her to find me openings. [grind]. She told me that I could be a brand planner at best and none of the bigger agencies would hire me and I would have to take a pay cut. So I interviewed with two, both accepted me and the person who offered me more money, I joined him. And it was the best damn move of my life. [luck].
For the next two years I worked with Raj at CLA. I saw Vikram and him build up a team and a body of work that was / is enviable. I learnt the business, met some amazing folks (some are friends till date) and most importantly, realised that I wasn’t good enough. So, a time came when I had to move on. Plus Raj had shown me that my world is not limited to my batchmates and peers and all that.
Quit CLA to start something with a friend. It did not work out. Joined an events agency (not that I knew what events management was — I trusted the guy (Suvi at Gravity) and took a leap of faith. [luck]. It was the second best move ever. Next three years I worked really hard [grind], travelled the world, learnt how “real” businesses are managed, and grew a lot as a person. I also realised that I am an adrenaline junkie. Well, not a junkie per se but I love on-the-spur decisions. I love live entertainment. I love action. I love travel. I love to make people happy. And most importantly, I learnt that I am cut out for the business of events.
Quit Gravity to startup yet again. This time with another set of friends. Each day at 5times5 was a battle. We tried a lot of things, most failed and yet we kept at it. It was the toughest thing that I’ve ever done in my life. Could’ve done more. Could’ve hustled more. But I could not. I still believe I could’ve done it better. Anyhow, while we sustained business for almost 18 months (purely because of the hardwork that my partners put in, we never broke even, leave alone getting profitable), it got reaffirmed in my head that I need freedom and independence in how I work. We eventually shut the business, moved on and I was lucky to find a job fairly fast. With a social media agency. [luck]. The guys who hired me took a leap of faith this time, by hiring someone like me who was new to this whole social media thing. But I think I did ok there. It got stifling pretty fast. And I had learnt the importance of time by then. So, quit them in about 6 months.
Started freelancing — thanks to (Sanjay at SWL), they offered me the first gig. And from there on, I hustled really hard. I told everyone I knew that I am in the market and I can work on brand planning, social media and / or events. People couldn’t fathom how could one guy do all three (and they still dont get it). I was ridiculed (I still get ridiculed). I kept at it. [hustle]. I got a few projects that helped me pay my bills and survive in Mumbai. Oh, I was lucky that I did not have send money back home. [luck].
And then, one fine day, I struck gold. A guy I worked for knew a guy who knew another guy who was looking for a brand planner for a project in Nigeria. [luck]. I knew nothing about Nigeria and the guy who was hiring me knew nothing about me. He offered for some reason and I needed the money, so I took the gig. Did pretty well with that project (I think) and starting getting more work from him. With each piece of work, we got comfortable with each other and started working on more things. Think of a positive feedback loop. So much so that today Rajesh (at Viscomm) and I have partnered to setup an events management business, C4E. And I spend bulk of my time working with him at Viscomm and C4E. And this is where I am.
And this is how I got here! And now that I am at it, lemme answer a few more questions that C did not ask.
Will I do this for rest of my life?
I dont know. I have never planned my life and I dont think I can plan. I take things as they come and then react. All I know is that each year, I need to build on what I did in the year before.
What is next?
Again, I dont know. One things for sure. For the next few years, I am going to build C4E and grow AWSL. I have a clear idea about how I want C4E to evolve (an entertainment conglomerate). And a vague idea about what I want AWSL to be (enabler for other businesses). Will explain what I mean by this and intend these to be, in subsequent posts. For the time being, I think I am enjoying where I am. Wish me luck!
Oh, one more thing. Apart from “work”, there are a few things that excite me and I want to explore further. I dont know how and when and where and why etc. but I will. These are:
Writing. I did write a book in 2014. And I am working (albeit very slowly) on the next. And I will probably write a few more before I die. So, writing is on the cards.
Music. I want to play guitar. And I will learn it someday.
Fitness. I really want to get fit. So I will probably spend a lot of time in the coming years on my fitness. I have made a promise to myself that I will scale Mt. Everest before 2025. So that.
Compete. I want to compete in some sport at the international level. At 34, I am too old to be an athlete. So, I will probably pick up a sport like Pool, Snooker or Poker. So may be that.
Teach. I dont know if I am wise enough to teach. But I have been in front of students and I love the feeling. I love being the enabler and I want to give teaching a sincere shot.
That’s it I guess. Thank you C for helping me think on this. While I was writing this, I realised that I’ve been extremely lucky in life. I may not have a house and I may not earn as much as my peers do, but I have a lot to be thankful for. I just hope things work out and I do make the ding. And I do become the richest man in the world! After all somethings never change — even if its been 10 years since you passed out of MDI. You are a change master and you can and you will change the world! No?
P.S.: And, if you have time, you must read the story of Prof. Bakshi.
P.P.S.: Another epiphany. All these people that I have met, all the things that I have done, is because I went out and made tons of loose connections. Last few months I have stopped doing that. I need to re-start.
Republished from my personal blog. | https://medium.com/c4-entertainment/work-and-all-that-d8b4cd9235d8 | ['The Real Sg'] | 2017-04-02 16:24:18.078000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Work', 'Purpose', 'People'] |
5 Steps to Cleaner Code | 2: Use Meaningful Names
As with the replacement of magic number, the use of meaningful names is to ensure the code is easy to understand both for the person writing it and others picking it up further down the line. This applies to variables, method names, class names and any other items that require naming within your project.
Take the two lines below, both perform the same function, however the second example is much more descriptive and reduces the need for a comment.
decimal x = 3.99m; // postage cost
decimal postageCost = 3.99m;
Here is another example, this time where the method name isn’t describing the task the method is performing. What does the name TotalCost mean? Is it retrieving, updating or doing some other task with total cost? To understand this you would need to read the code within the method. A better name would be GetTotalCost as this indicates exactly what the method is doing.
private decimal TotalCost(decimal subTotal)
{
decimal postageCost = 3.99m;
return Decimal.Add(subTotal, postageCost);
}
3: Return Early
Returning early from methods is a way of exiting when certain conditions have been met as early as possible. It helps cut down on nested conditions blocks and else statements which in turn improve the code quality/readability.
Using the GetTotalCost method, we may want to return a total cost only when the subTotal parameter is greater than 0. This first example below provides one way of performing this task, however there is a lot of code for what is required and we only return at the end of the method.
private decimal GetTotalCost(decimal subTotal)
{
decimal totalCost;
decimal postageCost = 3.99m; if (subTotal > 0)
{
totalCost = Decimal.Add(subTotal, postageCost);
}
else
{
totalCost = 0;
}
return totalCost;
}
We can refactor this the above method to return early if the condition is met or carry on if it isn’t. As you can see we have cut down on lines of code and at the same time made the method much more readable and easier to follow.
private decimal GetTotalCost(decimal subTotal)
{
decimal postageCost = 3.99m; if (subTotal > 0)
return Decimal.Add(subTotal, postageCost);
return 0;
}
This is a very simple example but I’m sure you can see the benefit especially if the code contains a greater level of nesting and if/else statements. | https://medium.com/@csmithblog/5-steps-to-cleaner-code-d2eb8e80d1eb | ['Chris Smith'] | 2020-12-09 14:21:32.562000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Clean Code', 'Coding Style'] |
The Loss of Innocence | What will we bring with us from 2020?
2020: A Loss of Innocence?
A year like no other. Unprecedented. Sort of monotonous? We’ve heard it all. Never before had we felt like we had so much time to do, well, so little. Or felt as if we were under quite so much pressure to use all that supposed free time to change, to grow, to acquire helpful new skills.
In my case, my new-found skills are ones I don’t care too much for. The ability to scenario-plan all the ways you could potentially infect your nearest and dearest in a bid to manage all the various risks involved in 2020’s small permitted social occasions, of clocking up an unfathomable amount of on-camera time, of acquiring the new-found ability to scrutinise every inch of my face in high-definition and of becoming uncomfortably familiar with every inch of our cosy (read small and built to pass in and out of) city-centre apartment.
Daily signs of the changes brought about to manage Covid have become commonplace (and necessary).
Away from the screen, 2020 brought new unexpected scenes sharply into focus. Instead of discovering new cities or destinations, the familiar transformed before our eyes until we found ourselves walking along empty city-streets in the wake of the first lockdown, as we wondered how long it may last. (The summer, surely, some of us thought then) Or as winter drew in, a more eerie atmosphere accompanied walking around Dublin’s empty thoroughfares, as we rattled by empty shopfronts, the odd fellow masked walker and darkened restaurants.
There have been happy moments too, where we found new ways to snatch time together. Or in our case, to plan a new version of our wedding in two months to gather the permitted number of guests together in September to bear witness and celebrate as we tied the knot. To meet my sister’s blossoming pregnant bump — at last! — ahead of the arrival of our new favourite human, Eleanor, to celebrate a new job, to toast another sister’s engagement, and another’s homecoming.
Or the sunny days that accompanied the early days of lockdown, offering many of us the chance to step outside and switch off, the discovery of new favourite holiday spots around Ireland or the embrace of the cold Irish sea for swimming newcomers.
But above all, 2020 to me represents a sort of loss of innocence for most of us. A reminder that many of the comforts and benefits of modern life are not always guaranteed. That in fact, many of the perks of life in the 21st Century are a gift, brought into being by generations before us, who brought about scientific progress, great healthcare and the opening up of society — evidenced again in the powerful global collaboration that has brought about the hugely hopeful and optimistic development of a Covid-19 vaccine. Our worlds this year have felt smaller as we’ve retreated indoors, reduced social circles, lost the art of the casual meet-cute or small talk and physically put distance between ourselves and the wider world on bracing daily walks. And for people who have experienced loss of any sort this year, it’s been a truly annus horribilis.
And what of our awakening. When we look back, what will we bring with us from 2020? (Not Covid I hear you say — and not the overuse of unprecedented or ‘you’re on mute’ either). Perhaps we’ll emerge as stronger more resilient versions of ourselves. Although, the thought of that makes me personally feel fatigued already.
If we could choose, I’d aim for holding on to the sense of wonder and sheer joy we’ve tasted at moments this year, to celebrate and appreciate the re-awakening, when we finally do get to re-experience what we loved, from dancing until dawn, meeting friends and family without the constant sense of doom or travelling again.
Of appreciation for the good things, and there are many, in our daily lives.
Never again, I pledge, to take the joy of a bloody brilliant night out for granted. Here’s to a good time, sometime, in the future. | https://medium.com/@hannahlouisedunne/the-loss-of-innocence-bb1888994597 | ['Hannah-Louise Dunne'] | 2020-12-28 13:10:07.990000+00:00 | ['Reflections', '2020', 'New Year', 'Culture', 'Mindfulness'] |
The modern state of the Binary Options industry and how blockchain can revolutinize it — Artem Levin (10.12.2020) | Intro
The binary options industry was in the spot of attention of people around the globe since 2010. There are numerous reasons for this.
Binary options give you a smooth experience in its basics as an instrument and an easy-going process. You need to choose the market, decide on YES or NO, or if the asset’s price will be higher or lower. If you win — the premium of 30–90% is accrued on your balance.
Massive marketing campaigns “too good to be true” around the globe which just reached out to every person on the planet as far as I see it.
The negative experience of people, like from boiler rooms, that even seem to be regulated just fake the price of the asset to scam the people. And, as we know, negative experience has more word-of-mouth than positive.
History
Let’s take a look at what’s currently happening in the binary options industry and where it all may go.
Initially, binary options are just a usual vanilla option and is described in all economic books as a typical derivative instrument.
A quote from https://www.leaprate.com/news/the-history-of-binary-options-trading-infographic/#:~:text=In%20binary%20trading%20you%20can,(CBOE)%20was%20officially%20launched.&text=In%20May%202008%2C%20binary%20options,American%20Stock%20Exchange%20(AMEX).
Binary options trading is becoming increasingly famous worldwide after the advent of binary options exchanges such as Nadex and Daweda Exchange. In binary trading you can bet on financial assets and make some quick profits. The history of binary options trading dates back to 1974 when the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) was officially launched. In 2008, options were publicly made available for the first time as tradable assets on CBOE.
2008 was the year when the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States triggered one of the worst financial meltdowns in human history. Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and many other symbols of financial stability collapsed one by one. This was the scenario when investors realized the need for a low-risk investment option which consequently led to the emergence of binary options trading.
In May 2008, binary options were publicly made available as tradable assets on American Stock Exchange (AMEX). A couple of months later, few binary options platforms were introduced by brokers such as 24Option, Banc De Binary and AnyOption. Those brokers are considered pioneer in the binary options industry. The trend of binary options trading touched new highs after the advent of binary brokers, However, the conflict of interest problem emerged as a result of binary options trading via brokers because everyone was betting against the brokers which means brokers were the losers when traders won and vice versa.
The conflict of interest problem led to the emergence of binary options exchanges and in 2009 the first binary options exchange came into being. The name of the exchange was Northern American Derivatives Exchange (NADEX). Binary exchanges allow peer to peer trading of binary options contracts which means a binary trader can bet against another binary trader (instead of the exchange or broker). This concept successfully addressed the conflict of interest problem and consequently binary options trading continued flourishing.
In 2010, SpotOption was launched — the largest binary options software provider which currently holds more than 300 white label brokers and capitalize more than 60% market share. 2012 was also an important year in the history of binary options trading when Banc De Binary announced to become the first ever regulated binary options broker and prompted other binary brokers to follow the same path. In May 2012, Cyprus Security & Exchange Commission (CySec) — the chief regulatory agency of Cyprus- for the first time classified binary options as tradable assets; then began a slightly dark period for the binary options industry when a number of binary options scams attracted the attention of mainstream media. In 2013, CySec warned traders of unregulated binary options platforms amid lots of complaints from binary options traders. Same was the year when Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined Banc De Binary for illegally soliciting US customers for almost $11m. In June 2014, the CFTC and SEC issued a joint investor alert, warning binary options traders about fraudulent platforms.
In April 2015, Nadex announced 54% rise in trading volume during a 12-month period. One month later, the UK government announced plan to treat binary options as a financial product (and not the gambling product). In February 2016, SpotOption announced a record 5 million mobile app downloads. In October 2016, the term “binary options” recorded 110,000 monthly search on Google — almost the same as Forex trading.
A snapshot of Binary options history from https://www.leaprate.com/news/the-history-of-binary-options-trading-infographic/#:~:text=In%20binary%20trading%20you%20can,(CBOE)%20was%20officially%20launched.&text=In%20May%202008%2C%20binary%20options,American%20Stock%20Exchange%20(AMEX).
Long story short, we have these boiler rooms faking the price of the assets to make people lose, and pure conflict of interest as these companies are profiting on people’s losses.
On the one hand, binary options are regulated for the professional investors on exchanges like NADEX and AMEX and on the other — restricted for the retail investors in many countries, but not keeping them safe from call-centers and website mirrors of the banned services.
How can we solve that?
Settle the bets of users against each other, not the user against the platform. That lets the platform earn not on users’ losses but on commissions from the trades. Let everyone participate will the clear rules of DeFi. So all participants with a metamask wallet and any summ on the account can make a bet. Use public oracles (price feeds) to provide a fair price. We decided to choose Chainlink as a price feed as the most trusted oracle provider at the moment. Provide intuitive interfaces that the current fiat users can easily switch to Value Network instead of scammy fiat binary options providers. Apply a multi-level referral program (settled on the blockchain) to let webmasters, community owners, and other participants refer the traffic on the platform and earn from the commissions from the trades, not from people’s losses. (We’ll put a closer look at the multi-level referral system later to describe why it is just a customer acquisition instrument but not the MLM scheme. Long story short — because referrals are earning on commissions from trades, not on forcing the new people come to the platform)
What is the size of the market?
The estimated market size is from 30 to 100 billion dollars yearly, according to multiple sources.
Source 1, 2, 3
Current DeFi binary options products
Currently Synthetix launched their binary options platform and their token reacted on that event greatly
What’s next?
Check out Value Network roadmap in Q1 2021 — https://valuenetworklive.medium.com/roadmap-for-q1-2021-value-network-9d582795bfe5
Vesting period of the project to motivate the team and advisors — https://valuenetworklive.medium.com/vntw-token-vesting-period-explained-07-12-2020-artem-levin-b31fcee9b5d5
Liquidity reward program — https://valuenetworklive.medium.com/the-problems-of-initial-liquidity-and-liquidity-reward-program-for-vntw-token-and-value-network-48f070267a64
Artem Levin, 2020 | https://medium.com/@valuenetworklive/the-modern-state-of-the-binary-options-industry-and-how-blockchain-can-revolutinize-it-artem-68d5cb5d090c | ['Value Network Defi Products'] | 2020-12-10 13:07:31.685000+00:00 | ['Defi', 'Options', 'Prediction', 'Binary', 'Markets'] |
Mr. & Mrs. Winston: Two Chatbot Tutors to practice English every day! | Mr. & Mrs. Winston: Two Chatbot Tutors to practice English every day!
If you follow our Facebook page, you might have seen that we have decided to create two chatbots: Mr. Winston for level A2 and Mrs. Winston for level B1. We are happy to announce that they are both ready to be used by teachers and students! Bérenger Dupont Dec 16, 2020·4 min read
Here is how they will work:
First, you will need to log in to Facebook and go to the page:
@Mr.WinstonBeta for level A2 students
@Mrs.WinstonBeta for level B1
If you don’t know what your level is, we recommend you start with Mr. Winston and then rise in level with Mrs. Winston if it is too easy for you. In order to talk to the chatbot, you will need to open a conversation on Messenger with one of these two pages.
The chatbot will present itself and explain how to access the content. It will also ask you to subscribe to the Daily Tasks. If you don’t want to receive daily tasks, you can ignore its message and directly type “menu”.
What are the Daily Tasks?
This means that you will automatically receive one short exercise per day, as long as you answer the chatbot every day. You will answer either by clicking on a button to choose the correct answer or typing your answer directly in the chat.
Here are two things to keep in mind:
We advise you to subscribe to these at a suitable time of the day, to avoid receiving them at a time when you are typically busy.
When you type your answer remember to always proofread and watch out for typos, as if you were doing an exercise in class!
Exercises
The daily tasks are not the only content that you will find on the chatbot. In order to access exercises on a specific topic, type “menu”, which will show you all the exercises our chatbot offers!
In each exercise, you will get immediate feedback on your answers and the possibility to either ask for more information on grammar topics or to practice more. These exercises are available 24/7 and the amount of exercises you do every day is completely up to you!
FAQs
As we all tend to forget grammar rules, it is always possible to ask your questions to our chatbots. In order to do so, just type a simple question, such as “What are quantifiers?” and you will receive an infographic with some of the most important things to remember about this grammar point!
You can also access these revision cards at the end of an exercise on the topic. The chatbot will ask you if you need an explanation or if you want to practice more. All you have to do is click on the “explanation” button!
As this project is only in its testing phase, we would love to get your feedback by filling in a short questionnaire on your user experience!
The chatbot will send the questionnaire to all users by the end of the tests, but you can also fill it in directly after testing it by clicking on the appropriate link below:
If you are a language teacher, please use this questionnaire.
You can also ask your students to test the chatbot and answer the questionnaire below!
If you are learning English and want to share your feedback with us, please use this questionnaire.
We hope you will enjoy talking to the Winston family! If you want to participate in short learning sessions with us in January and February, you can subscribe here:
Subscribe to the webinar
If you would like to know more about the project, we suggest you read our previous articles.
Keep in touch with the progress of the project:
Visit the project’s website: www.mrwinstonchatbot.eu
Follow the project on Facebook: @MrWinstonchatbot
#MrWinstonchatbot #erasmusplus
In collaboration with: Les Apprimeurs, Citizens in Power, CitadaSkola, Work in Progress and St Kliment Ohridski | https://medium.com/@belgianbery/mr-mrs-winston-two-chatbot-tutors-to-practice-english-every-day-a94e6571b75a | ['Bérenger Dupont'] | 2020-12-16 14:43:36.352000+00:00 | ['Chatbots', 'Learning', 'English Language', 'Education Technology'] |
TRXLL Is An Artist to Look Out For | TRXLL Is An Artist to Look Out For OnTheRise ·Dec 13, 2020
Photo of the artist
TRXLL, a rapper who started making music when he was 8 years old, is an artist to look out for. Inspired by artists such as; Kendrick Lamar, Logic, 2Pac, Joyner Lucas, and Tech N9ne, he definitely shows it in his music.
How he started rapping was by playing around with free apps, he says that at first it was just producing, then he moved into becoming a vocal artist.
In 5 years, he says he sees himself growing to the point where he has a fanbase that would consistently listen to his music, he also says that he would like to be doing shows here and there, but overall, he just would like to be more known.
Go check TRXLL out, his latest song is named “High”, and we definitely think it would be something you would enjoy.
@realdontrell | https://medium.com/@ontherise/trxll-is-an-artist-to-look-out-for-79320e44da6f | [] | 2020-12-13 07:43:00.015000+00:00 | ['Hiphop', 'Artist', 'Rap', 'New Music', 'Rapper'] |
Blockchain Concept | Blockchain consist of collection of blocks and which links together as a single linked list. A block basically contains any kind of data, hash of the data, previous hash, and timestamp.
figure 1
Genesis block — A beginning block in the chain.
The blockchain generally starts from special type of block, which named as genesis block.
figure 2
Let’s assume that someone change the block B data (see figure 2). The corresponding hash will change, but the block C’s previous hash is old, which also needs to be changed. So which invalidates the blockchain. So likewise all the blocks need to be changed. Therefore change of single block, quickly needs to be changed all the invalid blocks.
Since these days there available high speed computers, which generates thousands of hashes in a second. Therefore to avoid that issue, blockchain uses the concept of Proof of work. which used to slow down the creation of new blocks, because which is a computational problem, that takes some time to sort out. So this will archive the fraud prevention, increases the security and unchangeable reliable transactions. | https://medium.com/@gayanrupasinghe21/blockchain-concept-3fa4d4f07e9e | ['Kavindu Gayan'] | 2020-11-27 11:07:21.641000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Startup'] |
I am fucking single, and i hate it. | soooo, it’s been a while since i broke up with my boyfriend.
we broke up somewhere between winter of 2018 and summer of 2019 , there was no sudden abruption or anything , i think the breakup happened over the course of 10 months.
(it was a 2 years relationship)
Anyway,
back to me being single , man i fucking hate it
wait, sorry — i don’t know really if i was in love with him. It was a bit motherish relationship… but yeah, thought you might wanna know why we broke up but nevermind:)
now, back to me being single…
But, nah! wait, wait, come on… he wasn’t bad— my ex — he was actually really sweet, i didn’t hate him. i hated my self when i was with him. i was just very unhappy… all there was is that i was projecting all my negative feelings onto him and then i made him feel bad about it. after 20 mini breakups, 3 or 4 emotional breakdowns and endless number of fights — with one that got physical— we finally came to terms with it and decided to stay together :D and make things work! we didn’t. i fled the country, seriously. we never really announced the breakup, we still talk — occasionally — but yeah! things are fine.
and now i’m single and i need someone to hold at night, because i feel terribly lonely.
cringy wink ;) ?
no?
ok. bye | https://medium.com/@sarakanzari/i-am-fucking-single-and-i-hate-it-d79e163d5c83 | ['Sara Kai'] | 2020-12-27 01:33:18.779000+00:00 | ['Breakups', 'Toxic Relationships', 'Singles', 'Heartbreak'] |
A Peercoin Propaganda Piece | Motivation can mean more than just hanging in there. Image credit ShonEjai
Let’s talk motivation. What makes you get out of bed in the morning? Why do you want to stay in bed in the morning? There is a constant balance between pleasure and duty, a mixing of chemicals and spirit that makes you do you. And sometimes, let’s be honest, a lot of the time that motivation is money. We all need it to function practically, to survive, and its versatility allows us to boil our motivation into something we can channel into a specialization. Say what you want about capitalism, it undoubtedly creates a system of motivation.
Peercoin is money, so the logical conclusion is that my motivation for writing this piece is in order to get more Peercoin. Well, I don’t want or expect donations, I would much rather you donate to the Peercoin Foundation or developer funds. But surely it’s because I am invested in the system. That much is true, there is motivation there in that I have put a nontrivial amount of time, energy, and money into this network. However, I do not at present intend on ‘cashing out’ at any imaginable price point. There must be a deeper motivation, or an expectation of reward, for my writing to you today.
I ought to construct an argument about how Peercoin is a revolution, that it will entirely replace government capital, and so on. And if I thought that, it would be perfect motivation for a hypothetical future where I have a large amount of social power. However, I don’t really believe that, at least not for the foreseeable future. I believe Peercoin is a settlement network that works best with third party services and functions, and government capital as well as credit cards and the entire financial system in place across the world is a plenty fine example of a ‘third party’ (to Peercoin) service/function. I don’t see Peercoin replacing anything that came before cryptocurrency, really. I see it as adding something new.
Possibility is what motivates me. I wake up in the morning and say ‘what if?’ The creation of new that is Peercoin fills me with hope. It is sappy, without a doubt, but the way I have seen people come together around Peercoin over the years is powerful. There is a common acknowledgment of the mutual motivation, that if you’re just in it for the money you should go elsewhere. Peercoin is a bridge between the practical and the fantastical, in that it dared to implement something new (Proof of Stake) while still being rooted in its history so strongly that protocol development still follows Bitcoin’s in lock-step.
Mixing the organic with the designed can result in emergent creations. Image credit Joshua Woroniecki
That mysterious creation of the mixture between the old and the new is what I want to tell you about. Take Lightning Network for example, this is a function designed for Bitcoin that Peercoin ported over without too much trouble. But the potential implications are highly intriguing. Let’s presume that Peercoin implements a few expected upgrades to its minting protocol, such as multisig minting. At that point, we will need to choose how minting interacts with Bitcoin technologies like Lightning. Are Lighting nodes now able to mint by cooperating with each other? If a Lighting multisig mints a block then we are suddenly thrust into a world where Lighting operators are uniting to govern the chain and possibly make intrinsic money from it, a situation completely unlike what Bitcoin had imagined. Here, with these curious forms of rewards for participating in the system, we readily see how motivation is a key property of Peercoin.
The alignment between people that use the functions of Peercoin that go beyond simple transactions and the people that govern the chain to select these kinds of functions is one of the main drawing points of Peercoin. The ability to motivate coinholders to actively participate in the network via the block reward provides a fundamental base point for interaction with the system. And this motivation trickles all the way to the top, where people feel compelled to volunteer their time and effort working on something that they don’t have a huge reason to expect large rewards from. We all see the self-sufficiency of the network and that it will likely survive for all time because it is designed specifically with that goal in mind. It is a self-reinforcing system in this way, regardless of how it is valued by the third parties. The ability to motivate is the motivation, in an endless bootstrapping of human involvement in the consensus process. I can’t tell you how to interact with Peercoin, I can only tell you that you will have company if you do. | https://medium.com/peercoin/a-peercoin-propaganda-piece-f26fd7522381 | ['Peercoin Pulse'] | 2021-03-04 15:55:22.650000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Lightning Network', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Peercoin'] |
We’re Going to a Birthday Party | It’s been a stressful day. It’s been a stressful year. They talked about corona virus and the election all day and then I dropped my phone in a bucket of bleach, the day before my god damn birthday.
You can tell I take my birthday very seriously, because I am clearly lacking enough attention on literally all of the other days of the year. It’s sad that yesterday after my phone’s tragic death, that all I wanted for my god damn birthday was for people to be nice to me. Not passive aggressive, not faux-sympathetic, just fucking nice to me because I deserve it. It is really a simple package of ethics.
Two nights ago at an open mic this really annoying guy bought me a drink and offered me beer money and it was one of the nicest things anyone could ever do for me. I feel bad for finding him annoying, because I knew why he was annoying, and I also knew how to tell a person to chill the fuck out. But I never told the guy to just like, chill the fuck out. And by not telling him that I was doing both of us a disservice. It made me get way more mad because I let him keep being annoying, and that dude knows he’s got a mental thing going on and can’t help it unless someone tells him to knock it off. Tell people to knock their shit off and see if it works. Odds are good. Some people aren’t assholes they’re just like a handful.
I would go so far as to say, I am also a handful. I’ve been trying really hard to talk less because I know the velocity at which my own voice becomes annoying. Incessantly so, even. You cling to certain topics in your head because you’re good at talking about them and it feels good. You cling to anything that’s good until you bleed out all of your serotonin. I don’t have that fucking much serotonin.
And then a fun thing starts happening when you actually lose all of your serotonin and your brain starts trying to replace the chemicals. It’s when you go from thinking you’re insane to actually being insane.
I lost my phone and immediately lost my shit. I have had a prepaid Walmart phone for the last 11 years. I live in a city without Walmarts and take the bus. So I can’t like, navigate out to the suburbs to a Walmart. And also, I don’t have any money! What phenomenal luck, what perfect timing. The day before my biggest Facebook notification day of the year. The day when everyone suddenly forgets about how much they don’t like you. I like to seize the opportunity when I can.
Look at me, look at me.
I’m having a bit of a hard time looking at myself. Something always hurts to look at. I am turning into my dead grandmother, grandmother dead as of March last year. I spent a lot of time in that ghost house after it happened. I caught some relative ghosts for sure. Gotta love Cordova.
She died from cancer. I really I hope *I* don’t get cancer. But there is the flu going around. The evil and murderous flu. All happening in my own damn state. Looks like all of Washington had a “look at me, look at me” moment. And then I lost my phone to the corona virus. I mean, it fell into a bucket of bleach. Because one of my zipper pockets accidentally became unzipped. Everything was just falling out of them all day. And I fucked up. But like, come on man! It’s the day before my damn birthday! What the fuck. Not nice. I’m broke as shit and waiting to get paid from this damn job and I don’t wanna be without a phone.
Though this entire situation is making me psychotic, or rather, BECAUSE this situation is making me psychotic, I think the world is trying to talk to me. And the world is from the South. A place without cool updated cell phones like ours. They are a few years behind on stuff in Alabama. A place where some people actually just live ferally in the woods. The last time I was in Alabama all I did was sit on a swing in the woods for two straight days. It was nice as hell. Maybe I need to get back in touch with some roots, man.
I’m also having fever dreams every night. 25 was a long year. I’m ready to bury the hatchet. I’m 26 now and I’m ready to hold my head down and get my fucking shit together. Please God, if you could help me get my shit together, I have no other invisible friends left to talk to. I need something nice to happen.
Also if you live in Seattle come to my early as shit birthday party today at Raney’s at 3:30. Today, the day of our lord, Denver, Colorado. #303 | https://medium.com/@pipershepherd17/were-going-to-a-birthday-party-d05cfd079fec | ['Piper Shepherd'] | 2020-03-03 14:42:57.388000+00:00 | ['Super Birthday', 'Birthday'] |
What food is on your deserted island? | What food is on your deserted island?
The kids say something different each time I ask. Sometimes it is chocolate or lollipops, donuts are a crowd favorite. And cake, can’t forget cake. Ignacia needs avocados and an infinite supply of orange juice, nothing more, nothing less. My list is made of honey, peanut butter, and bread, for there is but a few things that are just as good separate as they are together. Elisa also likes this list, but would add banana. She says banana is her favorite, so I offer her one. She declines.
A campervan is not quite a deserted island, though it often feels like an island. There are more things to do and a good laminated windshield protects you from the stinging insects in the night air. With such limited space, the question of food is important. How do you keep children well fed and maintain a healthy diet? It’s not all just beer and cookies. We have most of the same things you have back home, salt and olive oil, eggs and oatmeal. However, as we roam from country to country, from culture to culture, the pantry changes in appearance: a bag of aplanchados in Colombia, the finest chocolate in Ecuador, rich gourmet sauces in Peru, empanadas in Chile, pizzas and pastas in Argentina.
The more variety you eat, the sooner you realize how much food shapes our culture and how history is made up by what we eat. Much of the development of the Americas boils down to two plants: maíz and papa, or corn and potato. Without these staples, armies were never nourished and empires were never built. Elaborate tales of mythology were never told and believed. Without the staples, the men and women of the Americas would have all lived a nomadic life hinged to surmounting hunger.
The domestication of edible plants is the energetic core of progress, but being satisfied goes deeper than potatoes and corn. There are the plants with attributes and values that exceed caloric intake. For these we make special ceremonies; and instead of composing who we are, they define who we are.
The clear example of this is the coca plant from the Amazon rainforest. Coca, which you chew, drink, or eat, is one of man’s most famous jungle discoveries. And for thousands of years, the plant influences society and affects the lives of millions across dozens of countries. A versatile plant like coca can sustain a village, lift an entire nation, and if properly manipulated, awaken the spirit and brighten the human experience through the divinity of nature. On the other hand, coca has wrought misery and destruction. Not an insignificant part of modern society surely wishes the plant was never created, because thanks to its derivative cocaine, coca holds a dark influence over the human psyche, the modern economy, and a slice of the political landscape in the Americas.
No plant in South America plays a larger role in human development than coca, but if there were a close second, then it would surely be the ilex paraguayensis, the tree that bears the leaves used to brew the invigorating tea known as yerba mate. The Rainbow odyssey took us east from the Andes through Paraguay to the great falls of Iguazú, the center of yerba mate cultivation. The Ruta de la Yerba Mate, a touristic circuit recently created to celebrate the history and culture of mate, follows the great rivers through the Argentine province of Misiones. The red soil rich in iron and abundant rainfall makes Paraguay, Misiones and the southern states of Brazil the only place in the world where the tree has flourished. Here, the yerba is deeply rooted in the indigenous Guaraní traditions and lifestyle, played a central role in territorial wars among neighbors, and allowed generations of immigrants to develop the modern yerba mate industry.
The drink first entered the history books in the early 1600s through the Jesuit priests who built missions in the Atlantic rainforests among the rivers of Paraguay, Paraná, and Uruguay. In the beginning, they banned the drink, and only 20 years later realized that the Guaraní work ethic improved considerably after drinking the yerba. Thus began more than a century of yerba mate cultivation, its promotion, and exploitation. The Jesuits closely studied the Guarani, learned their language, and protected them from their enemies and Portuguese slave traders. They were less concerned with the extraction of silver and gold and more with inculcating them with Christian values. The Jesuits took advantage of the yerba mate to convert the natives, but perhaps it’s the yerba mate that converted the Jesuits.
By the end of the 1700s, the Jesuits had built a forest utopia in a place where slavery or annihilation was normal, a feat that without the yerba mate would have been nearly impossible. In these missions, the trees flourished and bundles of mate soon became the currency of the Jesuits. Demand for the tea grew across the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal thanks to its ability to rejuvenate body and mind. As a result, the Jesuits’ power and influence increased, and the population of 30 Jesuit-led missions reached 170,000 people before the priests were banished from the region in 1767.
The yerba and the rivers all played major roles in the ensuing conflicts of the 1800s, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina jockeyed for the red-soil territory, knowing that he who controlled the yerba, controlled the rivers, and he who controlled the rivers, levied taxes. A culture of contraband and smuggling arose, yet another example of the rippling effects of yerba mate on the region and local culture.
Today, the influence of yerba mate extends much further than just around the Paraná river: from the glaciers of the Patagonia to the deserts of Arabia, mate is the drink of choice. Yerba mate is a go-to energy drink in German discoteks, and sprouts followers every time Leo Messi is photographed with a mate in his hand. It reached me in 2007 through the mountain culture of the Andes, where I shared my first mates with Chilean climbers and mountaineers. Nothing beats mate at the crag or after a day of snowboarding.
When I end up on my deserted island with too much peanut butter, I’ll look back and wish I had a yerba mate. Since driving the Ruta de la Yerba Mate, I have noticed the yerba has slowly converted Ignacia, so she can bring yerba mate onto the island, because yerba mate is best when you share it. | https://medium.com/@nicojparco/what-food-is-on-your-deserted-island-10c3b004767 | ['Nicholas J Parkinson'] | 2020-03-19 03:28:40.294000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Plants', 'Food', 'Yerba Mate', 'Food And Drink'] |
Blockchain to the Rescue | Blockchain to the Rescue
For Once, a Poll That Has Nothing to Do with Trump
In another signal of the growing importance of blockchain technology, the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) recently polled its members seeking information about their plans to use the technology, and came up with some surprising results.
The WFE is the trade association of publicly regulated stock, futures, and options exchanges.
The WFE’s poll showed that more than 84 percent of members were either investigating or actively pursuing blockchain initiatives. The expected time for rollout of the technology ranged from less than three years to an indeterminate evaluation period. The results demonstrates the industry’s focus on gaining efficiency in new areas through its use, but also the obstacles that may slow adoption, primarily regulatory uncertainty.
WFE chief Nandini Sukumar characterized the results of the survey as positive, noting the “overwhelming number” of respondents who are already progressing work with distributed ledger technology. In its report, WFE acknowledged that blockchain’s usefulness is still uncertain, given “such as risks of maintaining security standards across a decentralized database, legal and regulatory uncertainty, and concerns around scalability.” Nevertheless, blockchain has the potential to allow for the combination of trading, clearing, and settlement, which are now separate steps (and are regulated as such).
Just think: If any of our presidential candidates had an 84% approval rating, they could take that to the bank in November. | https://medium.com/creativeblockchain/blockchain-to-the-rescue-786eab634b4e | ['Adam Shoemaker'] | 2016-08-31 17:49:59.265000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Fintech'] |
A delicate balance | A delicate balance
Originally published in BusinessDay on 24 March 2016.
Photo by Omotayo Tajudeen
…a society that feels it has no voice, will make its voice heard in whichever way it sees possible.
Whether due to dominance of the media or current economic power, the “average” Nigerian is not thinking about the huge economic potential or the breadbasket (agricultural production zones) of Nigeria when they think of Northern Nigeria. On their minds is likely the religious extremism that has been on the rise in the recent past and contributed to the development of one of the region’s bloodiest militant groups in the region — Boko Haram. While it is true that Boko Haram has wreaked havoc on the North, it’s also true that the militant group is one of several difficulties that Northerners have faced for decades. As the current administration continues on its mission to crush Boko Haram and end its season of tyranny, solutions must sought that also address socioeconomic and geographic issues in the North to prevent the resurgence of such groups that thrive in times of desperation and exclusion.
As the current administration continues on its mission to crush Boko Haram and end its season of tyranny, solutions must sought that also address socioeconomic and geographic issues in the North to prevent the resurgence of such groups that thrive in times of desperation and exclusion.
It is indisputable that the economic landscape in Northern Nigeria has been severely affected by Boko Haram. The activities of this Islamist militant group have led to mass migration of Nigerian citizens to areas not affected by the violence. This has in turn resulted in children abandoning school, adults losing jobs, disruption of trade and an overall drop in foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, affecting livelihoods. Boko Haram’s emergence four years ago is estimated to have led to a 21% drop in FDI between 2011 and 2012. The negative effects have largely been dictated by geography and have been felt most acutely among the country’s Northern states. Three states in particular — Borno, Adamawa and Yobe — have borne the brunt of the insurgency leading to a state of emergency being declared in 2013 and running till November 2014. An estimated 3,000 people were killed in 2015 as a result of the insurgency and a further 3 million internally displaced to date. Boko Haram and ISIL are jointly responsible for 51% of all claimed global fatalities in the previous year (2014) — with the total figure of those killed through terrorism in 2014 coming to 32,658 with 7,512 in Nigeria alone (23% of all deaths caused by terrorism in that year).
The region’s problems however began long before the emergence of Boko Haram. Despite occupying the majority of the country’s landmass, Northern Nigeria has consistently ranked lower than the country average on human development indicators.
The Northern part of Nigeria consists of 19 states, which geographically occupy 719,435 square kilometers or 79% of Nigeria’s landmass and constitute 53.6% of Nigeria’s population. Long-standing under investment by government and insecurity in the region has resulted in significant slow-down of both educational and commercial activities. Similarly, the Northern states face the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country, the lowest school enrolment rates for children, the highest youth unemployment rates, highest levels of poverty and highest inter-ethic and inter-religious conflict, notably the Boko Haram terrorism.
In recognition of the grim situation in the Northern states, a number of government and private initiatives have been put in place. Notable among the national-level interventions are social-protection interventions such as the Presidential Initiative for the North East (PINE), Care of the Poor (COPE), funded initially through the Millennium Development Goals Debt-Relief Gains fund, the Maternal and Child Health Care (MCH) programme, and a Community-based Health Insurance Scheme. Similarly at federal level, interventions around revival of industries, alleviation of poverty, granting access to business loans and development of business and technical skills have been introduced; and cash transfers are being considered by the current administration. A number of donor communities have also provided services in health, education and relief services. These include programs by Save the Children, Oxfam and DfID, among others.
In spite of these initiatives, the economies in Northern Nigeria are not as strong as they could be. Reports indicate that Nigeria’s North is poorer than the South and the situation continues to be exacerbated by the Boko Haram violence. The gross state products (GSP) of different regions show that Northern states, despite occupying majority of Nigeria’s population, accounted for only 38% (15.4 billion Naira) of the country’s GDP in 2012 (prior to the escalation of Boko Haram insurgency). Of this amount, 8.3 billion Naira (55%) and 5.7 billion Naira (37%) were attributable to the North West and North Central states respectively. Comparatively, the North East states where Boko Haram are most active, contributed only 8% of this GSP at a paltry 1.3 billion Naira in 2012.
The sectors of economic growth potential for the North have however remained largely unchanged, the leading one being agriculture. Given agriculture and agro-allied industries’ significant contribution to GDP and workforce, strong growth in the recent past, and Northern Nigeria’s rich agroecology, it is one of the most competitive sectors for development of Northern states. Northern Nigeria since independence has been the source of a significant percentage of the foodstuff consumed in the South. Nearly 50% of food and 47% of livestock consumed in the South were produced in Northern states prior to the Boko Haram insurgence. Two of the region’s strongest economic states — Kano and Jigawa — have highlighted agricultural investments in food crops (sorghum, millet), horticulture (mango, guava, cashew), industrial crops (gum Arabic, sugarcane), livestock and fisheries as key to the development of their respective regions. Across the key Northern states of Kano, Jigawa and Borno, agriculture is the sector that provides the highest employment opportunities at 32%, 33.4% and 52.9% respectively.
Nearly 50% of food and 47% of livestock consumed in the South were produced in Northern states prior to the Boko Haram insurgence.
Other promising sectors include trade, hospitality, as well as manufacturing. In addition to their strong GDP contribution, trade, hospitality, and manufacturing are significant employers. Within the Northern region, a sample of key states indicates that trade and commerce (including hospitality) account for a significant portion of employment opportunities. In Kano, 20.9% of the population is employed within the hospitality industry while 11.6% works within wholesale/retail trade. In Jigawa, the numbers indicate that 11% of the population work in the hospitality industry and 7.4% in wholesale/retail trade. Finally for Borno 17.6% of the population are employed within the trade sector. In manufacturing, selected representative states of Northern Nigeria — Kano, Jigawa and Borno — depict a similar trend of employment and growth. Manufacturing emerged as a significant source of employment among the population at 14.9%, 20.5% and 11.3% respectively. However, despite these promising figures, several sectors that have a high contribution to the economy are at serious risk because of insecurity.
When thinking of how to deal with the problems in the North, dealing with security concerns must go hand in hand with strengthening of economic opportunities if solutions are going to be sustainable. There are five key factors that have to be taken into account. The first is that whichever initiatives and investments are undertaken in the North, one has to figure out how to separate development work from politics and insecurity. This is in no way an easy feat, but in trying to work both in development and politics in the region, it will be extremely difficult to make headway. One has to find the right way to balance working on the two issues in the region — without getting subsumed in political issues or getting too detached working on development issues without taking into account prevailing political factors. There has been limited / no redistribution of wealth and the situation is starker in northern Nigeria given the poor performance on all development indicators. Disenfranchised youth — who are most at risk of joining Boko Haram need to have a voice in their societies that have typically been hierarchical in structure.
There has been limited / no redistribution of wealth and the situation is starker in northern Nigeria given the poor performance on all development indicators. Disenfranchised youth — who are most at risk of joining Boko Haram need to have a voice in their societies that have typically been hierarchical in structure.
The second factor is to ensure that data-driven approaches are brought into any investments in the region. With an ongoing security crisis, it is very easy to make investments made on hunches or emotion, but in the long term such approaches could be extremely wasteful and even detrimental to sustainable development. Hard facts and data are important for any decision-making in the region. The third factor is to balance short term and long-term development goals. For instance, it is very tempting to work only to increase production of an essential good, with no focus on quality; however long-term development hinges on both. The fourth factor is to take into account that government and companies have few extra resources to devote in the North given the current situation. As such, any initiatives need to be cost-effective as it will always be difficult to source funds for them. The final factor is to remember that some communities are in many cases starting from scratch to build institutions and infrastructure and they require holistic solutions that not only address broad sectors (e.g., access to grants and finance) but also build more specific knowledge among sector players (e.g., training SMEs on leveraging capital).
Key considerations when creating interventions in conflict zones
These five key factors act as guiding principles for ensuring that economic opportunities in the North are strengthened while at the same time dealing with security concerns. It is therefore of utmost importance to not focus on solving economic issues or security issues without taking into account just how co-dependent the two problems are; a society that feels it has no voice, will make its voice heard in whichever way it sees possible. To deal with the ongoing crisis we have to deal with the underlying issues that have created a society where terrorism is an option. | https://medium.com/@nnekais/a-delicate-balance-f89f7a177ec8 | ['Nneka Eze'] | 2021-05-03 14:42:50.085000+00:00 | ['Northern Nigeria', 'Nigerian Economy', 'Nigeria', 'Boko Haram', 'Employment'] |
How to Learn Git in Simple Words | I have worked with many data scientists in the past years. One thing that I found common among them is the lack of software development skills. A simple, but important, practice in software development is version control that is kinda known as Git in the industry while other technologies exist. I found many data scientists are not very comfortable with Git mostly due to the fact that they did not understand why, where, and how they must use it. In this article, I described Git technology in simple words and provided you with scenarios where you must use it. I also describe the most important functionalities that you need for daily development: (a) saving changes, (b) inspecting the codebase, (c) undoing changes, and (d) rewriting history. Hope this helps you become more comfortable with this amazing technology.
During the data science interview, you may not be asked about, for example, “How Git must be used effectively?”. However, you must know how to work with Git from the very first day.
In a data science interview, you may not be asked about, for example, “How Git must be used effectively?”. However, you must know how to work with Git from the very first day. You would create a bad first impression on your manager if you are not comfortable working with Git; especially, with more advanced Git operations such as Rebase. The advanced Git operations may create issues that lower the speed of development if you do not use them correctly.
When I interview data scientists, I always evaluate their software development skills as well. Many interviewers do not conduct such evaluation but that does not mean they do not expect you to know Git. By not knowing Git technology, you end up having a highly inefficient collaboration with your colleagues that can easily endanger your position. So, be prepared for it.
— What is Git?
Git is a widely accepted software for tracking changes in the codebase (a.k.a. version control) used for coordinating development within the team. In version control, the main goal is to keep your local codebase in sync with the remote codebase while you pull all the latest changes made by other developers and push all the latest changes made by you. The remote codebase is the main codebase that developers must always look into it to find out the latest changes.
Git is a technology that enables you to keep every codebase in sync with the remote codebase while all of them are changed frequently. Git lets you save and retrieve snapshots of every step in development also called “state”. We have many examples, of state management technology in the software industry such as Docker (platform as a service) or Terraform (infrastructure as a service). Git is the widely accepted state-management technology for code changes.
Git lets you save and retrieve snapshots of every step in development also called “state”. We have many examples, of state management technology in the software industry such as Docker or Terraform. Git is the widely accepted state-management technology for code changes.
Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash
— How to use Git?
Saving Changes
A common nightmare in development is to lose the code changes that you have worked on for a day due to any reason. Git gives you an opportunity to save your changes in both local codebase and remote repository. You can use commit command to save your changes in the local codebase and push command to save your changes in the remote codebase. If you want to save the latest changes temporarily, you can use stash command. You usually use stash when you want to, for example, switching between two branches without committing.
Inspecting the codebase
From time to time, you need to inspect the codebase to gather more information about the status of changes in the codebase. I described above that Git is a state management technology, so you must be able to track the state of the codebase anytime you want. You can use status command to display and track the state of the codebase. You can also use log command to display committed snapshots. log command lets you list the project history, and search for specific changes.
Undoing changes
For many reasons, you may need to undo some committed changes. You can use reset command to undo changes. This command has two main types: hard and soft . When the soft argument is passed, all of your code changes stay in your codebase, but all the corresponding commits would be deleted. When the hard argument is passed, the state of the codebase is completely reset to the exact state or snapshot of the codebase which you pointed to. Each snapshot of the codebase is registered with a unique commit id. Let me share two scenarios when you need to use reset with soft and hard argument.
Scenario 1 (when you need to use reset --soft ) — You are working in a company that has a strict rule on development paradigm. You are working on a branch to develop feature A. At the same time, you start developing feature B. You forgot to create a new branch and committed code changes related to feature B on the same branch as feature A! After several commits, you notice it and decide to clean up your branch. You must undo your changes.
You are working in a company that has a strict rule on development paradigm. You are working on a branch to develop feature A. At the same time, you start developing feature B. You forgot to create a new branch and committed code changes related to feature B on the same branch as feature A! After several commits, you notice it and decide to clean up your branch. You must undo your changes. Scenario 2 (when you need to use reset --hard ) — You are working with Git operations and out of a sudden, you made a mistake. All of your recent changes get deleted and you become very frustrated. You want to revert the codebase to a snapshot where you are certain about its quality. At this time, what you need is to go back to a snapshot of the codebase which is clean.
Note that the hard argument must be used by cautious since it is deleted everything.
Rewriting history
A group of developers may be against rewriting history; however, many others use this powerful feature to develop faster with less conflict. You can use this feature to build a clean history in the state management system and resolve conflicts fast if you use it correctly. The main operator that you must use to rewrite history is rebase . You can use rebase to squash several commits into one commit.
In two main scenarios, you need to use rebase .
Scenario 1 — You take a branch of the main (a.k.a., master) branch several days ago. You did a series of developments but your work is not finished yet. During this time, your colleagues finish their tasks and merge their changes into the main branch. Now, your branch is out of sync with the latest changes in the main branch. You must re-base your branch, taken from an older snapshot of the main branch, on top of the latest changes in the main branch. You may ask why? Because otherwise, you can not merge your changes to the main branch since your branch is outdated (i.e., may have some discrepancy with the main branch)
— You take a branch of the main (a.k.a., master) branch several days ago. You did a series of developments but your work is not finished yet. During this time, your colleagues finish their tasks and merge their changes into the main branch. Now, your branch is out of sync with the latest changes in the main branch. You must re-base your branch, taken from an older snapshot of the branch, on top of the latest changes in the branch. You may ask why? Because otherwise, you can not merge your changes to the main branch since your branch is outdated (i.e., may have some discrepancy with the branch) Scenario 2 — You have worked in a branch for a while. You committed your recent changes in a large number of commits. You decided to squash your commits in a commit (i.e., rewriting the history) for two reasons. First, you want to have a clear path of development (also refers to as clean history) to ensure bad habits of development do not get pushed to the remote codebase. Second, you want to rebase on top of the recent changes in the main branch. If you have many commits in your branch, conflict resolution (i.e., the discrepancy between your branch and the new main branch) becomes much harder since you have to resolve conflicts in every commit.
Note that if you are not an expert with Git, never try rewriting history by yourself or on a critical codebase. I highly suggest using an experimental codebase to master Git before applying any of these commands, especially the complex ones, on a critical project. You can read more in the article below.
— Last Words
If you want to learn more, you should learn about git-flows. What is git-flow, though? A git-based development workflow, also known as a git-flow, is a sequence of development steps to build and release software. To have effective collaboration, you must also know the nuts and bolts of the most essentials git-flows. You can read about the two most essential git-flows in this article: Git-Flow is the Source of Productivity, Not Confusion.
I highly recommend you to read the awesome tutorial created by Atlassian. Plus, if you are not comfortable with Git CLI, you can use the great Atlassian’s Git client named Sourcetree. While it does not remove your need to use Git CLI, it gives you a user-friendly environment to use Git for many common needs.
Thanks for Reading!
If you like this post and want to support me… | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-learn-git-in-simple-words-263618071dd8 | ['Pedram Ataee'] | 2021-09-14 00:56:10.493000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Git', 'Software Development', 'Data Science', 'Careers'] |
Healthcare Business Review | Business and Technology Magazine for Healthcare Industry | Healthcare Business Review
Healthcare Business Review is a Business and Technology Magazine for Healthcare Business Industry which offers the latest news, CXO articles. Top solution providers in Healthcare Business Industry.
Healthcare Business Review is a publication located in United States. They lists various technology news and insights on the latest trends in the healthcare industry.
IoT Streamlines Healthcare Supply Chain
Source — Healthcare Business Review
The healthcare industry is growing to be smarter and competent with each new technological breakthrough. it’s anticipated to repeatedly seek new methods to leverage the potential of the Internet of things (IoT) to reduce waste within the supply chain.
Three ways during which IoT can help perk up supply chain management of the healthcare sector are:
1. Growing a Holistic View Of the availability Chain
Hospitals can employ IoT to enable cloud-based data analytics with their cloud-based, system-wide inventory management. The approach helps connect processes and products with their actual cost. Experts observe that now the healthcare supply chain isn’t only about manufacturing, shipping, and distributing products. To accurately assess the worth chain, it’s to be examined holistically and canopy the direct also because the indirect expenses. the sort of system-wide valuation demands tons of data which will be collected, visualized, aggregated, and acted upon.
2.Improve the Competence of Clinical Staff
According to a survey that included responses of over 600,000 medical professionals, 42% of execs think that provide chain work takes day off from patient care.
About 45% of frontline providers also said that the physical supply chain tasks even have a small or large negative impact on patient care. IoT’s connectivity and data-sharing aptitude are often wont to free the frontline employees from inventory-related burdens. Experts advise employing advanced product-tracking technologies along side the automated systems to assist alleviate the strain of supply chain tasks and obtain the physicians back to their patients.
3. IoT To Develop Accuracy, Speed, and Spend
Specialists consider the healthcare supply chain as a strategic benefit, which has the potential to yield significant financial savings. They believe that IoT is significant to propel change. Doctors, surgeons, and nurses have a considerable stake in enhancing supply chain operations. Most medical professionals recognize the correlation between financial success and provide chain management.
Data generated from IoT connectivity offers visibility across the organization facilitating proper management of delivery, workflow and merchandise standardization, and precise clinical documentation across the whole enterprise. | https://medium.com/@jackmathew/healthcare-business-review-business-and-technology-magazine-for-healthcare-industry-74cf5cce6b92 | ['Jack Mathew'] | 2020-12-21 07:29:12.580000+00:00 | ['Busines', 'Healthcare Business', 'Technews', 'Technology', 'Healthcare'] |
Slow Museum Movement | Museums and you are better at a slower pace.
Let’s start a new movement.
Background
In recent years there seem to be countless studies, books, documentaries and journal articles pointing to the importance of slowing down life. Following in that wave a new resurgence had developed in the health & wellness world especially activities like meditation and yoga.
In that same spirit in the food community, the slow food movement became a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Food
It promotes local food and traditional cooking. In a lot of ways it is a return to how we cooked a hundred years ago — local and slow.
Personal History
As a father of 4 children under 8 and who most describe as an early adopter of tech and extreme extrovert. I am now at 37 the epitome of someone who is looking to slow down.
The point of this article.
I have now been working in the museum field for over 15 years and honestly have been to some of the best in the world such as the Natural History Museum in New York to San Francisco MOMA. Today, I find myself avoiding any interactive exhibits (boring), any tech friendly exhibit like an Ipad display or kiosk (boring), and I find the standard short text labels not inspiring or interesting. The exhibits I find myself drawn to and inspired by are the classic displays. The diorama with a bench in front of it with a decent amount of exhibit text.
Now.. I know I am the exception. The majority of museum visitors don’t have time for this experience or desire it. And, we as museum leaders need to continue to try and hook the average visitor to pay attention more and frankly… just show up. For example, we hide stuffed leprechauns in the mansion… cough, cough. To be fair it is kinda of fun to look for them and Museums should NOT be boring or elitist places.
That said.
We can be again a place for higher learning.
We can be a place of grand curiosity and wonder.
We can do better at creating a lifelong love for the museum experience.
What are we doing?
Just like the food movement, we are slowing down now. By asking the visitor to sit down in a room and study all the greatness that is in our museum. Have the visitor see what we see as staff. All those amazing details, that you easily miss in a 1 minute look.
To help accompany that experience we have put chairs in every room and we have new museum chairs which you can carry with you to whatever place where you would like to stop and enjoy
Plus… we are creating a new book we call the “Field manual”. It will include a large percentage of what know about every room. And.. every year as we learn more, we will update the field manual. So every year there will be new ifo. Trust me… we have learned a lot lately. Also, we will sell the manual for about what it costs us to print — our guess is $1 to $3.
Lastly.. because we are a house museum on an estate.. we have some advantages over the Art Museums who are already practitioners of the slow museum movement. What is that advantage? The estate. Part of the experience is more than just learning, it is also seeing how it felt to live in this amazing built environment. This is why we have hammocks tied up all over the estate in the summer, this is why we have free snowshoe rentals in the winter and why we have relaxing Loll furniture placed throughout the estate.
Yes… most visitors will not go through Glensheen slowly.
That is fine.
We bet many do though. The ones that do will have a drastically different experience — we promise that.
So.
Come slow down with us and join the movement. | https://medium.com/@duluthdan/slow-museum-movement-4d78e4cfdb4e | ['Dan Hartman'] | 2020-03-23 02:12:33.593000+00:00 | ['Museums', 'Historic House Museums', 'Slow Food', 'Glensheen'] |
Nikujaga (肉じゃが) — Food in Japan. Nikujaga (肉じゃが)is a traditional… | Nikujaga (肉じゃが)is a traditional Japanese food in which the meat, potatoes, and onion are stewed in a sweetened soy sauce and mirin. Locals made this dish by frying meat, potatoes, onions, konnyaku, etc., and then boiling it with soy sauce, sugar, and mirin. For the meat, they usually use either beef, pork, and chicken. Conveniently, it is easy to produce because it uses the same ingredients as curry rice and was introduce nationwide as a military diet.
This dish is a specialty from Kyoto and Hiroshima prefecture along with the other three; Obanzai, Hiroshima Kaki and Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki. As we go to this article, we will get to know what consists of nikujaga, how to make one, and its history.
Etymology
The name nikujaga also has its meaning. When you translate nikujaga (肉じゃが ), it means “meat and potatoes”. Niku (肉) means “meat” in Sino-Japanese and Jaga (じゃが ) is a short version of Jagaimo (じゃがいも) which means “potato”.
What is Nikujaga?
Nikujaga is a Japanese dish specialty from Kyoto and Hiroshima prefecture which stir-fry meat, potatoes, onions, shirataki noodles, etc. Afterward, locals will boil it in soy sauce, sake, sugar, mirin. It is one of the stewed dishes in Japan. In addition to being home-cooked food, it is one of the dishes that is serve in izakaya and small restaurants.
It is one of the menus in home economics at school as a dish for beginners because it includes the basic cooking processes. Consequently, there are also differences in the ingredients and seasonings used depending on the region, home, and store. Pork and chicken can be use instead of beef, konjac may be use instead of Shirataki noodles.
Nikujaga History
Maizuru City, Kyoto
There’s no definite theory about the origin of Nikujaga because there are two prefectures involve in its history. The two prefectures are Kyoto and Hiroshima prefecture. Locals claim that both Kyoto and Hiroshima prefecture are the birthplaces of Nikujaga. In October 1995, Maizuru City declared that they are the birthplace of nikujaga. Subsequently, in March 1998, Kure City, Hiroshima Prefecture also name itself as the birthplace of nikujaga.
Well, here’s a fact. The story of the birth of Nikujaga begins when the Satsuma domain scholar Heihachiro Togo from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era was studying abroad in Portsmouth, England, when he was still young. At that time, Togo was impress by the “beef stew” he was eating when he is going to England. And so, when he came to Maizuru City, he asked the military cook to add beef stew to the menu of the ship’s meal. However, at that time, it was difficult to obtain red wine, demiglace sauce, and butter, which are the ingredients for beef stew, and the troubled military personnel used soy sauce and sugar instead. Togo says that this dish includes beef, potatoes, and carrots.
Kure City, Hiroshima
In Japan at that time, beef stew and its variant, Hayashi rice, were already a common menu at Western restaurants. There is also an opinion that boiling beef with soy sauce and sugar is just an urban legend. Because it is the same method as sukiyaki and Yamatoni beef.
The same thing happen in Kure City, Hiroshima Prefecture, where Heihachiro Togo was stationed. Maizuru City claims that it was the birthplace of nikujaga. This is because the recipe for meat and potatoes at that time remained in Maizuru and Portsmouth in England recognized it as the birthplace of nikujaga. They are also selling “original nikujaga croquettes” jointly developed by local civic groups and food manufacturers. On the other hand, Kure City claims that Togo Heihachiro was posted to Kure City before Maizuru. Additionally, they also claim that the nikujaga recipe it uses as the basis for the birth of their nikujaga was arrange in a modern way. Thus, this debate has been going on for about 20 years.
Nikujaga Recipe
This section will tackle the nikujaga recipe. First off the list is nikujaga ingredients. Its ingredients consist of potatoes, onion, meat (pork, chicken, or beef), carrots, shirataki noodles, soy sauce, sugar, and mirin.
What is the difference between Kansai Nikujaga and Kanto Nikujaga?
Locals stated that pork is what they use for meat in the Kanto region. There are various theories about this but it seems that the predominant theory was that the pig farming boom occurred after the Great Kanto Earthquake. Consequently, since delicious pork is directly produce and is available at a low price, locals use pork as often.
Meanwhile, in the Kansai region, locals often use beef for their nikujaga. There are various theories about this, but it seems that in the Kansai region, it has become common to keep cattle as livestock for agriculture since there was no meat habit before the Meiji era.
Other than meat, there seems to be no particular change in typical ingredients such as potatoes, carrots, shirataki noodles, colored pods, or green beans, but there are differences depending on the household.
What are the health benefits and nutrition of Nikujaga?
Pork, carrots, potatoes, onions, and konjac in nikujaga are useful for health and beauty. Pork is rich in vitamins, essential amino acids, and proteins. Additionally, it supports the recovery of fatigue of the body. Carrots are rich in carotene and other nutrients such as iron, potassium, dietary fiber, and phosphorus. By taking carrots, you can suppress the oxidation of your body, so it can keep your skin youthful.
Potatoes are rich in nutrients such as vitamin C, potassium, and folic acid. The nutrients contained in potatoes are effective in improving hypertension, preventing cancer and adult diseases. Eating onions makes your blood smooth. Effective for recovering from fatigue and improving high blood pressure. Konjac is low in calories and is an ingredient with high diet effectiveness.
What is Nikujaga served with?
Nikujaga is a common home-cooked winter dish, served with a bowl of white rice and miso soup. It is also sometimes seen in izakayas.
How do you eat Nikujaga?
Locals typically eat nikujaga that is pack into a bento lunch box or as part of a traditional Japanese meal served with rice and numerous side dishes. This dish is also being taught to girlfriends to make for their boyfriends to impress them.
Recommended Nikujaga Restaurants
Sake no Ana
“Sake no Ana” is a 3-minute walk from Ginza Station and is open as an izakaya at night. It is a popular restaurant where you can have a delicious lunch during the day. Their menu “Favorite lunch” is one of their best where you can choose dishes from 15 kinds of side dishes. Such as the standard and monthly dishes. Nikujaga is one of them. Depending on the month, there are other lineups such as “chawanmushi,” “two-piece sashimi,” and “menchi-katsu.” Additionally, there is also coffee or tea on this selectable menu.
Mikame
“Mikame” is a 3-minute walk from Ginza Station. It is a Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant. At night, the price is unique to a luxury store; however, you can enjoy it at a wallet-friendly price at lunchtime. For lunch set meals, you can choose 2 to 3 dishes from sashimi, simmered-dishes, and grilled-dishes. You can enjoy elegantly seasoned set meals such as “Nikujaga”.
Kyoya Ginza Store
“Kyoya Ginza store” is an 8-minute walk from Ginza station and a 7-minute walk from Shimbashi station. It’s a little far from both stations, but it’s a popular restaurant as a timeless set meal restaurant. A set meal of nikujaga appears as a daily lunch menu. It is a set meal that you can relax with just the right amount of seasoning.
Farmer’s Kitchen
“Farmer’s Kitchen Ginza” is a natural food restaurant located a 5-minute walk from Ginza Station. You can enjoy dishes that make the best use of the taste of the vegetables by contracting with a farmer who practices their farming method. At the lunch buffet, there are many menus centered on dishes using seasonal vegetables such as nikujaga.
Conclusion
In Japan, many people eat Nikujaga at home. And some never had them at restaurants. They might also have bought a bento box containing nikujaga. In conclusion, Nikujaga is typical Japanese home cooking. When it comes to nikujaga, there are synonymous related words such as “the taste of your home” and “the food you want your mom to cook.” I think it’s a convenient dish that creates an elaborate feeling and creates a feeling of accomplishment at the end because it is easy to make. | https://medium.com/@krishasabban/nikujaga-%E8%82%89%E3%81%98%E3%82%83%E3%81%8C-food-in-japan-78e74c7475d8 | [] | 2021-08-03 13:28:11.164000+00:00 | ['Japanese Culture', 'Japan', 'Japanese Food', 'Food', 'Japanese'] |
Permanent behavior change in the age of COVID-19 | There’s little doubt that the coronavirus pandemic is a multidimensional tragedy. People are sick, dying, dead, or dealing with long-term after-effects from “recovery” that will stay with many of them for the rest of their lives. Layered in with that tragedy is that many national governments have proven themselves to be less than adequate in dealing with a pandemic.
A huge shift in behavior
Nothing in this post is meant to trivialize the loss and suffering the pandemic has caused. And yet, in the complicated latticework of cause and effect, there can be little doubt that we’ve just witnessed five years of evolution in how people approach virtual presence, in a little under three months.
For example; Pre-pandemic, there were three sets of people in my life who refused to do meetings via video conference:
My lawyers , who were of the particularly paranoid type, and claimed that video conferencing wasn’t secure enough.
, who were of the particularly paranoid type, and claimed that video conferencing wasn’t secure enough. My accountant , who had a strong preference for looking me dead in the eyes as he stabs his accusing finger at my tax paperwork to tell me exactly where I had made mistakes.
, who had a strong preference for looking me dead in the eyes as he stabs his accusing finger at my tax paperwork to tell me exactly where I had made mistakes. My therapist, who is deeply wonderful, but a luddite at heart.
As soon as the pandemic hit and the social distancing began, guess who figured it out? That’s right — all three of them, in a matter of weeks.
That is the short term.
‘Remote work’ doesn’t just mean sitting at your kitchen table twenty-two blocks away from the office.
In the long term, it will turn out that some of these changes are permanent. My accountant lives just down the street, so I might give him a pass, but you can bet your top dollar that I’m never again getting in a car to drive for 45 minutes to go talk to my lawyer. I will miss the ridiculously good coffee at their office, but if she can tolerate video conferences during COVID-19, she can figure it out when the social distancing directives are lifted, too.
A large number of office workers have had three months of working from home; and many of them are starting to realize that the benefits outweigh the downsides. This is the beginning of a permanent shift around the attitudes about remote work — that ‘remote work’ doesn’t just mean sitting at your kitchen table twenty-two blocks away from the office, but that workers get a real choice in where they want to live; if you’re not going into the San Francisco office anyway, then who cares if you live just across the bridge in Oakland, in Vancouver, or in Buenos Aires.
For decades, cheap and available air travel has made attending events available for many — but not for everyone, and at a tremendous cost to the environment.
The other change we are seeing is a tremendous acceleration in knowledge about how to connect in the digital realm. We’re seeing a return to phone calls over video calls in some cases, because if you don’t need the visual, then it’s delightful to be able to stare off into the distance or close your eyes instead of being perma-focused on the screen two feet away from you. And when people are doing video calls, the number of people who’ve upped their game with better cameras, light and sound has increased drastically.
Preventing 1.5bn journeys per year
At Konf, we’ve always been big believers in virtual events. In fact, we started the company because we were a group of environmentalists who took a look at the world of virtual events and thought “Hmm. Every year, 1.5bn people travel by planes, trains, and automobiles to go to events — if we can reduce that by even just 1%, the impact will be tremendous.”
The planet has been blessed with five years of human adaptability crystallizing in a matter of months. Even when vaccines are produced, and the pandemic starts to fade from the newspaper headlines at some point in the future, all of that collective learning and adaptation will stick.
Don’t get me wrong; I’d be delighted if I never have to go to another Zoom birthday party. Especially ones for close friends who live within driving distance. But I’d also be thrilled if I don’t have to fly to 20 events throughout the year, and were able to attend those from the comfort of my own home.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’m so excited about the world of virtual events right now; As painful as the pandemic has been, the vast majority of people who would go to events and conferences have learned how virtual events can be a great alternative to in-person events. And with the Konf platform, our mission is to make them better than in-person events.
🌱 The planet is breathing a sigh of relief already. | https://medium.com/konf-clubhouse/permanent-behavior-change-in-the-age-of-covid-19-c8e476b61f33 | ['Haje Jan Kamps'] | 2020-07-14 14:54:23.633000+00:00 | ['Events', 'Travel', 'Startup', 'Virtual Events', 'Behavioral Economics'] |
ekoparty 2019 review | Fifteen years ago it was only us, our friends and a giant desire to create a community. We wanted to share that which inspired and challenged us, learning with others in a context that represented us. We couldn’t find this space at first, so we went ahead and tried to create it ourselves.
Today, in 2019, we are writing this blog to tell you about the 15th edition of said place 😱
We knew that this edition was important so we set out to support and share the particular spirit behind this year’s theme, “The 90s”.
To achieve this, our team designed a space that brought together our favorite things from that era: we set up a gaming room with everything you need to travel through time and share with friends the games that were part of your stories; a comfortable and relaxed space with different options to challenge you and, at the same time, have fun: Welcome to Faraday’s Arcades and Flippers world 🎮🌎
You could play alone, you could play with others (team spirit 💪) or you could also go the extra mile and get the necessary points to win one of our newly designed t-shirts.
We change, but we keep what we like most:
For the second consecutive year, we enjoyed the presence of Charly from Café Z in our booth, a joyous moment for every coffee lover (like us!). Freshly brewed coffee made with patience, artistry and care.
Aligned with Ekoparty’s CTF, we created our own challenge where, in addition to participating for personalized prizes (1st — Nintendo Switch / 2nd — Amazon Kindle / 3rd — Arduino Set), you could get points for the #eko15 CTF.
Our technical team shared a workshop about Implementing a Vulnerability Management lifecycle — thank you all for participating!
And as our project is growing and our team too, we participated in Ekodating where, along with many other sponsors, we generated a meeting point to interview those who feel like joining us (we appreciate your time so much).
We have traveled a long way from the first ekoparty to this current edition; we made mistakes, we stopped to review things, we changed and as a result, we learned. But we never ever ever stopped being surprised by the enormous support we receive: You don’t just come to ekoparty, you are the ekoparty.
Today, fifteen years later, we understand that sometimes the future is better and bigger than we were encouraged to imagine.
Thank you for being #eko15 with us! See you next year!
https://www.faradaysec.com
https://github.com/infobyte/faraday
https://twitter.com/faradaysec
https://www.instagram.com/faradaysec/
https://forum.faradaysec.com/
https://www.faradaysec.com/ideas | https://medium.com/faraday/ekoparty-2019-review-abd1940ac8c6 | ['Mariela Blanco'] | 2019-10-22 13:52:28.488000+00:00 | ['Ekoparty', 'Infosec', 'English', 'Faraday'] |
Uncommon Answers to Common Questions | Uncommon Answers to Common Questions
It’s not a poem, but goofy.
What’s up?
The sky.
Where are you going?
I’m going forward.
Where did you come from?
Home. Obviously.
Where do you live?
What a silly question! At. My. Home.
How old are you?
Not much old.
What do you do for a living?
Eat, sleep, breath. I would recommend you do that also.
What did you do?
You need to be more specific. When?
Do you have a car?
No, it’s too heavy.
Do you speak another language?
I think we both are fluent in English. Or do you not understand me?
How much does this cost?
Exactly amount written on the label.
Can I pay by card?
Yes, 5 cards, please.
Which bus should I get?
I would suggest you buy a car. Much cheaper choice!
What do you think?
I think what I think and think what I think and… get me out!
How did you find this?
I searched.
Do you like this?
I never thought about it.
What is your view on this?
Close to 180 degrees.
Are you ready to order?
Yes. I order you to bring me water!
What would you like to drink?
Any food. It takes so long to chew it sometimes…
Can I get you anything else?
You cannot get me everything. Can you? Are you a gin?
How was your meal?
It was on the plate. I finished it now.
What’s that?
It’s definitely that. | https://medium.com/goofy-poetree/uncommon-answers-to-common-questions-6313752dbad7 | ['Todd J. Harmond'] | 2020-11-27 19:07:54.410000+00:00 | ['Weird', 'Answers', 'Questions', 'Funny', 'Humor'] |
What is content writing? how to do content writing step by step? | Knowing more about content writing and how to do it has a peek at this article, which will help you do better in content writing, which will benefit you in many ways.
What is content writing?
Content writing is the procedure that includes deep thinking, good writing ability, a proper selection of words, and editing of an article too. Content writing should be precise and clear. To be a good content writer, you should be pro at English grammar. You should have a good sense of selection of words, and you should produce plagiarism-free work. No doubt, content writing helps you in different ways, and it helps you earn and get good at English.
Types of Content writings
If anyone thinks doing content writing means just writing articles, so he is wrong. As content writing has a wide variety which is:
Technical writing
A person cannot do content writing on every topic. For example, a software engineer cannot write on banking and accounting. The person doing technical writing should have done specialization in that topic and have an interest to only give unique and engaging content. The content should be less complicated and more attractive and presentable, which can attract more people.
Click Here to Learn more about Content Writing
https://gotowebinfo.com/what-is-content-writinghow-to-do-content-writing-step-by-step/ | https://medium.com/@gotowebinfo/what-is-content-writing-how-to-do-content-writing-step-by-step-a197ed4ea844 | ['Umar Farooq'] | 2020-12-13 05:05:58.583000+00:00 | ['Web Article', 'Content', 'Content Writing', 'What Is Content Writing', 'Articles'] |
O Key of David | Priest, dean of a cathedral a city with so much beauty and heartbreaking poverty. Bring hope to the hopeless! Live compassionately! Lovingly serve everyone! | https://medium.com/@Troy_Beecham_Episcopal/o-key-of-david-eacf52da9582 | ['Father Troy Beecham'] | 2020-12-20 19:54:10.348000+00:00 | ['God', 'Jesus', 'Advent', 'Christianity', 'Father Troy Beecham'] |
🔮 Here’s What Your Horoscope Says About Your Bitcoin Trading Habits in 2020 😉 | Aquarius: January 20-February 18
Based on your quick ability to solve problems and aggressiveness to go for anything you’ve set your eyes on, we reckon 2020 is the year for you to try out new payment methods on Paxful. We’ve expanded our empire to include over 300 ways to buy and sell bitcoin in case you didn’t know!
You can also channel your love to help people through donating to our #BuiltWithBitcoin initiative. Help us build 100 schools in emerging markets, and enable hundreds and thousands of kids to learn in places that are safe and clean — because why not?
Pisces: February 19-March 20
Our crystal ball is desperate to tell us about your psychic powers and creative brain. One way you can channel your creative juices is through designing social media posts and writing blogs about crypto — and get rewarded for doing it!
Combining your gift in content creation with your natural skills as a social butterfly, you can really make a fortune through our Peer Program. This program is a chance for you to become a community leader, lead rookie traders, and make a passive income from posting on social media and getting VIP support from Paxful. Be the great marketer you were born to be!
Aries: March 21-April 19
Action, action, action! Our Aries babies are always fighting until they win or they feel bad for having even a minute to spare. For 2020, you might want to keep an eye out on the best offers on the market when bitcoin (hopefully) crosses the $20,000 mark this year.
We’d also like to let your sporty side know that you can now earn crypto by attending viewing parties at sports bars! Next time you want to buy a ticket or your favorite team’s merchandise, ask for the bitcoin option.
Taurus: April 20-May 20
Do you agree that Taureans have their own way and like to stick to their guns? Well, whatever your answer may be, we love you for your strong opinions. Hop on the Peer Program and help make Paxful a better place for traders — we need people that are vocal like you to let us know what you think about our upcoming platform features. And we won’t push you — you earn however much you work!
Looks like you’re a big saver as well. If you haven’t already, try sending money overseas with us — we don’t charge sky-high transaction fees like banks do. Or, you could sell your bitcoin for some major discounts on gift cards from some of your favorite businesses.
Gemini: May 21-June 20
You may not have noticed, but as the life of the party you’re always keeping boredom at bay for the people around you. In this new year, use that super social power of yours to bring your trader status up! Be a little warmer when you chat with your customer, and respond a little faster. All these little things are going to add up and make people want to give you positive feedback. And the more positive your profile looks? The more people will trade with you. You can thank us later.
Cancer: June 21-July 22
Whether or not you’re a parent, Cancers are known to be the loyal, trustworthy counselors that people turn to when they need advice. Use this power of yours to inspire others! Join our country-specific Telegram groups and our global meetups to share your ideas with other crypto enthusiasts.
Another special ability of yours is to suss things out and make sure no one’s lying. This trait comes in handy when you’re looking for a reliable vendor. You have our OK to call out any scammers that you spot.
If you do happen to be a parent, consider introducing crypto to your kids by having them play Minecraft or read Billy’s Bitcoin!
Leo: July 23-August 22
If there’s a motto perfectly designed for Leos, it’s go big or go home. 2020 is the year for you to slap on your trade amounts because trading small is so last year. The price of bitcoin just raced past $10K in early February so go big, my friend.
Your love for hoarding a crowd for yourself would work in great favor once you join our Affiliate Program. The more people you have under you, the more gains you’ll make. We’re currently offering you 50% of the escrow fees from your direct affiliates’ trades, and 10% of the trades of your affiliates’ referrals. You’re not gonna pass up a deal that great, right?
Virgo: August 23-September 22
We know you’re hardworking, and we want to reward you for it. If you haven’t already, complete at least 50 trades with 20+ different partners to become a Power Trader and get awarded a special badge on your profile. If you keep going, you could even earn the Institutional Trader badge. Just sayin’, not many people can achieve that feat!
Also we have a feeling that you might be looking for some more educational resources for the crypto world. Tune into our regular webinars or come to our meetups to follow the hottest bitcoin updates and learn how Paxful’s new moves can better benefit you.
Libra: September 23-October 22
This top hair salon in SoHo Manhattan has been accepting bitcoin as a payment method since 2014; use your virtual money when you chase after the next perfect hairstyle!
Judging from your obsession with a neat and tidy environment, you probably will try whatever you can to remove negative feedback from your profile. Be ultra responsive and answer any questions your trading partner may have to make sure they leave you positive feedback! It might also help to trade using more traditionally trustworthy methods such as bank transfers.
Scorpio: October 23-November 21
Being a Scorpio means you’re never a pushover; in fact, you’re very far from being one. Because you’re born to be a fighter, strategizing and networking and climbing the career ladder 24/7, we see no better way to grow your bitcoin business than joining our Peer Program as a Peer, then growing your territory as an Ambassador, and eventually becoming Paxful’s helpful hand as an Associate.
The more loyal you are to your referrals, the more loyal they’ll be with you. Make more money with your strength, Scorpio!
Sagittarius: November 22-December 21
Your ability to talk bravely with #nofilter is much appreciated here at Paxful. If you love us, tell your friends about us. What’s more, stay tuned to our bitcoin giveaway campaigns and get rewarded for sharing your well-thought-out opinions with us!
For your free soul, try making bitcoin trading the main task of your day! Many of our vendors have earned a no-strings-attached lifestyle from trading, and they’ve made lots! Give it a try — having money roll into your wallet while you travel is a pretty cool feeling.
Capricorn: December 22-January 19
It’s hard to imagine a Cap not fighting for a badge on their profile. You may not be trading the biggest amounts, but you’re diligent enough to trade persistently to reach a large base of trading partners. In 2020, get up there! Earn yourself a Power Trader or Institutional Trader badge to make people come to you. You deserve to be recognized for your hard work.
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Whatever your goals are for 2020, we hope you have fun making the most of our platform and taking advantage of our lucrative programs! We’re here to help you make more, so use us.
What are some other things you’d like to achieve on Paxful? Let us know in the comments below! | https://medium.com/the-paxful-blog/your-crypto-horoscope-bb890c03f39b | [] | 2020-03-05 15:01:01.531000+00:00 | ['Astrology', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Zodiac Signs', 'Bitcoin', 'Horoscopes'] |
A VC outlook on Meat-Free products | Is there a future for meat-free products in Europe?
Studies showed that customers’ expectations regarding meat products involve food safety, pleasure (taste and texture), animal well-being, sustainability, and health. The ability of the industry to meet some or all of these attributes will be crucial to create new meat-free product categories.
Meat-Free products: what are the main challenges of the European market?
The high number of ingredients in meat-free products might raise consumers’ concern about health impact (even if these ingredients are natural). Moreover, the tech nature of these products might lead consumers to relate them to processed food, which suffers from a negative perception in Europe.
How do VCs look at the European market?
Meat-free production is a constant tech and innovation challenge. The U.S. is currently leading the R&D in this space. VCs tend to invest where innovation and founding teams are located. We believe that meat is not a commodity product anymore and that meat-free production has become a tech/innovation/patent competition, which is a source of massive opportunities.
What will be the primary driver of consumers’ demand in the coming years?
Meeting the attributes and hitting the price point!
Who will be the winners & losers in this business?
We believe that developing a mass-market retail strategy will necessarily involve strategic partnerships with established international players at each level of the value chain. Ventures that will be able to develop such partnerships will have a strong competitive edge to position themselves as leaders in the industry.
What are the main differences between the U.S. and European markets?
U.S. incumbents (meat producers) have been exposed to disruption and innovation threats for a longer period of time. This has given them additional time to adapt to the meat-free revolution. Subsidy policies for meat production might also slow down adoption by setting up artificially low meat prices.
For startups, scaling new technologies requires large addressable markets. Innovation providers might consider Europe as fragmented and heterogeneous in terms of retailer’s typology, consumer expectations, and regulations.
*Panel participants: | https://medium.com/agroecology-capital/a-vc-outlook-on-meat-free-products-479ddae499a3 | ['Djalil Reghis'] | 2019-10-08 22:40:01.110000+00:00 | ['Protein', 'Agriculture', 'VC', 'Meat Free', 'Agtech'] |
Is Bad Behaviour Ruining Your Meetings? | Meeting participants need to behave themselves if a meeting is going to be a success. There cannot be any interrupting or less respectful language. I am talking about this from the perspective a board meeting, but every meeting faces the same challenges.
The board or committee is a group of people who are attempting to reach a common set of goals. Any meeting should have a goal and the participants should know the goal. There must be agreement on what the goals are, and then there can be discussion about how to get there. A meeting can be all about discussing the strategies and tactics for achieving common goals. A meeting is not about discussing which of the meeting participants are morons.
Discuss ideas not personalities.
Board members will not always agree with each other and they should not always agree, we want to hear multiple points of view. Having a board member say “I disagree with you; I think that we will have enough customers to make this work” is fine. What is not fine is saying “You are an idiot, of course we are going to have enough people for this to be a success!”
When someone feels that they are being attacked personally, (as the above example shows, being called an idiot does feel like a personal attack) they become defensive. They stop listening to the other people’s point of view and start defending themselves. Any meeting will work better if people are actually listening to each other, not just thinking about how to get even for rude comments.
The whole concept of a board, committee or a workplace meeting is that everyone feels comfortable sharing their opinions and their viewpoints. What is the purpose of a meeting if not to share ideas and progress being made toward the goals? We need to discuss ideas not attack people personally, if the group is going to move forward and achieve their goals. Otherwise why call the meeting in the first place, most of us have other things to do besides go to more meetings.
Returning to our example of the meeting participant who was called an idiot. This conversation deteriorates into nastiness about who is an idiot. What the board needs to be discussing is in this case is how to estimate how many customers they need to make this work. The talk should be about that — the customers and a vigorous discussion of the facts and the estimates and the assumptions. Surely grown-ups can talk about that without name calling. I would also say a couple of words around interrupting, the meeting rules should prohibit interrupting another participant when they are speaking. It is not respectful behaviour to interrupt. Whoever is chairing the meeting should make it clear that disrespectful language and interruptions are not acceptable behaviour.
The concept of a “respectful workplace” is applicable for any group. Anyone attending a meeting needs to show the other participant respect. If you make sure that this happens at your meetings, the meetings will be more pleasant as well as more productive. | https://medium.com/governance-guru/is-bad-behaviour-ruining-your-meetings-5cf2fcaa954b | ['Debi Peverill'] | 2020-12-14 02:31:53.631000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Board Conduct', 'Productivity', 'Meetings', 'Respectful Workplace'] |
Making of a B2B brand | Making of a B2B brand — Brand Purpose
While branding is predominantly considered to be an activity carried by businesses that are down the value chain and closer to the consumer; branding is flourishing in businesses higher up the value chain — closer to manufacturing. People ask me, how important is branding for B2B businesses? Honestly, it is much more important than ever before. One of the reason for it is that competition has grown excessively. New entrants who master the art of reverse engineering and imitation are able to offer the same product or service at unimaginably low costs to their buyers. Think about it — imitators don’r really need to spend money on research & development.
So, the question is how do B2B brands really market themselves? The traditional marketing theory would advice hackenyed solutions such as email marketing, publishing white papers, organising webinars, and exhibiting in big trade fairs. But does it really diffrentiate you? I think it just makes you a run of the mill business. I made a sincere effort to understand some hero acts that could actually differentiate a B2B business.
To start of with B2B brands need a purpose to exist. The purpose lends a meaning to their business. I have been associated with one international design studio based out of India — Inmark. This year onwards, they made branding and marketing a strategical business division — at par with trade. They started with understanding their true reason of existence. They realised don’t exist to sell paper designed products; but they existed to create designs made of natural and sustainable mediums. Majority of their collection was made out of paper which was made from cotton rags. They used this understanding of business to lend themselves a meaning for their existence.
Inmark is a design studio that creates lighting products for international home and living brands
Having clearly defined their purpose, Inmark started creating digital assets such as websited and social media. Their websites lend a tone to their business. It has been inspired from clean card design to subtly tell the world about their minimalist design approach. Their social media has white pallets and borders that has been borrowed from their clean geometrical silhouette from their lamps.
One aspect common to their work is geometrical designs inspired from nature
Inmark now are already talking about elevating their philosophy to next level where they would want to create acts around their purpose. Their acts have been at the hygiene level. They feel all they do is still extremely hygeine — something that they’re just meant to do. In coming times, they would want to create acts to make them conversational. If you talk to their leadership team, you’ll be amazed. When it comes to branding, their thinking is really involed. They say that “branding is a business activity of making the business cool”. Quite honestly, even the cult Kotlerians would agree to this! | https://medium.com/@sushantsharma_42983/making-of-a-b2b-brand-6f91a4abf8af | ['Sushant Sharma'] | 2019-12-01 14:50:54.580000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Lighting', 'Branding', 'Design', 'Lamps'] |
Visualising Singapore’s changing weather patterns: 1983–2019 | The lack of seasonal variations lull many into thinking that Singapore’s weather is predictable and unchanging. Nothing is further from the truth, with climate change making the city state’s weather even more unpredictable.
We are beginning to feel the impact of warmer days and more intense storms. At the ground-level, it feels as if Singapore is getting much warmer at an earlier hour.
On many days, the 8am sun that greets me upon stepping out feels more like something I would expect in the late morning. The mid-afternoon blaze has never felt more intense.
In this project, I’ll attempt to illustrate Singapore’s changing weather patterns using classic as well as new visualisation libraries like Plotly Express.
The repo for the project is here. The charts in this Medium post can be found in this notebook, while the data can be found here and here (raw version). | https://towardsdatascience.com/visualising-singapores-changing-weather-patterns-1983-2019-a78605fadbdf | ['Chua Chin Hon'] | 2019-08-12 12:41:22.025000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Climate Change', 'Singapore', 'Data Journalism'] |
It’s almost weird how trauma shapes us as people. | It’s almost weird how trauma shapes us as people. I mean, there is an impact on our lives, but I never realized how much it affected my own identity. I lost two siblings by the age of ten. Before then, my introductions to people consisted of “Hi, I’m Anna, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m half Irish, half Peruvian, but I’ve lived in the Middle East my whole life.” I mean, it was pretty simple. Just key defining things about myself that protected me from being vulnerable to others and was just enough for them to know about me. After I lost my siblings, it became more of a “Hi, I’m Anna, and my siblings are dead.” Yeah, I know it’s morbid as can be. Many people used to tell me things like, “first time I met you, I never felt like speaking to you again. You creeped me out to the absolute max.” Thanks Lottie, noted. The thing is, not only did people find it creepy and morbid, but they thought of me as some attention seeking child. Truth is, I wasn’t. Something about introducing myself to people in this way was a form of hope. A small sliver of hope that I cling onto that someone would say, “oh, I lost mine too.” As weird as it may be, in a world in which we feel so alone and disconnected, the feeling of finding a kindred soul or spirit sounded so liberating. Trauma is one of those things that just kind of sticks, it’s a weird web of superglue that kind of clings onto you no matter what. Eventually, you stop trying to fight it and almost invite it into your life. It’s a strange thing, but having your trauma be a part of you and your identity sounds so unhealthy, but it’s a way to reclaim it.
I guess trauma and vulnerability go hand in hand. It took me a while to come to the realization that vulnerability doesn’t necessarily have to be something bad. It can be empowering, you let people know things about yourself before they do. A way to flip your trauma off. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s okay to deal with your trauma in different ways. After all we’ve gone through, making jokes about it or “reclaiming” it, doesn’t seem so bad after all. A bit of a ramble, but oh well. | https://medium.com/@aldybgg/its-almost-weird-how-trauma-shapes-us-as-people-2034581d65a1 | ['Anna Balarezo'] | 2020-12-19 18:37:07.554000+00:00 | ['Trauma', 'Death And Dying', 'Trauma Recovery', 'Mental Health', 'Death'] |
Five Things First-Year Teachers Should Know About Distance Learning | Five Things First-Year Teachers Should Know About Distance Learning
As a fifth-year teacher, I offer this advice to all of the first-year teachers who will be teaching virtually.
Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash
During the spring of 2020, many teachers experienced what it would be like to teach virtually for the first time. Based on our experiences, here are five tips you should know before you begin your first year of teaching virtually.
Many students won’t know how to login or submit the assignment
One of the hassles most teachers dealt with post-spring break was student logins. Most students had never used their login information to access school resources since it was never required. Teachers called parents the week after spring break to help students log in to Google Classroom before they could assign their students any work.
Before you plan what you want to teach the first week, make sure you know where to access students’ login information and parent contact information. Prepare yourself mentally to make more phone calls than a telemarketer.
Finally, make sure you familiarize yourself with using Google Classroom (or whatever program your school decides to use). If students don’t know how to submit the assignment, call their parents to help guide them through it.
Remember there are veteran teachers who are less tech-savvy than you are who will be calling and emailing the IT department non-stop with the same questions. If you have a question about how to upload an assignment, either Google it or be prepared to wait a while.
Don’t scold them for not completing the assignment
It’s challenging to build a positive classroom environment online. There is little interaction from the students, who only log in to complete the assignment five minutes before it’s due.
During these trying times, passing your class is the last thing on their minds. Some kids looked for a part-time or full-time job when schools closed in the spring and have no plans to quit when they’re earning a steady income. Other kids babysit their siblings and help them with their homework before they do their own.
Some kids don’t have access to the internet at home and can’t go online until their parents come home from work to drive them to the nearest public Wi-Fi. Some kids do their work on their cellphone because they can’t afford a laptop.
If they don’t turn in the work by your deadline, give them a day or so before you reach out. Don’t call the morning of because it was a few hours late. Completing your assignment is the last thing on their mind.
When they do complete the work, send them a positive note as feedback after you’ve graded it. It might be the only positive thing they hear that day.
Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash
Reach out to your colleagues
One of the worst blessings are professional development meetings. Usually, teachers feel it’s a waste of their time since they’ve heard the strategies presented countless times before.
On occasion, veteran teachers will learn a thing or two and implement these new teaching skills in their classroom. Since schools will not be meeting in person, it’ll be more difficult for you to interact and make small talk with veteran teachers during these meetings and build relationships with them.
Engaging in small talk with veteran teachers during professional development meetings shows you who’s friendly enough to help you and provide guidance when needed. Even though the meetings will now be virtual, you can still ask them for help.
Send them an email after your Microsoft Teams or Zoom call. Let them know you’re a first-year teacher. Most of them will be more than willing to help you with whatever you need.
Find curriculum online for free
In the event your school district has incomplete or outdated curriculum, look for free resources online. A quick Google search will help you find a plethora of resources available for you to use.
Teacherspayteachers.com provides paid and some free curriculum for teachers. If you want the good stuff, be prepared to shell out a few hundred dollars for premium curriculum. For example, a semester’s worth of curriculum for high school world history costs between $100-$400.
If you don’t have the means to pay for the curriculum, there is still plenty of free resources available. If you are struggling to find free curriculum, try searching for individual lesson plans that meet your school district’s objectives.
For example, search for “free Ancient Greece high school lesson plans” on Google. Some teachers create blogs with their lesson plans available to the public. Just remember to tweak the lesson plan to your liking and to meet your school district’s objectives.
Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash
Save your first paycheck
When your first paycheck comes in, it might be the biggest check you’ve ever received in your lifetime. You will feel ecstatic and might want to spend it. But there is something you need to remember.
No job is guaranteed right now. According to Reuters, almost half a million school personnel were laid off nationally in April 2020. No matter what politicians say or do, your job is not guaranteed. School districts will do what they need to do if the budget is cut or rerouted to other expenses.
Once your paycheck comes in at the end of the month, pay off necessary expenses and save the rest in a high-yield savings account.
Conclusion:
One of the most common sayings among veteran teachers is “your first year will always be your worst”. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. So long as you follow these simple guidelines, you will survive, possibly thrive, during your first year of teaching.
If you’re worried about what teaching will look like when classes go back to being in-person, check out my article here of things you should have learned in your college education courses to prepare you for your first year of teaching. | https://medium.com/illumination/what-first-year-teachers-should-know-about-distance-learning-799f4eeea2ea | ['Aj Krow'] | 2020-07-25 08:26:17.377000+00:00 | ['Teaching', 'Life', 'Education', 'Learning', 'Life Lessons'] |
[iOS App Practice]#2 LINE App’s passcode lock screen | 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/%E5%BD%BC%E5%BE%97%E6%BD%98%E7%9A%84-swift-ios-app-%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BC%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4/practice-ios-app-line-apps-passcode-lock-screen-fe7ff5742aa0 | ['Serena Cheng'] | 2020-12-13 14:27:34.272000+00:00 | ['Swift', 'iPhone', 'Xcode', 'iOS', 'Apps'] |
Freelance Journalism: From idea to published article | Christy Romer is a freelance journalist based in Madrid. His most recent article, Why Valencia, Spain, Has More Bees Than People, was published in CityLab in December.
Aside from the obvious (“it’s stressful”, “the hours suck”, “proper jobs are easier”), no-one ever gives useful advice about freelancing. It’s all romance or pessimism; awe or fear. And trying to find out exactly how much anyone gets paid is a whole lot of awkwardness for a thoroughly depressing pay-off (for the record: I’ve been paid €0, €50, €110 and €350 for a 1,000 word feature).
But back when I was starting out, in the heady days of mid-2018, one question worried me more than any other: How are you supposed to find and sell ideas ?
The answer, experts say, is to just pay attention to the world around you. I remember once reading that a journalist in Amsterdam had ended up with an amazing trafficking exposé because they’d noticed that the prostitutes on their daily commute were now Eastern European, instead of Dutch. I think about that example a lot — it’s exactly the sort of fascinating but overwhelming lead that had always left me paralysed. I’d think: wow, amazing story — but where do you start? Or: there are other journalists already doing similar stories, and better. Or: we’ve not had much about that topic in the news recently, so maybe editors wouldn’t be interested? Or, more simply: it’s difficult and I’m not experienced enough.
They’re not stupid objections — selling an article requires explaining why a story is important, why a particular publication should run it, and why a writer is both best-placed and sufficiently capable of telling it — but they shouldn’t leave you paralysed. Here are eight overly-detailed steps explaining how I confronted such insecurity and went from idea to published article.
Selecting the idea
I don’t know about you, but I write for one reason and one reason only: I love spending my time learning about and sharing things that interest me. I think finding something that interests you must be the starting point for any article.
As it happens, I’m fascinated by pretty much anything and everything. Here are a few ideas that I scribbled down in recent weeks:
A friend of a friend told me he keeps bees in Slovakia. He also told me he was considering buying the second version of FlowHive, a new style of beehive — which has become the fastest crowdfunder ever — and is designed to make harvesting honey idiot-proof
I saw police horses walking through the centre of Madrid at 8pm in the evening. I wondered where the horses stay — in city centre stables? Do they have working hours? Do they get taken to the countryside at night? Is there someone whose job it is to guard the horses at night?
The newspapers keep talking about a new law in Madrid, prohibiting non-electric or non-hybrid cars from entering the centre of the city. But there are lots of garages, mechanics, and produce drop-offs near the office where I work. What will happen to their trade? Is the local council compensating for lost revenue?
I stumbled across a book by an American historian who blamed the Spanish civil war on the left, rather than on a military coup. What was the historian’s deal? Did the book become a sort of right-wing bible? Did someone in Dictator Franco’s Government commission it? Does that mean there were a class of extranjeros (foreigners) who produced this sort of work for the fascist regime?
Although they’re raw, I think there’s potential for drilling down and finding something new and emotionally arresting with each of those ideas. I was particularly interested by the bees, so I started there. I googled FlowHive with an obvious thought: maybe no publications have covered how successful the crowdfunding campaign was? No such luck. There were stories the world over about the invention and the people behind it. The thought of trying to interview the inventors for a different take seemed slightly less worthwhile — other than a specialist bee magazine or business publication (legitimate avenues, but not ones that appealed to me), who would be interested?
Refining the idea
A bit more Googling revealed the FlowHive was being touted as good for putting on roofs and making honey. I also found it was being sold internationally — with a big market in the UK and Australia. As I’m based in Spain, I wondered what the take-up had been like here. Was it selling quickly and leading to a massive social change? Or were people rejecting it? After clicking a few links I found the product would have a smaller market here because urban beekeeping is actually illegal in the country. That was very interesting. Urban beekeeping is fashionable and popular around the world, but illegal in Spain. Why?
A bit more Googling revealed some blog posts from beekeeping charities in the country that had asked this same question, suggesting it was now time for the laws to be changed. Again, the wheels were turning in my head. Maybe there was scope for an article along the lines of: The push to make urban beekeeping legal in Spain?
Talk to people
But only having a few blogs felt disingenuous, as there was no clear and sustained campaign pushing for such change. Also, which English-language publications would be interested in the work of one social organisation? There are millions of charities around the world with millions of specific causes, and therefore millions of individuals fighting for specific causes. I remained curious, though, so I thought the best thing to do would be to get in touch with the charities and ask if they’d be willing to have a quick chat with me about urban beekeeping in Spain. Maybe they’d be able to shed some light on innovative programmes or campaigns around the country.
I emailed the press teams with a routine introduction, saying I was a journalist who was interested in writing a story about urban beekeeping and and asking whether they’d be interested in being interviewed. I added that if so, could they answer a few questions by email or in a 5 minute phone conversation to help me get my bearings: were they planning on launching a campaign? Did they know of any organisations or projects fighting for change?
I was fishing around for the hook of the story — I wanted to base my eventual article on a movement or group of people committed to doing something new. I didn’t think anywhere would be interested in the fact that urban beekeeping was illegal in Spain on its own, but would be in a story about a specific project.
→ As an aside, my favourite stories are those that are incredibly specific but are written in such a way that they’re accessible to anybody. This is my guide for that sort of article.
Wider research
In the meantime, while I gave the charities a day or so to reply, I did some more research about bees and honey in Spain. And there I found some very useful context: Spain is the number one producer of honey inside the EU, making over 20,000 tonnes every year. But news reports also estimated the production of honey had halved in 2018 — with the implication that Spain’s position as the super producer in the EU was at serious risk. I started threading the ideas together, wondering whether it would be possible to set this up as a solution story (which would be more attractive to news outlets): Spain has a huge issue with honey production, which is clearly a big part of its economy, yet it remains one of the few countries to not allow urban beekeeping — a practice which could potentially help it increase production again. Other articles said that bees were sometimes more efficient in cities, or that honey tasted better because bees weren’t dealing with pesticides. Similarly, articles revealed the deadly plight facing bees across the world, with terrifying statistics such as a third of the world’s food being at risk.
The charities came back with some reflections, and a petition to change the law in Madrid, but it still didn’t quite feel like enough. I wanted something concrete, something with a track record. Luckily, the second charity I spoke to suggested contacting Valencia’s local Government, as it was ‘doing something interesting with bees’.
Idea nailed
That lead turned out to be perfect. My initial research hadn’t turned up much about Valencia because lots of the press coverage was in the Valenciano language — a sort of French-ified Spanish. But I found that the council had set up beekeeping conferences and school visits as part of plans to become a city that welcomed urban beekeeping. There was even a council-level plan in the works, codifying city-wide collaboration between firefighters, politicians, environmentalists and beekeepers in a way that completely diverged from national policy. This was it. I called the council for a few days in a row until someone agreed to talk to me (the same approach — I was interested in a story, would anyone have a few minutes to chat), and I found contact details (through Instagram) for an urban beekeeper quoted in one of the Valenciano-language newspapers and got him to agree to an interview too.
Valencia
That was when it started to fall into place. I had a quirky story (bee-friendly programmes in a Spanish city) context (importance of honey to Spain, current crisis of production, bees at huge risk the world over which threatens human livelihood) access to interviews (the local council and an urban beekeeper, quoted in one of the Valenciano-language stories, agreed to chat), a sense of structure (this is how and why one city was responding to a massive national and international crisis, with a suggestion that other cities could do the same). I also asked the council and the beekeeper if I could use any of their photos, which was a big deal when it came to the pitch.
Hammering down on the city project also helped shape where the article would be pitched. It’s surprisingly easy to find city and urban-focused magazines and sections of newspapers, so I figured I could try and pitch the article and even if several places turned it down I’d still have a place to go.
Sending the pitch
I was a huge fan of CityLab — and I’d even read an article they’d previously published about the death of bees — so I sent them a pitch. This was it:
Hi CityLab I’m Christy Romer, a freelance journalist based in Madrid. I’ve been published in The Independent, El Pais, The Guardian / The Observer, and debated live on BBC Radio 4. More examples of my writing on my CV. Pitch The city buzzing to save Spain’s bees Deadly predators, chemical sprays and accelerating climate change have decimated Spain’s bee population and forced them to take refuge in cities. But while most urban areas have dismissed bees as dangerous pests, Valencia has pioneered a city-wide plan to both save the industrious honey producer and reacquaint residents with the possibility of a green, bio-diverse city. Nowhere does the bee crisis seem more pronounced than in Spain, where honey production has collapsed by 50% in one year — sending the country crashing down from its pedestal as the main producer in the EU. Valencia’s radical response over the past four years is a sterling example of city-wide cooperation. Rather than direct the fire department to simply remove the growing number of beehives in city parks, graveyards and streetlights, the council set up municipal colonies and worked with firefighters on a collection and distribution network. These colonies now house 800,000 bees — a figure larger than the city’s total human population — and the council’s new urban beekeeping plan has paved the way for bee workshops in schools, annual urban beekeeping conferences and a successful trial of colonies in local allotments. The projects are going from strength to strength and the council is now eyeing the most difficult challenge of all: licensing ordinary citizens to set up bee colonies on their rooftops. The practice has been developed in New York, Vienna and London, but remains illegal in Spain. Developing the story I’d focus on how the council policies came about and what they mean for urban life I’d include the opinion of local beekeepers and the wider possibilities for Spain — Valencia’s actions are spurring on change in cities across the country I’ve already interviewed the council and the urban beekeeper behind the first allotment colony in Valencia. I also have strong contacts with two charities in the country fighting for urban beekeeping. Images I have permission to use photos of urban beekeeping projects in Valencia (see https://www.instagram.com/p/BqnbtC4BZ2c/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link and https://www.instagram.com/avauapiculturaurbana/) and access to photos of council beekeeping workshops etc. I do hope this is of interest! It’s in many ways a solutions story, as well as a reflection on why some cities take a while to follow the lead of others (NY, London etc). Do contact me by email or phone if you need any more information. Very best Christy
The pitch was modelled on this blog post. I would 100% recommend reading it — a section editor for the New York Times’ Smarter Living section spoke to numerous editors to find out why editorial pitches do and don’t get accepted, and what writers can do to improve their approaches.
I sent the email to CityLab. And waited. I didn’t hear back after a week, so I sent a chasing email, to which the editor of the magazine replied and said yes, they’d be interested in a post! (Advice I’ve read is that you should wait a week to chase — there are 1,001 legitimate reasons for an editor to have not replied to your initial approach, and may just need a nudge. It’s then advised to wait another week or two, before sending a final email — — after which point it’s very much understood and accepted that writers will take their ideas elsewhere if the publication hasn’t replied to them).
When to interview?
Another question: should you conduct interviews before pitching the article? It’s obviously risky / more difficult to do so before, because people are more likely to agree to speak to you after you say the article will be published in X publication. It also may be that the article changes focus once you sell it, meaning you either need to interview different people or ask your subject different things, and it could be emotionally draining to spend weeks / months trying to sell a piece while an interviewee is routinely asking you what will happen with that time they gave you for free.
But I’m starting to think that the flip side is much more compelling. Not only are all of those points surmountable, interviews give you a chance to pick up even quirkier bits of information to drop into a pitch and entice an editor. With the City Lab pitch, the snippet that stood out for the editors was that there are more bees in Valencia than people, which became a key focus for the article’s structure. I heard that — and info about bees fleeing to the city to escape pesticide-soaked rural areas — — from the council rep, who I interviewed on a Friday, before sending the pitch the following Monday.
Writing the article
Everything you do while freelancing is a test — you want this piece of work to go well out of pride and as groundwork for potential future collaboration. So a level of stress kicks in after the excitement of selling an article and negotiating deadlines. The key, though, seems to be to being a nice and dependable person. While obviously not ideal, editors can work with someone whose article needs a bit more support if their responses are prompt and the revisions are done with a good attitude. After all, the editor has already shown interest in the idea, and it’s in their interest to produce something that will work for their readers.
I often umm and ahh over the start of an article — getting the tone and direction right — but I find leaving it to the end takes the pressure off, giving me the necessary mental space to enjoy playing with language. My technique is just to get everything down, not worrying about perfection, then set about repeatedly chiselling the unwieldy monster until the exquisite form hiding underneath is revealed (My first drafts for a 1,000 word article are usually around 3,000 words). I also think it works well to look at the article from multiple ‘angles’: on a laptop, on a mobile, with double spacing, etc… It gives you get a better sense of flow.
So after a two-week deadline, and a few further days of revisions (adding references, pulling some of the context higher up in the article), the draft was agreed and everything went live.
And that was that! No magic, no innate talent that I have that other curious people don’t. Just finding something I was interested in, using Google a lot, listening well, and being friendly.
You can do the same. | https://medium.com/@Christyromer2/freelance-journalism-from-idea-to-published-article-aae1949436a1 | ['Christy Romer'] | 2019-01-21 13:28:40.072000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Publishing', 'Freelance Writing', 'Pitching'] |
“Get Up! It is not over, yet.” | 16.12.2020
This means it has been approximately 350 days since you reeled off a list of 'promises' (in our annual 'new resolutions' ritual).
The dreadful reality is that you possibly have not crossed as many t’s nor dotted many i’s as hoped. The frustration might have succeeded in sending a storm of worry and anxiety through your pores.
A casual peep through your fingers reveals a damning list of plans that never took off. Many, you forgot were made in the first place.
You probably planned to (and been planning to) read a book every week this year and have not touched one, yet. It is still not late to pick a book TODAY and read a CHAPTER.
It might not qualify as a book but you would've at the very least read part of a BOOK (emphasis with intent).
The point I'm trying to make: don't write this year off as waste, yet. You can still perform a miracle by doing ONE thing with INTENT.
Did you want to complete 10 online courses, particularly at the outset of the COVID-19-induced lockdowns across several Countries? (Who didn’t?! I legit registered for over 20 courses. Kindly do not ask how many I walked over the finish line. Thank you.)
Well, you could pick one, anyone, and simply take the first module. Forget the scope of the course and focus on diligently and patiently getting to the end.
If December 31, 2020, catches up with you while still on it, don't fret. Remember your development will not be reset on account of calendar changes. Thank you.
Take this attitude across several other decisions you’ve been struggling to tackle and start nibbling. It’s never too late.
This is what I’m doing now...PUBLISHING my first 'Medium' article (several years after I pledged to do so).
*gets up and pours me a drink* | https://medium.com/@o.ugwuozor/get-up-it-is-not-over-yet-58015461c111 | ['Odinaka Ugwuozor'] | 2020-12-16 22:28:00.407000+00:00 | ['Action', 'Motivation', 'Beginning', 'Authors', 'Startup'] |
Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener review: A budget price makes this system worth the setup hassles | Bringing your garage door into your smart home isn’t the simplest process, nor is it the cheapest: Many smart garage door systems—our top pick, the Chamberlain myQ, notwithstanding—will run you $100 or more. And then there’s the hassle of climbing around on a ladder in your garage and dealing with some often janky wiring.
Meross doesn’t do much about the installation headaches—in fact, it’s one of the more labor-intensive openers on the market, for reasons I’ll explain shortly—but it does help out greatly when it comes to price. At a mere $40, it’s the second cheapest smart opener on the market, after the $30 myQ.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart garage door controllers, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product. Christopher Null / IDG Less-than-articulate installation instructions like this might challenge novices.
Like all of Meross’ products, the initial presentation of the device is decidedly understated. A plain white box contains all the individually packaged components, with nothing but a QR code to direct you to setup instructions and the Meross app. You will need those instructions.
All smart garage door openers have compatibility limitations, and Meross’ is no exception. Like all the other wired openers I’ve tested, Meross’ does not work out of the box with newer, more secure openers and requires a special accessory in order to do so.
Meross doesn’t actually sell this accessory; you are directed to email the company to obtain one directly (for free) if the app’s compatibility checker determines your opener isn’t compatible.
As such, it’s probably worth downloading the app and plugging in your garage door model information before you even purchase the product in order to save yourself an extra trip up the ladder in your garage. I ended up installing the device on a slightly older Liftmaster that did not need the accessory. The other two openers in my garage, however, would have required one.
[ Further reading: A smart home guide for beginners ]While Meross’ installation instructions are far from perfect, hardware setup is similar in most ways to other smart garage door openers. The opener plugs directly into wall power, and two bare wire leads connect the Meross opener to terminals on the back of the garage door motor, either through screw posts or spring-loaded connectors. Meross throws you for a twist, however, in its choice of door sensor technology, which is used to tell the app whether the garage door is open or shut. While most smart openers use a wireless sensor that mounts to the door and can sense whether it is upright (door shut) or horizontal (door open), Meross instead relies on a two-part magnetic sensor similar to the type used in a home security system.
Christopher Null / IDG A simple in-app animation tells you when your door is in motion.
That’s an interesting idea—except the sensor must connect to the Meross opener via a long wire. You snake this wire along the track, much like you do with the infrared sensors used to determine whether the door opening is blocked, and carefully position the magnets somewhere on the door.
Getting this all situated isn’t the simplest process, because if the sensor wire hits the chain, it can easily rip the whole thing apart. Meross doesn’t provide any accessories to make this easy, so bring some binder clips to make the process a bit cleaner. (Gloves are also a good idea, since the track can be quite oily.)
The good news is that the lack of a wireless door sensor takes one potential trouble spot out of the equation, and the MSG100 need only communicate with your router via Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) in order to maintain its connection. Setup through the Meross app was quick and error-free in my testing, after which I was able to use the app to freely open and close the door.
Alexa and Google Assistant are both supported, letting you use your voice to operate the controls, and the MSG100 also supports both Samsung SmartThings and IFTTT. A different version of this product (model MSG100HK) supports Apple HomeKit, but it was not available at press time.
I particularly enjoyed the thoughtful additional features in the app, including an “overtime reminder,” which pushes a warning if the door is left open for a user-configured length of time, and the “overnight reminder,” which alerts you if the door is open after hours (at a time you set). You can also set the door to close automatically after it’s been open for a set time, or close at a certain time of day. My only complaint with the app is that it can be slow to respond—opening the door can take 5 to 10 seconds of “thinking” in some cases—but that’s a minor issue. All activity is logged in the app, and push notifications are also sent to your phone for just about everything.
Meross’s installation is more onerous than most smart garage products, but for just $40, one might feel able to tolerate a bit of a headache. If MyQ’s opener doesn’t work for you, this is our second-best recommendation.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@mike70640708/meross-smart-wi-fi-garage-door-opener-review-a-budget-price-makes-this-system-worth-the-setup-5df9782d7920 | [] | 2020-12-25 01:36:46.301000+00:00 | ['Headphones', 'Entertainment', 'Audio'] |
Getting Started with JavaFX | Maybe you are new to programming and want to start making stunning projects! Perhaps, you have been coding for years and want to make fun side projects. Well, with JavaFX you can enhance your practical knowledge of Object Oriented programming while having a blast!
Before we dive into a brief example, we need to make sure we have all we need to get started. Below is a list of prerequisites for our short project.
Java. An IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans, etc.) JavaFX jar files. A little knowledge of classes and objects in modern programming languages.
Once you have those, you are all set! JavaFX is a tool that allows us to build GUI(Graphical User Interface) applications with Java. It is very simple to pick up and can be quite fun to use. Now, let’s start our project.
Open your IDE. (I am using Eclipse, but the process should be similar on most Java IDEs.) Choose a workplace location on your computer. Create a new Java project with the name SolarSystem or anything that you like. In your project, select the src package. In that package create a Java class called “JavaFXDemo”. Next, go to the project tab at the top of your screen and select properties. Choose the build path option and paste the jar’s from your JavaFX download into the classpath. Finally, add the JRE needed for running JavaFX applications. Go to the Run tab -> run configurations -> arguments. Then add the following line to the VM arguments entry box: “ — module-path (path to javafx 11 lib folder)— add-modules=javafx.controls” (View the link below from StackOverflow for more help with this issue).
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51478675/error-javafx-runtime-components-are-missing-and-are-required-to-run-this-appli
Now, we have a Java class that will serve as the code that builds our mini solar system. Let’s import the needed classes with the following statements. (To make this easier to follow, the all of the instructions will be in bold for the rest of this article and the code will be in regular font).
import javafx.animation.PathTransition;
import javafx.animation.Timeline;
import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.layout.Pane;
import javafx.scene.layout.StackPane;
import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
import javafx.scene.shape.Circle;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
Great, now we need to make sure that our JavaFXDemo class extends Application and that we override its start method.
@Override
public void start(Stage arg0) throws Exception {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
//Create a pane.
StackPane pane = new StackPane();
Then we will add a StackPane object that will hold our model solar system. After that, we can add three Circle objects that will represent the sun, earth, and earth’s orbit.
//Create two Circle objects for the sun and earth.
Circle sun = new Circle();
Circle earth = new Circle();
//Create one more Circle earth’s path of travel.
Circle earthOrbit = new Circle();
We can now customize these circle’s with methods such as setRadius() and setFill(). We can also make a PathTransition object that we can use to place our earth circle onto the circle for its orbit. We can customize the PathTransition with methods like setOrientation() and setRate().
//Set the radius of the Sun, earth, and earth’s orbit.
sun.setRadius(50.0);
sun.setFill(Color.YELLOW);
earthOrbit.setRadius(100.0);
earthOrbit.setFill(Color.BLACK);
earth.setRadius(10.0);
earth.setFill(Color.BLUE);
//Make a PathTransition object for the earth and establish some attributes.
PathTransition pathTransition = new PathTransition();
pathTransition.setPath(earthOrbit);
pathTransition.setNode(earth);
pathTransition.setOrientation(PathTransition.OrientationType.ORTHOGONAL_TO_TANGENT);
pathTransition.setRate(0.2);
pathTransition.setAutoReverse(false);
pathTransition.setCycleCount(Timeline.INDEFINITE);
Now we just need to use the play method to start our PathTransition object and add all of our Circles onto our pane. Finally, we’ll add our pane object to a Scene object and that Scene object to our Stage parameter. Once we call the stage argument’s show method it will become visible.
pathTransition.play();
//Finally, add the nodes onto the pane.
pane.getChildren().add(earthOrbit);
pane.getChildren().add(earth);
pane.getChildren().add(sun);
//Make a Scene object and use the Pane object as its argument.
Scene scene = new Scene(pane,100,100);
arg0.setScene(scene);
arg0.show();
}
To finish our application, we must create a main method and use Application.launch() to start our app.
public static void main(String[] args) {
Application.launch(args);
}
}
That’s all! You now have all the knowledge you need to create a model of our solar system in JavaFX. If you want to make your project more appealing, try experimenting with more of the Circle objects’ methods. Also, feel free to look at the GitHub repository at the end of this article for more ideas, or view OpenJDK’s website. Have fun coding!
GitHub Solar System Repository : https://github.com/pbaileydev/SolarSystem | https://medium.com/@pbaileydev/getting-started-with-javafx-a88f9709acd0 | ['Phillip Bailey'] | 2020-12-12 01:52:45.246000+00:00 | ['Easy', 'Fun', 'Javafx', 'Java', 'Programming'] |
Conditioning Yourself to Give | I grew up frugal. Let me paint a picture. My parents wouldn’t let me donate clothes unless I had outgrown them. We had a storage room in the basement where we’d stock food items that we found on sale, and then buy like, 10 of them and keep them until the next sale. My mother would feel like she had failed if something in the fridge went bad and she had to throw it out, and I can only remember her doing that a handful of times over 25 years.
My parents would keep everything from my childhood, including a small xylophone, which I used for practice through about 8 years of orchestra and band. We kept my childhood electric keyboard until I was married and had toddlers of my own. My dad insisted I keep both musical instruments so my kids could play them too.
My immigrant parents grew up with 8 and 14 kids in their respective families. It’s probably accurate to say that the life they built in Canada was the single largest accumulation of wealth in only one generation at any point in either of their family trees. They had much, much more, but they never left the frugal way each of them were raised. So this is how I grew up, as though resources were scarce, and to respect and use everything we had instead of thinking of it as disposable. Honestly, if everyone in every first-world developed nation went about their lives as my parents did, we would not be in the environmental crisis in which we presently find ourselves.
If everyone in Canada and the US were as careful with their money as well, it would not only tank the economy but severely curb the rampant consumerism that we as a society believe we must embrace. My family went clothes shopping at an outlet store maybe three times a year, and that was only when my brother and I were still quickly growing, up until our teenage years. And even then we each got three or four new items. We never felt like we didn’t have enough, but that was exactly what we had — just enough. Always just enough.
But here’s the flip side of growing up with decades of that frugal mentality, right from birth — you are forever in the mindset of conserving and storing resources. You spread the cream cheese on your bagel razor thin so that it’s just enough. You put a small blob of paint onto your palette so that it’ll be just enough of that colour for your picture and nothing will go unused. You think it over a few times before buying a sandwich outside because there’s food sitting in your fridge, and you’ve already got just enough groceries for this week. You don’t buy the sandwich because its addition will spill over into excess. And you’ve been conditioned into the religion of Just Enough.
Now, I grew up privileged. We were not left wanting for anything, but we also didn’t do luxuries. We ate at restaurants only on birthdays but did have fast food regularly. I suppose that conservation mentality the rest of the time gave us the money to spend on trips to India every few years, and allowed my parents to pay off their house relatively quickly in a choppy economic climate. But I also never learned to think beyond myself or my own resources. It didn’t occur to me until fairly recently that when you have a certain type of privilege (wealth; health; being straight; being cis; being male; and let’s be honest, being white), it comes with a responsibility to leverage that privilege to help balance the scales for those who don’t have the benefits of living as you have.
That wouldn’t have figured into my parents’ upbringing though. With a football team full of kids, you don’t — can’t — think beyond yourself or your immediate family. But we weren’t that family of 10-plus people anymore. We were wealthier than any of our ancestors had ever been in the old country, with 75% fewer kids.
It didn’t even cross my mind that the frugality that I’d thought was the norm was quite a fringe way of thinking. Not until I met my partner, who had grown up lower middle-class, but was raised to give one of whatever he happened to be holding, if he was holding two of it. My family gave on special occasions or when it suited our purposes, like on religious days where we honoured our ancestors by donating food, or food drives at my school. We didn’t just up and buy a bunch of clothes and give it to our nearest shelter. In fact, when I started doing that type of thing as an adult, my dad would question why because it wasn’t a full moon or a new moon day.
My partner was the one who turned the frugal philosophy of my entire upbringing on its head. When we were discussing this in our early days, he called it hording. I was insulted. I told him I wouldn’t have the savings I had, and I wouldn’t have been able to pay down debt without this mindset. He said that’s fine, insofar as my needs. But beyond one’s needs, it’s hording.
“Think about that keyboard,” he said. “Except for some dust, it doesn’t even look used. You think you were keeping it for when you would use it again, or when our kids would use it, but you kept it for 25 years, not using it at all in that time. Someone else, or several other people could have been using it during all those years. Now, it’s doubtful it may even switch on, and you don’t know for sure that our kids would even want a keyboard. If they do, they sure won’t want one that’s 25 years old. When you were 10 years old, would you have wanted a keyboard from 1967?”
Holy duck.
In my zeal to preserve and conserve a bunch of things, I’d been wasting the worst thing of all — time. I’d taken my parents’ style of life management and thought of it as gospel, going through my whole life not realising that it’s not about what I, singular, have and may or may not use. It’s about what I, singular, have that has a fair likelihood of being used by anyone, plural. It’s not about my life alone, it’s about the stuff being employed to improve someone else’s life.
Yes, I realise very few people’s lives will turn on an electric keyboard. For those of you who are anxious about that, it did switch on, and it was donated as soon as was humanly possible after that conversation. Another thing that dawned on me after hearing my partner’s take was about my parents’ dogma of saving every penny. It applied when they were growing up for obvious reasons, but they actually didn’t realise they had a lot more room to spend as adults than they allowed themselves. So much room, in fact, that my mom died not ever having enjoyed life because she was too focused on socking things away for a future she didn’t end up having.
I had to re-condition myself, and part of that involved actively telling myself that spending that extra $20 to drop off at a food bank wouldn’t take away from my retirement. What helped immensely was joining a fantastic Facebook page called Northern Canada Mini Projects, where so many of the members are like Santa on crack. The pure joy and rush these people get when they pack a box of new or gently used clothing, food, baby accessories, toiletries, or Christmas/summer gifts is contagious. Some of them even keep spreadsheets to track all the boxes they send up North to different locations, and many of them involve their friends and neighbours in group initiatives to share shipping costs.
Through them, I learned about what scarcity of resources actually looks like. It looks like $100 for a single watermelon or a $22 jar or peanut butter, because of the freight costs for everyday items to reach remote communities in Canada’s north. I learned about how hard these mostly Indigenous towns have to fight to get basic resources from the government, and how grateful they are that people in southern Canada are using part of their household budgets to help. Most importantly, I learned about the inimitable rewards of direct giving — handing food or clothes directly over to whomever they will benefit instead of donating $20 online to a charity that will use part of your gift for administrative fees and junk mail.
University me would think Today me is blowing through cash like there’s no tomorrow. But both versions of me have their budgets on the same spectrum, in the same range of what middle-class Canadians spend on extras. Only now, my priorities are different.
Also, think about it — there IS no guarantee of a tomorrow. There’s only a high likelihood of a tomorrow that we take for granted in order to avoid plunging ourselves into an existential crisis before we fall asleep at night. But there is a guarantee that there will always be a hungry person somewhere who has done everything they can to avoid going to get cans from a food bank. There’s a guarantee that there will be homeless people in Iqaluit, Nunavut, who have taken to sleeping under overturned canoes in -20 Celsius weather, who could sure use an insulated coat that’s in someone’s closet waiting to be worn for the first time in years. There is a guarantee that the women’s shelter in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut will have new tenants walk in with nothing but what’s in a backpack and what’s on their backs.
I read something profound once that I’ll always keep with me — that when you’re presented with a situation, the first thought that pops into your head is how you’ve been raised to react to it. Like seeing a lady walking down the street and immediately thinking she’s way too old to be wearing a skirt so short. But the subsequent thoughts that come into your head indicate what you’ve become, and what you really believe — like thinking, no, wait, she doesn’t need other people’s judgment. You rock that skirt, lady!
That’s the conditioning I hope to give my kids right now regarding giving. I don’t want generosity and openmindedness to be an afterthought the way it’s been for much of my life. When they have two of something, I want their immediate reaction to be to give at least one of them over to someone who doesn’t have any. When we go grocery shopping, I hope they’ll notice pasta is on sale and that we should buy a few for a box to send up North; not that we should buy a few to store in the basement. When their clothes are still in good condition but they want to buy a few different things for themselves, I hope they’ll pack them away to give to parents who can’t afford kids clothes — not pack them away to save for 30 years for their own kids.
After years of deconditioning and reconditioning to think of those people as part of my family and as part of the group of people for whom I budget, I’m happier with myself as a person. It’s the mental feeling of unzipping your skinny jeans and putting on those sweatpants. It’s the solace and reassurance that you’re going to be fine, even if you’re not in hunter-gatherer mode 24/7. But it’s also the constant awareness that unless you’re in more of a giving mode, someone else may not be fine. And I want to think of those someone else’s with as much regard as I think of my own kids. | https://medium.com/@kamyaramaswamy/conditioning-yourself-to-give-e658c7e9588b | ['Kamya Ramaswamy'] | 2019-12-11 22:02:23.225000+00:00 | ['Generosity', 'Changing Your Life', 'Giving', 'Inner Journey', 'Life Lessons'] |
The Sex Saboteur Sisters Who Lured Nazis To Their Death | This remarkable woman, alongside her sister and best friend Hannie Schaft, were super-agents for the resistance in World War II. From a young age, she was raised in a socialist household by a mother who taught her the value of life. Her mother, Trijn, raised her children as a solo mum in the Dutch city of Haarlem. As the politics flared in Germany, people were fleeing the country and crossing the border to escape persecution. The 1930s saw the Oversteegen household harbor Jews, dissidents, and gays. All smuggled in the dead of night.
Soon the war arrived in the Netherlands. Trijn realized that her library of communist literature was a major attraction to the Nazis who wanted nothing more than to lock up people with free thought. It pained her dearly to lose the books in the burning but she held fast to her beliefs and the importance of fighting injustice.
The resistance had noticed.
The sisters were already causing a nuisance among the authorities. They could be seen handing out anti-Nazi pamphlets and “glued warnings across German posters in the street calling men to work in Germany.” recalled Freddie in a later interview.
Freddie (left) and Truus. Photo sourced from Manon Hoornstra
Joining the resistance was the logical progression. The younger Freddie looked angelic. When she wore her hair in braids she could be mistaken for 12. The Nazi’s didn’t suspect a thing. Nobody was on the look-out for a sweet twelve-year-old girl who liked nothing more than to blow up bridges and sabotage railways!
The two sisters began as couriers, moving weapons and stealing identity papers to help Jewish people escape. Then arson followed by assassination. The two were remarkably efficient at it. Taken one night to a warehouse, they were both taught how to use a pistol and where best to shoot. Their favorite method was to saddle up behind their mum on a bike and shoot Nazis as they rode past. Again, the thought of a petite young girl shooting to kill as she rode past on her pretty bicycle was way beyond the German’s comprehension.
Some targets were Dutch collaborators who gave the Nazis details of Jewish and dissident families. Others were high-ranking Nazi officers.
Truus Oversteegen with a Sten gun. Photo by Sophie Poldermans
One night, their assignment was to “liquidate” a member of the SS. The sisters found their target in a restaurant. Truus, now an attractive 18-year-old, smiling coyly at the officer. With a flash of leg, a hint of sex to come, Truus lured him out. Like many men who were to die at her hands after him, the officer couldn’t resist the suggestion of a proposed walk in the forest. Gleefully he followed Truus, the seductive trap sprung as a resistance fighter stepped out of hiding and shot him.
“They were unusual, these girls,” says Bas von Benda-Beckmann, a former researcher at the Netherlands’ Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “There were a lot of women involved in the resistance in the Netherlands but not so much in the way these girls were. There are not that many examples of women who actually shot collaborators themselves.” Source — History.com
It wouldn’t take long before they were going on missions by themselves. They never revealed how many Nazis and Dutch collaborators they assassinated.
Their friend Hannie join them and the trio became inseparable. A hardcore resistance machine taking down Nazis wherever they went. Hannie became known as the ‘Girl with the Red Hair’ which made her easy to spot. She would be captured by a German guard who saw through her disguise. Her distinctive red hair was showing through the roots. The sisters were devastated when the Nazis arrested and killed her in 1945, just three weeks before the war ended in Europe. Hannie’s infamous last words were “I’m a better shot,” after initially only being wounded by her executioner. | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-sex-saboteur-sisters-who-lured-nazis-to-their-death-e2443082023a | ['Reuben Salsa'] | 2020-11-18 22:48:08.757000+00:00 | ['Nazis', 'Resistance', 'Salsa', 'History', 'World War II'] |
RSS feed for for twitter | A simple question that for some reason does not have a simple answer:
“I want to follow someone’s twitter feed using an RSS reader, where is it?”
Well it seems that for some reason Twitter has quite hidden it but as a public service I will share the results of my research with you.
You will find it at:
So, for my twitter feed it is:
Of course, users of BlogBridge have a much easier time and have many more options. With BlogBridge you can subscribe to a person, to a list, or even to a general Twitter query, like “Object Oriented Marketing”.
Watch this brief video to see how you would do it in BlogBridge: | https://medium.com/pito-s-blog/rss-feed-for-for-twitter-e88d1f01cd77 | ['Pito Salas'] | 2017-06-08 19:19:59.972000+00:00 | ['Geeky', 'Blogbridge', 'RSS', 'Subscribe', 'Feed'] |
5 Reasons “God Friended Me” is a Game-Changer | I’m gonna ruffle some feathers here.
The term “faith-based entertainment” — which I use grudgingly at times because that is what my fellow journalist friends use — all-too-often means “no thanks, I’ll watch something else”. It translates roughly to unwatchable, preachy, and and most of all…not entertaining.
Like you, I’ve been yearning for premium faith content that I actually want to watch. And, like you, I was beginning to despair of ever seeing that, especially on network TV.
And then, “God Friended Me” came along out of nowhere.
Now, here’s the thing.
Hollywood has tried to do this stuff often, the problem is that typically, Hollywood is as bad at making it as some of the independent “faith-based” creators, but in a different way. The independents make stuff that just isn’t watchable, but is solid from a theology perspective. Hollywood makes stuff that is watchable, but is a theological train wreck.
Fundamentally, the industry doesn’t understand “our crowd” and so they have a hard time understanding what is going to work and what won’t. Case in point, I once had a studio producer show me some content that featured demons as the heros, and I had to inform him that — while this is technically faith-based if you really want to point a fine point on it — that’s not the faith we are all talking about. He was genuinely surprised.
Billboard in Los Angeles
So, with this background before you, you’ll forgive me for being completely cynical when I saw the billboard near my home in Los Angeles. My instant reaction was, “Good Lord, what irreverent, horrible, tone-deaf thing are they going to do this time?”
And then, a reporter friend of mine called and said, “Hey, I know you know this audience in and out, can you comment on a story I’m writing on this new CBS show?”
“Sure,” I said, and then fired up my Apple TV to watch the pilot.
(Incidentally, you can watch it streaming by clicking here)
So, I watched.
And I watched.
And I kept watching.
Scene from “God Friended Me”
I immediately ran to the kitchen and proclaimed to my wife, “You have to see this!”
She came in, we finished, and we looked at each other. We were silent.
I was instantly reminded of an interview I did with ENJOY CEO Ron Johnson for my Dove Channel series, in which the famous Apple Store creator laid out the new for some “new thinking” in the conversation on faith. The faith community — he explained — had been relying on just the heart to articulate faith for far too long, and argued that we also needed to consider the concept of the path to faith through the mind (this is absolutely, 300% Biblical).
So, I called reporter Christian Toto and told him what I thought.
(P.S. Here’s the full story Christian wrote for The Washington Times by the way, absolutely worth a read.)
“We are long-overdue for some new thinking in how we communicate faith to a new generation,” said Mr. Faraci, president of Inspire Buzz, a marketing firm that promotes family-friendly content. “The reason ‘God Friended Me’ is working is that it’s doing that, not pulling from the old playbook.” The show’s depiction of Miles’ conflicted thoughts on faith are instantly relatable, he said. “They’re having the conversation in the show that young people are already having. … A lot of faith content is speaking to an older generation,” Mr. Faraci said. The new show is “thought-provoking, fresh and different. It asks really good questions that people from the faith community appreciate and people who don’t come from a faith background appreciate, too.”
If you’ve read this far, you’re thinking — Ok ENOUGH ALREADY — just tell me why this show is so great.
It’s Entertaining as All Get Out : Like it’s predecessor (without which I’m not sure this would have been made) The Good Place, you have absolutely no idea what is going to happen and the show keeps you guessing. Above all else, it’s just great TV no matter who you are.
: Like it’s predecessor (without which I’m not sure this would have been made) The Good Place, you have absolutely no idea what is going to happen and the show keeps you guessing. Above all else, it’s just great TV no matter who you are. It Explores Faith for a New Generation, While Keeping it Interesting for Everyone Else: The show assumes the viewer has little grid for traditional religion and plays on that, but also alludes to the fact that many Millennails still believe in a Higher Power and are asking deep, existential questions. It explores all of these things you’ve heard people talk about, from a multi-generational view.
The show assumes the viewer has little grid for traditional religion and plays on that, but also alludes to the fact that many Millennails still believe in a Higher Power and are asking deep, existential questions. It explores all of these things you’ve heard people talk about, from a multi-generational view. The Cast is Diverse Without Being Forced: you’d think a cast featuring a group like this would be cliche’, but it’s not. The characters work beautfully together, one of the reasons the show is so fresh, fun, and different. There are so many storylines and each character really works. Can’t wait to see how the patchwork comes together.
you’d think a cast featuring a group like this would be cliche’, but it’s not. The characters work beautfully together, one of the reasons the show is so fresh, fun, and different. There are so many storylines and each character really works. Can’t wait to see how the patchwork comes together. The Show is Focused on What God is Focused on — People : Without knowing where the show is going after just two episodes, one thing is clear, this show is all heart. Rather than focusing on doctrine or religion, it’s focused on God’s heart for people, and our role in His plan by being is hands and feet. In the words of Ron Johnson, making love visual.
: Without knowing where the show is going after just two episodes, one thing is clear, this show is all heart. Rather than focusing on doctrine or religion, it’s focused on God’s heart for people, and our role in His plan by being is hands and feet. In the words of Ron Johnson, making love visual. America is Itching to Have this Conversation on Screen: We all know that faith can be explored in a fun and fresh way, we just didn’t know that network TV was capable of putting something up that accomplished that goal. I’m still pinching myself. How did this thing get up there again? The fact is, this really does hit the cultural nail on the head, and is sparkling conversations all over the place.
(Incidentally, the Rotten Tomatoes audience is loving it too, with 81% saying yes yes yes we like)
So congrats to CBS, you have a hit on your hands.
We can’t wait to see how you — and potentially other players in a traditionally clueless town when it comes to faith — might be able to change our expectations. | https://medium.com/inspirebuzz/5-reasons-god-friended-me-is-a-game-changer-7e916feea64 | ['Matthew Faraci'] | 2018-10-13 12:31:07.190000+00:00 | ['TV Shows', 'Religion', 'TV Series', 'Faith', 'Entertainment'] |
5 quick tips when creating a design system in Sketch | Things can really turn into one long Layer List of confusion if you leave the renaming and organisation of Layers till the end of a project.
Back in the day, I used to sort out this layer spaghetti manually. Yeah, I’m one of the crazy ones. But now there so many great plugins out there that can help you quickly sort out the renaming and organisation of your Layers, and I’ll be touching upon these in the next tip.
Now, that’s not to say you should leave everything right to the end, and X plugin’s magical fairy dust should be sprinkled over your System, which it could, but to rename, and organise sections as you move along. Just small chunks at a time will ease the burden when you come to put X plugin to work.
Tab and Cmd + R are two of the most valuable shortcuts to know in Sketch. Use them. Frequently. | https://uxdesign.cc/5-quick-tips-when-creating-a-design-system-in-sketch-b8dcbc1fcc7a | ['Marc Andrew'] | 2020-11-06 14:22:22.086000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Sketch', 'Design Systems', 'UX', 'UI'] |
Don’t crease them! | Don’t crease them!
I waited to stare at the window for the mail lady to drop my new shoes off. My all-white Air Force 1s! I was so excited. Beep beep. The mail lady dropped my box off. I picked it up. I was quite excited. I slipped them on very carefully. Attempting not to crease them! I decided to take cute, trendy Instagram pictures. I walked out the door very stiff. Watching my feet to make sure not one inch got creased. Boom! I tumbled down all thirteen stairs. In the end, my whole shoe got ripped open. There goes not trying to crease my new shoes. | https://medium.com/@crrsycei/dont-crease-them-2c95e1df1ed0 | [] | 2020-12-27 08:56:35.322000+00:00 | ['Shoes', 'Funny', 'Fashion'] |
[Leet Code] Maximum Nesting Depth of the Parentheses | LeetCode: https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-nesting-depth-of-the-parentheses/
Problem:
A string is a valid parentheses string (denoted VPS) if it meets one of the following:
It is an empty string "" , or a single character not equal to "(" or ")" ,
, or a single character not equal to or , It can be written as AB ( A concatenated with B ), where A and B are VPS 's, or
( concatenated with ), where and are 's, or It can be written as (A) , where A is a VPS.
We can similarly define the nesting depth depth(S) of any VPS S as follows:
depth("") = 0
depth(C) = 0 , where C is a string with a single character not equal to "(" or ")" .
, where is a string with a single character not equal to or . depth(A + B) = max(depth(A), depth(B)) , where A and B are VPS 's.
, where and are 's. depth("(" + A + ")") = 1 + depth(A) , where A is a VPS.
For example, "" , "()()" , and "()(()())" are VPS's (with nesting depths 0, 1, and 2), and ")(" and "(()" are not VPS's.
Given a VPS represented as string s , return the nesting depth of s .
Example 1:
Input: s = "(1+(2*3)+((8)/4))+1"
Output: 3
Explanation: Digit 8 is inside of 3 nested parentheses in the string.
Example 2:
Input: s = "(1)+((2))+(((3)))"
Output: 3
Example 3:
Input: s = "1+(2*3)/(2-1)"
Output: 1
Example 4:
Input: s = "1"
Output: 0
Solution:
class Solution(object):
def maxDepth(self, s):
"""
:type s: str
:rtype: int
"""
stack = []
max_val = 0
for i in s:
if i == "(":
stack.append(i)
if i == ")":
stack.pop()
length = len(stack)
if length > max_val:
max_val = length
return max_val
Explanation: | https://medium.com/@matthewboyd123/leet-code-maximum-nesting-depth-of-the-parentheses-f773c63c4d41 | ['Matthew Boyd'] | 2020-12-13 18:02:54.785000+00:00 | ['Leetcode', 'Leetcode Easy', 'Data Structures', 'Algorithms', 'Leetcode Solution'] |
A case for akka-coordination lease | In a project I currently work on we have to run only one instance of a particular service. Basically it’s a service reading a stream of akka-persistence events and building a kind of read model out of those. There is a single events stream and each “entity” follows certain state changes that result in database updates on the projections side. Sounds like a typical Singleton pattern that can be programmed around e.g. Akka’s cluster singleton, right? Yes – and no at the same time.
unsplash.com
The case is that while the service we want to have a single instance of is indeed logically part of an application that is already using Akka Cluster, it is not really justified to put this app in the cluster just to make use of Cluster Singleton. The application isn’t expected to use any other clustering goodies.
Exploring available options
First thing to note before we dive into research: if you decide on using a Singleton pattern you should be aware of consequences and limitations you introduce by that: scalability and availability among the others. Obviously you can’t scale a singleton in a way other than adding more resources to it but this can only go so far. Regarding availability, you need to consider and prepare for cases where the app is simply not available for some timespan. E.g. if it fails due to an OutOfMemory error, there is a time required to detect it and restart/bootstrap a new instance as there is no sibling instance that can take over the load.
Ok, let’s move on to some options available.
As we’re lucky to be on Kubernetes regarding our deployment, the first idea would be to just use its ReplicaSet with a number of replicas set to 1. It’s ok when things are fine, there is just 1 instance of the app running. It starts to complicate when there is e.g. a rolling update in progress or some network instability happens. Take for example a scenario when there is an app running and for some reason it stops responding to readiness/liveness checks. In this case k8s will start another pod assuming the original one died for some reason. When after some time the first pod comes back, there is a slight timespan during which there are two instances of the app running until k8s sorts it out and kills one. This is because a ReplicaSet works in a way where it guarantees the “at least”, not “at most” or “exactly” in terms of the number of replicas running at any given moment.
Another Kubernetes-based option would be to use a StatefulSet which can provide stronger guarantees in terms of pods lifecycle, meaning it will not start new pods until the previous ones gets shut down completely with regards to desired number of pods. At the first sight it looks fine as it doesn’t violate singleton guarantees, but there are some limitations of a StatefulSet that make it quite complex to use (volumes management, headless service requirement etc.)
You can finally try managing the singleton-like behavior on your own, e.g. by instances updating some persistent entry to control which running instance is in charge of being active and which one is in kind of “standby mode”. But that’s a lot of infrastructure-related code (track current active instances, record heartbeats, manage timeouts in case of failures etc.)
This sure looks like a good candidate for a reusable piece of code/library to use and this is where akka-coordination and its Lease concept take the scene. As said on their doc:
The lease is a pluggable API for a distributed lock.
and
Any lease implementation should provide the following guarantees:
— A lease with the same name loaded multiple times, even on different nodes, is the same lease
— Only one owner can acquire the lease at a time
The only available (official) implementation at the moment of writing is kubernetes-lease. Looks like a good match for our use case so let’s review general lease usage in more details.
First you need to create lease instance using LeaseProvider and by passing lease name, config key that contains this specific lease’s configuration (implementation dependent) and the owner of the lease which should be unique for all instances working with given lease (hostname and port of the ActorSystem combination is a good default here).
val lease = LeaseProvider(actorSystem).getLease(leaseName, leaseConfigKey, owner)
Once a lease is created you can attempt to acquire it, calling which gives you Future[Boolean] indicating whether a lease was acquired or not (it’s already acquired by another instance).
lease.acquire(leaseLostCallback).map { acquired =>
if(acquired)
// run singleton logic
else
// schedule next acquisition attempt
}.recover {
case e: Throwable => // schedule next acquisition attempt
}
If a lease gets acquired you’re free to start your singleton-based logic to do its work as it’s guaranteed to be only one instance running at that time. Otherwise you should keep polling acquire in arbitrary intervals to be ready to take over when current owner releases the lease or when it times out, making the lease available for acquisition. You can pass optional leaseLostCallback to acquire to be called when this instance suddenly loses the lease to do some cleanup etc. and go back to polling acquire . When an instance being the active singleton is about to shut down, it should explicitly release the lease rather than let it time out (not sending heartbeat in configured time). It will allow for smoother and shorter transitions. In case of current lease owner failure it’s a combination of heartbeat-interval and heartbeat-timeout configuration properties that defines how long it will take for the lease to be available for the other instances to pick it up.
That’s basically all that is to using Lease in general. Now let’s look at a Kubernetes-specific lease that we use. In general, as stated in the docs, that lease implementation can be used as an enhancement for Split Brain Resolver, Cluster Singleton and Cluster Sharding increasing consistency of these, but it can simply be used more directly as in our case — to manage simple singleton-based service deployed on Kubernetes.
It’s built on top of Kubernetes CRD (Custom Resource Definition) that already provides concurrency and consistency control so that it’s enough to build a kind of distributed lock on. This also means that lease resource type needs to be created first (together with corresponding RBAC) in the cluster. That’s a one-time operation requiring cluster admin privileges.
apiVersion: apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1
name: leases.akka.io
spec:
group: akka.io
version: v1
scope: Namespaced
names:
plural: leases
singular: lease
kind: Lease
shortNames:
- le
and
kind: Role
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
name: lease-access
rules:
- apiGroups: [“akka.io”]
resources: [“leases”]
verbs: [“get”, “create”, “update”, “list”]
--
kind: RoleBinding
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
name: lease-access
subjects:
- kind: User
name: system:serviceaccount:<YOUR NAMSPACE>:default
roleRef:
kind: Role
name: lease-accese
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
This allows applications to create and update lease instances within their namespaces later, without any special privileges required. Now just a piece of configuration on the application level where kubernetes-lease already contains the defaults under akka.lease.kubernetes config key and you’re ready to use it with generic Lease API as described above. You may probably want to tweak the configuration parameters related to heartbeats to minimize takeover time depending on your needs but in general you now have your singleton service guarded from running into data consistency issues.
Summary
Sure, using a singleton pattern has its drawbacks, but it’s a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. If you decide to use one, it’s required to understand the consequences and have strong guarantees that the singleton pattern is not violated as it may result in some hard to revert data corruption. | https://blog.softwaremill.com/a-case-for-akka-coordination-lease-4867887e4d7f | ['Michał Ostruszka'] | 2020-11-23 09:27:52.264000+00:00 | ['Akka Persistence', 'Scala', 'Kubernetes', 'Akka'] |
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TELEVISION SHOW AND HISTORY
A television show (often simply ) is any content prBookmark this siteoduced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a tv set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are usually placed between shows. s ‘re normally scheduled well ahead of The G0G with Grandpa and appear on electronic guides or other TV listings.
A television show may also be called a tv program (British EnBookmark this siteglish: programme), especially if it lacks a narrative structure. A tv set Movies may be the G0G with Grandpaually released in MoViE that follow a narrative, and are The G0G with Grandpaually divided into seasons (The G0G with Grandpa and Canada) or Movies (UK) — yearly or semiaual sets of new MoViE. A show with a restricted number of MoViE could be called a miniMBookmark this siteovies, serial, or limited Movies. A one-The G0G with Grandpa show could be called a “special”. A tv set film (“made-for-TV movie” or “televisioBookmark this siten movie”) is a film that`s initially broadcast on television instead of released in theaters or direct-to-video.
Television shows may very well be Bookmark this sitehey are broadcast in real The G0G with Grandpa (live), be recorded on home video or an electronic video recorder for later viewing, or be looked at on demand via a set-top box or streameBookmark this sited over the internet.
The first television set shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within an extremely short range from the broadcast tower starting in the. Televised events such as the 60006 Summer OlyBookmark this sitempics in Germany, the 60006 coronation of King George VI in the united kingdom, and David Sarnoff’s famoThe G0G with Grandpa introduction at the 6 New York World’s Fair in the The G0G with Grandpa spurreBookmark this sited a rise in the medium, but World G0G II put a halt to development until following the G0G. The 626 World Movies inspired many Americans to get their first television set and in 622, the popular radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “Mr Television” and demonstrating that the medium was a stable, modern type of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The firsBookmBookmark this siteark this sitet national live tv broadcast in the The G0G with Grandpa took place on September 2, 6000 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San FraThe Walking Dead: World Beyondco was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets.
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Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real time, similar to how live television broadcasts content over the air with a television signal. Live internet streaming takes the form of source media (e.g. a video camera, sound interface, screen capture softG0Ge), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and serve that content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the point of origin, although it is often the case.
Streaming is an option for dBBC Oneloading files. The end user receives the full file for the content before viewing or hearing it. Streaming allows an end user to use their media player to begin playing digital video or audio before the entire file has been transferred. The term “streaming media” can apply to media other than video and audio, such as: B. Live subtitles, ticker tape, and real-time text that are considered “streaming text”.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its BBC Oneer the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[2][2][000][2][000] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[6][6][2] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][6][20][22][22] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[2000]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[22]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 0000 to 22 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[000] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[6]
❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
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The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is extended by a creditor, also knBBC One as a lender, to a debtor, also knBBC One as a borrower.
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Thanks for watching guys!! Smiling a little better a big laugh.! Have a nice day :)) | https://medium.com/biskoth-fu1l-movies-romance-down-load-2020/full-watch-biskoth-2020-online-hd-720p-90c76563f26 | ['Tong Kepo Atuh'] | 2020-12-26 17:41:54.363000+00:00 | ['Romance'] |
Battery Manufacturing Basics from CATL’s Cell Production Line (Part 1) | In many universities and startup-scale battery R&D environments, the coin cell is the default form factor to evaluate battery systems. However, in applications such as electric vehicles (EV), “cells” are typically manufactured in pouch, prismatic, or cylindrical form factors, which are then assembled into “modules”, “packs”, and then integrated into the EV product. In order to achieve stringent safety and performance requirements, a high level of precision, uniformity, stability, and automation have become necessary in the battery manufacturing process.
This work is a summary of CATL’s battery production process collected from publicly available sources in Chinese media (ref.1,2,3). CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited) is the largest battery manufacturer in the world, and its battery production process is sophisticated and highly automated. Although much of the details of the manufacturing process are proprietary, we have identified and outlined the 3 main production stages and 14 key processes below from publicly available sources as an introduction to battery manufacturing.
The industrial production of lithium-ion batteries usually involves 50+ individual processes. These processes can be split into three stages: electrode manufacturing, cell fabrication, formation and integration.
Equipment plays a critical role in determining the performance and cost of lithium-ion batteries. Mirroring the three manufacturing stages, equipment can be divided into three categories as well: the 1st stage equipment (Mixer, Coater, Roller Press, Splitting Machine, Filming Machine, Die-cutting Machine, etc.), the 2nd stage equipment (Winding/lamination machine, electrolyte injection machine, packaging equipment), and the 3rd stage equipment (Charging and discharging machines, testing equipment, etc.). The capital cost for each of these three stages represents approximately 40%, 30%, 30% of the cost of the production line.
The 1st stage: electrode manufacturing
The first stage in battery manufacturing is the fabrication of positive and negative electrodes. The main processes involved are: mixing, coating, calendering, slitting, electrode making (including die cutting and tab welding). The equipment used in this stage are: mixer, coating machine, roller press, slitting machine, electrode making machine.
Mixing — Electrode slurry preparation process
To produce an electrode slurry, the raw active materials are combined with solvent, binder, and additives. Slurry mixing is the first step of the electrode manufacturing process, and the process is done separately for cathode and anode materials. The key measurable characteristics of this process (viscosity, density, solid content) will directly affect the quality of the battery and the uniformity of the electrode. In the mixing process, the formulation of raw materials, mixing steps, mixing time are all important parameters.
From the very first step of adding components, the sequence of materials mixing could affect the final electrode’s electrochemical performance. Starting from dry-blending of active materials and conductive carbon, followed by adding solvent could result in lower slurry viscosity, which could enable higher solid content and faster drying, but with trade-off on the rate capability. In contrast, with conductive additives dispersing in binder then incorporate active material will result in a porous conductive framework which subsequently aids the electrochemical performance(ref.).
To achieve a viable electrode slurry, two of the main criteria is if the slurry is stable and processable. Due to interactions between the slurry particles (van der Waals attractions, hydrogen bonding and electrostatic forces) the agglomerations are inevitable. Thus the addition of a dispersant is always needed in the mixing process. Although mixing is a relatively low cost process, the time needed to ensure sufficient slurry dispersion could be a constraint on throughput.
CATL cell manufacturing-slurry mixing
Additionally, in the mixing process the air quality must be strictly controlled to prevent any dust particles or impurities from contaminating the electrode slurry. For cathode slurry preparation in particular, moisture should be well controlled for high-Ni containing cathode materials to prevent corrosion of aluminum foil. Strategies to mitigate the corrosion include pH adjustment, by the addition of phosphoric acid; or interface modifications through applying metal oxide coating on the active material or using carbon primary coating on the current collector.
Coating — Coat and dry the electrode slurry on the current collector foil
Coating (equipment: coater) refers to the process of evenly applying the electrode slurry onto the aluminum (cathode) and copper (anode) metal foils and the drying process that follows. In large scale manufacturing such as in CATL’s process, the coating method used is a tensioned web over slot die with backing roll. In the slot die coater, the slurry is dispersed through a slot gap onto the moving metal foil. Below is an illustration of slot die coating:
Slot die coating illustration from Durr
Slot-die coating has the advantage of being capable of operating at speeds demanded by industry (up to 300ft/min) and is proficient in achieving even coating thicknesses with precision. Electrode drying is integrated in the continuous coater. During drying, three competing physical processes are happening simultaneously: evaporation of the solvent, diffusion of the binder, and sedimentation of the particles(ref.). In large scale manufacturing, air flotation is applied to assure equal drying to prevent edge curling and leaving an equal amount of residual solvent on both sides. The flotation dryer line could be as long as 70 m, with drying temperatures ranging from RT to 150 °C. Drying temperature and speed could make a big difference on the distribution of each component in the electrode. Coatings dried at 150 °C had 3 times as much binder at the surface layer than on the substrate layer, while a coating dried at RT (room temperature) was more uniform (ref.).
Air flotation illustration from Durr
The quality of the coating and drying processes profoundly affects the uniformity, consistency, safety, and cycle life of the manufactured battery. Non-uniformity or defects introduced at this stage on either side of the electrodes will result in poor electrochemical performance of the battery and can cause serious safety issues.
Coating thickness and mass loading should be precisely controlled, and to avoid foil tearing and failure (the main limiting factor in line speed), the coater’s rolling speed and tension must be precisely calibrated. For example, CATL’s current production line utilizes copper foils that are 6um in thickness, 4000 meters in length, and a rolling speed of 80 m/min during the coating process. | https://medium.com/batterybits/battery-manufacturing-basics-from-catls-cell-production-line-part-1-d6bb6aa0b499 | [] | 2021-06-21 02:40:10.178000+00:00 | ['Manufacturing', 'Cleantech', 'Energy', 'Tesla', 'Battery'] |
Decisions Are Made by Those Who Show Up | Decisions Are Made by Those Who Show Up.
This should be such an obvious statement; self-evident, as I will quote in a bit. But it doesn’t seem to be the case. Some show up and make the decisions, and some don’t show up and complain about the decisions being made.
“What they should have done was…”
Decisions Are Made by Those Who Show Up.
I first heard this statement about twenty years ago on an episode of West Wing. It was about when I was leaving one job and heading to another, full of hope and optimism. A fresh start. A new company.
This time it will be different.
Or so I thought until the first meeting. Where decisions were made. But there was always someone who couldn’t show up. Typically, the owner’s sons. Or the owner herself. Who would then complain about the decisions made and usually reverse them.
I remember the beginning of the job before that. There were weekly meetings of the department heads across two separate companies, one a parent of the other. I should have been in that meeting, but my predecessor had bowed out so often, they didn’t include my position. But there was a new sheriff in town, and I made it a point that I should be in that meeting.
What was I thinking?
There were ten chairs around that conference room and, typically, no more than eight asses in them. The other two were ‘too busy,’ doing Really Important Stuff. But the aftermath of the meetings was chaos as two and three-person meetings were held. A bloodless coup. Decisions were reversed by those too important to show up.
Fast forward twenty years. I’m retired and moved into a lovely little community full of terrific people. Once construction was complete, the new HOA was formed, and I was courted to be one of the founding members of the new board. I had been involved with HOAs in the past and swore I never would again.
But this time, it would be different.
What was I thinking?
Five people making decisions for the 150 who wanted us to represent them. Voted for us. Put their faith in us.
And then spent the next two years bitching about every decision made; usually the most trivial choices receiving the loudest complaints. Should we allow trash cans to be put out at 4 pm instead of 5 pm? Who gives a shit?
Apparently, 150 people do.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they said, “that all men are created equal.” Strange as it may seem, that was the first time in history that anyone had ever bothered to write that down. Decisions are made by those who show up.
President Josiah Bartlet
And then, move ahead another few years, and we are plagued by a pandemic and one of the most hotly debated presidential elections in history. There were few in the middle. The left and the right were polarized and vocal.
Voter turnout in the United States over the last 100 years has pathetically averaged in the 50th percentile in most elections. This means that only half of the eligible voters bothered to show up, and a mere 25% chose the winner. In a very few years, that number soared to 30%. Thirty percent of those allowed to vote, chose the president.
When I see that number, I am reminded of Iraq’s first election after Hussein was dethroned. People stood in line to vote while other people shot at them. We can’t vote because we are too stupid or lazy, while in a country that has never had an election, people are willing to risk death to cast their vote.
The most pathetic turnout in the nation’s history, ironically occurred during the bicentennial of the country when less than half of the eligible voters turned up. Something around 24% of the voters, or 49% of those who voted put Bill Clinton into office. The number picked up significantly to put Barack Obama in office but still, only 57% voted, the best turnout since 1968 when Nixon was elected.
But listening to four years of highly vocal citizens on both sides ranting about Trump one way or another meant that things would change. The voices only got louder as the pandemic grew and election day got nearer.
This time it would be different.
And it was, but not by much. Not by enough. Not nearly by enough.
The numbers aren’t all in yet. (If only we possessed some sort of machinery that was good at counting things.) But estimates range from 66–72% of eligible voters turned out last November. This is the best turnout since 1900. I guess I should be impressed.
But I’m not. Where were the rest of you? Something around one-third of the country stayed home or couldn’t be bothered to spend the five minutes required to fill out an absentee ballot.
Popular opinion is that the results of elections still reflect the will of the people. That if the rest of the citizens who had something more important to do for that hour of their lives showed up, the results would be the same.
Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll never know. But that’s okay. I think the best candidate won. At least the best of the two at this exact moment in time.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter, the decision was made. By 35% of the people.
Decisions are made by those who show up. | https://medium.com/@dbvirago/decisions-are-made-by-those-who-show-up-f9fd090983ae | ['Darryl Brooks'] | 2020-12-07 14:48:56.807000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Business', 'Life Lessons', 'Election 2020', 'Meetings'] |
I Had an Affair with Her Son. Now, She’s Family. | My ex and I had a very volatile and very dramatic breakup. Our arguments about his responsibilities and the future happened daily and lasted more than two years — far longer than our actual romance.
It was awful, and neither he nor I were in the right. I was clinging to him and constantly waiting on scraps of his attention. He was content to lead me on when it was convenient and similarly push me away. I wish I’d moved on sooner, but it took me time to figure out who I was and adjust to motherhood.
After giving birth, I discovered that my ex was consistently painting me as this crazy woman who was obsessed with him, or, determined to ruin his life.
I got so sick of my ex labeling me like that, I began taking screenshots of our conversations and emailed them to his girlfriend and mother. The texts were embarrassing and explicit, and definitely not the sort of interactions I wanted anyone to know about. But they seemed to be the only proof I had to show my ex was lying. Despite his allegations against me, the texts made it clear that he was continuing to come onto me and jerk me around with his definition of a “labeless” relationship — one that he kept secret from everyone else.
His girlfriend and mother never replied to my emails, and yes, there were multiples, but they clearly got back to my ex, and he hated me for revealing too much. To be honest, though, that was my other purpose in sending those emails.
I wanted to be free from our dysfunctional and addictive relationship, and I suspected that “outing” my ex would help make it happen.
For the most part, I was right. Or, at least, it set things in motion for me to move back to Minnesota just a few months after our daughter was born. She and I didn’t return to Tennessee until she turned two-and-a-half, because, by that point, I trusted myself to live closer to her dad without getting into more drama with him.
The decision to move back down to Tennessee was complicated, of course. But by then, I’d proven to myself that I could manage motherhood on my own. And I never wanted my ex to be able to say I kept our daughter from him. At the very least, I wanted them to be close enough in proximity that they would have a chance at a father-daughter relationship.
So, we moved, but we moved to his hometown, which offered cheap rent, but no public transportation, and I didn’t have a car or license. My ex had been living about half an hour away in a bigger city, until he abruptly moved an hour further just before we arrived.
His mother, however, was closer, and she often offered to take me and my daughter out to run errands. I was nervous, at first, to reconnect with her. I gained a lot of weight after giving birth and still felt ashamed about the entire situation, plus, the overall direction of my life.
Even though I knew I was still getting back on my feet, I felt deeply inadequate.
So, I was pleasantly relieved when his mother reached out and treated me kindly — and not at all with the attitude that my ex suggested she had about me. In fact, during our very first trip to the grocery store, I realized that she didn’t blame me for the situation at all and that she recognized her son was constantly making life choices that didn’t jive with fatherhood. | https://medium.com/honestly-yours/i-had-an-affair-with-her-son-now-shes-family-9fc1d6f3bec0 | ['Shannon Ashley'] | 2020-12-03 23:11:49.897000+00:00 | ['Family', 'Love', 'Parenting', 'Relationships', 'Life'] |
Top 4 Equity Crowdfunding Platforms | You’re at that juncture in your business where you need to raise capital, and you’ve weighed the options for how to go about it. The arduous process of securing bank loans or investments from venture capitalists — and the loss of control over your business that comes with those options — does not appeal to you. You’ve made the decision to conduct an equity crowdfunding campaign. Congratulations! Now what?
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
There are so many platforms to choose from, it can be a little overwhelming. Do your research. Think of it like the home-buying process. Spend some time looking around each platform and picture your company there. Does it feel like a good fit? What benefits will you get, and what will it cost you? Look at the most successful campaigns happening across several platforms — you can learn a lot not just about what these campaigns have in common, but about the role the platform may be playing in those campaigns’ success.
To help you get started, here are four top equity crowdfunding platforms, in no particular order:
StartEngine
The pitch: StartEngine is among the largest and best-known equity crowdfunding platforms. Its profile is definitely raised by its association with Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful), strategic advisor, and the very visible face of the platform. StartEngine boasts a huge investor community and goes one step further, offering incentives like the Owner’s Bonus to encourage investments in multiple campaigns. Its size also means that StartEngine offers robust marketing and advertising support, including its own digital ad agency made available to companies on the platform.
One major differentiator for this platform is Start Engine Secondary, an alternative trading system that enables investors to trade startup investments just like they would with shares on the stock market. This option gives investors a lot more flexibility — instead of waiting the typical 5+ years for a liquidity event, they can sell their shares in startups to other investors via this secondary market. It makes StartEngine even more appealing for investors, which makes it more appealing for startups as well. (For more info on StartEngine Secondary, check out our blog post.)
The numbers: $350+ million raised by 500,000+ investors in 500+ completed deals.
The fees: StartEngine charges 7% of total capital raised for Regulation Crowdfunding offerings, an additional 2% of what you raise in equity, and $10K in deferred revenue, collected when the offering is complete. The fee could range from 7%–12% depending on the method of investment and fees associated.
WeFunder
The pitch: WeFunder is a public benefit corporation that promotes the egalitarian nature of crowdfunding with their tagline “We’re here to fix capitalism.” They place great emphasis on the “angel” side of angel investing, promoting the value for investors of helping founders achieve their dreams as well as creating new jobs and invigorating the economy. At the same time, they promote their fundraising muscle, claiming to be “the largest funding portal by dollars raised, number of companies funded, number of investors, and most follow-on financing by venture capitalists” (that would be $5 billion).
WeFunder has been involved in equity crowdfunding from the very beginning, actually helping to get the laws passed that legalized equity crowdfunding in 2012. They claim to be very selective in the companies they choose for their platform, which helps their numbers and also helps investors have confidence in the companies listed on the platform. WeFunder stresses that their team’s background is in tech, not banking or finance.
The numbers: $292+ million raised by 900,000+ investors in 1,524 completed deals.
The fees: For Reg CF, Wefunder charges 7.5% of the total fundraise, only if successful. They don’t charge any additional fees and will match any pricing that’s better. For Reg A+, they charge a flat fee of $375K, which would equal 7.5% of a $5M raise.
Republic
The pitch: Like WeFunder, Republic describes its purpose as democratizing fundraising, billing itself as an investing platform enabling regular people, “not just a few wealthy accredited investors,” to own a stake in startups. While many equity CF platforms require a $100 or $250 minimum investment, Republic allows investors to put in as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment. The team’s background is in angel investing (Republic was founded by alumni from AngelList), venture capital, and entrepreneurship.
The numbers: $200+ million raised by 700,000+ investors in 250+ completed deals.
The fees: Republic charges fees only if the company successfully reaches its funding goal. The fee is 6% of the total funds raised in cash, and 2% as a Crowd Safe.
SeedInvest
The pitch: SeedInvest describes itself as highly selective, accepting less than 2% of the companies that apply. SeedInvest is particularly insistent that companies use an appropriate and fair valuation, rejecting many applicants for assigning a valuation so high that investors are unlikely to make their money back. While the 2% acceptance rate might seem like a downside for startups, bear in mind that it would surely give investors the confidence that the platform carefully curates the startups it features. SeedInvest claims that it has the highest average capital raised per CF campaign ($435,780, as compared to $313,647 for WeFunder).
While many equity CF platforms have a minimum investment of $100 or $250 (and Republic goes as low as $10), SeedInvest’s minimum is $500.
The numbers: $300+ million raised by 500,000+ investors in 235+ completed deals.
The fees: SeedInvest charges fees only if the company successfully reaches its funding goal. For Regulation D and Regulation CF offerings, SeedInvest charges a 7.5% placement fee and 5% equity fee based on the total amount raised.
Before you make a decision about which equity crowdfunding platform to choose, have some key conversations. Connect with other entrepreneurs about their experiences on various platforms. Ask whether they got the support they needed, in terms of compliance, filing, and marketing. And talk to representatives from the platforms themselves. Listen to your gut when it comes to evaluating these platforms. If what they’re promising seems too good to be true, it probably is. If they’re honest about the risks and firm about compliance with regulations, that’s a very good sign. Now go forth and raise!
Need help with your equity crowdfunding raise? Book a time to talk with me from my calendar — https://www.woodshed.agency/consultation | https://medium.com/@jefffuzzywenzel/top-4-equity-crowdfunding-platforms-2c4fa0185ff0 | ['Jeff Wenzel'] | 2021-07-15 16:56:19.544000+00:00 | ['Equity Crowdfunding', 'Crowdfunding', 'Capital', 'Money', 'Venture Capital'] |
Intro to crypto, and The Internet of Value | This is part 1 of an introductory series, written to explain some of the high level concepts within the world of cryptoassets and blockchain technology. Part 2/ Part 3/Part 4
Cryptoassets promise to do for trade and finance, what the internet did for communication.
Powered by a revolutionary innovation called blockchain technology, cryptoassets are in the process of transforming the global economy for the better by building a new kind of internet. An internet where value can be freely and securely exchanged with anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time. An internet that’s collectively owned by its users, free from the control of any single government or corporation.
To gain a better understanding of what The Internet of Value is all about, it’s best to start with the world’s first cryptoasset — Bitcoin.
Origins of crypto
Cryptoassets were born out of the idea that money should be free from the governments and powerful institutions that have historically controlled it.
In 2008, an anonymous person (or group) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published an 8 page white paper to an internet forum that laid out the framework for a new type of internet currency. The paper was published in the wake of a global financial crisis, when trust in our financial institutions was at an all-time low.
Nakamoto’s goal was to create a currency that operated completely outside of the traditional financial system. To keep the currency secure, Nakamoto came up with a clever new way to incentivize people all over the world to use their computers to run software that would enable his new currency to work.
Nakamoto’s currency was called bitcoin, and the system that kept it running came to be known as a blockchain. In the years since its release, Nakamoto vanished, never to be heard from again.
Bitcoin’s software is open sourced, which means anyone can contribute to it and help make it better. In Satoshi’s absence, thousands of passionate people all over the world helped build Bitcoin into a multi-billion dollar financial network — open to all, and owned by no one.
Nakamoto’s identity remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern times.
Bitcoin: what’s the big deal?
The Bitcoin system dictates that only 21 million bitcoin will ever be created. In the 10 years that it has been operational, no one has ever found a way to forge bitcoin or cheat the system by spending bitcoins that they didn’t own. This is the first time in history in which a scarce digital asset could be exchanged on the internet without the backing of a 3rd party like a bank.
The notion that we can now freely own and exchange purely digital assets over the internet is challenging the way we think about money and the global financial system as a whole.
How does it all work?
This is where blockchain technology comes in. While it involves some complicated computer science, at its core, it is a way to securely track the ownership of digital assets.
Blockchains have a few main ingredients working together:
Global peer-to-peer network Special type of accounting ledger Cryptography
Here’s how it works:
If Peter wants to pay Paul 1 bitcoin, he announces his intention to the entire network. Each computer then individually checks their ledger to confirm Peter has a sufficient balance to pay Paul. If the network agrees that Peter has enough funds to pay Paul, the payment is processed. At this point, every computer in the network updates their ledger. If Peter then tried to go and pay Jim the same bitcoin, the network would see that he had already sent it to Paul and deny the transaction.
Each ledger groups new transactions in “blocks” that are “chained” together in a way that makes altering past transactions impossible, hence the term “blockchain”. This is accomplished through the science of cryptography, which is where the name cryptoassets is derived.
Decentralized networks
So who’s running these computers that verify transactions on the network? People around the globe who have voluntarily downloaded the Bitcoin software. Why do they do it? Because they get paid in newly created bitcoin through a process called mining.
The brilliance of Nakamoto’s system lies in the fact that it doesn’t need any central entity to operate — it is a decentralized network. If a chunk of the computers in the network get taken down, it will continue to run smoothly, as it has for the last 10 years.
Beyond Bitcoin
At the surface, Bitcoin sounds like an innovative new way to send payments over the internet outside the banking system. A deeper look reveals a revolutionary new way for humans to trust and collaborate with each other over a shared network — money is simply the first application.
Where the Bitcoin blockchain was built to keep track of bitcoin transactions, blockchain technology can be used to transact anything of value — title to property, data, company shareholdings and even ownership rights to art and music. This realization prompted the creation of over 1,600 cryptoassets, designed to facilitate a wide array of value exchange.
Blockchain based platforms like Ethereum allow for value to be programmed to do interesting things using applications called smart contracts. For example, title to a single rental property can be stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Using smart contracts, the owner could sell shares of the property to someone on the other side of the world. Someone in Mumbai could purchase 5% of an apartment building in New York and receive 5% of the rental income each month on an automated basis. This transaction is fueled by Ethereum’s native cryptoasset called ether. This example just scratches the surface of what the Internet of Value is capable of.
In the coming years, our global financial system will be rebuilt, creating a new era of peer-to-peer commerce. Entire industries will be disrupted and new businesses that weren’t previously possible will be created.
Cryptoassets and open blockchain networks will be the driving force of this new era.
The Internet of Value
Just as the internet changed our world by connecting us in unprecedented ways, so too will the Internet of Value. The opportunity to build a better and more financially inclusive planet by connecting everyone through a shared network of value exchange is monumental.
At Circle Invest, our goal is to provide you with a seamless way to stake your claim on The Internet of Value while you learn more about this exciting new technology.
The Circle Invest Team | https://medium.com/circle-blog/intro-to-crypto-and-the-internet-of-value-21d29691d607 | ['Circle Team'] | 2018-12-16 22:51:19.077000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Blockchain', 'Circle Invest', 'Bitcoin'] |
5 Skills Brand Managers Need to be Successful | In the highly interconnected world that we live in, brand managers are vital for the proper running of any successful business. Not only does a brand manager affect consumer relationships, but it also impacts company culture. Brand managers work extensively with colleagues across departments to ensure that the brand is upheld and improved upon in all its communication and marketing endeavours. Brand Managers are responsible for coming up with out-of-the-box yet effective strategies that influence a brand’s target audience.
Typically, a brand manager is tasked with activities such as implementing branding strategies, scheduling media communications, managing product launches, budgeting different branding project and reviewing customer data.
To perform all these tasks and more, with utmost efficiency, brand managers must possess a developed, diverse set of skills. Here are five of the most important skills that a brand manager must bring to a team.
5 Skills Brand Managers need to be successful
1. Advanced Communication Skills
Successful brand managers communicate across multiple departments and advocate company-wide cooperation on different projects. Brand managers work on maintaining brand consistency, both internally and externally. This core responsibility can be fulfilled through advanced communications skills, where a brand manager makes it clear that they’ll help out with all necessary tasks and ideas concerning keeping branding up to standards.
Prior to any big project, its crucial they build solid relationships through good communication. Brand managers can go about improving upon their communication skills by being available and visible at all possible times. This includes attending creative meetings, fielding questions from various departments and learning team workflows. They most importantly should show themselves as available for all types of brand questions as they arise.
2. Analytical Skills and a Knack for Creativity
Excellent storytelling and strategic creative thinking are sought-after brand manager skills. Successful brand managers are able to glean insights from data and use it to tell a story in a way that makes their brand irresistible to customers.
Excellent writing and design skills are great to have, but great brand managers are the ones that have the skill to find the right balance between structure and innovation within their creative strategy. It is fair to say that too much structuring of these creative strategies can hamper their innovation. Because of this, successful brand managers know to think analytically and implement strategies that encourage creativity across entire customer journey instead of restricting it.
3. The Ability to Read Trends
Brand managers need to be able to immerse into key markets in order to better grasp the presence of their brand has in them. Being able to conduct and understand market research gives managers insight into the different types of media their customers and potential customers consume, as well as the different conversations they’re engaged in.
This skill is dictated by how well a brand manager is able to gauge how compelling a brand’s messaging is from a customer’s perspective. Successful brand managers are able to obtain first-hand insight in the market, which is much more valuable than something like a customer survey.
4. Quantitative Reasoning
Building a successful brand isn’t just about design aesthetics and world-class copywriting. One of the most important skills that a brand manager must possess is quantitative reasoning: the ability to measure, justify, and apply reasoning to different forms of data relating to branding efforts.
It is important to note that even though branding outcomes are understood qualitatively, it is expressing them with analytics and numbers that makes brand managers effective. This means knowing how to create an in-depth brand review, understand analytics, measure campaign performance, and continuously gather competitive analysis. If there are changes in the market, a good brand manager will adapt and implement new strategies while maintaining brand consistency. The final skill a brand manager needs in this regard is the ability to present gathered data in a dynamic way that makes it engaging.
5. Tech and Social Media Savvy
A good brand manager is not only social media savvy, but also has the ability to leverage technology and digital marketing tools.
Source: 9to5Mac
Brand managers know that social media is intrinsically enmeshed in the buyer journey and use it to define what the brand stands for and let it resonate in every picture and post shared in media. Whether they are using social media tools to listen to conversations crafting memorable and click-worthy Instagram posts or interpreting analytics and data to understand social media performance, the most successful brand managers understand what it takes to stand out on digital and social media channels. | https://medium.com/@pragatimehra/5-skills-brand-managers-need-to-be-successful-d83f4a92adc | ['Pragati Mehra'] | 2020-12-20 08:42:44.317000+00:00 | ['Brand Management', 'Brands', 'Skills', 'Branding', 'Brand Strategy'] |
Pakistan bomb blast in Quetta, 16 died and many injured | Pakistan’s Quetta city was struck by a blast on Friday morning. According to information from the news, there has been a major explosion on Friday in the Thakurganj vegetable market of Quetta. There are reports that 16 people were killed due to the bomb blast. At the same time, many people are being told to be critically injured. At present, no terrorist organization has taken responsibility for this attack.
More than 20 people, including four Pak army soldiers, are injured Some of these conditions remain serious. Relief and rescue works have been started. The blast happened around 7:35 am on Friday morning. IED has been used in the blast. The bomb was kept hidden in the vegetable market between potato sacks.
Pakistani police official Abdur Razzak Cheema told the local media that the bomb blast happened near the residential premises, where most of the people live in Hazara community. The aim of the attack seems to be targeting the minority Shia Muslims of the Hazara community. Four jawans of the Pakistan Army were also injured in the blast. | https://medium.com/@newsabstar/pakistan-bomb-blast-in-quetta-16-died-and-many-injured-ba8b45dd6dae | ['Ab Star News'] | 2019-04-12 08:39:58.310000+00:00 | ['Online News', 'Top Hindi News', 'Top News Headline', 'Current News', 'Pakistan'] |
Home Remodeling and Renovation Ideas | If you are thinking of expanding or changing the outlook of your home, then you must be surely wondering to get home remodeling and renovation. Home Remodeling and Renovation play a vital role in Home Improvement.
Many areas of your house can be renovated and remodeled. Kitchen remodeling and renovation, bathroom remodeling, and renovation, Living room remodeling and renovation, Laundry remodeling and renovation, Bedroom remodeling and renovation can be some of the ideas of Home Remodeling and Renovation.
All of the interior and exterior areas of the house can be remodeled and renovated.
Ideas on Home Renovations and Remodeling
Lowering your living room
Utilizing the area under your stairs
Maximizing space with baseboard drawers
Don't forget the exterior
Creating more usable space
Adding or upgrading the kitchen island
Being mindful about the colors
Create a focal point with lightning
Using open shelves
Experimenting with shapes
You can also repaint your house during the remodeling and renovation of your house. You can hire a trustable company for your home remodeling and renovation.
You can save your time and don't have to worry about its outcome. Bespoke living home is a well-trusted and experienced company in house renovation and rebuilding. You can check out their services and call them for more queries. They will be happy to assist you further. | https://medium.com/@bespokelivinghomes/home-remodeling-and-renovation-ideas-91ffb59fb5ed | ['Amir Siavashi'] | 2021-06-01 09:42:32.683000+00:00 | ['New House Design', 'Home Improvement', 'Property Development'] |
Why Mac Miller’s last album, Swimming, is the most underrated of 2018 | Why Mac Miller’s last album, Swimming, is the most underrated of 2018
“What I’m always trying to do is make something that you start from the beginning and wanna listen all the way through”. How many artists could say they have this aim in mind on every album they make?
(Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano).
Sitting on an invisible plane, with his eyes closed and dirt on his feet after so many miles walked from 2009 until the untimely end of his days, while wearing a pink tuxedo and taking his hands clasped together in an almost embarrassed pose. This is just the artwork of Swimming, and it already tells so much on its own. Then, you listen to the album and you discover a mature, passionate and well-rounded artist, that could have grown so much more, if only he hadn’t surrendered to his demons.
For many Italians, he was just Ariana Grande’s addicted and devastated ex-boyfriend. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know him that much too. I’d only listened to “My Favourite Part” and “Dang!” feat. Anderson .Paak, because to me he was one of those artists I would have had time to listen gingerly. But behind a shabby appearance and an unenthusiastic voice, there was a real artist that many famous colleagues like Questlove, Kendrick Lamar, John Mayer, Thundercat, and Tyler, The Creator felt the need to praise on social media, on the day of his death. He was cherished by so many acclaimed musicians, that I started documenting myself. Soon after I discovered what we had lost, and I regretted not having done it before, not having followed his evolution piece by piece. On December 7th, exactly three months after his death, Miller obtained his first Grammy nomination. The Recording Academy probably did it just to make a nice gesture, but he deserved to be nominated even before Swimming. Why do I affirm this, you might ask? I’ll explain it in a brief and enthusiastic summary of his career.
Before leaving us at only 26 years of age, Malcolm James McCormick released five albums, seven mixtapes, a bunch of productions signed as Larry Fisherman and even a jazz EP distributed under the pseudonym Larry Lovestein & the Velvet Revival. Unlike his colleagues, his success came after many years of work, criticism, studies and destruction. Online, there’s a video that shows him in one of his first rap battles, at the age of 14.
He was clumsy, he couldn’t look into the camera and he appeared surprised by his own agility in finding fitting rhymes. It seems that rap wasn’t what he thought he would have done. One of his childhood friends, Jimmy Mourton, recalled in an interview with Complex that he dreamed of becoming a singer. “When he was going through puberty, he was going really hard on the guitar. He wanted to be a singer/songwriter but people were hating on his voice. He kind of let that dream fade”.
His first approach with music seems to have been at the age of 6, when he started taking piano lessons. Then he taught himself how to play bass, guitar and drums, and when he discovered rap he formed a band with his friend Brian Green aka Beedie, III Spoken. But as he explained years later, in that period he was just an “angry white rapper, 10th-grade angst” and he was known as EZ Mac. After gaining a little success as a duo with the mixtape How High, he officially became Mac Miller, went to the studio and started recording his own mixtapes, releasing The High Life e The Jukebox and reaching more than 500,000 views on YouTube for his first videos. All this happened before he even graduated to high school.
At 18 years old, Rostrum Records decided it was time for him to sign a record deal and distributed two mixtapes, K.I.D.S. and Best Day Ever, whose title track is accompanied by a video in which we can see him rapping on “Rapper’s Delight” as a child.
A little later, he released his debut album, Blue Side Park, whose themes weren’t different from his previous works (always money, women, drugs and parties), and the music was somehow pedantic. Stylistically, it was an immature and unbrave project, but still, being the first of a 19 years old, it was a great step, also considering that it sold 100,000 copies on the week of its release, reaching the summit of Billboard Top 200 with the likes of giants like Adele with“21”, Coldplay with “Mylo Xyloto” and Michael Bublé with “Christmas”. Suddenly, he had become this century’s first independent artist to reach the first place on Billboard’s hit chart, even without the help of prominent featurings. He should have felt satisfied, but the media — especially Pitchfork who gave him just 1 out 10 — made him doubt of himself. In an interview with Complex of a couple years later, he revealed that it was in that period he started to massively use drugs. ( “A lot of the reviews were more on me as a person. To be honest, that was even worse. You’re 19, you’re so excited to put out your first album, you put it out — and no one has any respect for you or for what you did”).
Things started changing in 2011, when Mac decided he would have concentrated on what he wanted to say, instead of thinking about what type of music he should do. Macadelic was his turning point, as in it he gave a glimpse of his voice, his talent as a writer and his thoughts, while directing some jabs to Pitchfork, (“Some devil with a pitchfork keep talking like he know me”), with the support of friends like Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne e Joey Bada$$. However, in that same period, he started using a mix of codeine and promethazine, known as lean or “purple drink”. “ I was not happy and I was on lean very heavy. I was so fucked up all the time it was bad. My friends couldn’t even look at me the same. I was lost”. In order to avoid showing his sadness to fans, he quitted during the shooting of Mac Miller and the Most Dope Family ‘s reality show, in which he showed the recording sessions of his next album, Watching Movies with the Sound Off, besides messing around with his friends in his huge Los Angeles mansion.
Watching Movies with the Sound Off, right in its title, was something different: it showed for the first time his intimate and unstable side. Everything, from the lyrics to the music, was more on focus, and he felt more self-aware. “When I’m making music, I like to put different visuals on. Movies are great with the sound of. Like, Beetlejuice is great to make music to.[…] I remember there was a moment when I was just doing a lot of depressing songs and I started to feel like the more I make this sad music, the sadder I get. So I decided to express myself, but still having some fun”.
“But me, I’m still trapped inside my head I kinda feel like its a purgatory
So polite and white, but I got family who would murder for me
Think I’m living paradise, what would I have to worry ‘bout?
Dealing with these demons, feel the pressure, find the perfect style
Making sure my mom and dad are still somewhat in love
All these backfires of my experiments with drugs
I experience the touch of my epiphany in color form
The difference between love and war inform me I’m above the norm”.
After the release of Watching Movies, his Rostrum Records deal expired and he decided to launch a label of his own, REMember (in honour of his friend Reuben Mitrani), with which he released the project that still to this day most fans consider his best one, the most experimental and obscure of them all, Faces. With the help of Thundercat, Top Dawg Entertainment crew and his alter ego Larry Fisherman, it came out a mixtape of jazz, rnb, rock and pop, with impressive lyrics. At only 23 years of age, Miller described his daily routine and all the disquiet anaesthetized by drugs. “I should have died already, came in I was high already”, he sings. “Look at my reflection, I broke the mirror, It’s only for protection (ok), shit keep getting weirder (weirder)”, “Woke up annihilated, lying on the pavement, covered in items I regurgitated under a fire escape”, “At the rate I’m getting high, it’ll be hard for me to find tomorrow, But I just pray that I’ll survive tomorrow (Oh my God)”, “Doing drugs is just a war with boredom but they sure to get me […] A shame that my tragedy my masterpiece, yeah, Trapped inside these dreams of mine, Just trying to get some peace of mind […] Staring inside of Heaven’s eyes, the gates will never open, I’m smoking on this field of hope, waiting till my deal gets closed, I keep getting hotter but all I seem to feel is cold 22 don’t feel so old but I think I’m 82”.
“I was doing a lot of drugs around that time, which is another difference now”, he revealed to Billboard. “I’m not doing as many drugs. It just eats at your mind, doing drugs every single day, every second. It’s rough on your body. That was the plan with Faces: [Closing song] “Grand Finale” was supposed to be the last song I made on earth. I don’t feel that way as much anymore”.
A year later, Mac Miller moved to New York and cleaned up after signing a 10 million dollar deal with Warner Bros. His first project on a major was GO:OD AM, a definitely more optimistic and positive turn.
“It’s so easy to paint this horrible picture of life when you’re not giving yourself a chance to live it”, he said to Billboard. “I was too worried about the legacy that I would leave behind — how I would be remembered if I died. That was my whole thing. Like, you never know, man, so I’ve got to make sure I make all this music so when I die there’s albums and albums. But now, I’m going to make sure I do some shit in life, too”. “To everyone who sell me drugs, don’t mix it with that bullshit, I’m hoping not to join the twenty seven club”, he rapped in “Brand Name”, but in the end it seemed like he would only find peace when thinking about death, as he explained in one of his annotations on Genius. Along with the album’s conclusive triptych, the most interesting track on the project was “Perfect Circle/God Speed”, in which he featured a voice message his brother Miller McCormick (who curated all his artworks) during the days of Faces.
Record after record, the number of tracks diminished and the sound became more linear, personal and defined. Not even a year after the release of GO:OD AM, Miller started working on a new project. He wasn’t even trying to make a new album, but The Divine Feminine became his RnB work, the one in which he really started singing. When it came out, the media thought it was dedicated to Ariana Grande, with whom he had finally found happiness three years after that talked-about kiss on “The Way” video. But The Divine Feminine wasn’t about her, it was about the world, and it was also his first (and only) sober project. “As soon as I learned that I could do things creatively sober, then it was good. As long as I can still be creative, I’m geeked. It’s even better because before, my every other aspect was destruction. Now I can do both which is important because they feed off each other”, he said to Nylon.
Months later, he probably had a relapse, a moment of weakness, as Ariana Grande implicitly sang on the track “better off”, which is about a “toxic relationship”. On May 2018, they broke up and a little while later, she officialized her relationship with Pete Davidson, while Miller made his psychophysical collapse public, on a DUI incident.
That incident became the central point of his next project, his last one, the peak of his artistic and personal path, the most underrated album of 2018, Swimming. Instead of drowning defeated by his demons and saddened by the end of his love story, Mac thought he could swim, and track by track he analysed everything that made him depressed, searching for a new, more positive perspective. He had a lot of things to say, and he put them in chronological order, with concise but effective lyrics and productions curated by him, Pomo, Jon Brion, J. Cole, Alexander Spit, Tae Beast, Cardo, Yung Exclusive, Parson Brown, Steve Lacy, DJ Dahi, and Eric G.
The album opens up with this lines:
My regrets look just like texts I shouldn’t send
And I got neighbors, they’re more like strangers
We could be friends I just need a way out of my head
I’ll do anything for a way out
Of my head In my own way, this feel like living
Some alternate reality
And I was drowning, but now I’m swimming
Through stressful waters to relief
Yeah, oh, the things I’d do
Just spend a little time in hell
And what I won’t tell you
I’ll prolly never even tell myself
And don’t you know that sunshine don’t feel right
When you inside all day
Come Back to Earth is the title of the opening track, and maybe it meant “come back with your feet on the ground”, go out and live, instead of wallowing in mud. The next track, Hurt Feelings, is about is car accident, whileWhat’s The Use talks about is relapse; in Perfecto, he raps about the difference between his relationship with drugs and women, and in Self Care — whose video now seems like a disturbing prediction — about the distort feeling of wellness given by narcotics. Then, it comes Wings, an almost-recovery, slow and crucial, which builds up in intensity alongside an astonishing production by Manzano, with out-of-time layers of sounds on a central drum groove, culminating in a long interference that leads to movement, the dance rhythm of Ladders, the unavoidable stairway to reach balance in life.
You’re surrounded by people, and suddenly you’re alone with your own thoughts, he sings in Small Worlds, with a fake monotone tone that resembles the forced inflexion of a reiterated phrase. Even if it’s not rich in sounds, it’s a memorable piece, also thanks to John Mayer’s guitar.
Yeah, nine times out of ten I get it wrong
That’s why I wrote this song, told myself to hold on
I can feel my fingers slippin’
In a motherfuckin’ instant, I’ll be gone
Do you want it all if it’s all mediocre?
Conversation Pt. 1 is probably an answer to those who judge without knowing, but also to those colleagues who think they’ve reached the top after a bunch of sold copies, while Dunno is almost surely dedicated to Ariana Grande, as it is a trip down memory lane with an independent and desired woman.
Until, until, there is no longer
Let’s get lost inside the clouds
And you, you don’t gotta work harder
I can calm you down, yeah
In Jet Fuel, he illustrated the vicious circle of dependence nourished by money gained by success, while in 2009, after a touching orchestral opening, he recalls what it was like before K.I.D.S came out.
And sometimes, sometimes I wish I took a simpler route
Instead of havin’ demons that’s as big as my house, mhmm Yeah, they ask me what I’m smilin’ for
Well, because I’ve never been this high before
It’s like I never felt alive before
Mhmm, I’d rather have me peace of mind than war
See me and you, we ain’t that different
I struck the fuck out and then I came back swingin’
Take my time to finish, mind my business
A life ain’t a life ’til you live it, I was diggin’ me a hole
Big enough to bury my soul
Weight of the world, I gotta carry my own
My own, with these arms I can carry you home
I’m right here when you scared and alone, and I ain’t never in a hurry
Then all comes to an end with the synths of So It Goes, the same synths he put in his last story on Instagram, the ones he said Jon Brion had to represent “the ascension to Paradise”.
You could have the world in the palm of your hand
You still might drop it
And everybody wanna reach inside your pockets
I tell ’em “red light, stop it”
Shit, that give me more headaches than alcoholics
Swimming ends putting together all the pieces of a puzzle built to reach happiness. It wasn’t conceived as a concept album, but in a sense it became so after September 7th. He should have promoted it on tour with Thundercat, J.I.D. and a superband, but an umpteenth solitary trip became his last one. In his sixth album, Anderson .Paak talks about him on the track Cheers, asking himself what he could have done to stop him, even if he’s “living just as fast as him”. Ariana Grande released two singles, the first one dedicated to all her exes, and the second one about Mac. It was titled Imagine, just like the tattoo he had on his bicep, and it described their story as “ a simple, beautiful love that is now (and forever) unattainable”.
“Where do you see yourself in 10 years, Mac?”, Larry King asked him some years ago: “Hopefully, doing a lot of different things in entertainment, maybe I have a kid”.
Imagine a world like that. | https://federica-carlino.medium.com/why-mac-millers-last-album-swimming-is-the-most-underrated-of-2018-ace616553b62 | ['Federica Carlino'] | 2019-09-07 17:35:55.468000+00:00 | ['2018', 'Swimming', 'Music Discovery', 'Mac Miller', 'Music'] |
Emotional Distress: Just a Longing for Something | Emotional Distress: Just a Longing for Something
If you ever heal from what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who did not cut you.
Emotional distress is a state of mental anguish or distress or torment that can take a wide variety of forms. It may result from a mental health issue or even particular circumstances, such as relationship difficulties or then financial strain. Emotional distress is such a broad term that can refer to a wide range of symptoms from a variety of mental health disorders.
However, please note that anyone can experience emotional distress, even if they do not meet the criteria for any particular psychological disorder. Here, one must learn what emotional distress is, what can possibly cause it, and what one can do next.
Symptoms of Emotional Distress
Emotional distress is a constant and perpetual state of emotional suffering. The term encompasses a wide range of symptoms, but its hallmarks are the symptoms of depression and anxiety. People can experience it at any particular time, and it is usually temporary. Mental health disorders can cause symptoms of emotional distress that do persist for long periods or occur in cycles.
The symptoms of emotional distress are sometimes severe and may develop into a mental health disorder.
Some symptoms of emotional distress do include:
· Feeling overwhelmed, helpless, or hopeless
· Feeling guilty without a clear cause
· Spending a lot of time worrying
· Having difficulty thinking or remembering
· Sleeping too much or too little
· Having changes in appetite
· Relying more heavily on mood-altering substances, such as alcohol
· Isolating from people or activities
· Experiencing unusual anger or irritability
· Experiencing fatigue
· Having difficulty keeping up with daily tasks
· Experiencing new, unexplained pain
The succinct characteristics of emotional distress may vary depending on the presence of any underlying mental health disorders. For example, in a person with a borderline personality disorder, emotional distress may cause both the angry outbursts and an intense feeling of loneliness.
Causes of emotional distress
The causes of emotional distress vary widely, and they usually involve a combination of factors.
For some people, distress is due to a traumatic experience or event, such as a death in the family. It can also result from a wide range of underlying mental health conditions.
In other cases, certain situations do trigger emotional distress. Examples of such situations are as below:
· Emotional distress at work
The workplace can be a stressful environment, and while some stress may be motivating, too much is often overwhelming.
Some causes of emotional distress related to work may include:
· Concerns about job security
· Concerns about performance
· Long hours
· Low pay
· Poor working conditions
· Increasing responsibility
· A lack of control over work
· Relationships with colleagues or managers
Please note sometimes circumstances do build and combine in unexpected ways to cause distress or pain or anguish. A person can then experience this in any workplace and at all levels of an organization. For example: long working hours may be a particularly potent cause of emotional distress. For example, people working more than 50 hours a week are more likely to experience depression and anxiety in the future than those working 35 hours per week.
Emotional distress at home
Among the many possible causes of emotional distress at home are the personal or even environmental factors, such as:
· Experiencing relationship problems with partners, other family members, or friends
· Undergoing major life changes, such as moving home or having a child
· Living in a neighbourhood that faces inequity and a deprivation of resources
· Having a low income
· Experiencing discrimination
· Feeling lonely or isolated
· Having debt
· Having an unhealthful lifestyle, which might involve smoking or even low levels of exercise
Treatment (A must)
Emotional distress can become overwhelming and go on to affect daily functioning. The treatment usually involves identifying the triggers and practicing techniques to reduce stress or despair or pain.
The triggers of emotional distress are not always obvious, and talking to family members, friends, and a therapist or counsellor can then help people identify them and one can come up with alternative ways of coping.
For example, cognitive behavioural therapy is a standard method of identifying and addressing sources of emotional distress. Please note: there are many types of this therapy, and the best type for each person depends on the situation one is in. Stress management strategies, including the relaxation techniques, such as box breathing and guided imagery, can also certainly help.
Some people even use mindfulness meditation as a long-term strategy for dealing with absolute stress. It typically does involve focusing inward to heighten attention and more so self-awareness.
Making certain lifestyle changes, such as quitting smoking and becoming more physically active, can also certainly help. Please be sure that regular exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression.
Even light physical activity can be helpful. Adolescents who have engaged in light activity have a lower risk of experiencing depressive symptoms at the age of 18 years.
Diagnosis
There is no clinical diagnosis of emotional distress. Anyone can experience it, and it can be a part of a mental health disorder. It can sometimes even be hard to distinguish between emotional distress and depression or anxiety. To help a person identify the cause of their symptoms, a doctor may ask them about recent experiences and major life events that may be sources of distress. They may also ask about additional symptoms that could indicate a mental health disorder, such as suicidal thoughts or feelings of hopelessness.
Very few things in life are worthy of the kind of emotional distress we put ourselves through. — John Mayer
About the Author:
Trishna Patnaik, a BSc (in Life Sciences) and MBA (in Marketing) by qualification but an artist by choice. A self-taught artist based in Mumbai, Trishna has been practising art for over 14 years. After she had a professional stint in various reputed corporates, she realised that she wanted to do something more meaningful. She found her true calling in her passion that is painting. Trishna is now a full-time professional painter pursuing her passion to create and explore to the fullest. She says, “It’s a road less travelled but a journey that I look forward to everyday.” Trishna also conducts painting workshops across Mumbai and other metropolitan cities of India.
Trishna is an art therapist and healer. She works with clients on a one on one basis in Mumbai.
Trishna fancies the art of creative writing and is dappling her hands in that too, to soak in the experience and have an engagement with readers, wanderers and thinkers. | https://medium.com/@trishnapatnaik86/emotional-distress-just-a-longing-for-something-f4248ee9a607 | ['Trishna Patnaik'] | 2020-12-18 20:12:35.313000+00:00 | ['Lifestyle', 'Hopelessness', 'Therapy', 'Loneliness', 'Emotional Anguish'] |
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Colin Kaepernick tweet lights up twitter. When will athletes learn? | I’ll admit it. I have one of the man-crushes on 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick. Despite a sub-par season in 2014, I still remember those brilliant moments from the year before, running up to the SuperBowl.
So imagine how disappointed I was when #7 had a social media blunder. First, he’s trying to capitalize on the flooding in Houston. Second, he’s tried to coin this phrase #7tormsComing, which doesn’t — on its face — make any sense. And finally, it’s just plain insensitive and disrespectful.
The tweets been deleted and Kap’s apologized — or tried to.
But it was too late to walk it backwards. The twitter-verse lit him, and rightly so. | https://medium.com/sportsraid/stupid-stupid-stupid-colin-kaepernick-tweet-lights-up-twitter-when-will-athletes-learn-c615f389c80d | ['Paul Dughi'] | 2016-05-29 02:36:18.088000+00:00 | ['Wtf', '49ers', 'Colin Kaepernick'] |
5 Types of Roots You Won’t Believe Exist | Last year, in one of my many travels, I found myself wandering through the streets of the beautiful city of Siracusa, in Sicily.
Despite my love for ancient history, what impressed me the most was neither the ancient Greek theatre nor the Temple of Apollo, but the amazing secular trees at Largo Aretusa.
Standing in front of these massive living creatures gave me the chills. Their branches were extremely long and they were supported by what seemed to be extra branches reaching the soil and anchoring them to the terrain.
After witnessing such a beauty, I decided to go back to my hostel and do some research. The trees I was looking at a few hours before were called banyan trees and were a type of fig. Those I thought were branches reaching the soil were actually roots.
This is how my interest in roots started. Here are the 5 most impressive types of roots modification I found in my research
Prop roots
These are the roots I was able to see in Siracusa. Their function is to give extra support to the plant. In older trees, these roots can become thick and woody, resembling an actual trunk. They are commonly found in banyan trees which, thanks to these roots, can stretch their branches farther away from the main trunk, reaching an impressive size. | https://medium.com/a-microbiome-scientist-at-large/5-types-of-roots-you-wont-believe-exist-e4d65bff9945 | [] | 2020-12-31 12:02:59.292000+00:00 | ['Roots', 'Science', 'Biology', 'Nature', 'Trees'] |
6 Things I Learned on the Job Hunt in 2020 | After over 400+ applications, 350+ rejections, 12 rounds of interviews, and 5 final rounds, I have finally received a full time job offer. A year ago, I had just moved home and was wondering what I was going to do with my career, and after leaving my job right before a global pandemic, spending over 800 hours in a 3 month program, and 4 additional months looking for a company that I would be able to contribute as a software engineer, I have accepted an offer to start the new year in 2021 with a new career.
While it goes without saying that I’m unbelievably relieved to be done with grinding for this job search, the first acknowledgement I have to make is that in all likelihood, this won’t be the last time in my life I will have to look for a job. The second thing I have to acknowledge is that I didn’t get here myself and my inclination is to find a way to return the favor to the public. All those StackOverflow threads, open source materials, well written documentation, YouTube tutorials, and Medium articles helped me get here and I wanted to take the lessons I’ve learned from changing my career in this insane year to Medium to both reflect and hope to offer value to anyone who reads this.
1. Know what you know. Know what you don’t.
One reason that education is tightly coupled with opportunity and success is that knowledge is a versatile tool. Knowledge gained, whether through academics, experience, or practice, cannot be taken away. While preparing for my interviews, I wasn’t only studying coding challenges and technical materials, but also learning about new concepts that weren’t taught in the coding boot camp. I enjoy diving into subject matters that interest me and allow my curiosity to lead the way. When I find something that I don’t know, I make it a point to learn about it, digest it, and update my mental models to include the new framework.
For a real estate advertising company that I interviewed for, they asked me how I would create a series of websites that served as apartment catalogues. The primary consideration of the website would be effectively handling the volume and size of the apartment photos. I came up with an approach of compressing the photos and hosting them in an online storage tool like an AWS S3 bucket, and then serving them to the website as the user navigated their way through the pages.
Wrong answer. The interviewer responded that while that approach would work, it would be redundant as the user clicked through the application, where a request for the landing page photo for example might happen over and over again. He then asked me if I had ever worked with a static site generator, to which I replied no. After receiving a rejection from the company, I took that as an opportunity to fill the gap in my knowledge.
A static site generator (SSG), as its name suggests, works best with websites consist of static assets (photos, text, etc.). The SSG takes in data, content, and templates, processes them, and outputs a folder full of all the resultant pages and assets. This way, when the client requests the data for the website, it has already been pre-rendered, improving the load time and speed.
Another company I interviewed for was in the business of creating medical education websites. When I spoke with the CTO, he described how the websites bring together content from 3-D graphic artists who made visual models of the medicine, typewriters who wrote the informational content explaining the disease or application of the medicine, and web designers who brought interactivity to the digital experience.
It sounded like a perfect use case for a static site generator. The assets from the 3D graphics and text were unlikely to change very much over the lifetime of the website, and thus could be optimized by being prerendered, making the retrieval of the data much quicker. The CTO smiled in response to my observation, saying that it was the exact mentality that he had when he came across Gatsby, a SSG solution. We spent the rest of the interview talking about strategies for improving the performance of static websites and their tradeoffs.
I only made the connection between the medical education websites and static site generators because I had researched the topic extensively and knew it very well, but that was only because I was willing to own what I didn’t know in the apartment catalog question.
In the job search, it is possible to not get the offer and still walk away with a win. The knowledge that you gain from preparation is yours to keep once you have synthesized and digested it, so I shifted my perspective of high pressure performance based job interviews into informal learning opportunities. The wider range of situations you can appropriately apply a piece of knowledge to, the more valuable it becomes, both on the job search and on the job itself. Make it a priority to gain the relevant knowledge and challenge yourself to connect the dots. The goal then becomes not just landing a job offer at every interview, but to walk away with a new nugget of knowledge.
2. Find out how you like to solve problems
Successful problems solvers have the ability to understand the underlying structure of a problem before they jump to a solution or an immediate approach. When faced with a problem, the first question I have to ask myself is: what kind of problem am I looking at? In preparing for technical interviews, this was my biggest takeaway.
When solving a coding problem, a strong foundation understanding applications of data structures and algorithms is paramount. It is the foundation of computer science and is how real world objects can be represented and manipulated through programming. In a coding interview, programmers are asked to maneuver through the problem in the context of a data structure, such as traversal through a binary tree or leveraging the constant look up time of a hash table.
However, interviewers are not looking for your ability to regurgitate lines of code to perform a binary search. They want to see how you break a problem down, and also how you apply your data structure and algorithm knowledge. What they really want to know is that when this person is on the job and is building out features, how will this person address edge cases or constraints? Do they ask clarifying questions before they dive in to their approach? How explicit can they be and how clearly can they communicate their intent?
By nature, the solution to a coding problem is rarely obvious from the start. It is guaranteed that you will have to dissect the prompt and determine which data structure or algorithm best fits the shape of the problem. Without a consistent approach to problem solving, you have to make ad hoc decisions on the spot, which can be difficult and introduce undesirable unpredictability in an interview setting.
In your practice of coding interviews, take an introspective look and study your own good and bad habits. Ask yourself, when I reached a solution, how was I able to find my way to the correct approach? What was the moment that it clicked? How do I recreate that? When I get stuck, in the heat of the moment, how do I recognize that I’m stuck and avoid diving down a dead end? How do I get out of my own way?
Like a well conditioned boxer, once you’ve established a synergy between your technical repertoire and personal style, you become a formidable force. You don’t control the type of problem that you will be presented with, but you do control your own problem solving toolkit and system. Train it well, and when the time comes to step in the ring, you’ll be ready.
3. Make a system and simplify
The job search is challenging on multiple dimensions, it can often feel like so much is out of your control. It is inherently a noisy and chaotic process if you choose to brute force your way to interview prep, personal projects, outreach, networking, sleep, physical and mental health, relationships, and maintaining any sense of a normal life. This is why it’s imperative that when you are looking for a job to break down your problems into manageable chunks and systematize them.
One of the comforts that a job provides is the structured, scheduled environment and defined scope of work. When you’re looking for a job, no one is telling you what you need to do next or how to do it. That responsibility falls on your shoulders. Defining your own standards of success and setting up your systems allows you to progress in a direction without feeling like you’re not making any progress.
The tool that I utilized the most during this time was my calendar. By putting events on my calendar, I had allocated time to do everything I wanted to do: job search, algorithm practice, personal projects, but also take care of my life outside of work by scheduling time to check in with friends, cooking nice meals, and getting exercise. When I sat down at my desk, I didn’t have to spend time thinking about what I should be doing, a previous me had already decided. My schedule also included breaks, which allowed me to take a step back and not feel guilty if I wanted to go play video games or watch some YouTube or go for a walk.
By pre-deciding, you don’t pay the cost of the decision making fatigue, determining at each moment what the best thing is to do. Should I be working on my data structure knowledge or on outreach? Ideally, both, and if you have designated time for them, you don’t have to feel that you’re slacking off. If you know that you want to practice algorithms and improve your fluency, it will not happen overnight. You’ll be much better served giving yourself a consistent, shorter duration of practice rather than waking up one day feeling extra motivated to go for six hours straight and then deciding the next day that you’re too exhausted to do it again.
Think of your thoughts and time as currency. From an investment perspective, it is unwise to put all your eggs in one basket and hope for a huge payout. A healthier and more robust portfolio is a diverse one. Schedule time for your own personal wellbeing, alongside your professional goals, because even when you do land that job, you will want to be able to balance both. By attacking the job search on all fronts, you take small but meaningful steps in the right direction.
By making your job search system as a function of time, you allow yourself to make incremental progression in the direction that you have decided. No matter how small the time investment, compound interest is your friend and by making your investment based on long term valuation, you guarantee that your time is not going to waste and actually is culminating in a greater payoff in the end. To borrow an example from James Clear’s Atomic Habits: If you make just a 1% improvement every day, in six months, that results in a 6X return. If you continue that trend for an entire year, that results in a 37X return.
Choose which areas that you need that 1% increase in and schedule time to do them, then commit to it. Once your system is defined, all you need to do is put in the time. In a recent article written by Barack Obama about how he approached the toughest decisions of his presidency, he states:
Looking back, the number of complex situations I had to adjudicate seems remarkable — that’s the job of the President of the United States. But the truth is that, even as regular Americans going through our days, we face countless decisions — a reality made even more acute by the pandemic. We’re constantly assessing how to act and what to do, carefully weighing the safety of each choice. It can be exhausting. The best we can do is find a framework that helps us consider our choices, knowing that there may not be one perfect answer. That way, we can rest a little easier knowing that did the best we could in the circumstances, come what may.
4. Grow an appetite for rejection
Two months into the job search, I received a job offer to be a software engineer at a consultancy, working on a migration from a traditional REST API to a GraphQL based web application. It was my first real job offer and I had finally reached my yearlong goal of changing my career to become a software engineer. However, as advised in the boot camp, I was told not to accept right away and instead to continue looking for opportunities to strengthen my position in negotiation.
A week later, a professor at Columbia University reached out to interview me for a role developing an online platform for data scientists and professors to host and distribute AI models. It was a dream job. I would have the opportunity to combine my technical skillset in web development with my intellectual curiosity of artificial intelligence and I knew my passion for both would show through my interview and take home assignment. I spent hours while I was in Maine on vacation with my family to work on the assignment and submit it. The professor loved the implementation and invited me back for a final round interview.
The following Monday, I received an email from Columbia professor stating that they had chosen another candidate for the job. A few days later, the consultancy informed me that they had lost a major client and could no longer afford to bring me on as an employee. I went from being one step away from my dream job and having a safety net to absolutely nothing within the span of a week. After the one and a half months I had spent going through both processes, including studying for the interviews, learning a completely new set of technologies for a three hour live coding challenge, a take home that I spent four days on, and a combined five rounds of interviewing, I had absolutely nothing to show for it.
I was heartbroken. As cruel as 2020 had been, this was an exceptionally awful experience. If there was ever a point where I doubted myself the most in my ability to make this career change happen, it was after that week. I was so disappointed that I didn’t look at my computer or code for days.
People often say that the job search is analogous to dating. The courtship process can be lengthy, confusing and uncertain, but it all pays off in hopes of a prospective future and a match for both parties. Unfortunately, the sting and the numbness of rejection hurts just the same. The future that you imagined having together all of a sudden becomes a distant fantasy. After submitting yourself to that sensation of getting knocked down over and over again, one has to wonder if they’re going mad or if the journey is worth it.
However, if your goal is to find a partner or to find a job, you won’t find it laying on the ground. In an interview of Guy Raz of How I Built This, a podcast that tells the origin stories of the world’s most well known companies, he was asked if after interviewing all these different entrepreneurs if he had discovered any common thread between their paths to success. His response was that those who had developed an appetite for rejection ended up developing the resilience necessary to arrive at success.
Just like dating, it doesn’t matter if a thousand people tell you no if just one person ends up saying yes. Hearing no hurts, whether it’s from a company or a potential partner, but it is important to be able to separate the rejection from your own self-esteem. All feelings are transient and how you feel now is not how you’re going to feel forever. A rejection does not diminish what you bring to the table or your value, and thankfully, a single “no” does not eliminate the thousands of other opportunities out there. Remember to be kind to yourself. Give yourself time and space to process your pain, but when you are ready, muster up the courage to look again.
5. Discover a means of self-expression
In an attempt to avoiding burn out on the daily grind of the job search, I decided to find hobbies to pick up. Interspersed in my schedule were time blocks dedicated to reading, writing, and even just going on walks with friends. In the moment, these side projects may have not had a direct impact on me finding a job, but it drastically improved my tangential skills that made me a compelling candidate in the job market.
I discovered that writing helped me digest experiences and form them into valuable messages for both myself and others. The more adept I became at describing my internal thoughts and feelings in English, the more explicit and expressive I became in coding. A skilled programmer is someone who is able to take an abstract concept and write code that formalizes the process in a clear and concise manner. By forcing myself to sit down and write, I had to think from the perspective of my audience and how to best convey my intent.
On one of the walks with my friends, I shared that I felt that while I was aware of my own self-image and worth, I wasn’t always the best at portraying that in the context of a job interview. My friend found that hard to believe, as he noted that I have great speaking skills, but also added that I maybe had to think from the perspective of the interviewer and what they were looking for.
I connected that piece of feedback with a personal goal of creating my own podcast. On my podcast, I interview friends and family to tell their own stories and spend a lot of time crafting questions to allow the guests to become their own storytellers. One guest spoke about his sexual orientation and how it informed his art and his views on art in the digital age. The biggest revelation that I had was the power of storytelling and being able to convert your life experience into a narrative. While I had been good at listing off my personal achievements and skills, what wasn’t clear was how my narrative aligned with that of the company, and that’s exactly what I needed to do for the companies I was interviewing for.
Observing how the people that I interviewed were able to reflect on the challenges they faced and find a path forward was equal parts inspirational and informational. Anyone can identify all the problems that they’ve faced in their life, some can figure out a way over their obstacles, but one must take sober look at the past to be able to distill experience and lessons into the shape of a story. At each interview I gave for a job, I started to view the stories from the perspective of the company and how I might fit into that narrative.
The hobbies that I picked up could easily be misconstrued as frivolous, but they added a different perspective for me to pursue my job search through a unique lens. It allowed me to approach my job search through an orthogonal angle and gave me an ability to express myself with higher fidelity. By picking up a hobby that adds another dimension to your forms of personal expression, whether it be dance, art, exercise, gaming, etc., you can take the transferrable skills from those activities and gain more of an understanding of the unique merits that you provide as well as your capacity to share that value.
6. Find people who believe in you
During quarantine, I spent my job search at home in a desiccated market without professional experience as a software engineer. It was lonely. I hadn’t seen my friends or family in months and I had just received yet another round of rejections, meaning I would have to start my search from scratch yet again. However, despite all this, I had a partner who was in the midst of the complications of starting her own career as a teacher, and she is one of the main reasons for the preservation of my sanity and ultimately my job offer.
Without Alex consistently supporting me through failures and obstacles, I don’t know if I would have even made it this far. She was there to listen when I complained about work, and fully supported me when I came up with the idea to even commit to leaving my job and changing my career. During the boot camp, she let me stay in her 200 square foot apartment with her as she finished out graduate school. We moved in together in July and she offered to cover the majority of rent, confident that I would be able to land a job soon and pay her back. Having someone believe wholeheartedly in your ability to succeed and stand by you every step of the way is an absolute blessing that I am incredibly grateful for.
Right before my final interview, I was nervously pacing through the apartment when she grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me directly in the eyes and said “This is what you’re best at, you’re going to be great”. The very first question of the interview involved a concept that I was unfamiliar with, and I completely fumbled it, but instead of getting down about it, I continued to move forward and gained more positive momentum as the interview went on. Ultimately, the conversation went extremely well and I felt great after the interview despite botching the first question.
When you’re on something as independent as a job search, even though at the end of the day the company only gives offers to individuals, that journey doesn’t have to be travelled alone. There are people who will willingly give their time and resources just to help you realize own your goals. Those people do not necessarily have to be romantic partners, they can be friends, family members, managers, colleagues, anyone that you share a personal rapport and feel comfortable talking about your dreams with.
Once you’ve established your relevant knowledge, tuned your problem solving instruments, systemized your job search, harnessed the power of perseverance, and honed in on your narrative, all that’s left is surrounding yourself with a support network of people. After all, your title of friend and family member does not change when you get a new job. I went on this year long journey in hopes of securing a future for my career, my personal goals, and my life with my partner and have walked away with not just a new job, but a multitude of lessons that I hope might help you someday. | https://medium.com/@andrew-jyan/6-things-i-learned-on-the-job-hunt-in-2020-183d542a0b96 | ['Andrew Jyan'] | 2020-12-14 15:09:55.489000+00:00 | ['Job Search', 'Careers', 'Bootcamp'] |
To 2001, the year I still dread- 1 | To 2001, the year I still dread- 1
Grief, as they say, come in different forms. There are times that it tugs at us, so hard that we choke under its weight. Times when we wonder if there’d ever be a way out. I have seen grief, I have experienced it and I have choked.
2001 was a year that I got shook to my core, a year that I questioned the very essence of my being. It was a year that everything changed for my family.
The year was pretty smooth until March when my mother decided to take my younger brother and I to her hometown for the holidays - I was excited about this particular trip because my mother had always been a strict one and I dreaded being alone with her during the holidays. When she suggested that we change environment for a while, you do not want to picture the happiness that coursed through me, little did I know that it was going to be short lived.
On the 31st of March, 2001, my mother, with out baggage and myself plus younger brother whom was just a little above 2 years went to the Ile Ife park at Agodi Gate- there were two buses on turn and one had just one more passenger to get filled up. I still can’t picture if it was a dream that I had earlier heard or I was just being the ‘emere' that my mum referred to me as but I sternly warned my mother not to enter this bus that was going to leave soon. In fact, I wept, tugging at her skirt and begging that we became the first passengers in the other bus but not only did she shout at me in her usual way, the other passengers that were already eager to leave the park (if only they knew it was going to be their last trip) beckoned at us to go with them and yes, we did.
Out seat was right behind the drivers’- I remember the faces of our neighbours on that row, there was a man right by the window(this man swapped places with us so that it would be easier for my mother to ‘lap' my brother and I). There was another woman, baker that had thus massive wedding cake to deliver for a wedding the following day in Ife. She was the most impatient of us all because she was getting late and didn’t want to exceed her deadline- GSMs were not that common at the time(only the selected few were just starting to test the waters) so there was no way for her to reach the bride that she was on her way. Payments were made, the agberos removed their shares and we left the city of Ibadan, little did we know that none of us was going to return as whole beings.
We set out, not knowing that this journey was going to rob of us happiness, sanity and good health in a matter of hours to come. | https://medium.com/@m.adedoyin95/to-2001-the-year-i-still-dread-1-956a9434d202 | ['Mariam Adedoyin Adeyeye'] | 2020-12-18 15:20:48.247000+00:00 | ['Grief And Loss', 'Transport', 'Experience', 'Travelling', 'Journey'] |
FREEDownload & Read PDF FREE An Acupuncturist’s Guide to Medical Red Flags and Referrals | An Acupuncturist’s Guide to Medical Red Flags and Referrals
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https://medialibraryonline.blogspot.com/media70.php?asin=1891845543 | https://medium.com/@halimahmelia/download-read-pdf-free-an-acupuncturists-guide-to-medical-red-flags-and-referrals-189494d2e42e | ['Halimah Melia'] | 2021-09-11 04:33:16.456000+00:00 | ['Amazon', 'Downloa', 'Pdf', 'eBook', 'Free'] |
Your Ruins Are My Home | Your ruins are my home; let me kiss your feet
Your river is my blood; I drink of it
Your desert is my salvation; I surrender
Your rich black earth is my body; I nourish of it
It is I, your ever-loving daughter and servant.
If you like this, you may fancy this too: | https://psiloveyou.xyz/your-ruins-are-my-home-cc912e36f70b | ['Wendy S. Bradfield'] | 2020-12-13 13:02:53.278000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Inspiration', 'Poetry Sunday', 'Love', 'Self'] |
What Do Employees Want When They Return to the Office? (Video and Podcast) | Our assumptions about what others want are often incorrect due to the cognitive bias called the false consensus effect. Extensive research shows that most employees place a premium on telework and work-life quality after the pandemic. That’s the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes what employees want when they return to the office.
Video: “What Do Employees Want When They Return to the Office?”
Podcast: “What Do Employees Want When They Return to the Office?”
Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast
Here is the article: What Do Employees Want When They Return to the Office?
The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course
Transcript
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today we’ll talk about decision making on returning employees to the office and specifically figuring out what employees want. Employers often don’t have much clarity about what employers want, especially during a time of disruption. And the pandemic has been a time of major disruption. So bringing employees back to the office is a very tricky question that depends on really understanding what they want. Because you know, you don’t want to be forcing people to go back to the office, it’s going to be pretty difficult environment, if you tried to force people, especially with the great resignation coming with so many people looking to leave their current positions, and find a new job in the midst of this great hiring boom, the post pandemic recovery. So what does the post pandemic workplace look like? It may not be what employers imagined. Employee leaders overwhelmingly have been successful through in person interactions, they have successful 2030, some 40 year careers through in person face to face in office interactions, and I really want to go back to January 2020. That’s what they feel like doing. And that’s what they feel like their employees should feel like doing. Because they assume that that’s what employees want, it’s easy to make that assumption, because that’s what they want. leaders want that and they assume that employees want that. Unfortunately, these assumptions are often wrong, and problematic because of mental blind spots called cognitive biases. And the biggest one, the biggest one, applying to employees, where employers make assumptions about employees is called the false consensus effect, the false consensus effect. It’s a problematic mental tendency, where we assume that those who are in our tribe, those who are in our in-group agree with us to a much greater extent than they actually do. So for example, though, our employees, the employees, the various leaders, their team members, have the same opinion about returning to the office permanent post pandemic porque arrangements. So that is an example. It’s often a false assumption, something that really is not as accurate as we think we are in making that assumption. We happen in relationships all the time as well. By the way, this is why there’s a pretty significant divorce rate in the United States. People make bad assumptions about their partners and in all sorts of relationships, you have to understand that the pandemic caused major disruptions where people really shifted their perspectives. I mean, over a year of telework, that has really shifted the perspectives and all the things associated with the pandemic, then society, the worries, the problematic lack of social interactions, face to face that cause people to have different habits, norms, values, and returning to the office, they often don’t think what employers think they should think or actually think they think. So it’s good to get research on what employees actually think. And so that’s what you want to do to avoid judgment errors, avoid making hasty assumptions. And instead, look at this objective data, survey data research of all sorts on what employees actually want. So what do we do? What kind of data do we have? Well, there are eight major surveys that have been done, on what employees one that have been published in the spring of 2021. And so that’s what the employees, that’s where the surveys are coming from. And overwhelmingly, they show that employees want to continue working remotely for a large chunk of the time seven, some even permanently. So for a large chunk of their workweek. employees want to work from home, the large majority vast majority, and then a substantial minority want to continue working remotely full time, over two thirds, that’s over two thirds, want to continue working remotely half the time or more. And that’s kind of the lower bound of the surveys. Usually when you see questions of you know, how many people want to go back to the office for over half the workweek. With this you’ll see something like maybe 20% 25%. It’s rare that it goes and surveys up to 33% 1/3. So definitely over two thirds want to work remotely half the time or more, and over a fifth. Depending on a survey you’ll see anywhere from 20 to 35% want to work remotely full time over two fifths and this ranges from 42% to 58%. With quit if working remotely wasn’t a regular option if working remotely for at least half the work week wasn’t a regular option, and some would quit if working remotely full time wasn’t the regular So something you have to understand where employees are coming from. Now, employees feel pretty good about remote work, you know, you might have heard about complaints about remote work, or various problems. But overall, they feel quite good about it, as you can see from the fact that they want to do substantially, a lot of it, they want to do remotely, it’s a crucial benefit, this perceived as a crucial benefit, something that they will sacrifice a lot of money for 8% of their salary on average. So that’s a major chunk of change that they are willing to sacrifice. So this is really something for you to consider as employers. And as employees, neither, this is something for you to bring to your boss. And this is something they should know. Now, the surveys also show that there are a number of other benefits of remote work, where employees report having much more work-life balance when they work remotely, when they don’t come to the office, employees feel more productive, they feel more engaged, they feel happier. So all of these are huge, large benefits, productivity, engagement, happiness, and they’re glad to be in your company. Those are all major benefits. And they also feel less stressed. So not only are more productive, engaged, happier, but also less stressed. So that’s great. We definitely want employees who are productive, engaged, happy and less stressed. Now, there are some problems with telework. So working from home is not all fun and games that are some challenges that need to be addressed. And that can’t be addressed effectively. They want fewer meetings. Now that’s not too difficult to address as an issue of telework. Over half the field burned out partially because the hours are stretched, there’s insufficient boundaries on their time, which can be addressed. And over three quarters, get zoom fatigue, again, tied to the meetings, lots and lots of meetings, which you can definitely have less of. So you want to solve a large number of challenges with telework to make it easier going forward. Other telework issues include that there’s a lot of challenges with employees getting sufficient money for their home offices for their equipment, equipment, like good laptops, good microphones, good video cameras, good bandwidth for their internet. So broadband and stuff like that are issues and for their furniture, good ergonomic furniture, nice comfortable home spaces, quiet home spaces. Another issue is that other folks may not be great at virtual communication, collaboration. So this is a challenge if they feel that, hey, there’s a lot of challenges with others and themselves, not having the greatest skills in virtual communication, virtual collaboration. Those are areas I’ve been really surprised to see companies failing to invest in getting training in these areas. So getting training in virtual communication and virtual collaboration is something that would be really important for companies going forward. And research done during the pandemic backs up the survey results. That’s the survey results. There’s a lot of research showing that these survey results are quite accurate. employee productivity rose following the transition to telework. So for example, there was a 5% increase more than 5% increase from March August 2020, compared to March August 2019. So in that period of time, six months from March to August 2020 compared to March to August 2019, there was a 5% increase in productivity, which definitely shows that people going to work at home contributed to the rise in productivity. 90 and 94% of workers feel equally or more productive than before the pandemic working at home. So this is all about telework, of course. So talking about teleworkers only. And employers overall are pretty convinced of efficiency. So when we look at employers, and when we ask them, are you going to make workers more productive? Are they more efficient? They say yes, which makes sense because of course, workers don’t have nearly as much money and they don’t have a community. I’ve had to go from their bedroom to their home office, right? Instead of spending a couple of hours on the commute, stressed out and so on. And they don’t have a lot of the hassles that come from working in the office. So coming in various distractions going through security, all of that sort of stuff, so they can spend more time being productive and actually doing work. Now, there are a number of other reasons telework will stick around some companies, a lot of companies made serious investments in it for remote work. So they keep using this because they now have this much less of an obstacle. Employers, employees spend money and resources for home offices. There are some companies that fund home offices for their employees. And of course, employees themselves spent a lot of money on improving their home offices as well. So that’s another benefit and there is a big Big reduction in stigma around telework, which was a big issue. But people who are teleworking were perceived as folding it in. And now teleworking is normalized. That’s the big thing. So that’s what you need to understand about workers and what they want when they return to the office. And again, the large majority of workers over two thirds more likely over four, three quarters on average. So two thirds of the lower bound want to work from home over half the time, about 20 to 20 to 35% want to work remotely full time, and over two fifths would quit if they weren’t given the opportunity to work remotely, at least half the time. And the number would quit if they weren’t given the opportunity to work remotely, full time. So those are things that you need to understand about workers and what they want. And the false consensus effect is a dangerous judgment error, which causes leaders to misperceive what their workers want and what they will be willing to do. If they don’t get what they want. While we’re seeing a number of companies with good workers, the top talent is leaving, because the company is really bungling the return to the office. All right, this has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. I hope you liked it. Please leave your comments and thoughts on the show. I’ll be glad to hear them. You can leave them in the show notes as comments. And you can of course, email me at Gleb at disaster avoidance experts dot com with your notes with your quote, questions, comments, again, that’s Gleb at disaster avoidance experts.com. You’ll find a lot more information about the show in the show notes and I hope you subscribe to the show on whichever venue you’ve checked out. Check this out, whether it’s videocast or podcast we have both. Alright, I hope you have benefited and that hope this show will help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Till next time, my friends.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts . | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/what-do-employees-want-when-they-return-to-the-office-video-and-podcast-3ae37e9a0341 | ['Dr. Gleb Tsipursky'] | 2021-07-05 14:09:22.807000+00:00 | ['Cognitive Bias', 'HR', 'Work From Home', 'Risk Management', 'Pandemic'] |
We Should All Be Worried About The United Nations Food Systems Summit. | We Should All Be Worried About The United Nations Food Systems Summit.
A battle for the future of food is already underway. There’s still time to change the outcome. A Growing Culture May 2·9 min read
Image: John Keatley. Graphic: AGC
Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.
At the heart of the opposition is the fact that the conference has been co-opted by corporate interests who are pushing towards a highly industrialized style of agriculture promoted by supporters of the Green Revolution, an approach that is meant to eradicate hunger by increasing production through hybrid seeds and other agrochemical inputs. It has been widely discredited for failing to achieve its goals and damaging the environment. The Summit’s concept paper perpetuates the same Green Revolution narrative — it is dominated by topics like AI-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture, as well as finance and market mechanisms to address food insecurity, with methods like agroecology notably absent or minimally discussed.
A Crisis of Participation
But the problem is not only the subject matter that the conference has put on the agenda. It’s also the remarkably undemocratic way of choosing who gets to participate, and in what ways. The agenda was set behind closed doors at Davos, the World Economic Forum’s exclusive conference. As Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International puts it, “They have cherry picked representatives of civil society. We don’t know why, or which procedure they used.”
“The multi-stakeholder model of governance is problematic because it sounds very inclusive,” Monsalve continues. “But in fact we are worried about the concealing of power asymmetries, without having a clear rule in terms of accountability. What is the rule here — who decides? And if you don’t decide according to a rule, where can we go to claim you are doing wrong?”
The conference organizers have claimed that they have given peasant-led and civil society groups ample opportunity to participate in the conference, but this is a facade. The UN’s definition of ‘participation’ differs significantly from that of the hundreds of civil society groups that have spoken out against the Summit. The Summit claims that allowing groups to attend virtual sessions and give suggestions amounts to participation. But true participation means being consulted about crucial agenda items that have a massive impact on the communities they represent. This was not done.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to shape the agenda, Monsalve explains. “The agenda was set. Full stop. And therefore we are asking ‘why is it that we are not discussing how to dismantle corporate power? This is a very urgent issue on the ground for the people. How is it that we are not discussing about COVID and the food crisis related to COVID?’”
Organizations like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), which represents 148 grassroots groups from 28 countries, feel similarly. “It’s just like having a table set,” explains Sylvia Mallari, Global Co-Chairperson of PCFS. “So you have a dinner table set, then the questions would be who set the table, who is invited to the table, who sits beside whom during dinner? And what is the menu? For whom and for what is the food summit? And right now, the way it has been, the agenda they’ve set leaves out crucial peoples and even their own UN nation agencies being left behind.”
Elizabeth Mpofu of La Vía Campesina, the largest peasant-led organization representing over 2 million people worldwide, explains how “The United Nation food systems summit, from the beginning, was really not inclusive of the peasants’ voices. And if they’re going to talk about the food systems, on behalf of whom? Because the people who are on the ground, who are really working on producing the food should be involved in the planning. Before they even organized this summit, they should have made some consultations and this was not done.”
The concerns are not only coming from outside the UN. Two former UN Special Rapporteurs to the Right to Food — Olivier De Schutter and Hilal Elver — as well as Michael Fakhri, who currently holds the position, wrote a statement to the summit organizers early on in the process. “Having all served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” they write, “we have witnessed first-hand the importance of improving accountability and democracy in food systems, and the value of people’s local and traditional knowledge.
It is deeply concerning that we had to spend a year persuading the convenors that human rights matter for this UN Secretary General’s Food Systems Summit. It is also highly problematic that issues of power, participation, and accountability (i.e. how and by whom will the outcomes be delivered) remain unresolved.”
Michael Fakhri has also expressed concern about the sidelining of the Committee on Food Security (CFS), a unique civil society organization that allows “people to directly dialogue and debate with governments, holding them to account.” As Fakhri explains, if the CFS is sidelined in this summit (as they have been thus far), there is a real danger that “there will no longer be a place for human rights in food policy, diminishing anyone’s ability to hold powerful actors accountable.”
Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) and PCFS member, stated during a Hunger for Justice Broadcast on April 30th that the problem comes down to one of fundamentally conflicting values: “Multinational corporations and small-holder farmers have different values,” said Kenyangi. “While the former value profit, the latter value the integrity of ecosystems. Meaningful input of small-holder farmers, respect for Indigenous knowledge, consideration for biodiversity… will not be taken into account [at the Summit]. They will not tell the truth: that hunger is political; that food insecurity in Africa is not only as a result of law and agriculture production, but it’s a question of justice, democracy and political will. That’s our concern.”
The Presence of AGRA
The problems with the Summit were compounded further by UN Secretary General António Guterres choosing to appoint Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy to the conference. AGRA is an organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (as well as our governments), that promotes a high-tech, high-cost approach to agriculture, heavily reliant on agrochemical inputs and fertilizers. They have been at the forefront of predatory seed laws and policies that marginalize and disenfranchise peasant farmers on a massive scale.
AGRA has devastated small-scale farmers under the mission of “doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.” Their approach has been proven to be markedly unsuccessful. Timothy Wise, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, began to research AGRA’s efficacy in the last fourteen years of work. Unlike many nonprofits who are held to strict transparency standards, AGRA refuses to share any information about their performance metrics with researchers. It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request to find out what AGRA has to show for their US$1 billion budget. Researchers found that AGRA ‘apparently’ had not been collecting this data until 2017 (eleven years after their founding in 2006).
Food security has not decreased in their target countries. In fact, for the countries in which AGRA operates as a whole, food insecurity has increased by 30% during their years of operation; crop production has fared no better. Yet this narrative continues to be pervasive around the world. It is the backbone of the UN Food Systems Summit and most development agendas. And AGRA’s president is leading the conference.
Attempts to build bridges with civil society organizations have failed. In sessions with civil society groups, Ms. Kalibata has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the growing peasant-led movements that reclaim traditional agricultural methods as promising avenues to a more sustainable food system. Wise explains, “During the session she held with peasant groups, she basically indicated that she didn’t know about the peasant rights declaration that the UN had passed just two years ago. And she told them, why do you keep calling yourselves peasants? She said that she calls them business people because she thinks they’re needing to learn how to farm as a business.”
“It’s also a pretty significant conflict of interest, which people don’t quite realise,” Wise continues. “AGRA is a nonprofit organisation that’s funded by the Gates foundation and a couple other foundations — and our governments. They are about to enter a period where they desperately need to replenish their financing. And so they are going to be undertaking a major fund drive exactly when this conference is happening. And the summit is being positioned to help with that fund drive.”
Since Ms. Kalibata was named special envoy, there has been a public outcry over this clear conflict of interest. 176 civil society organizations from 83 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres voicing their concerns over Ms. Kalibata’s corporate ties. They never received a response. 500 civil society organizations, academics, and other actors sent the UN an additional statement laying out the growing list of concerns about the Summit. Again, they received no reply.
While 676 total civil society organizations and individuals expressed clear concern over Ms. Kalibata’s appointment, only twelve people signed a letter supporting the nomination. The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s AGRA Watch team found that all but one of these individuals have received funds from the Gates Foundation.
Competing Pathways for Food Systems Change
This summit isn’t just a case of poor planning and a lack of genuine participation for peasant-led organizations. It represents a deeper and more insidious trend in food systems governance: the erosion of democratic decision-making and the rise of powerful, unaccountable, private-sector actors who continue to consolidate power over the food system.
The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. “If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
That’s why this conference is so important: it will set the stage for the approach to food systems change in the coming decades. We the people need to decide who should set the agenda for a food future that affects us all — one that preserves biodiversity and prioritizes human rights and well-being. Are we willing to let the corporations who pursue profits at all cost continue to claim that they know what’s in our best interest? Do we want a future governed by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the largest agrochemical and seed companies in the world? Or are we ready to demand that those who actually grow our food — peasants, farmers, and Indigenous peoples around the world — be the ones to determine our direction?
This is what’s at stake. Right now, the most powerful players in the food system are poised to set an agenda that will allow them to continue amassing profits at staggering rates, at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.
But there is still time to fight back. Where the conference holds most of its power is in its legitimacy. As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble. We must stand in solidarity with the grassroots communities who are telling the truth about this conference and what it represents. We must get to work. | https://medium.com/@agrowingculture/we-should-all-be-worried-about-the-united-nations-food-systems-summit-803159ee9903 | ['A Growing Culture'] | 2021-05-02 01:42:05.458000+00:00 | ['Food Systems', 'Bill Gates', 'Food Security', 'United Nations', 'Sustainability'] |
LightGBM on Home Credit Default Risk Prediction | Feature engineering
Feature engineering is usually the longest process that we need to do in order to create a machine learning model. Now I would like to start this part with finding out the datatypes of each column which the output can be seen in figure 13.
Figure 13. The datatypes of each column in reduced_df.
Notice that some of the columns in our data frame are still in form of object. In Pandas, object simply means string. This is actually a problem since basically any machine learning algorithm will work only with numerical data. Hence, we need to either label-encode or one-hot-encode all these objects.
To determine whether we should use label encoder or one-hot encoder, we need to find out the number of unique values in each of those columns first. If a column has more than 2 categories, then we need to use one-hot encoder. Otherwise, if the number of categories is exactly 2 we need to use label encoder instead. In order to do that, I decided to create a simple loop which is going to print out the number of unique value in each of the columns in reduced_df.
Figure 13. Code to find out the number of unique values in each column in reduced_df.
Figure 14. The unique values of each reduced_df column.
Pardon the weird indentation :) We can see here that CODE_GENDER, NAME_INCOME_TYPE and NAME_EDUCATION_TYPE are having more than 2 unique categorical values. Hence, we need to convert these into one-hot format. My approach here is to employ get_dummies() function taken from Pandas library.
Figure 15. Code to convert values in the data frame to one-hot representation.
Initially, the shape of reduced_df is (307511, 17), where 17 indicates the number of existing columns. Subsequently, after running the code in figure 15 above, the data frame should now be having the size of (307511, 30). This number of column is taken from 17 (initial) + 3 (code gender) + 8 (income type) + 5 (education type) – 3 (no of columns converted to one-hot) = 30 (final result).
Next, we need to perform label encoding to the columns where the number of unique values are exactly 2. This can be achieved by using LabelEncoder object from Sklearn module. The complete process is done in figure 16. Additionally, notice that here I am using 3 different label encoders for the 3 columns.
Figure 16. Code to perform label encoding.
Alright, up to this point we already created features in which all of those are in form of non-string data. Now if you check the datatypes of all columns in the data frame like what I did in figure 13 above you should see that everything has been in form of either integer or float. And this is exactly what we want.
Figure 17. The number of NaN values in reduced_df.
However though, we still encounter another problem. What’s that? Look at the figure 17. All values displayed here basically denotes the number of missing values in the corresponding column. There are actually 2 options to choose here, either dropping all those NaN values or filling them with a particular number.
In this case, I decided to fill them all using the average value of each column for some reasons. In fact, you may try to use median, zeros, or probably forward fill in order to do so. Yet I feel like taking the mean value is just the right choice.
The implementation itself is pretty simple thanks to fillna() method which can directly be applied to the columns. The detailed steps is shown in figure 18.
Figure 18. Filling missing values with the average value of the corresponding columns.
And that’s the end of feature engineering chapter! Now let’s continue creating the machine learning model in the next section! | https://becominghuman.ai/lightgbm-on-home-credit-default-risk-prediction-5b17e68a6e9 | ['Muhammad Ardi'] | 2020-11-04 15:04:22.431000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Feature Engineering', 'Python', 'Data Visualization', 'Machine Learning'] |
Axios ve Reactjs ile JSON Verisi Nasıl Çekilir? | At the Intersection of the Development, Front-End, Back-End, and Mobile || JavaScript, Python, and AWS || [email protected] | https://medium.com/@muumdev/axios-ve-reactjs-ile-json-verisi-nas%C4%B1l-%C3%A7ekilir-e73445b03aa9 | ['Murat Umutlu'] | 2020-12-21 22:34:21.771000+00:00 | ['Data Fetching', 'Reactjs', 'Axios', 'Json Data Example'] |
The Best Ways To Make Money Blogging in 2021. | The Best Ways To Make Money Blogging in 2021.
The Best Ways To Make Money Blogging in 2021.
How Do You Make Money Blogging?
The moment you decide to use your blog to make money, you’re no longer just a blogger. At that moment, you also become an entrepreneur, and your blog becomes a small business.
You’ve probably heard of financial planners giving free seminars to attract clients, right?
Well, blogging is a lot like those free seminars. You’re giving away your expertise and knowledge in the hopes of attracting customers and then gaining their trust.
In other words, if your goal is to make money with your blog, use it as a lead generation mechanism. Nurture those leads until they are ready to purchase, and the profit can quickly snowball.
Here’s How to Make Money Blogging..
Set up your blog Write content that gets lots of traffic Convert visitors into email subscribers Send those subscribers content that builds trust Send those subscribers content that builds trust Sell products or service content that builds trust
The problem ?
It’s hard to do. The process is simple on the surface, but each steps is enormously complicated and requires extraordinary skill. Especially the last one. For instance, do you want to sell your own products or services? If so, which ones? Here are just a few of the options:
Make money blogging by selling these types of things Or.. what if you don’t have any products and services to sell ? What should you do then?
Well, you can also make money blogging by selling someone else’s products and services.
The most conventional( and least profitable) method is selling advertising. where you allow companies to promote their products and services to your audience in exchange for a fee. You can also form partnerships with other companies, promoting their products and services and earning a commission each time one of your readers purchases. This is called “affiliate marketing.”
Which model should you choose? What should you do?
Well, I can give you my thoughts. After a decade in this business, I’ve learned a few things, and I believe some of them might surprise you…
Don’t Sell Advertising( or Use Google Adsense)
Ask your average beginner how they plan to make money blogging, and they’ll say they plan to sell ads on their site. After all, that’s how big newspapers and magazines monetize, so why not them? But it’s a mistake.
The next most profitable strategy would have been a partner with other companies, collecting a commission on each sale as an affiliate.
The point?
If you have an engaged audience that trusts you, and you’re trying to figure out how to make money blogging, selling ads is never a smart move. And that includes all the variations like Google Adsense, sponsorships, and advertising networks. None of it will make nearly as much money as promoting your own products or earning commission from promoting someone else’s.
Start with Affiliate Marketing(or Services)
As I write this, it just so happens that I’m in the initial stages of starting a new blog(more details to be announced soon). It’s in a completely different space where I have no products, so I’ve been pondering the best way to monetize it, and here’s what I think…
Affiliate marketing is the smartest strategy.
If you’re not familiar with the team, it’s a business model where you endorse other people’s products or services in exchange for a commission. On software and information products, affiliate typically earn a 50% commission or sometimes even more, so it can be quite lucrative. Pat Flynn, for example, makes over $100,000 a month in affiliate commissions. Here at smart Blogger, we mostly promote our own products, but we also make a tidy sum promoting LeadPages and SiteGround.
Granted, you won’t make that kind of money when your blog is small, but when you’re just blog is small, but when you’re just starting to learn how to make money blogging, affiliate marketing is still a good way to start for several reasons:
It’s faster. Instead of investing months, years creating a product, all you have to do is publish a link on your site. Assuming your audience is engaged, you could be earning commissions within hours or even minutes.
The income from affiliate marketing is almost entirely passive. You don’t have to worry about creating products, supporting customers, or any of the technical complexity of selling your own products or services. You can also invest the time you save into growing your traffic, leading to more revenue later.
It can guide future product creation. If one affiliate products sells 10X better than all the others you promote, you might want to think about developing your versions of the product, because you have proof your audience wants it
Personally, I think the advantages are so enormous that when it comes to how to make money blogging, no one should consider any other business model… with one exception:
Service providers.
If you are a graphic designer, real estate agent, attorney, r any other type of service provider, you probably want to offer your service on your blog from day one. The profit you make will almost certainly outstrip anything else, at least in the beginning.
Build the Funnel in Reverse.
Even if you’re making fantastic money from affiliate marketing or selling services, chances are you’ll want to try your hand at developing your own product at some point. So, where should you start?
My answer: with blogs, the most profitable price is usually the end of the funnel. Here’s what I mean….
You’ve seen a sales funnel, right? A company entices you with a freebie, then they offer you something cheap but irresistible, and then they gradually sweet talk you into buying more and more expensive stuff. It’s a tried and more expensive stuff. It’s a tried and true marketing tactic, and you should absolutely build a sales funnel for your blog.
What you might not know is you should build it in reverse. A lot of bloggers launch a cheap e-book as their first product, and then they get frustrated when they don’t make much money. Here’s why: the real profit is at the end of the funnel, not the beginning. Selling e-books is fine and dandy if you have half of a dozen more expensive to offer your customer afterwards, but it’s downright silly if you don’t. You’re much better off creating and selling the expensive products first, and then gradually building cheaper and cheaper products.
When you do have some less expensive products to sell, you can offer those to new people first, safe in the knowledge that you have something more profitable up your sleeve to sell them later.
If you want to read more than: click here | https://medium.com/@codetolearn/the-best-ways-to-make-money-blogging-in-2021-c4e29179cbdd | ['Deepak Kumar Soni'] | 2020-12-22 11:31:23.059000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Digitalmarketingstrategy', 'Moneymakingblog', 'Make Money Online', 'Onlinelearninganalytics'] |
It’s Never Too Late to Turn Trauma Into Growth | It’s Never Too Late to Turn Trauma Into Growth
The psychology of post-traumatic growth can help us understand why some people become stronger, braver, and more creative after the worst moment of their lives Soniya Aktar Dec 17, 2020·7 min read
Photo: Justin Paget/Getty Images
It’s been 29 days since I lost my partner in a swimming accident. And for the 29th day, I’m awake at an ungodly hour writing. Writing about his life, and mine. Writing about everything I learned and how deeply we loved in our too-short time together.
The last time I experienced a surge of creativity like this was three years ago, when my divorce was finalized. This wasn’t one of your run-of-the-mill separations where we tried to work it out but couldn’t. This divorce came on fast and hard and necessarily. But while I fully expected to fall apart, I didn’t. Instead, in between waves of shock and grief, I learned to play a new instrument to remind me how brave I was. I started sharing my songs and writing publicly and started a new graduate school program. I wanted to remind myself I was still alive.
We all know about post-traumatic stress disorder, when the impact of a traumatic event causes psychological distress and manifests as anxiety, intrusive thoughts, ongoing fear, and reactive symptoms. But in the 1990s, researchers began to take note of another response to trauma: Some people actually seem to get stronger, braver, more spiritual, more connected, and more appreciative of life in direct correlation to the worst moment of their lives.
We are living in a time of widespread trauma. In the midst of it, you may be experiencing some form of post-traumatic growth (PTG). This doesn’t mean you are suffering any less than others — it simply means your pain has found a place to go. Here’s how to identify PTG and how to make room for it.
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https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/Roma-v-Torino-In-Diretta-Gratis488.pdf
https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/Roma-v-Torino-In-Diretta-Streaming4851.pdf
https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/La-Serena-vs-Ude-Chile-En-Vivo-cl-game-Online592.pdf
https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/La-Serena-vs-Ude-Chile-En-Vivo-cl-game-free598.pdf
https://www.ccab.org/sites/default/files/webform/Mechelen-v-Cl-Brugge-be-bfd-a412.pdf
https://www.ccab.org/sites/default/files/webform/Mechelen-v-Cl-Brugge-be-soccer417.pdf
https://www.atmosphere-eubrazil.eu/sites/default/files/webform/Mechelen-v-Cl-Brugge-be-bfd-a412.pdf
https://www.atmosphere-eubrazil.eu/sites/default/files/webform/Mechelen-v-Cl-Brugge-be-soccer417.pdf
https://www.maitland.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/webform/mechelen-v-cl-brugge-be-bfd-a412.pdf
https://www.maitland.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/webform/mechelen-v-cl-brugge-be-soccer417.pdf
https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/Mechelen-v-Cl-Brugge-be-bfd-a412.pdf
https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/Mechelen-v-Cl-Brugge-be-soccer417.pdf
https://dandyrads.com.au/pbn/Video-deportivo-la-coruga-vs-el-ejido-kery-vivo1.html
https://dandyrads.com.au/pbn/Video-deportivo-la-coruga-vs-el-ejido-kery-vivo2.html
https://www.colliersauto.com.au/oxu/Video-deportivo-la-coruga-vs-el-ejido-kery-vivo1.html
https://www.colliersauto.com.au/oxu/Video-deportivo-la-coruga-vs-el-ejido-kery-vivo2.html
https://www.atmosphere-eubrazil.eu/sites/default/files/webform/Best-FIFA-Football-Awards-live-streaming-2.pdf
https://www.atmosphere-eubrazil.eu/sites/default/files/webform/Best-FIFA-Football-Awards-live-streaming-tyc4.pdf
https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/Best-FIFA-Football-Awards-live-streaming-2.pdf
https://ap3f.adb.org/sites/default/files/webform/eoi_online_form/_sid_/Best-FIFA-Football-Awards-live-streaming-tyc4.pdf
What post-traumatic growth can look like
According to the Posttraumatic Growth Research Group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PTG tends to occur in five distinct forms:
Gaining a deeper appreciation for the beauty and wonder of life and showing more gratitude for the little moments often overlooked.
Deepening relationships with the people we love and/or choosing to comfort survivors who have experienced the same form of trauma.
Seeking out and embracing new opportunities and recognizing the brevity of our own mortality.
Becoming stronger internally through self-validation: “If I survived this, I can survive anything.”
Experiencing a shift or growth in faith or a brand-new connection with religion and/or spirituality.
The research on PTG is new and ongoing, and there’s a lot about it that’s still unknown. But what we do know is that it redirects the pain of the trauma, allowing us to look inward and toward the future rather than remaining stuck in the past.
How to cultivate post-traumatic growth
Post-traumatic growth isn’t the same as resilience, though the two are related. Resilience is influenced by one’s environment and involves a return to a previous level of healthy functioning after trauma. Think of it like a ball that bounces back once it’s dropped on the ground. Most people eventually do this following a major traumatic event.
Post-traumatic growth, however, is a transformational change in one’s capacity to create, connect, take risks, reflect, and hold perspective. It’s a ball that bounces back but then keeps on going, defying the laws of gravity.
There’s no proven recipe or hack for post-traumatic growth, but there are things you can do to make space for it — not to give yourself one more thing to do as you heal but to help ease your own healing process.
Indulge in creativity
Creating something new can be a meaningful way of honoring something that has been lost, whether that is a person you loved, a relationship you wanted, or a way of seeing the world. One of my deceased partner’s friends is working to finish producing the music they had been working on together. Others who knew him are creating scrapbooks, sharing pictures, and writing stories. Making space to memorialize a particular point in time is a way of capturing what you’ve learned and how you want to live differently in the future.
Creativity doesn’t need to be limited to art, music, or writing. Pour yourself into the thing you do best — whether that’s running a quicker mile than ever, propagating new succulents for your window, or cooking your meanest ever batch of chili. Do what you do with purpose, and take pleasure in the results. As a friend once wisely told me: If you can’t make it happy, make it beautiful.
Seek justice
Another way to cultivate growth following trauma is to seek to make things right — if not for yourself, then for others. A survivor of child sexual abuse might choose to confront or take legal action against their abuser. Parents who lost a child to cancer might decide to create a charity to help others in the same situation. A survivor of a natural disaster may decide to devote their life to helping other people rebuild.
Seeking justice can also be an internal act, especially when no one is to blame. It may mean going into the dark places of the heart, asking the hard questions, and allowing yourself to feel the pain of realizing there are no good answers.
Reach out
Unless you make an effort, you won’t know who else is suffering the way you are and would be comforted by your presence. Unless you share vulnerably, you won’t discover how much another’s presence will comfort you, too.
In the aftermath of trauma, tell stories. Ask for stories. Accept any and all offers of help. Go to the funeral or the remembrance day or the support group with other survivors. Take the risk of reconnecting with someone from your past. Take the risk of approaching someone you might not otherwise. Most people appreciate the opportunity to provide support in someone else’s darkest hour.
Know that experiencing the effects of post-traumatic growth doesn’t mean you won’t also experience the distressing effects of trauma. Alongside my current creative streak are painful physical manifestations of grief, intense mood swings, and lots and lots of crying. And I still have reactive symptoms to certain stimuli left over from my divorce.
Post-traumatic growth can and does happen, but don’t feel guilty if it doesn’t or if it doesn’t happen on your timetable. Even though I’m doing a lot of writing and creating, taking risks, and reaching out, I’m not ready to say this is a period of growth. It has only been 29 days. I’m not back to healthy functioning; the grief I feel far outweighs any of the growth I’m experiencing.
I take heart in the words my partner once shared with me when I told him the long version of the story of how my marriage ended. He listened intently and thought carefully about his response. “As much as I want to say sorry for what you’ve gone through,” he said, “it doesn’t seem like the right thing to say. Because I don’t see you as a victim.” Instead, he said, he saw me as a survivor.
There are so many of us now who are living through our own traumas or just beginning to find our way out. The pain doesn’t go away, but it can pave the way for something beautiful and new. | https://medium.com/@wannarjookan34df/its-never-too-late-to-turn-trauma-into-growth-8eb1a5b376ff | ['Soniya Aktar'] | 2020-12-17 15:20:59.363000+00:00 | ['Trauma', 'Psychology', 'Growth', 'Grief', 'Self Improvement'] |
Bridging Excel with Python: xlwings | Recently, I did several oil and gas commodity price simulations using stochastic techniques to evaluate the risk exposure of a regional oil and gas player. These simulations involved calculating 10,000 sets of prices x 5 price indices, on a monthly level for 3 years.
The traditional approach would have been to use a 3rd party Microsoft Excel plugin to perform these stochastic simulations, but from some research and other’s past experiences, I found that:
It cost about 3,000 USD per user per year for a license 10,000 simulations would take hours to run on MS Excel, and would crash frequently It had inflexible functions, and was hard to customize to the client’s situation
Personally, I feel MS Excel is always good for fast data wrangling with little set-up and is good for visualizing the flow of calculations, but generally suffers under heavy computing.
Another option was to implement the stochastic simulation in Python. This solved many of the problems highlighted above:
Absolutely free, with dozens of open source packages for stochastic simulation, optimization, etc. The Pandas package in Python is suited for heavy computing: 10,000 simulations took minutes to run, compared to hours Fully customizable functions and simulations
However, there was an issue…
The client was much more comfortable using Excel than Python/Jupyter notebooks. So how would we be able to successfully handover our Python based simulation tool and deliver lasting impact?
Enter xlwings
I’m surprised this package gets so little hype for what it’s able to do.
xlwings acts as an interface between a Python kernel and Excel workbook. It’s able to:
Read specific data from an Excel workbook into memory, and print data, graphs and pictures generated by Python into specified places in an Excel workbook Use the in-built Excel ribbon to import your Python functions that can be used in the Excel formula bar or as VBA macros (The VBA code is auto-generated for you!)
With these features, I built a bespoke input Excel workbook, with all the explanatory notes and formatting required. xlwings was used to link the workbook to Python functions in a separate script, and the client could realize all the benefits of Python without mucking with Jupyter notebook, nor writing a single line of code.
Illustrative workflow for our commodity price simulation tool
After some painless installation of Python and the needed packages, the client took to the workbook quickly. They particularly enjoyed clicking on the macro buttons and seeing the results printed to the Excel book instantly (“What if I change it to 50%? To 100%? Let’s compare the results now”). I could see that this format greatly encouraged experimenting around with different strategies.
As consulting starts to rely more on advanced analytics like machine learning, big data visualization and scenario simulations, I predict xlwings will quickly become a favorite tool in my toolkit.
Go check out xlwings here: https://docs.xlwings.org/en/stable/ ✌ | https://medium.com/@ernest-huang/bridging-excel-with-python-xlwings-2e3f47cf4ac5 | ['Ernest Huang'] | 2021-02-02 16:46:57.677000+00:00 | ['Simulation', 'Python', 'Excel', 'Stochastic Modelling', 'Xlwing'] |
Create your styled Map from your Zwift activity | A FIT file is a binary file that contains all information about your activity (power, speed, elevetation, GPS coordinates, hearth rate etc)
Convert FIT file to Geojson
OK , you are human so you are not able to read binary files.
Also some nice map tools are not able to read FIT files. Some Map tools are able to read and import Geojson file.
For this reason we need to convert FIT to Geojson.
Fortunately someone in the world built a tool that converts FIT into Geojson.
With this tool https://fit2geojson.netlify.com/ you can drag’n drop your FIT file and download your new Geojson file.
A Geojson file is a file in Json format that includes geolocated data.
Once you download your Geojson file, you can use a tool like https://xyz.here.com/studio/ to upload the file and create your map
XYZ Studio
XYZ Studio is a cloud service provided by HERE Technologies that allows you to manage your geo data, put them on map and style them.
XYZ Studio has a free plan so we can use our FIT or GPX for free.
Go to https://xyz.here.com/studio/ , once you logged in, on the dashboard, click the button “Create new project”.
A new project is created for you, and you can see an empty map. Drag’n drop your new Geojson on the map “et voilà” your Zwift training is shown in your map. | https://medium.com/@robertodev/create-your-map-from-your-zwift-activity-8818ff34b8d8 | ['Roberto Butti'] | 2019-03-03 18:39:12.410000+00:00 | ['Zwift', 'Fit', 'Xyz Here', 'Gpx', 'Maps'] |
Draw a Hand Turkey | Step 3: Eye, Gizzard, and Beak
Eye, Gizzard, and Beak
Colour a small black circle near the end of the thumb to make the turkey’s eye. Below the eye, on the outside of the thumb, draw two ovals that make the gizzard. On the tip of the thumb, draw one triangle for the beak. | https://medium.com/@everythingcj/draw-a-hand-turkey-c59904519cdb | ['Everything Cj'] | 2021-02-07 18:04:32.012000+00:00 | ['Drawing', 'Turkey', 'Christmas', 'How To', 'Festivals'] |
The Origins of Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving | The Origins of Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving
Squanto and Sarah Josepha Buel Hale had something to do with it
Photo by Chris Chow on Unsplash
It is important to note that the Pilgrims were thankful to the American Indians for survival when they arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower. They meant to go to Manhattan (apparently that was a hot spot even in 1621) but due to bad weather, they ended up landing on the shores of Cape Cod.
It was a miracle, they tell us. In the midst of rough waves, they were gently deposited on the beach right in front of an empty village. One hundred and six Pilgrims were on the journey to the colonies, but only fifty-three survived.
They moved right in.
Of course, they couldn’t know that the original villagers, the Patuxet Indians, had died of a smallpox epidemic years before.
Another miracle was Tisquantum, a Patuxet Indian, otherwise known as Squanto. Having been kidnapped years earlier, taken to Spain, and sold into slavery, he had escaped and returned to his home village in 1619 only to find it empty.
The village where he grew up? The pilgrims lived there now.
He had escaped the epidemic and was the only Patuxet Indian left.
The Pilgrims First Winter
Together, he and his adopted tribe the Wampanoags helped the pilgrims survive. According to Edward Winslow, a senior leader on the Mayflower, the tribes loved on them…
“We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us: we often go to them, and they come to us;-”
Squanto and the other Indian tribes helped them plant corn, beans, squash, to hunt game and to fish. There were even pumpkins in attendance.
And then they had the first giving of thanks together that winter;
“-many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted,-”
Many believe that this is the first Thanksgiving from which everything is derived. There is some truth to this. Three days. That was some party.
Below is a drawing of Squanto teaching the hapless pilgrims how to fish. He was also a diplomat and translator, mediating between the Pilgrims and local tribes like the Pokanokets and the Narragansetts. However, he was the very last Patuxet Indian to walk this earth.
The German Kali Works, New York, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
He died in 1622.
Thanksgiving wasn’t national
We know about Thanksgiving; the corn, squash (We rarely have it, but it's in the public menu somewhere), cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans, pumpkin pie, turkey, and the everloving cranberry sauce. It’s loosely derived from this original meal.
We had been taught that from that moment, we memorialized that event with our Thanksgiving day predicated on the togetherness of our pilgrim fathers with the Wampanoags…not quite so fast.
There is more to the story.
People who lived in the New England states liked to celebrate Thanksgiving day — other regions not so much. First of all, there was nothing official. The date? That was questionable. The place?
Some states celebrated, but the South had never heard of it.
President Thomas Jefferson declared it when he was Governor of Virginia, but not as President. When asked, he told the Baptists that he believed that Thanksgiving was a religious holiday. Since he believed in the separation of church and state he would not declare it.
So he could or would do nothing for the persecuted Baptists. You see, at this time, Baptists (as in the same ones who attend those Missionary Baptist Churches that we see on every corner in every town) were considered to be…a cult. Imagine.
Jefferson was considered godless by some after this.
Sarah Josepha Buel Hale, Mother of Thanksgiving
But Sarah Josepha Hale would not give up promoting a national Thanksgiving holiday. A writer and teacher, she was the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book for forty years. With an audience of over 150,000 subscribers, it was the most influential publication of its day.
She also wrote the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb.
She petitioned five U.S. Presidents in a row to turn Thanksgiving Day into a formal, national holiday much like the 4th of July. Mrs. Hale worked on this project for thirty-six years. It was of some concern to her that no one would decide on a single day to celebrate.
Oddly, random days had been announced by various leaders in diverse locations:
For example, a day of thanks had been proclaimed in 1777 by George Washington after the colonies defeated the British in the Battles of Saratoga.
And in 1789, the first House of Representatives proclaimed a random day of Thanksgiving.
However, until Mrs. Hale promoted Thanksgiving Day, there was no annual or national day.
They were in the middle of a war
There was a war on. The Battle of Gettysburg between the North and South was carried out over three days; there were 50,000 casualties. It was the deadliest battle on American soil.
The southern General Robert E Lee had been beaten by the Union after his invasion into the North, but the announcement was perhaps not universally acknowledged at first…by both sides.
Denial can cause a lot of people to die.
Scholars looking back could see that the North had already won. It’s very possible that with the resources he had at his disposal, such as the amount of ammunition available, the number of soldiers not yet deployed, and the North’s superior industrial might, Lincoln knew this too.
It just wasn’t formal yet. This sounds morbid but simply put, more people had to perish. And this they did for over two more years.
President Abraham Lincoln wanted to unite the nation during the Civil War, so after reading Sarah’s essays, he prepared a declaration. The nation was still split in half, but it was to be a day to give thanks that would be beneficial for both sides.
Mrs. Hale thought that the holiday was a way for the nation to heal even if only for a moment.
She continued to write editorials on the subject, urging Americans to “put aside sectional feelings and local incidents” and rally around the unifying cause of Thanksgiving.
Photo by Girma Nigusse on Unsplash
President Lincoln agreed: The proclamation arrived from President Abraham Lincoln on October 3, 1863:
“I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”
The first national proclaimed Thanksgiving was on November 26, 1863. Even then, the South still waited several decades before celebrating the holiday.
Many of us do not remember being taught that there was a connection between the Thanksgiving holiday and our American Civil War. However, this is when the holiday really began.
Here’s another thing; to give thanks (all faiths were encouraged) was not the only reason for the holiday.
Lest the country forget that it was at war, however, Lincoln suggested that Thanksgiving would be an occasion not just to celebrate bounty but to grieve loss.
Thanksgiving is also a time to remember.
Let us give thanks every Thanksgiving — to Mrs. Sarah Josepha Buel Hale, Squanto, President Lincoln, to our friends, family, and God.
Let us also remember those we have lost.
And may God bless us all. | https://vrob125.medium.com/the-origins-of-abraham-lincolns-thanksgiving-b7f9bba78a78 | ['Vanessa Robinson'] | 2020-11-26 21:03:14.331000+00:00 | ['Thanksgiving', 'Abraham Lincoln', 'Slavery', 'Civil War', 'History'] |
How To Stop Being A Moody | “We are governed by our moods; should be the other way around.”― Haresh Sippy
Moods play a major part in our lives. They govern our emotions, feelings, and actions. And if they are not managed well, they can wreak havoc and chaos in our lives and relationships.
“Moods are psychological states that can occur in the form of a reaction to an event without any explainable external cause.”
To be able to control moods, we must first understand them.
Most of us are not able to understand moods because they misunderstand it for emotions. But they are different. Moods, unlike emotions, are less specific, less intense, and less likely to be initiated by a possible cause. While emotions (happy or sad) are mostly triggered by a person, event, or thoughts.
Besides, the mood is a product of two dimensions: energy and tension. One can be energetic or tired while being calm or tensed. Moreover, one feels best when one is in a calm-energy mood and worst when in a tensed-tired state. When low energy arousal is coupled with tension, one experiences a bad mood.
“You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.”-Rob Brezsny
Hence, we must know the art of controlling our moods, so that they don’t ruin our personal and professional life.
So, let’s get started. | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/how-to-stop-being-a-moody-1397a3d5d6c1 | ['Darshak Rana'] | 2020-09-06 19:06:13.218000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Advice', 'Spiritual Secrets', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement'] |
Speedy Meetings | Speed it up people!
Bad/too many meetings is the #1 complaint of professionals. And while there are no easy, quick fixes, there are ways to make meetings less terrible. And we owe it to each other to try to make our work lives better.
The simplest way to make meetings less terrible is to shorten them. A little time pressure is a good thing, and everyone could use a little transition time between back-to-back meetings. Schools know about transition times — Social Studies doesn’t end at the same moment that Biology class starts.
So here’s the simple trick: Schedule half-hour meetings for 25 minutes and hourlong meetings for 50 minutes instead.
Meeting scheduling is a form of estimation, and estimation is a form of future-telling. It’s not only something human beings are bad at, it’s not even completely possible. Unfortunately our forecasts are most reliable when we follow Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands to fill the time available.”
The Freakonomics podcast has a terrific episode on improving meetings: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/meetings/. They talk to Steven Rogelberg, author of, “The Surprising Science of Meetings.” The podcast is great, the book is just OK.
Google follows this 25/50 minute rule as do a growing number of organizations because it is so simple and it helps. It makes meetings a little bit less terrible. It lets us get to the next meeting on time. It allows time for little after meeting conversations, which can be more important than the meetings themselves.
Google even includes a “Speedy meetings” setting in Google Calendar to make these 25/50 minute durations the defaults. And Microsoft is experimenting with a similar feature for Outlook.
Join me in scheduling and holding speedier meetings. Don’t accept the default 30/60 minute durations for meetings you schedule. It’s a little bit lazy. And we owe it to each other to make our meetings a little less terrible and our work a little bit better. | https://medium.com/@jugglenutz/speedy-meetings-fdbee010a865 | ['Mark Nelson'] | 2020-11-24 00:31:37.429000+00:00 | ['Time Management', 'Meetings', 'Management'] |
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