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Diving deeper into Unity-ML Agents | Last time, we learned about how Unity ML-Agents works and trained an agent that learned to jump over walls.
This was a nice experience, but we want to create agents that can solve more complex tasks. So today we’ll train a smarter one that needs to press a button to spawn a pyramid, then navigate to the pyramid, knock it over, and move to the gold brick at the top.
To train this new agent, that seek for that button and then the pyramid to destroy, we’ll use a combination of two types of rewards, the extrinsic one given by the environment. But also an intrinsic one called curiosity. This second will push our agent to be curious, or in other terms, to better explore its environment.
So today we’ll learn about the theory behind this powerful idea of curiosity in deep reinforcement learning and we’ll train this curious agent.
Let’s get started!
What is Curiosity in Deep RL?
I already cover curiosity in detail in 2 other articles here and here if you want to dive into the mathematical and implementation details.
Two Major Problems in Modern RL
To understand what is curiosity, we need first to understand the two major problems with RL:
First, the sparse rewards problem: that is, most rewards do not contain information, and hence are set to zero.
Remember that RL is based on the reward hypothesis, which is the idea that each goal can be described as the maximization of the rewards. Therefore, rewards act as feedback for RL agents, if they don’t receive any, their knowledge of which action is appropriate (or not) cannot change.
Thanks to the reward, our agent knows that this action at that state was good
For instance, in Vizdoom “DoomMyWayHome,” your agent is only rewarded if it finds the vest. However, the vest is far away from your starting point, so most of your rewards will be zero. Therefore, if our agent does not receive useful feedback (dense rewards), it will take much longer to learn an optimal policy and it can spend time turning around without finding the goal.
The second big problem is that the extrinsic reward function is handmade, that is in each environment, a human has to implement a reward function. But how we can scale that in big and complex environments?
So what is curiosity?
Therefore, a solution to these problems is to develop a reward function that is intrinsic to the agent, i.e., generated by the agent itself. The agent will act as a self-learner since it will be the student, but also its own feedback master.
This intrinsic reward mechanism is known as curiosity because this reward push to explore states that are novel/unfamiliar. In order to achieve that, our agent will receive a high reward when exploring new trajectories.
This reward is in fact designed on how human acts, we have naturally an intrinsic desire to explore environments and discover new things.
There are different ways to calculate this intrinsic reward, and Unity ML-Agents use curiosity through the next-state prediction method.
Curiosity Through Prediction-Based Surprise (or Next-State Prediction)
I already cover this method here if you want to dive into the mathematical details.
So we just said that curiosity was high when we were in unfamiliar/novel states. But how we can calculate this “unfamiliarity”?
We can calculate curiosity as the error of our agent of predicting the next state, given the current state and action taken. More formally, we can define this as:
Why? Because the idea of curiosity is to encourage our agent to perform actions that reduce the uncertainty in the agent’s ability to predict the consequences of its own actions (uncertainty will be higher in areas where the agent has spent less time, or in areas with complex dynamics).
If the agent spend a lot of times on these states, it will be good to predict the next state (low curiosity), on the other hand, if it’s a new state unexplored, it will be bad to predict the next state (high curiosity).
Let’s break it down further. Say you play Super Mario Bros:
If you spend a lot of time at the beginning of the game (which is not new), the agent will be able to accurately predict what the next state will be , so the reward will be low.
, so the reward will be On the other hand, if you discover a new room, our agent will be very bad at predicting the next state, so the agent will be pushed to explore this room.
Using curiosity will push our agent to favor transitions with high prediction error (which will be higher in areas where the agent has spent less time, or in areas with complex dynamics) and consequently better explore our environment.
But because we can’t predict the next state by predicting the next frame (too complicated to predict pixels directly), we use a better feature representation that will keep only elements that can be controlled by our agent or affect our agent.
And to calculate curiosity, we will use a module introduced in the paper, Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction called Intrinsic Curiosity module.
If you want to know it works, check our detailled article
Train an agent to destroy pyramids
So now that we understand what is curiosity through the next state prediction and how it works, let’s train this new agent.
We published our trained models on github, you can download them here.
The Pyramid Environment
The goal in this environment is to train our agent to get the gold brick on the top of the pyramid. In order to do that he needs to press a button to spawn a pyramid, then navigate to the pyramid, knock it over, and move to the gold brick at the top.
The reward system is:
In terms of observation, we use the raycast version. With 148 raycasts, but detecting switch, bricks, golden brick, and walls.
We also use a boolean variable indicating the switch state.
The action space is discrete with 4 possible actions:
Our goal is to hit the benchmark with a mean reward of 1.75.
Let’s destroy some pyramids!
First of all, let’s open the UnitySDK project.
In the examples search for Pyramids and open the scene.
Like WallJump, you see in the scene, a lot of Agents, each of them comes from the same Prefab and they all share the same Brain (policy).
Multiple copies of the same Agent Prefab.
In fact, as we do in classical Deep Reinforcement Learning when we launch multiple instances of a game (for instance 128 parallel environments) we do the same hereby copy and paste the agents, in order to have more various states.
So, first, because we want to train our agent from scratch, we need to remove the brain from the agent prefab. We need to go to the prefabs folder and open the Prefab.
Now in the Prefab hierarchy, select the Agent and go into the inspector.
In Behavior Parameters, we need to remove the Model. If you have some GPU you can change Inference Device from CPU to GPU.
For this first training, we’ll just modify the total training steps because it’s too high and we can hit the benchmark in only 500k training steps. To do that we go to config/trainer_config.yaml and you modify these to max_steps to 5.0e5 for Pyramids situation:
To train this agent, we will use PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) if you don’t know about it or you need to refresh your knowledge, check my article.
We saw that to train this agent, we need to call our External Communicator using the Python API. This External Communicator will then ask the Academy to start the agents.
So, you need to open your terminal, go where ml-agents-master is and type this.
mlagents-learn config/trainer_config.yaml — run-id=”Pyramids_FirstTrain” — train
It will ask you to run the Unity scene,
Press the ▶️ button at the top of the Editor.
You can monitor your training by launching Tensorboard using this command:
tensorboard — logdir=summaries
Watching your agent jumping over walls
You can watch your agent during the training by looking at the game window.
When the training is finished you need to move the saved model files contained in ml-agents-master/models to UnitySDK/Assets/ML-Agents/Examples/Pyramids/TFModels.
And again, open the Unity Editor, and select Pyramids scene.
Select the Pyramids prefab object and open it.
Select Agent
In Agent Behavior Parameters, drag the Pyramids.nn file to Model Placeholder.
Then, press the ▶️ button at the top of the Editor.
Time for some experiments
We’ve just trained our agents to learn to jump over walls. Now that we have good results we can try some experiments.
Remember that the best way to learn is to be active by experimenting. So you should try to make some hypotheses and verify them.
By the way, there is an amazing video about how to hyperparameter tuning Pyramid environment by Immersive Limit that you should definitely watch.
Increasing the time horizon to 256
The time horizon, as explained in the documentation, is the number of steps of experience to collect per-agent before putting it into the experience buffer. This trades off between a long time horizon (less biased, but higher variance estimate), and a short time horizon (more biased, but less varied estimate).
In this experience, we doubled the time horizon from 128 to 256. Increasing it allows our agent to capture more important behaviors in his sequence of actions than before.
However, this didn’t have an impact on the training of our new agent. Indeed, they share quite the same results.
We published our trained models on github, you can download them here. | https://towardsdatascience.com/diving-deeper-into-unity-ml-agents-e1667f869dc3 | ['Thomas Simonini'] | 2020-03-25 14:49:54.905000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Reinforcement Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Data Science', 'AI'] |
You don’t need personalization | You don’t need personalization
So you say. A zoology of naysayers and naysaying.
In personalization, there’s a zoology of naysayers and the things they naysay. Just the same, it’s critical to engage constructively with dissenting views. I’ve learned a lot this way. You might, too.
If you know how to spot them, the dissenting arguments on personalization (see a working definition and background here) are few, but consistent, in conforming to a common line of complaint:
The critic. For some, personalization is synonymous with filter bubbles, overzealous retargeting, or dark patterns. It can’t be done virtuously. The skeptic. For us, personalization is a hill too high to climb. We can’t execute reliably or effectively. The pundit. The personalization gap is a disillusioning horse race of have and have-nots. The game is rigged. The pragmatist. We don’t need personalization to compete. It’s irrelevant.
If you and I are having a first conversation about personalization, I have to confess I am becoming good at sussing out which, if any, of these dissenting voices tugs at you most urgently. I also find myself making reference to some pat answers to these critiques:
For critics , I ask them to consider Spotify’s productization of algorithmically rich discovery tools so good they become celebrated marquee features, like Discover Weekly. Then consult a content subject matter, whom should be your first line of intelligence on the potential user benefit of personalized experience in your digital ecosystem. (My colleagues and I are at work on a sensible framework, progressive personalization, for ensuring it enhances user value and the user experience, while also driving business results.)
, I ask them to consider Spotify’s productization of algorithmically rich discovery tools so good they become celebrated marquee features, like Discover Weekly. Then consult a content subject matter, whom should be your first line of intelligence on the potential user benefit of personalized experience in your digital ecosystem. (My colleagues and I are at work on a sensible framework, progressive personalization, for ensuring it enhances user value and the user experience, while also driving business results.) For skeptics and pundits alike, I encourage them to consult the hierarchy of personalized experience. With a trusted guide’s help, there are sensible entry points of every size, scale and price point now. Getting going is about building capability and muscle mass for where user behavior is leading us: digital’s algorithmically-centered near future.
alike, I encourage them to consult the hierarchy of personalized experience. With a trusted guide’s help, there are sensible entry points of every size, scale and price point now. Getting going is about building capability and muscle mass for where user behavior is leading us: digital’s algorithmically-centered near future. For pragmatists? Read on.
“Personalization is not for us.”
Like any echo chamber, this line of dissent invites having its premise punctured.
While their motivations are sincere and their thinking generally sound, I’ve come to see the rhetorical flourish of personalization doubters—“ehh, it’s not for us”—as a kind of unintended disservice by digital professionals to themselves, their teams and organizations.
Allow me to unpack that accusation.
It’s not that they must necessarily be wrong. Inasmuch as the conversation around personalization is itself stunted, complex and confusing, these summary judgments are merited.
Taking a pass on personalization efforts in your organization is not foolish. But wishful thinking parading as informed speculation, on the other hand, does no one any favor. So I wanted to take a little time to talk about what we’re talking about when we talk about personalization.
That sidelines calculation is not misplaced nor is the root fear unmerited. But it is still ultimately wrong. Leaning into personalization is a matter of strategy and of digital evolution.
Strategy is the art of getting where you need to go
Fundamentally, technology adoption is a matter of business strategy. It’s about getting from the current state to a desired future one.
The greatest strategy will always be dogged focus and a solid plan for getting from point A to point B, distractions called out and managed to the side. In my consulting travels, banishing under-performing assets and dead-weight initiatives has always been a sound recipe.
But know that results speak plainly and loudly, and that neither personalization nor artificial intelligence, nor your competitors, nor the market, nor user behavior, are waiting on you. Your digital evolution, of course, is entirely on you.
Personalization is not a solution in search of a problem. It’s how the fabric of digital is evolving.
The so-called pragmatist tack, that personalization might be fine for retailers, but unnecessary for them, is a familiar one. But it disregards the wider shift that’s now underway, as digital touchpoints multiply, user expectations and loyalty respond to user centricity, and the need for more finely structured and intelligent, contextual content experiences grow.
Sure, personalization’s star shines brightly in social media, entertainment and ecommerce. (As Shana Pilewski notes, Gartner says personalization is the foremost priority among retailers in 2017.) But the richness of its applications are only being felt now, as new startups crop up offering specific recommender heuristics for elearning or content consumption, for example.
In fact, personalization is a landscape of related technologies, as I’ve said elsewhere. Without being exhaustive about it, consider this waterfront:
search and discovery UX, from browse to recommender systems
push notifications
conversational interfaces (as dissimilar as bots and voice)
growth testing and optimization
These are all forms of personalized experience. Are these, too, as irrelevant to the so-called pragmatist?
I could go on.
Baldly put, saying personalization is irrelevant is tantamount to saying search on Google, or reach on Facebook, is inconsequential. It’s hard to fathom, though I welcome corrective feedback.
Far from being a tech alone, when I talk to product management leaders today, I routinely hear one or another variation of “personalization is the product”: that personalization is suffused in so much of table stakes product feature development today.
Amazon, Netflix, Spotify: The motivations are diverse, the outcomes clear
Hype is unhelpful, everyone knows that. Pull the curtain back, however, and it’s plain to see that—for the poster children who’ve popularized its use, titans like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify—personalization’s benefits have themselves never been about personalization per se, but a clearly identified benefit.
Amazon: Drive transactions. Accelerate customer conversions by helping them frictionlessly navigate a vast sea of product choices.
Netflix: Drive consumption. Bring anytime, anywhere film and TV entertainment viewing to the mainstream, catering to a diverse and global range of customer tastes.
Spotify: Drive engagement. Do the same, starting with music. Productize new ways of bundling that media for different user impulses for discovery and consumption.
What do these companies all have in common? Aside from large corpuses of content and data, and their push to shift user habits and behaviors, they have become savvy players in each and every area of the wider personalized technology landscape listed above.
Are these business outcomes inconsequential to you? Let me know in the comments, pragmatists.
Still, this neat piecing apart the personalized value proposition may not always hold true. We may be in the early stages of an acceleration around personalization. For a new generation of digital brands, perhaps best exemplified by StitchFix, personalization is so core to the value proposition as to be inseparable from every element of the business and experience.
The four enduring arguments for personalization
So, when you elect to forego a personalization program this year, or your product teams veer from testing to recommendations to vague bot or voice UX prototypes, remember that personalization is an umbrella concept that spans each of these, and makes individual point solutions incrementally harder without a holistic, omnichannel view of the user.
And remember the results you are voting down when you decide that personalized product opportunity is not for your organization:
Performance—cutting through the noise of irrelevant content, interactions and page-load times Focused efficiency—zeroing the business or organization in on key performance indicators and the user flows of highest concentrated business value User centricity — delivering and benchmarking for user value through contextual intelligence Differentiation—providing fresh and memorable modes for discovery, utility and delight that stand apart from the competition
There is no shortage of gaudy success metrics for those who’ve personalized, (I suspect the smash-ups of poorly run programs are equally dramatic!), but where I find it simpler to focus, argumentatively, in personalization’s favor is with the enduring potency of these generalized benefits.
The one counterargument: When to pause on personalization
I haven’t come across an example where outright deferring on personalization was the clear course of action, but I do encounter those embarking upon a personalization effort for whom I do recommend hitting pause.
(I’ve shoplifted with affection from Kathy Baughman and Kevin Nichols on this front. Watch them present here and see more of their thinking here.)
The case for pausing, not pursuing, a personalization program is clearer (and smarter) than it looks. Too much of the received wisdom on personalization elides the necessary hard work to get to a smoothly functioning operation.
I’ve done a client exercise with great success that helps organizations scope, shape and price what personalized product opportunity is for them.
I’ll have more to say about this in the future.
Personalization is the future, sooner
There’s no need to truck out old Jeff Bezos shareholder letters. Personalization already sells itself to those who are in market and alert to their competitors’ efforts. There’s a certain self-evident quality to the value proposition of a technology that aids and abets users and brands alike.
Said another way, results are results and there’s no arguing with them.
But if you needed any further reason for reconsideration, it’s called AI.
You won’t move ahead—you won’t be able to move forward at all—with AI, and with operating confidently in an algorithmically-driven, feed-centric distribution environment, in the future if you do not invest in building capability and wherewithal with personalization much sooner than then. There will be no leapfrog moment, no machine-learning silver bullet. Without knowing your users, and learning how to deliver content in context, you are rudderless headed into that horizon line.
All our distant tomorrows have a way of becoming today.
Don’t personalize? Sounds simple.
It is. You don’t progress. | https://uxdesign.cc/you-dont-need-personalization-757aa5e971cb | ['Jeffrey Macintyre'] | 2019-08-28 00:11:36.135000+00:00 | ['Personalization', 'User Experience', 'Personalisation', 'Optimization', 'Digital Marketing'] |
“Brexit: A threat or an opportunity for UK lawyers and legal London?” | In November 2018, I wrote a piece for a competition in the Times newspaper. The title for submission was “Brexit: A threat or an opportunity for UK lawyers and legal London?”. I did not win, but I enjoyed the process and thought that there would be no harm in uploading my perspective. Congratulations to the winner and to the runners-up. Their entries can be viewed here https://www.oeclaw.co.uk/times-law-awards/winners.
It should be noted that some arguments made are now out of date. In particular the reference to relocation plans of certain financial institutions is a fact that has changed and should be considered in context. Here is my submission.
“For lawyers, Brexit is an issue of profound importance. Law firms and chambers have invested substantially into Brexit research units to help advise clients, yet the answer to the question of whether Brexit is a threat or an opportunity for UK lawyers and legal London has never been answered conclusively and its results are difficult to predict. This paper will argue that Brexit represents an opportunity because it poses legal questions that need immediate answers meaning UK lawyers, in London especially, are needed now more than ever.
The business sector prospers when the marketplace delivers predictable results and the legal sector, comprising solicitors, barristers and judges and court systems, relies predominantly on businesses for work. Lawyers provide advice to encourage confident decision making. Therefore, market confidence helps both sectors. Brexit is looked upon as a cause of economic stagnation, at least, or downturn, at worst; so why doesn’t this correlate to a threat for UK lawyers and legal London? Brexit is a legal question as much as a political one. Leaving an organisation such as the European Union (EU), which regulates manifold areas of law, asks unprecedented legal questions. Legal businesses will thrive wherever there’s legal uncertainty. It is unsurprising that London’s largest law firms have recently posted record profits because of Brexit — clearly while businesses prosper from market confidence, legal businesses thrive on legal uncertainty. [1]
Disruption in the economy can be a positive indicator of increasing market efficiency. Brexit’s disruption could provide the opportunity to recalibrate Britain’s economy, and facilitate trade with other nations according to demand, which in the long term could “herald an economic rebirth” [2] - indeed, IMF reports signal that 90% of international growth will come from outside the EU in the next 15 years. [3] A disruption with diverse consequences so far has been the drop in value of the pound (GBP). This poses an unmentioned opportunity for the UK legal sector as law firms could secure more EU work, with a weaker pound making UK legal fees more competitive than their EU counterparts. [4] Furthermore, through this devaluation, British assets became an “attractive” investment opportunity to foreign buyers sparking a rise in M&A work for London law firms in 2017. [5]
Brexit’s effect on UK lawyers and legal London creates a tension between market confidence, which is lowered, and legal uncertainty, which is heightened making the result a difficult one to predict. As market confidence decreases, so does legal opportunity, and as the economy remains resilient or even grows in the long-term so Brexit’s threat is nullified.
It is claimed that Brexit could threaten London’s legal standing in the world. This could happen in two ways: 1) international businesses operating in London would restructure themselves to spread across other cities in Europe; and 2) London’s position as the court capital of the world is jostled by another city within Europe or beyond.
Since the referendum in June 2016, international companies such as HSBC, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have announced job relocations to other cities within the EU yet some have only relocated 10% of the jobs they claimed they would. [6] Continued business productivity would encourage foreign direct investment to increase it to, and perhaps beyond, its pre-Brexit level — conditional upon clear and certain negotiation resolutions. [7] The lack of legal, political and, therefore, market certainty inhibits business productivity, posing a threat to lawyers as legal work could leave the UK along with the businesses it advises. [8]
London’s status as the legal capital is largely due to its language, location, legal system and service sector context. The only existing comparable city to London is Dublin — yet even with Ireland’s low corporation tax, it has failed to attract a majority of professional talent emigrating from London. [9] To maintain the status quo, regulated sectors hope for a Reciprocal Enforcement Regime; where judgments made in London can have binding effect in the EU and vice versa. This is a question of political will, making it impossible to predict; however, we can evaluate where else the legal capital could go.
Alternative courts such as the Dubai International Financial Centre Courts or the Singapore International Commercial Court pose a threat to London’s dominance, but they aren’t located close enough to existing financial hubs within the EU jurisdiction such as Frankfurt and Paris. Additionally, they pale in comparison to London’s legal system which is regarded has having the best legal talent in the world and laws that promote “certainty and [a] commercial approach”. [10]
While it’s clear the legal sector is currently benefiting from Brexit, the threats and opportunities won’t be known for sure until the final arrangement is concluded. Opportunity lies in the ability to strike a deal with the EU, while the threat lies in failing to reach one. The balanced response to the question in mind, and the answer that everyone can agree on, is that it remains too early to tell.” | https://medium.com/@davidcjsmall/brexit-a-threat-or-an-opportunity-for-uk-lawyers-and-legal-london-654e69b42f6c | ['David Small'] | 2019-05-06 18:57:26.477000+00:00 | ['London', 'Brexit', 'Law', 'UK Politics'] |
4 simple saving solutions to help you stay solvent and stress-free | Joslyn at Pexels
One of the biggest things preventing people from taking the solopreneur plunge or cutting their freelancing career short is because of money. While freelancing can be a fun and flexible career path, it can also be inconsistent. Some months you might yourself rolling in cash…
… while others might have you looking through every pocket in your clothing collection, hoping to come across some coins you may have forgotten. In fact, according to SA Freelance Media Industry and Rates Report 2018/2019, which was conducted and compiled by SAFREA last year, indicated that rates and payment issues were among the top five challenges facing freelancers. If you often find yourself pinching your pennies, here are four simple saving tips to keep you solvent as a solopreneur. You’re welcome!
1. Hold back on unnecessary spending
This might be stating the obvious, but if you want to save more of the money you have, you need to spend less of it. But this is often easier said than done! What might make it easier is remembering that freelancers have no fixed income or company benefits, so it’s wise to funnel money away into a savings account for household or medical emergencies which will, at some point, arise.
2. Stay on top of your taxes
Dealing with taxes is another area in which many freelancers struggle, mainly due to lack of understanding as well as the complicated and mind-numbing admin that comes along with it. But staying on top of yours can actually be of financial benefit in the long run, as you will be able to claim back for work-related expenses, such as your work-from-home office space and equipment.
3. Create new budgets monthly
Just as your income as a freelancer is likely to have some months be more lucrative than others, life has a way of making some months more expensive than others, such as the sudden onset of sickness or a burst bathroom pipe. This is why creating a new budget ahead of each month is a good idea, as it will give you an overview of any upcoming expenses as well as incoming money.
4. Download a financial app
It’s 2020, and there are plenty of apps on the market that can make managing your money a whole lot easier. And Guild is one of them. Guild is totally free and allows you to sync your profile with your bank account, get an overview of your business and personal finances (making tax season a breeze!) and generate professional invoices and quotes to send to clients from your dashboard. | https://medium.com/guildapp/4-simple-saving-solutions-to-help-you-stay-solvent-and-stress-free-f77b0ec8d8d8 | ['Helen Wallace'] | 2020-10-26 09:21:35.188000+00:00 | ['Freelancers', 'Freelance', 'Saving Money', 'Freelancing', 'Money'] |
The Best Deep Learning Papers from the ICLR 2020 Conference | Last week I had the pleasure to participate in the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), an event dedicated to the research on all aspects of deep learning. Initially, the conference was supposed to take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, however, due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, it went virtual. I’m sure it was a challenge for organisers to move the event online, but I think the effect was more than satisfactory, as you can read here!
Over 1300 speakers and 5600 attendees proved that the virtual format was more accessible for the public, but at the same time, the conference remained interactive and engaging. From many interesting presentations, I decided to choose 16, which are influential and thought-provoking. Here are the best deep learning papers from the ICLR.
Best Deep learning papers
1. On Robustness of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations
In-depth study of the robustness of the Neural Ordinary Differential Equations or NeuralODE in short. Use it as a building block for more robust networks.
Paper
The architecture of an ODENet. The neural ODE block serves as a dimension-preserving nonlinear mapping.
First author: Hanshu YAN
LinkedIn | Website | https://medium.com/neptune-ai/the-best-deep-learning-papers-from-the-iclr-2020-conference-c4faa6948ef0 | ['Patrycja Jenkner'] | 2020-10-30 16:17:47.378000+00:00 | ['Iclr 2020', 'Conference', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning'] |
An analogy to explain OS detection by NMAP | When you use NMAP to scan machines, there is an option to try and detect the OS of the target machine. How does it work? Here’s a helpful analogy.
Imagine you are playing with two mammals, a chimpanzee, and an orangutan. You are conducting this experiment in a double-blind format. You throw a ball towards each. The balls are of the same make. They both throw the balls back. If we examine these balls, they have fingerprints on them. These fingerprints can help identify which animal thew the ball back.
You see, it doesn’t depend on the information you send. It depends on what information the target machine sends back. NMAP sends a ping to the target machine with the intention of identification. The target machine responds by sending a ping back to NMAP. Now, every OS crafts ICMP ping packets very differently. The construction of these packets can help identify the target OS. NMAP has a database of a lot of operating system responses. NMAP uses this database to support the identification process.
Some operating systems have a similar make. Take, for example, Debian and Ubuntu. At their core, both these operating systems are Linux. Therefore NMAP can confuse them for each other.
Another interesting point to note here is that an OS evolves and changes. While Windows 10 1903 and 10 2004 are very similar in how they handle networks, they return different fingerprints.
In the end, NMAP proves to be very useful in helping identify operating systems. | https://medium.com/@anonymousmailroot/an-analogy-to-explain-os-detection-by-nmap-583b0f459a8e | ['Divyansh Bhatia'] | 2020-10-25 06:32:32.004000+00:00 | ['Namp', 'Fingerprinting', 'Scanner', 'Operating Systems', 'Network'] |
FOUR: FOREIGN WOMEN AND JAPANESE CORPORATE CULTURE | As Ya-Ting talked about her company, the first thing she said was that it is ‘completely traditional Japanese’ because the president was an older male. Her efforts to fit in and maintain the harmony in the workplace can be observed in situations, such as how she tried to dress in such a way so as not to stand out. Since she worked at a company with only ten employees and she came to Japan with the intention of gaining experience working in a Japanese environment, she had to negotiate between her identity as a foreigner and differing expectations of the local work space. Moreover, while pointing out how strict the work environment might be, the president was fine with her trying to change the ‘unwritten rule’ which assigned clerical tasks to women. It is worth noting that Ya-Ting’s company did trading with companies in China and she was the only non-Japanese employee besides her division manager. During the interview, she told me that if her Japanese colleagues went on business trips with her to China, she would have to be their interpreter. As her colleagues depended on her when dealing with Chinese clients and on business trips, this gave her some measure of power to change workplace practices. Moreover, her professional skills allowed her to be treated equally and her voice to be heard.
Women’s Power Over Men
Ya-Ting’s interactions with her Japanese male colleagues as a woman may be rare. Nevertheless, interactions between female and male employees in the Japanese workplace have been studied by anthropologists in the past. Dorinne Kondo (1990) conducted her fieldwork at a confectionery factory in Tokyo and observed how women’s role as workplace ‘mothers’ strengthened their power over their male counterparts which significantly made their position as part-timers on the shop floor less marginalised. As an example, Kondo describes the interactions between the twenty-one year old male artisan, Yamada-san, and female part-timer, Iida-san who was in her early forties. As she writes, one morning Iida-san was late for work and was yelled at by Suzuki-san, a young craftsman. To explain this behaviour, Suzuki said, “Well, if you see someone every day, you kind of miss them when they’re gone (Ibid: 294– 295).” Kondo further argues that women like Iida-san made themselves socially central at the workplace by offering informal support to men, such as fixing the collar on their uniforms, making the male workers gradually depend on them.
Similar to how Kondo describes the female part-timers as ‘mothers’ in the factory, Ogasawara (1998) uses the marriage metaphor to describe the relationships between men and women at the head office of Tōzai Bank. The office ladies (OLs) in her account were assigned miscellaneous jobs and catered to the needs of the male employees. As a result, she points out that men became dependent on the assistance from their female counterparts providing one way in which women were able to gain control over them. While about two decades have passed since Kondo and Ogasawara conducted their fieldwork, women in the Japanese workplace are still expected to provide miscellaneous support based on the interviews I conducted with the Taiwanese women working in Tokyo. Moreover, even though Kondo and Ogasawara argue that women acquire informal control over men by providing miscellaneous support in the workplace, such an argument seems no more than an excuse to justify women’s disadvantageous position. Ya-Ting would also have disagreed seeing it as gender discrimination and unequal treatment to women in the workplace. As a foreign female employee at her company, she tried to bring some positive changes that brought men and women closer to equality.
How Ya-Ting exercised her power in the office in changing the gendered work culture might be different from the women in Kondo and Ogasawara’s research. Nevertheless, they were all able to acquire power over their male counterparts as the men in their workplaces relied on them in some capacity. In Kondo’s study, it was motherly love making the male workers feel attached to the middle-aged female part-timers. At the bank where Ogasawara conducted her fieldwork, the salaried men did not even know how to make copies, and therefore they had to rely on the assistance from the OLs to conduct their own duties. In Ya-Ting’s case, it was her professional skills that made her colleagues rely on her at work. As a result, she was able to acquire power over her male counterparts without providing miscellaneous support, such as making copies, cleaning, and serving tea.
Innovation in Management
In contrast to the traditional corporate culture, the online travel magazine Ting-Ni worked for, which was a start-up company founded in 2013, had a rather flat organisational structure, according to her. She told me that the CEO was only 28 years old and the eldest employee was 35. In addition, one-third of the employees were non-Japanese. She said, “The Japanese at our company had to spend quite a long time in order to get used to working with us foreigners.” During the first three months working there, she felt questioned and untrusted by her Japanese co-workers. The CEO noticed it, and therefore added ‘Company Culture (kaisha bunka)’ on their website stating:
To recognise diversity
To trust one another
To create an environment which each person can unleash their full potential
Evidently, in contrast to larger corporations in Japan, start-ups tend to place greater value on diversity and the individuality of each employee. Moreover, Ting-Ni’s company seems to promote innovation in management allowing employees to work outside of the office, such as at cafés or anywhere else they prefer, which is rarely seen in Japanese companies. Examining entrepreneurship in Japan, Parissa Haghirian (2016: 135) argues that new young companies create jobs, take risks, develop profitable strategies as well as a more contemporary Japanese style of management. Although existing literature often argues that Japanese companies ignore diversity and treat foreign employees as if they were Japanese, evidently there are changes appearing in individual cases as the result of integration and conflict between Japanese and foreigners in the workplace, especially at small and medium-sized firms.
While foreign female workers in the Japanese workplace often struggle to adapt to the gendered work culture, they have the power to change it due to their professional skills making their Japanese colleagues dependent on them. In addition, as the number of foreigners in Japan continues to increase and more companies adopt a more innovative way of management, presumably there will be more changes brought to the Japanese workplace and their Japanese colleagues might also re-think the ‘unwritten rules’.
Next 👉FIVE: FUTURE ASPIRATIONS | https://medium.com/no-way-yes-wei/four-foreign-women-and-japanese-corporate-culture-ae11abdd3088 | ['Wei 陳薇荃'] | 2020-01-14 07:39:00.017000+00:00 | ['My Research', 'Gender Equality', 'Work Culture', 'Japan', 'Taiwan'] |
7 Tips For Choosing A Quality Gaming Headset | 7 Tips For Choosing A Quality Gaming Headset
what is the best gaming headset for PC, PS4 Pro, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox series x Margi Murphy May 20·8 min read
How to Choose a Gaming Headset — With and Without Microphone For Speaking
Your gaming setup is incomplete without the Best Gaming Headset. That is why today we are going to help you choose the Best Gaming Headset for your favorite game. Just keep reading till the end & you will become a pro to choose the best gaming headset for your gaming setup.
No matter if you are a PC gamer or Console Gamer, a gaming headset is something that you need every day for full enjoyment in the gaming world. Especially if you are a First-Person Shooting Games or Third Person Shooting Games lover then there is no second option other than using a Gaming Headset.
Honestly speaking, if you ask us which one is the best gaming headset then we can never specify one gaming headset that is best for everyone. Everyone has different needs so that headset manufacturers nowadays trying their best to satisfy the gamer’s need. But if you are looking for a new gaming headset then you must know How to Choose a Gaming Headset. Below we have mentioned some steps that will be very helpful to choose the gaming headset that suits you best.
Step 1: Choose Between Gaming Headset & Headphones
Gaming Headsets & Headphones are two different things. Still, now we have seen that people get confused with those two terms. Both are used for gaming, listening to music, watching movies & other audio-related tasks. The main thing that differs between those two is the presence of a microphone. In gaming Headsets, you will have a built-in microphone. Sometimes you can detach the microphone or maybe you need to purchase a microphone separately that you can attach with your gaming headsets. But in the case of headphones, there is no built-in microphone or you can not attach a microphone there. Many professional gamers choose a gaming headphone other than a gaming headset because most of the time you will get better audio quality from a gaming headphone. For reference, you can check those Amazing Gaming Headphones Without Microphone. But the thing that you must have is a separate microphone. If you have a microphone from before then there is nothing wrong to go with a gaming headphone. But if you are a newbie then we recommend you to go for a Gaming Headset. Gaming headphones also will cost more compared to the same category gaming headsets.
Step 2: Choose Between Open Back & Closed Back
If you have detailed knowledge regarding headsets & headphones then you might have known that there are two main categories available in the market. One is open-back headphones/headsets & the other one is closed-back headphones/headsets. The main difference between those two is the position of audio drivers. In an open back headphone/headset you can see the audio driver through the grille. On the other hand, the audio drivers are completely covered in closed-back headphones/headsets. That is the visible difference between these two that you can identify by seeing a headset/headphone whether it is an open back or closed back. But in the case of audio quality, there is also a vast difference. Open-back headphones/headsets are known to provide pure, authentic, lively & most natural audio quality.
That is why those headphones are mainly used in professional works like audio mixing & editing. Nowadays in the gaming sector, open-back headphones are being used widely. For example, gamers like Ninja uses open-back headphones for gaming. You can find the Best Open Back Headphones for Gaming here. On the other hand, closed-back headphones are known to deliver heavy bass & surround 3D audio quality which is more preferable in gaming. However, the main drawback of open-back headphones is that there is very poor noise isolation. If you are used to playing games in a quiet place or maybe you have your separate gaming room then an open back headphone can be a better choice for you. However, those headphones will cost you more. But it is guaranteed that you will get better audio quality compared to a closed-back gaming headset/headphone. If you need to play in different environments & need noise isolation very much then go for a closed-back gaming headset.
Step 3: Consider Your Gaming Platform
On which platform you use to play games should be a big consideration while choosing your gaming headset. Manufacturers nowadays make gaming headsets keeping in mind all platforms. That is why you will find that most gaming headsets are compatible with both Pc & Gaming consoles like PS5, PS4 Pro, Xbox One & Xbox Series X. Almost all wired gaming headsets come with a 3.5mm audio jack that is suitable for any gaming device. However, that is not the issue here, the main issue is all about software upgrades. If you are a console gamer then there is a big chance that you might face this problem if not chose your gaming headset wisely.
Some gaming headsets may support your gaming consoles but you will not get all the amazing features it offers. For example, if your gaming headset offers 7.1 surround sound but your gaming console does not support that then you will not get the full performance of your gaming headset. Also, some gaming headsets are meant to use either only for Play Stations or Xbox. So look for all the features & compatibility carefully before choosing your gaming headset. Also as a gamer, you must want to live to stream your gaming on Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.
That is why make sure you have the best compatibility with that no matter which gaming platform you use. You can check those Best Headsets for Gaming & Streaming with PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox One & Xbox Series X.
Step 4: Choose Between Wired & Wireless
If you are looking for a gaming headset then you have two options. Whether you can go with a wireless gaming headset or a wired gaming headset. If you are more of a flexible user then we recommend that you choose a wireless gaming headset. While playing from a long distance or if you like to play laying on your bed then a wireless gaming headset will come really handy. Other than that go with a wired gaming headset. There are some gaming headsets that you can use both with a 3.5mm audio jack or wireless. This feature can be a great addition.
If you are a console gamer & going for a wireless gaming headset then make sure that your gaming headset will fully support your gaming console. Sony has made some wireless gaming headset that is especially suited for its PS4 & PS5 series. If you choose a headset like that then you may not use that as a wireless gaming headset in your PC or Xbox. You will need a 3.5mm jack to connect most headsets. We suggest avoiding this type of gaming headsets if you like to switch your gaming platform sometimes.
Whether you want to buy a wireless gaming headset or wired gaming headset this link will be very helpful: Best Gaming Headsets of This Year.
Step 5: Consider The Game You Use to Play Most of The Time
Each & every gamer has a different choice in game selection. Some of you may like first-person shooting games like Call of Duty Coldwar, COD Warzone, Valorant, etc. There are gaming headphones that are especially suited for this type of game just like Best Gaming Headsets for Call of Duty & Other FPS Games. Some of you may like to play Third Person Shooting Games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, etc. In this type of game, you must hear the mildest sounds like footsteps to stay alive. That is why this type of game lover must have a gaming headset that can deliver detailed audio quality. You can check this for details: Best Gaming Headsets For Hearing Footsteps (PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X). If you like to play Adventure & RPG games like GTAV, Days Gone, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of The Tomb Raider, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Horizon Zero Dawn, Watch Dogs Legion then any type of gaming headset will do the job.
Step 6: Check The Built Quality
Before now, we have been talking about the audio quality of your gaming headsets. Now it is time for the built quality. While looking for the built quality you must consider the built materials, durability, comfortability, replaceable parts & the overall look of your gaming headsets. Everyone does not have the same ear & head shape. So that even the headset that claims the most comfortable fit may not suit you.
That is why look for the headset dimension before buying. Make sure that the earcups & headband sizes will match you. A bendable metal headband is more preferable. Also, make sure that the earcups are made with fine materials. If your gaming headset allows replacing those earcups in the future then this can be a really great feature as well. Some gaming headsets are made for a long time uses & do not overheat your ears.
Make sure your gaming headset also has this feature. To ensure durability manufacturer’s warranty is always admirable. Also make sure that your gaming headset has a smart look, at least you must like that.
Step 7: Consider Your Budget
Finally, the most important thing that you must consider is your budget. If you have a big budget of thousands of dollars for your next gaming headset then you can buy any gaming headset you like or may buy multiple headsets. But if you have a tight budget then never feel that you can not have the best one within budget. That is why pre-determine your budget for a gaming headset & look at the gaming headsets that suit your budget.
Even if you have a budget of $100 or a bit more, you can still have a good quality gaming headset. Just follow any of those links to find your budget gaming headsets: Best Gaming Headsets Under $100 & Best Gaming Headsets Under $150. | https://medium.com/@sharmin3086/how-to-choose-a-gaming-headset-bcd0a8ff6845 | ['Margi Murphy'] | 2021-05-20 22:07:03.522000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Headset', 'Headphones', 'Best Gaming Headset', 'Gaming Headset'] |
JavaScript Design Patterns — Composition, Inheritance, and Configuration | Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash
Design patterns are the basis of any good software. JavaScript programs are no exception.
In this article, we’ll look at the difference between composition and inheritance, and look at why we should make our program have some flexibility.
Composition Versus Inheritance
Composition is when our object contains other objects.
Inheritance is when we receive the parent object’s members in the current object.
They both have their place.
Composition is a has-a relationship while inheritance is a has-a relationship.
It’s very important to make distinctions between the 2 since they do different things.
In JavaScript, there’re various ways that 2 things are composed.
For instance, we can have functions that are nested in other functions.
We can write:
const foo = fn => {
//...
fn();
//...
}
We have a foo function that calls fn .
Also, we can have nested objects. For example, we can write:
const obj = {
foo: 1,
bar: {
baz: 2,
}
}
We have an object as the value of bar .
We can also have functions as values of object properties.
Composition is used for holding functionality that’s needed by something.
Inheritance, on the other hand, is an is-a relationship.
This means a child object is also a parent object. It’s just that a child object may have additional things.
For instance, if we have:
class Animal {
//...
} class Cat extends Animal {
//...
}
Then Cat is a subclass of Animal . Cat is an animal.
Cat shares all the members of Animal .
We can any methods of Animal and access any instance variables of Animal from a Cat instance.
For example, we can write:
class Animal {
speak() {
//...
}
}
class Cat extends Animal {
//...
}
The extends keyword indicates that Cat inherits the members of Animal .
Then if we create a Cat instance, we can write:
const cat = new Cat();
Then we can call speak by calling:
cat.speak();
Likewise, we can create an is-a relationship between 2 objects with the Object.create method:
const animal = {
speak() {
//...
}
} const cat = Object.create(animal);
Object.create takes a prototype object which will be the prototype of the child object.
So animal is the parent of cat in the example above.
Like with class instances, we can call speak by writing cat.speak() .
In both the class and object examples, the prototype of the object resides in the __proto__ property of the object.
Inheritance is good for creating multiple classes or objects that share things from the parent class or object respectively.
The general principle is that if we have volatile code, then we should use more has-a relationships rather than an is-a relationship since we assume that shared code between a parent and different children may change.
If we change shared code between parents and children, then we break all the children as well.
Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash
Creating Algorithms
Once we decided on the patterns to use, then we’ve to devise our algorithm for our program.
This should be easy once we created some basic designs. Implementation is all that’s needed in most cases.
We can use existing libraries to make our lives easier, which is what we should do in most cases.
If we have an is-a relationship between classes or objects, then we need to think about which pieces of code are shared and which ones are unique to classes or objects.
If we use a has-a model instead, then we can create algorithms in different places and use them as we wish to.
We should think about making our program configurable so that we don’t have to change code to have slightly different functionality.
This way, we make our lives easier since code change always has some risks.
To reduce that, we should make things that change frequently be configurable so that we don’t have to deal with them.
For instance, we can read settings from a file or database so an algorithm can be selected according to settings that are set in those places.
Conclusion
Our programs should have some flexibility so that we don’t have to change code for it to do different things.
Composition is when we have something in an object or class so we can use them as we wish.
Inheritance is when we have some shared code that’s used by other objects or classes. | https://medium.com/swlh/javascript-design-patterns-composition-inheritance-and-configuration-e84d024f8fe3 | ['John Au-Yeung'] | 2020-06-09 17:54:27.423000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Software Development'] |
How to Overcome Your Fears and Take the Risk | Let’s go back to the questions from earlier. I am going to go through them one by one so that the next time they pop into your mind you can remember that it’s just fear and anxiety talking not reality.
What if people don’t like it?
No matter what you do there will always be people who don’t like it or who are not supportive of it. However, it’s usually because they are either jealous that you had the guts to put yourself out there, what you are doing makes them feel unaccomplished, or it doesn’t align with their belief system.
Either way, it doesn’t matter where their opinions are coming from. If what you are doing comes from your deepest passions and feels 100% right to do, then that’s all that matters. As long as you love it and are doing it for the right reasons then the hate and nonsupports will be insignificant.
Plus if you love and believe in what you are doing you will begin to attract more people to your idea that will support you. However, you have to be the person that puts that energy in first.
What if I look bad?
How will you know if you look bad if you don’t ever try it? This goes along with the last question as well so you can use most of it for this question.
Additionally, if you are worried about the way you look then your priorities are in the wrong place. To be blunt, if you are worried about how your image will be affected that is an ego problem. I understand it, I had issues with it when starting this blog and other times in my life. However, once you work on getting over the need to fit a specific appearance you will realize how much easier it is to not just take that next step but live life authentically!
What if it’s not as good as I think it is?
Again, how will you know if you don’t even TRY! I know the hardest part is just pushing that one button or making that one phone call to turn your idea into a reality but you might as well go for it!
If it ends up not being as good as you thought, take a step back and brainstorm what you can do better the next time. Getting creative with ideas and concepts is not a one and done type of thing. You will make mistakes and you will need to adjust things as you go. If it’s not as good as you thought it would be then what can you change to get it to that vision?
What if it doesn’t work and I fail?
In its simplest explanation, then you fail. As I said above, the process of taking these creative risks is a learning process. They can’t all be successful because then you would never learn anything new.
Also, failing isn’t truly failing. Your idea might have failed but you haven’t unless you decide to give up. However, failing will always teach you a lesson that will help guide you in your next steps. When looking at it this way failing can never be completely bad.
It also means that what you are currently doing might not be in your highest good for your life’s purpose. So listen to what you need to learn and take that into your next idea. | https://medium.com/@skylarrae/how-to-overcome-your-fears-and-take-the-risk-ae80bf33a26f | ['Skylar Rae'] | 2020-12-17 18:09:46.207000+00:00 | ['Risk', 'Take Action', 'Personal Development', 'Vulnerability', 'Mental Health'] |
Mada Hotels Jobs 2021 — Fresher RestaurantSupervisor | Job Title: Restaurant Supervisor — Mada Hotels Jobs 2021
Organization: Mada Hotels
Duty Station: Jinja, Uganda
Mada Hotels Profile
Founded in 1982, Mada Hotels is one of East Africa’s leading hospitality service providers with properties spread throughout East Africa. Adventures Aloft Balloon Safaris is part of Mada services and offers Africa’s most famous game reserves including the Masai Mara, Serengeti and Tarangire National Park. They opened a new property in Namanve, Mukono called Kampala Nile Resort.
Job Summary
We are looking to hire a customer-oriented restaurant supervisor to ensure that all restaurant operations run smoothly. The restaurant supervisor’s responsibilities include overseeing the activities of restaurant staff, expediting customers’ orders as needed, and maintaining good working relationships with suppliers. You should also be able to identify ways to decrease the restaurant’s operational costs.
To be successful as a restaurant supervisor, you should exercise effective management skills and take necessary disciplinary actions to address poor staff performance. Ultimately, a top-performing restaurant supervisor should be able to achieve exceptional customer service and ensure that customers have a pleasant restaurant experience.
Roles and Responsibilities:
- Screening, interviewing, hiring, and training restaurant staff.
- Managing restaurant staff’s work schedules.
- Conducting regular inspections of the restaurant kitchen to determine whether proper standards of hygiene and sanitation are maintained.
- Overseeing food preparation, presentation, and storage to ensure compliance with food health and safety regulations.
- Checking in on dining customers to enquire about food quality and service.
- Monitoring inventory and ensuring that all food supplies and other restaurant essentials are adequately stocked.
- Monitoring the restaurant’s cash flow and settling outstanding bills.
- Reviewing customer surveys to develop and implement ways to improve customer service.
- Resolving customer complaints in a professional manner.
Minimum Qualifications
- The applicant for the Mada Hotels Restaurant Supervisor job should hold relevant qualifications
- Experience in the hospitality industry is required
How To Apply for Mada Hotels Jobs 2021
All candidates who wish to join the Mada Hotels in this capacity should Email a complete CV and cover letter to: [email protected] Or deliver physical copies to Jinja Nile Resort, Kimaka Road, Jinja, Uganda
Deadline: 25th December 2021
For similar Jobs in Uganda today and great Uganda jobs, please remember to subscribe using the form below:
NOTE:
No employer should ask you for money in return for advancement in the recruitment process or for being offered a position. Please contact Fresher Jobs Uganda if it ever happens with any of the jobs that we advertise.
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LinkedIn | https://medium.com/@jobuganda30/mada-hotels-jobs-2021-fresher-restaurantsupervisor-4227b3eeef79 | ['Ogoegbunam Nzekwu'] | 2021-12-20 14:09:34.342000+00:00 | ['Fresher', 'Restaurant', 'Hotels', 'Supervisor'] |
Create Your Own Markdown Editor With React | Create Your Own Markdown Editor With React
A cool beginner project that helped me get better at React
Photo by Ben Robbins on Unsplash.
When I started to learn React, a JavaScript framework for web applications, creating a Markdown editor was one of the first projects I did. It helped me handle and understand some of React’s functions, such as DOM handling, communication between the DOM and our components, using the state, etc.
This is a fun and easy project to make. I like it because you can make it your own — and it can be useful too. I do not particularly like any Markdown editors that are available today. Webstorm has a good one, but this editor is not free unless you are a student.
The editor discussed in this article will run locally and update in real-time as you type. If there is nothing written in the editor, the placeholder text comes back.
In case you are wondering, this is the final output of our editor:
Screenshot by the author. The app is running locally.
Let's dive into it. | https://medium.com/better-programming/create-your-own-markdown-editor-with-react-6906ea2b6c2 | ['Anaïs Schlienger'] | 2020-11-06 16:41:03.231000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Programming', 'React', 'JavaScript', 'Reactjs'] |
The Psychology Of Color | However, in reading this article I found that these same elements relate to communications planning — especially when itcomes to storytelling, data representation (infographics) and presentation decks. To create a truly powerful creative presentation that will capture the interest of the audience, it’s crucial to build a visual connection with your audience through color.
When it comes to design, the initial focus typically lands on idea, concept and then execution. The first step typically is to draft the layout of the project. However, most often than not, we forget that design is not just about creating cool layouts or intricate designs. Design is about building a connection between the product which we are designing and the target audience. The best way to do so is through the use of color. As humans, we are naturally drawn to certain things, in large part due to the color used and the feeling it evokes. Color expresses an emotion, gives the tone and attracts a person’s attention to the overall design.
“Color is an essential factor to the world of graphic design and advertising. Not only that it brings in depth and emphasis to a design but it also gives the feel and the mood of a design.”
The most fundamental way to grasp the psychology of color is to first understand the color wheel. The color wheel is made up of the hues, tints, tones and shades of primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Primary colors consist of the colors yellow, blue and red. Meanwhile, secondary colors consist of green, orange and purple. These colors are the main colors used in brand identity and advertising.
Bold primary colors are often used within a brand’s identity (logo). They capture the eye of the viewer, and if used consistently in the long term, they become recognizable. This is not just because of the brand name alone, but by association with brand color. For example; the following logos represented in the photo use primary colors along with minimal use of positive and negative space (the representation of white and black) for their branding. (Note: The article introduces black and white as “actual” colors. However, in design they are not considered colors. “In the visible spectrum, white reflects light and is a presence of all colors, but black absorbs light and is an absence of color. Black can be defined as the visual impression experienced when no visible light reaches the eye.”) In the case of secondary colors, some brands use them for color identity, but only some. | https://medium.com/comms-planning/the-psychology-of-color-8a54ab8a6964 | ['Naja Bomani'] | 2016-07-07 15:36:11.638000+00:00 | ['Branding', 'Colors', 'Design', 'Psychology', 'Advertising'] |
MIT CSAIL Uses Deep Generative Model StyleGAN2 to Deliver SOTA Image Reconstruction Results | MIT CSAIL Uses Deep Generative Model StyleGAN2 to Deliver SOTA Image Reconstruction Results Synced Follow Dec 10, 2020 · 4 min read
A group of researchers from MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have proposed a simple framework for performing different image reconstruction tasks using the state-of-the-art generative model StyleGAN2.
It’s common for machine learning researchers to train models in a supervised setting for solving downstream prediction and image reconstruction tasks. For example, in the task of super-resolution, which aims to obtain high-resolution output images from low-resolution versions, classical methods train models on pairs of low-resolution and high-resolution images.
However, such end-to-end methods can also require re-training whenever there is a distribution shift in the inputs or relevant latent variables. Distribution shifts can easily occur for example in the input x-ray images collected from a hospital if the hospital’s medical scanners are upgraded, or as the patients contributing the images age due to improved healthcare.
Given the prohibitively high computation resources required to re-train end-to-end approaches when distribution shifts occur, how else might researchers build ML models that are both easy to train and robust to distribution shifts?
“To this end, it is of crucial importance to introduce causal inductive biases in the model,” the CSAIL researchers explain, pointing to causal modelling as a solution. The team says adding causal inductive biases can ensure the independence of mechanisms within the framework, so that upstream changes will not necessitate retraining the downstream models.
The team says previous supervised learning image reconstruction approaches that starting with the corrupted image and generated a restored image worked in an “anti-causal direction,” regularizing the inversion process using smoothness priors or sparsity, and this tended to result in blurry images. Their proposed novel Bayesian Reconstruction through Generative Models (BRGM) approach is causal, and closely follows the data generating process.
The researchers leveraged StyleGAN2 for building robust image priors. To restore a noisy image, the pretrained SOTA StyleGAN2 generator model generates a potential clean reconstruction. A corrupted image is then generated via a corruption model processing the potential clean reconstruction. The simulated corrupted image is compared to the noisy image with a distance metric so the loss function can be minimized to avoid blurring in the final output image. In this way, the approach accounts for distribution shifts in either the image dataset or the corruption processing without requiring any model retraining.
The team examined their BRGM approach on three datasets, including challenging medical datasets, comprising:
60,000 images of human faces from the Flickr Faces High Quality (FFHQ) dataset
~240,000 chest X-ray images from MIMIC III
7,329 brain MRI slices from a collection of 5 neuroimaging datasets
In both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, BRGM outperformed SOTA methods PULSE, ESRGAN, SRFBN on super-resolution and inpainting reconstruction tasks.
The paper Bayesian Image Reconstruction using Deep Generative Models is on arXiv. | https://medium.com/syncedreview/mit-csail-uses-deep-generative-model-stylegan2-to-deliver-sota-image-reconstruction-results-54de4fbd8573 | [] | 2020-12-10 19:43:20.211000+00:00 | ['MIT', 'Stylegan', 'Research', 'Deep Learning', 'Image'] |
How to Beat the Odds as a Content Creator | How to Beat the Odds as a Content Creator
Five tips from everyone’s favorite vampire slayer
Photo by James Pond on Unsplash
If you’ve ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you know the Big Bads always require Buffy to think things through. When it comes to slaying it as a marketing content creator, a bit of planning doesn’t hurt there, either.
According to Forbes, 93% of B2B companies claim contenting marketing brings in more leads than the traditional tactics.
As your team’s content creator, it’s your responsibility to boost brand awareness to bring in those leads. Better yet, your badass content can kick up quality leads. That way, no one’s wasting time attracting the wrong sort of houseguests.
Here are five tips to help you become a pro marketing content creator. Then, you can bring in new business leads and watch your company rise to every opportunity. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-to-beat-the-odds-as-a-content-creator-8d09a420f245 | ['Jazelle Handoush'] | 2019-06-24 16:52:38.279000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Content Creation', 'Content Marketing', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Content Strategy'] |
Absolutely! | Absolutely! During each sleep regression it felt as if my son had “Spidey Senses”. When I walked by his room or prepared for my bedtime, he had a knack for waking up. Sleep regression is very real.
Thanks for speaking it so clearly! | https://medium.com/@nickmarmolejo/absolutely-d07f6b78d663 | ['Rice'] | 2020-12-12 08:42:37.865000+00:00 | ['Newborn', 'Life Lessons', 'Parenting', 'Family', 'Fatherhood'] |
Cristal Stone Hamsa Bowl Carving | Cristal Stone Hamsa Bowl Carving
Hamsa is a talisman in the shape of the palm of the hand in general.
Using the amulet as an accessory, without knowing its history, would not reveal its ability to protect, but also invoke a more powerful curse — but of course, that’s if you believe it.
made of selected wood, carving 100% carved artwork made by experts,
priced at $25 USD / PCS with a minimum purchase of 50 Pcs and Export costs borne by the buyer.
if the purchase of 10 Pcs = $ 350 USD to meet the needs of production experts and Export costs borne by the buyer.
Specifications:
Main Material Selected Wood 3 cm
Dimensions Thickness ± 2.8cm (finishing)
Hamsa hand dimensions 15.2cm X 19.5cm X 17cm
Made in Indonesia
Copyright protected goods avoid counterfeiting
Purchase order by instagram DM and follow
=== Instagram : Aries_Woodcarving ===
🏷 crystal stone decorative bowl character
👌 High Quality
👋 Wholesale and retail
📲 DM for prices and orders, my official account --> 🛒 https://www.instagram.com/aries_west_java?r=nametag
🌍 check out my website, "Aries Woodcarving" with this link: https://arieswoodcarving.wixsite.com/arieswoodcarving/shop
Realize the desire of good sculpture and good product to make your day fun
Attention…!!!
Avoiding fraudulent accounts in the name of Aries Woodcarving Check profile photo before transaction
only those labeled with the original Aries woodcarving because they match the photo labels of the goods displayed on social media. | https://medium.com/@anugrahperkasadesain/hamsa-hand-woodcarving-9ff5324eac89 | ['Aries Woodcarving'] | 2021-10-26 03:49:09.459000+00:00 | ['Woodworking', 'Export', 'Ilumination', 'Erotica', 'Aesthetics'] |
Happiness and Life Satisfaction | 3. How Happiness Score is distributed
As we can see below, the Happiness Score has values above 2.85 and below 7.76. So there is no single country which has a Happiness Score above 8.
4. The relationship between different features with Happiness Score
We want to predict Happiness Score, so our dependent variable here is Score other features such as GPD Support Health , etc., are our independent variables.
GDP per capita
We first use scatter plots to observe relationships between variables.
Gif by Author
'''Happiness score vs gdp per capital'''
px.scatter(finaldf, x="GDP", y="Score", animation_frame="Year",
animation_group="Country",
size="Rank", color="Country", hover_name="Country",
trendline= "ols") train_data, test_data = train_test_split(finaldf, train_size = 0.8, random_state = 3)
lr = LinearRegression()
X_train = np.array(train_data['GDP'],
dtype = pd.Series).reshape(-1,1)
y_train = np.array(train_data['Score'], dtype = pd.Series)
lr.fit(X_train, y_train) X_test = np.array(test_data['GDP'],
dtype = pd.Series).reshape(-1,1)
y_test = np.array(test_data['Score'], dtype = pd.Series) pred = lr.predict(X_test) #ROOT MEAN SQUARED ERROR
rmsesm = float(format(np.sqrt(metrics.mean_squared_error(y_test,pred)),'.3f')) #R-SQUARED (TRAINING)
rtrsm = float(format(lr.score(X_train, y_train),'.3f')) #R-SQUARED (TEST)
rtesm = float(format(lr.score(X_test, y_test),'.3f')) cv = float(format(cross_val_score(lr,finaldf[['GDP']],finaldf['Score'],cv=5).mean(),'.3f')) print ("Average Score for Test Data: {:.3f}".format(y_test.mean()))
print('Intercept: {}'.format(lr.intercept_))
print('Coefficient: {}'.format(lr.coef_)) r = evaluation.shape[0]
evaluation.loc[r] = ['Simple Linear Regression','-',rmsesm,rtrsm,'-',rtesm,'-',cv]
evaluation
By using these values and the below definition, we can estimate the Happiness Score manually. The equation we use for our estimations is called hypothesis function and defined as
We also printed the intercept and coefficient for the simple linear regression.
Let’s show the result, shall we?
Since we have just two dimensions at the simple regression, it is easy to draw it. The below chart determines the result of the simple regression. It does not look like a perfect fit, but when we work with real-world datasets, having an ideal fit is not easy.
seabornInstance.set_style(style='whitegrid') plt.figure(figsize=(12,6))
plt.scatter(X_test,y_test,color='blue',label="Data", s = 12)
plt.plot(X_test,lr.predict(X_test),color="red",label="Predicted Regression Line")
plt.xlabel("GDP per Captita", fontsize=15)
plt.ylabel("Happiness Score", fontsize=15)
plt.xticks(fontsize=13)
plt.yticks(fontsize=13)
plt.legend() plt.gca().spines['right'].set_visible(False)
plt.gca().spines['top'].set_visible(False)
The relationship between GDP per capita(Economy of the country) has a strong positive correlation with Happiness Score, that is, if the GDP per capita of a country is higher than the Happiness Score of that country, it is also more likely to be high.
Support
To keep the article short, I won’t include the code in this part. The code is similar to the GDP feature above. I recommend you try to implement yourself. I will include the link at the end of this article for reference.
Social Support of countries also has a strong and positive relationship with Happiness Score. So, it makes sense that we need social support to be happy. People are also wired for emotions, and we experience those emotions within a social context.
Healthy life expectancy
A healthy life expectancy has a strong and positive relationship with the Happiness Score, that is, if the country has a High Life Expectancy, it can also have a high Happiness Score. Being happy doesn’t just improve the quality of a person’s life. It may increase the quantity of our life as well. I will also be happy if I get a long healthy life. You?
Freedom to make life choices
Freedom to make life choices has a positive relationship with Happiness Score. Choice and autonomy are more directly related to happiness than having lots of money. It gives us options to pursue meaning in our life, finding activities that stimulate and excite us. This is an essential aspect of feeling happy.
Generosity
Generosity has a fragile linear relationship with the Happiness Score. Why the charity has no direct relationship with happiness score? Generosity scores are calculated based on the countries which give the most to nonprofits around the world. Countries that are not generous that does not mean they are not happy.
Perceptions of corruption
Distribution of Perceptions of corruption rightly skewed that means very less number of the country has high perceptions of corruption. That means most of the country has corruption problems.
How corruption feature impact on the Happiness Score?
Perceptions of corruption data have highly skewed no wonder why the data has a weak linear relationship. Still, as we can see in the scatter plot, most of the data points are on the left side, and most of the countries with low perceptions of corruption have a Happiness Score between 4 to 6. Countries with high perception scores have a high Happiness Score above 7.
5. Visualize and Examine Data
We do not have big data with too many features. Thus, we have a chance to plot most of them and reach some useful analytical results. Drawing charts and examining the data before applying a model is a good practice because we may detect some possible outliers or decide to do normalization. This step is not a must but gets to know the data is always useful. We start with the histograms of dataframe .
# DISTRIBUTION OF ALL NUMERIC DATA
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (15, 15)
df1 = finaldf[['GDP', 'Health', 'Freedom',
'Generosity','Corruption']] h = df1.hist(bins = 25, figsize = (16,16),
xlabelsize = '10', ylabelsize = '10')
seabornInstance.despine(left = True, bottom = True)
[x.title.set_size(12) for x in h.ravel()];
[x.yaxis.tick_left() for x in h.ravel()]
Next, to give us a more appealing view of where each country is placed in the World ranking report, we use darker blue for countries that have the highest rating on the report (i.e., are the “happiest”), while the lighter blue represents countries with a lower ranking. We can see that countries in the European and Americas regions have a reasonably high ranking than ones in the Asian and African areas.
'''World Map
Happiness Rank Accross the World''' happiness_rank = dict(type = 'choropleth',
locations = finaldf['Country'],
locationmode = 'country names',
z = finaldf['Rank'],
text = finaldf['Country'],
colorscale = 'Blues_',
autocolorscale=False,
reversescale=True,
marker_line_color='darkgray',
marker_line_width=0.5)
layout = dict(title = 'Happiness Rank Across the World',
geo = dict(showframe = False,
projection = {'type': 'equirectangular'}))
world_map_1 = go.Figure(data = [happiness_rank], layout=layout)
iplot(world_map_1)
Let’s check which countries are better positioned in each of the aspects being analyzed.
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=3, ncols=2,constrained_layout=True,figsize=(10,10)) seabornInstance.barplot(x='GDP',y='Country',
data=finaldf.nlargest(10,'GDP'),
ax=axes[0,0],palette="Blues_r")
seabornInstance.barplot(x='Health' ,y='Country',
data=finaldf.nlargest(10,'Health'),
ax=axes[0,1],palette='Blues_r')
seabornInstance.barplot(x='Score' ,y='Country',
data=finaldf.nlargest(10,'Score'),
ax=axes[1,0],palette='Blues_r')
seabornInstance.barplot(x='Generosity' ,y='Country',
data=finaldf.nlargest(10,'Generosity'),
ax=axes[1,1],palette='Blues_r')
seabornInstance.barplot(x='Freedom' ,y='Country',
data=finaldf.nlargest(10,'Freedom'),
ax=axes[2,0],palette='Blues_r')
seabornInstance.barplot(x='Corruption' ,y='Country',
data=finaldf.nlargest(10,'Corruption'),
ax=axes[2,1],palette='Blues_r')
Checking Out the Correlation Among Explanatory Variables
mask = np.zeros_like(finaldf[usecols].corr(), dtype=np.bool)
mask[np.triu_indices_from(mask)] = True f, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(16, 12))
plt.title('Pearson Correlation Matrix',fontsize=25) seabornInstance.heatmap(finaldf[usecols].corr(),
linewidths=0.25,vmax=0.7,square=True,cmap="Blues",
linecolor='w',annot=True,annot_kws={"size":8},mask=mask,cbar_kws={"shrink": .9});
It looks like GDP , Health , and Support are strongly correlated with the Happiness score. Freedom correlates quite well with the Happiness score; however, Freedom connects quite well with all data. Corruption still has a mediocre correlation with the Happiness score.
Beyond Simple Correlation
In the scatterplots, we see that GDP , Health , and Support are quite linearly correlated with some noise. We find the auto-correlation of Corruption fascinating here, where everything is terrible, but if the corruption is high, the distribution is all over the place. It seems to be just a negative indicator of a threshold.
I found an exciting package by Ian Ozsvald that uses. It trains random forests to predict features from each other, going a bit beyond simple correlation.
# visualize hidden relationships in data
classifier_overrides = set()
df_results = discover.discover(finaldf.drop(['target', 'target_n'],axis=1).sample(frac=1),
classifier_overrides)
We use heat maps here to visualize how our features are clustered or vary over space.
fig, ax = plt.subplots(ncols=2,figsize=(24, 8))
seabornInstance.heatmap(df_results.pivot(index = 'target',
columns = 'feature',
values = 'score').fillna(1).loc[finaldf.drop(
['target', 'target_n'],axis = 1).columns,finaldf.drop(
['target', 'target_n'],axis = 1).columns],
annot=True, center = 0, ax = ax[0], vmin = -1, vmax = 1, cmap = "Blues")
seabornInstance.heatmap(df_results.pivot(index = 'target',
columns = 'feature',
values = 'score').fillna(1).loc[finaldf.drop(
['target', 'target_n'],axis=1).columns,finaldf.drop(
['target', 'target_n'],axis=1).columns],
annot=True, center=0, ax=ax[1], vmin=-0.25, vmax=1, cmap="Blues_r")
plt.plot()
This gets more interesting. Corruption is a better predictor of the Happiness Score than Support. Possibly because of the ‘threshold’ we previously discovered?
Moreover, although Social Support correlated quite well, it does not have substantial predictive value. I guess this is because all the distributions of the quartiles are quite close in the scatterplot.
6. Multiple Linear Regression
In the thirst section of this article, we used a simple linear regression to examine the relationships between the Happiness Score and other features. We found a poor fit. To improve this model, we want to add more features. Now, it is time to create some complex models.
We determined features at first sight by looking at the previous sections and used them in our first multiple linear regression. As in the simple regression, we printed the coefficients which the model uses for the predictions. However, this time we must use the below definition for our predictions if we want to make calculations manually.
We create a model with all features.
# MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION 1
train_data_dm,test_data_dm = train_test_split(finaldf,train_size = 0.8,random_state=3) independent_var = ['GDP','Health','Freedom','Support','Generosity','Corruption']
complex_model_1 = LinearRegression()
complex_model_1.fit(train_data_dm[independent_var],train_data_dm['Score']) print('Intercept: {}'.format(complex_model_1.intercept_))
print('Coefficients: {}'.format(complex_model_1.coef_))
print('Happiness score = ',np.round(complex_model_1.intercept_,4),
'+',np.round(complex_model_1.coef_[0],4),'∗ Support',
'+',np.round(complex_model_1.coef_[1],4),'* GDP',
'+',np.round(complex_model_1.coef_[2],4),'* Health',
'+',np.round(complex_model_1.coef_[3],4),'* Freedom',
'+',np.round(complex_model_1.coef_[4],4),'* Generosity',
'+',np.round(complex_model_1.coef_[5],4),'* Corrption') pred = complex_model_1.predict(test_data_dm[independent_var])
rmsecm = float(format(np.sqrt(metrics.mean_squared_error(
test_data_dm['Score'],pred)),'.3f'))
rtrcm = float(format(complex_model_1.score(
train_data_dm[independent_var],
train_data_dm['Score']),'.3f'))
artrcm = float(format(adjustedR2(complex_model_1.score(
train_data_dm[independent_var],
train_data_dm['Score']),
train_data_dm.shape[0],
len(independent_var)),'.3f'))
rtecm = float(format(complex_model_1.score(
test_data_dm[independent_var],
test_data_dm['Score']),'.3f'))
artecm = float(format(adjustedR2(complex_model_1.score(
test_data_dm[independent_var],test_data['Score']),
test_data_dm.shape[0],
len(independent_var)),'.3f'))
cv = float(format(cross_val_score(complex_model_1,
finaldf[independent_var],
finaldf['Score'],cv=5).mean(),'.3f')) r = evaluation.shape[0]
evaluation.loc[r] = ['Multiple Linear Regression-1','selected features',rmsecm,rtrcm,artrcm,rtecm,artecm,cv]
evaluation.sort_values(by = '5-Fold Cross Validation', ascending=False)
We knew that GDP , Support , and Health are quite linearly correlated. This time, we create a model with these three features.
# MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION 2
train_data_dm,test_data_dm = train_test_split(finaldf,train_size = 0.8,random_state=3) independent_var = ['GDP','Health','Support']
complex_model_2 = LinearRegression()
complex_model_2.fit(train_data_dm[independent_var],train_data_dm['Score']) print('Intercept: {}'.format(complex_model_2.intercept_))
print('Coefficients: {}'.format(complex_model_2.coef_))
print('Happiness score = ',np.round(complex_model_2.intercept_,4),
'+',np.round(complex_model_2.coef_[0],4),'∗ Support',
'+',np.round(complex_model_2.coef_[1],4),'* GDP',
'+',np.round(complex_model_2.coef_[2],4),'* Health') pred = complex_model_2.predict(test_data_dm[independent_var])
rmsecm = float(format(np.sqrt(metrics.mean_squared_error(
test_data_dm['Score'],pred)),'.3f'))
rtrcm = float(format(complex_model_2.score(
train_data_dm[independent_var],
train_data_dm['Score']),'.3f'))
artrcm = float(format(adjustedR2(complex_model_2.score(
train_data_dm[independent_var],
train_data_dm['Score']),
train_data_dm.shape[0],
len(independent_var)),'.3f'))
rtecm = float(format(complex_model_2.score(
test_data_dm[independent_var],
test_data_dm['Score']),'.3f'))
artecm = float(format(adjustedR2(complex_model_2.score(
test_data_dm[independent_var],test_data['Score']),
test_data_dm.shape[0],
len(independent_var)),'.3f'))
cv = float(format(cross_val_score(complex_model_2,
finaldf[independent_var],
finaldf['Score'],cv=5).mean(),'.3f')) r = evaluation.shape[0]
evaluation.loc[r] = ['Multiple Linear Regression-2','selected features',rmsecm,rtrcm,artrcm,rtecm,artecm,cv]
evaluation.sort_values(by = '5-Fold Cross Validation', ascending=False)
When we look at the evaluation table, multiple linear regression -2 (selected features) is the best. However, I have doubts about its reliability, and I would prefer the multiple linear regression with all elements. | https://towardsdatascience.com/happiness-and-life-satisfaction-ecdc7d0ab9a5 | ['Xuankhanh Nguyen'] | 2020-08-09 02:58:36.484000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Happiness', 'Data Virtualization', 'Data Science'] |
9 Powerful Headline Hacks for Dedicated Professionals | 9 Powerful Headline Hacks for Dedicated Professionals
Learning to write magnetic headlines is an awesome skill — not just for writers
Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos.
Writers aren’t the only people to benefit from learning how to write magnetic headlines. As a working professional, mastering headlines can help you:
Stand out with job applications
Draw attendees to your meetings
Gather a crowd to your presentations
Get your emails opened
Get people using your app, your process
Get people using your service or product recommendation
Land you a higher paying position
The average professional — even the average writer — may think a great headline is all about getting attention no matter how it’s done. Getting that click. Yet the approach behind any powerful headline is this:
What’s in it for my reader?
Learn these nine headline approaches to stand out from the rest — and give yourself a leg up as a professional: | https://medium.com/better-marketing/9-powerful-headline-hacks-for-dedicated-professionals-588761c03dc5 | ['Cynthia Marinakos'] | 2020-09-14 17:57:11.728000+00:00 | ['Headline Hacks', 'Writing', 'Work', 'Startup', 'Marketing'] |
Basic Guide, Properties and Usecases of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) | JSON Methods
The global variable JSON serves as a namespace for functions that produce and parse strings with JSON data.
So the two main methods associated with JSON namesake are:
Stringify Parse
JSON.stringify(value, replacer?, space?)
It is a method on JSON which produces the strings with JSON data.
It translates the JavaScript value value to a string in JSON format.It has 2 optional arguments : replacer and space.
The optional parameter replacer is used to change the value before stringifying it. For example:
replacer function
Using the replacer:
> JSON.stringify({ a: 5, b: [ 2, 8 ] }, replacer)
'{"a":10,"b":[4,16]}'
The optional parameter space influences the formatting of the output. Without this param, the stringified value will be a single line of text.:
> console.log(JSON.stringify({a: 0, b: ['
']}))
{"a":0,"b":["
"]} > console.log(JSON.stringify({a: 0, b: ['
']}, null, 2))
{
"a": 0,
"b": [
"
"
]
} > console.log(JSON.stringify({a: 0, b: ['
']}, null, '|--'))
{
|--"a": 0,
|--"b": [
|--|--"
"
|--]
}
Two Data Ignored by JSON.stringify()
If the value is a function, then the JSON.stringify() ignores it.
eg:
a) var obj = {
“name”: “Rahul”,
“describe”: function(){return 10;}
}
> JSON.stringify(obj)
‘{“name”: “Rahul”}’ ;i.e., the function is ignored
b) JSON.stringify() handles values that are not supported by JSON (such as functions and undefined)
> JSON.stringify(function() {})
undefined
The toJSON() Method
If JSON.stringify() encounters an object that has a toJSON method, it uses that method to obtain a value to be stringified. For example:
> JSON.stringify({ toJSON: function () { return 'Cool' } })
'"Cool"'
Dates already have a toJSON method that produces an ISO 8601 date string:
> JSON.stringify(new Date('2011-07-29'))
'"2011-07-28T22:00:00.000Z"'
JSON.parse(text, reviver?)
It parses the JSON data in text and returns a JavaScript value. Here are some examples:
> JSON.parse("'String'") // illegal quotes
SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL
> JSON.parse('"String"')
'String'
> JSON.parse('123')
123
> JSON.parse('[1, 2, 3]')
[ 1, 2, 3 ]
> JSON.parse('{ "hello": 123, "world": 456 }')
{ hello: 123, world: 456 }
The optional parameter ‘reviewer’ can be used to transform the parsed data.
In this example, we are translating date strings to date objects:
dateReviewer function
The result is:
> var str = ‘{ “name”: “Rahul”, “birth”: “1998–05–15T22:00:00.000Z” }’;
> JSON.parse(str, dateReviver)
{ name: ‘Rahul’, birth:“Fri, 15 May 1998 22:00:00 GMT” } | https://medium.com/eoraa-co/basic-guide-properties-and-usecases-of-json-javascript-object-notation-eacba3e9066e | ['Rahul Mahajan'] | 2021-05-03 07:16:18.279000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Json Stringify', 'Json Parse', 'Json'] |
FanFood Study Reveals 6 Fan Purchase Behaviors You May Not Know | FanFood Study Reveals 6 Fan Purchase Behaviors You May Not Know
You definitely want to read till the end.
Fans making purchases on the FanFood app at Bert Ogden Arena, the largest indoor arena in south Texas.
At FanFood, we’re on a constant quest to understand fans attending live events. Insights derived from our data serve as guidance for both our venue partners and our team, as we pursue today’s ultimate fan experience together.
In this blog, we reveal 6 key insights summarized by our in-house research team. Hopefully we can contribute to the discussion about what fans truly want when it comes to fan experience.
1. Fans who order on their phones spend more per order
This graph shows how, over the past two years, as the adoption rate of FanFood app increases at our partner venues, the average concession order size (i.e., the average amount of money fans spend per order) has been increasing at a faster rate.
This finding has consistently come up in our interviews with our venue partners, and now we have sufficient data to corroborate it. When using FanFood, fans know that they don’t have to wait for long even if they purchase multiple items per order. Especially where in-seat delivery is offered, fans don’t even need to grab the food themselves and wouldn’t even think twice before adding more items to the cart.
Wouldn’t you order more too if the same kind of service is available?😉
2. People prefer meals over snacks at live games
A quick look at the top selling items on the FanFood platform reveals that sales of main courses outperforms that of any other category — including drinks and snacks. Soft drinks category ranks second, followed by alcoholic drinks and snacks.
Here’s a breakdown of the 5 top selling main course items across all venues using FanFood. If you need some inspiration on what items to include on your menu, this could be a great reference point:
By the way, are you surprised the sales of vodka is nearly the same as that of water?
3. Items most frequently sold together: Salted pretzel with a side of cheese
We may all have our own opinions about what the best concession food pairing is, but data has shown a clear winner — salted pretzel with a side of cheese.
Here’s a list of items frequently sold together, ranked by popularity.
What does this mean for your concession stand? Well, maybe start considering offering these item pairs as combos on your menu. We’ve discovered that when single items are packaged together and sold as combo meals, buyers tend to perceive them as a greater deal and are more tempted to buy.
4. No. of orders grow at a faster forecasted rate at venues with mobile ordering
This graph shows that if two venues both start with the same no. of concession orders per year — yet one with mobile ordering service offered and the other without — a year later the venue with mobile ordering would already be seeing their no. of orders higher than the other venue.
One key factor that explains this is that fans are placing more orders per game when mobile ordering is available. We’ve heard this from pretty much all venue partners we’ve talked to — people are ordering multiple times throughout the game because the act of ordering is just so simple (no more than a few clicks of a button!) You can read more about the experience of Durham Bulls Ballpark, where concession revenue per capita has tripled since the adoption of FanFood.
5. The convenience of technology keeps your fans coming back
We’ve repeatedly found that people are willing to pay for that extra convenience. It’s just the way it is. And that’s been apparent over and over again at our partner venues (people never seem to blink an eye at the extra charge for in-seat delivery, for example.)
We all know that convenience is a huge factor for a better fan experience. And what does a better fan experience lead to? More returning fans.
This bar chart shows how user growth rate has been rising overall amongst our venue partners (the growth rates are seasonal, of course, since sports games are seasonal). As you can see, not only has the total user growth rate been increasing, the growth rate of returning users has also been increasing.
Nowadays with the onset of live streaming, attendance at live sports games has been declining. As a result, fan retention has been a huge challenge faced by many of our venue partners (with the exception of schools perhaps, since fans are probably there for a different reason: cheering their children on.)
Sports technology might be a cure for the decline in live sports attendance. With more tech services incorporating better human-centered design, live games still have advantages that sitting on a couch in front of a widescreen simply cannot provide. And the key, without a doubt, lies in creating the ultimate fan experience that fans just cannot pass up on.
6. Mobile ordering helps venues increase revenue at a faster rate
For many concessionnaires and stadium managers, this last point is probably top of mind — revenue. We’ve predicted the revenue growth rate of our partner venues till 2020 based on their historical data, and the growth rate has shown to be not only increasing, but also increasing at a faster rate.
As fan adoption of the mobile ordering app increases at partner venues, not only are fans ordering multiple times throughout the game, but also they are placing larger orders. And if you’ve been following our blogs and have subscribed to our newsletter, you’d also be receiving tips and strategies on how you can increase your concession revenue in various ways.
Overall, what we’ve observed is that technology is making both the fans and the concessionnaires’ gameday experience more convenient, satisfactory and beneficial. Whether you are involved in the operations of venues or concessions, the earlier you adopt technological solutions to engage and retain fans, the more likely you’d be taking a lead in the race towards digitalization in the sports / live event industry. And what we know for a fact is: now is a better time than ever.
If there are topics / questions you’d love to see us explore on our blog, write or tweet at us @fanfoodondemand! | https://medium.com/fanfood-playbook/fanfood-study-reveals-6-fan-purchase-behaviors-you-may-not-know-578f4e6902a3 | ['Deeksha Sridhar'] | 2019-08-07 14:46:22.994000+00:00 | ['Insights', 'Concessions', 'Sports', 'Consumer Behavior', 'Data Visualization'] |
Quality assurance certification for software testers | Many jobs require certificates validating your competences. However, people have different motivations trying to document their knowledge and skills. For some, it’s a way of setting their professional goals, reaching specific career milestones or establishing areas of interests and specialization. Sometimes, certification is required in the process of recruitment for certain positions or it’s an indispensable condition to meet the formal workplace requirements, e.g. working with specific products or projects. Others treat it as a unification of the industry conceptual dictionary as well as a confirmation and systematization of acquired knowledge. Regardless of the motivation, it’s always a good idea to invest in self-development and expand your competences. It should be an immanent element of your professional career as a tester.
What should you consider before choosing a certificate?
The most important thing is to think about several basic aspects before making a decision on which certificate to choose. Obviously, you have to take into account your own preferences and professional interests. You should also think about the most convenient form — some prefer an option of preparing by themselves. Others feel more satisfied taking part in training with a program and a leader who’ll help solve some potential doubts.
While choosing the most suitable certification (or a certification with a training), it’s important to verify the renown and prestige of the body which is responsible for issuing the certification as well as the competencies of a trainer.
ISTQB certification options for software testers
The most popular testing certification is, of course, the ISTQB having different levels of advancement and varied areas of specialization. Here are some short characteristics of certifications according to standardized software testers qualification created by the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB):
ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level — It’s one of the most popular certifications. Getting it confirms having a basic software testing knowledge including: unified conceptual dictionary used in everyday work, testing foundations, testing in the context of software lifecycle, static testing and test design techniques, tests management, as well as tools that support testing. During recruitment interviews for a tester position, candidates can often expect questions about their knowledge of the ISTQB FL syllabus to identify if they have a theoretical background.
— It’s one of the most popular certifications. Getting it confirms having a basic software testing knowledge including: unified conceptual dictionary used in everyday work, testing foundations, testing in the context of software lifecycle, static testing and test design techniques, tests management, as well as tools that support testing. During recruitment interviews for a tester position, candidates can often expect questions about their knowledge of the ISTQB FL syllabus to identify if they have a theoretical background. ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level (every certification requires acquiring knowledge about the ISTQB FL) is divided into:
(every certification requires acquiring knowledge about the ISTQB FL) is divided into: Test Manager — especially for people who work as test managers or plan on getting such a position. The scope of required knowledge from the syllabus includes the aspects of software testing from a managerial perspective.
— especially for people who work as test managers or plan on getting such a position. The scope of required knowledge from the syllabus includes the aspects of software testing from a managerial perspective. Test Analyst — created for software testers whose responsibilities and interests oscillate around test analysis.
— created for software testers whose responsibilities and interests oscillate around test analysis. Technical Test Analyst — for people who want to confirm their competences in a more technical test analysis.
— for people who want to confirm their competences in a more technical test analysis. ISTQB Certified Tester Expert Level
Test Management — for people who manage a test team and the process of testing within the whole organization.
— for people who manage a test team and the process of testing within the whole organization. Improving the Testing Process — covering basic knowledge on enhancing the process of testing.
— covering basic knowledge on enhancing the process of testing. Specialist certification from the ISTQB family including:
Performance testing — it’s focused on the topic of performance and performance testing of a developed software.
— it’s focused on the topic of performance and performance testing of a developed software. Model-Based Tester — it concerns testing based on a model (Model-based testing, MTB).
— it concerns testing based on a model (Model-based testing, MTB). Usability Testing — it concerns verifying the usability of a software.
— it concerns verifying the usability of a software. Security Tester — confirming competences from safety tests: approach, methodology, and tools.
— confirming competences from safety tests: approach, methodology, and tools. Test Automation Engineer — applies to verifying knowledge about advanced test automation which translates into reliable influence on design, development and maintenance of functional test automation solutions in a company/project.
— applies to verifying knowledge about advanced test automation which translates into reliable influence on design, development and maintenance of functional test automation solutions in a company/project. Mobile Application Testing — aimed at people who want to develop their mobile applications testing knowledge.
— aimed at people who want to develop their mobile applications testing knowledge. ISTQB Agile Tester — aimed at people working in agile methodologies of software development, basic and advanced level.
It’s worth pointing out that ISTQB constantly develops and changes the range of certifications. That’s why it’s recommended to follow the society’s official website to be up-to-date.
Other forms of certification
Apart from ISTQB, testers have other options of verifying their professional competencies. Some of them are:
IREB Certified Requirements Engineer
IQBBA Certified Business Analyst Basic Level
IBUQ Basic Level
A4Q Certified Selenium Tester Foundation Level
Summing up
You should know that it’s only a small piece of what the IT industry offers in terms of confirming your qualifications with formal documentation. Depending on a chosen path — e.g. requirements analysis, cloud issues, project methodologies, test automation and design — you can always find an adequate training, class or certification applying to a strictly narrowed field, most coherent with your professional preferences. | https://medium.com/@iteo/quality-assurance-certification-for-software-testers-98b83b50c0f6 | [] | 2021-07-02 06:32:36.366000+00:00 | ['QA', 'Testing', 'Quality Assurance Testing', 'Software Testing', 'Quality Assurance'] |
I Miss The Man I’ve Never Met | My story isn’t one I’ve told many people — writing these words here, for the world to see, is both terrifying and freeing. If you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve found the courage to hit that ‘publish’ button.
Mine isn’t a happy tale — it almost didn’t happen at all.
My parents were both living and working away from home in their early twenties — my mother as a night clerk in a hotel/bus depot/tavern, my father as a drywall installer. They both lived in the employee wing of the hotel. My mother barely spoke English — My father didn’t speak a word of French. But love is the universal language, right?
All I’ve ever had are little stories from my mother about who he was — the kind of man he was; funny, awkward, romantic, sweet. He could sing like a bird and he snored like a chainsaw. She said that’s where I got it from — the singing. The snoring too — but I think she’s as much to blame for that one. And my blue eyes, she said they were his too.
One night, only three months into their whirlwind romance, too much alcohol was consumed. Things happened that shouldn’t have happened. Because of it, I almost didn’t happen. I think my father hated himself for what he did, even though my mother never did. I never did.
She never dated, other than a couple of blind dates on which she ended up taking me along. She never married — she never even slept with a man. My whole life, it was her and I. And my whole life, I longed for more.
As a child, I would make up these fantasies in my mind where we would magically find each other, and we would laugh, and cry and he would spin me around in a twirling hug the way daddies do with their little girls. That never happened.
As a teenager, I would watch talk shows where long lost children and parents would be reunited on television. I imagined myself in one of those big chairs, the host asking me about my childhood and then asking me to look into camera 1 and ask my dad to come, should he be out there, watching. And then there he would be, standing in the front row — and again there were tearful hugs followed by lifelong memories.
As a young adult, I scoured this new thing called the internet, searching in towns and cities all across the province for anyone sharing his name. I wrote and mailed countless letters. Sent them off with self-addressed stamped envelopes so they wouldn’t have to pay to reply — and every letter that dropped in the mailbox was sent with the fervent hope that it would reach the right person. A handful came back. They weren’t my father, but they wished me luck in my search.
When social media became mainstream, my search widened. This time, my mother joined me, and together, we clicked on dozens upon dozens of possible matches. Messages were sent to those who were a maybe, and again the ‘good luck’ notes came back from some — radio silence from others.
Now I’m almost forty years old — my daughter is turning twenty in less than a month. In my mind, I still feel like I’m twenty-five. And although I’ve never given up hope, that hope dims a little more with each year that passes. Because as I get older, I know he does too. And I can’t help but think that after all this time, maybe it just isn’t meant to be. Maybe he doesn’t want to know me — or maybe he’s still too ashamed to.
But still, I hope. And I dream. That one day, I’ll get to cry tears of unadulterated joy as I wrap my arms around this man I’ve never met, and say I love you, daddy. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/i-miss-the-man-ive-never-met-e8318bdc016c | ['Edie Tuck'] | 2019-08-26 20:14:42.626000+00:00 | ['Parenthood', 'Hope', 'Fatherhood', 'Life', 'Family'] |
Nioh 2: Analogy of a Fair Life? | If you’re Black in the US right now, you’re likely feeling drained. Everything that has happened from June up until now has been exhausting. From experiencing collective trauma and rage to seeing performative — and often meaningless — societal actions, it’s been a lot. Among all this stress, I noticed something about myself. I was retreating — diving deeper into another world — Koei Tecmo’s Nioh 2.
My avatar in the game (known as Hide) acts like the person I wish I could be. She works for a cause, is seen as an equal, is highly adept, and just happens to be Black. Her skin tone has no effect on the trajectory of her journey. I realized that this is perhaps my greatest opportunity to see a Black person excel with none of the “isms” average Black folks face daily.
Now, before I proceed, it’s important that I acknowledge what inspires this game. It’s an action title based on the Sengoku era of Japan. This was a violent and grueling time period of civil conflict. It’s far more nuanced of course, but it’s crucial that I remember it’s not just “a cool samurai game”. I don’t want to merely glorify a fantasy game shaped by history for the sake of entertainment. Also, the game doesn’t shy away from the subject matter involved.
Source: Koei Tecmo
From a game design standpoint, Nioh 2 is certainly not new. It actually has a lot in common with Demons’ Souls/Dark Souls/Bloodborne. What’s different here is that it isn’t set against an abstract mysterious medieval back drop. It’s a focused, linear fantasy narrative based on the unification of a country.
Hide has a companion, Tokichiro. He, much like Hide, lived life as someone on the margins. But Tokichiro’s assumption is that together, the two players can gain some success and stability during the turbulent times. To get this success, they fight demons and gain access to more spirit stones. Theses stones are more valuable than money but also, more dangerous. Eventually, the stones provide the key to social power and status.
The game is difficult by all accounts. If it wasn’t challenging, I wouldn’t have played it. Games like this aren’t for everyone. Completing each mission requires a great deal of patience. The ensuing level of stress is fun for some. For others, it’s something they avoid altogether.
Source: Koei Tecmo
For game players, access to resources determines level of difficulty. You have to choose your weapons, tools, magic and armor wisely. The game allows you wear and wield whatever you like. Their a lot to consider however because the armor you wear relies on your equipment weight. Heavy armor doesn’t allow to be very fast but you can take a considerable amount of damage. Light armor allows you to dodge to great effect, however the deficiency in defense means you’re easier to kill from attacks.
So, higher defense for lower mobility? Higher mobility for poor defense? Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Typically, I stick to the middle ground — I focus on protecting myself as much as I can and stay prepared to run if necessary. It’s eerily similar to how I move socially and professionally.
Managing these resources can feel intimidating, and it most certainly is. You constantly teeter between safety and space.
The most important resource by far is your stamina (ki). You quite literally will live or die by how you manage it. Do you risk running out of energy in hopes you’ll slay a foe? Maybe you risk breaking your guard while blocking attacks? There is nothing more lethal than running out of stamina. If you’re under attack and out of steam, you’re likely dead.
Source: Koei Tecmo
Sounds a lot like life, huh? We’re constantly asking ourselves if we should put all of our energy into work. If we should risk burning out. If we should overcompensate to get little or nothing. It’s hustle culture — the one many of us are living in. That said, if you aren’t skillful with your energy, you can’t even hope to complete missions in the game.
The other aspect of Nioh 2 that resonates with me is the narrative. Seeing Hide, Tokichiro and their allies work across decades to ignite change is interesting. I can’t help but be a fan watching characters on the come up, regardless of how serious or shallow the plot may be. My guess is that it has something to do with living in a competitive, capitalist society. Maybe that’s why I appreciate seeing folks on the bottom fight to get to the top.
A lengthy, arduous adventure definitely eases my mind. There’s a strange, undeniable comfort in the fact that success is straightforward. I find myself envious of my avatar’s success. With each victory, she gains more reputation, more favor, and she gets stronger. Eventually, Hide faces deadlier threats, one-on-one battles, and scarier demons. But overall, the only hurdles are the ones she can see — the ones right in front of her.
Source: Koei Tecmo
I wish my career worked that way. If only all of my grinding resulted in excepted results. Unfortunately, that’s not reality. You need to have the energy to stay ahead of the competition. You need to actively work on networking. You can never lose steam. Needless to say, working requires a lot more than just the body of your work.
Unfortunately, many of those factors aren’t fair across racial lines. As a Black person, the answer isn’t to simply go out and work hard. Nioh 2 allows me to forget about the lies steeped in meritocracy. In a fair world, we would all get our shot at success. It should be that simple. I often feel cursed by misfortune. The constant trauma I’ve experienced over the past month only exacerbates this feeling.
My envy of Hide’s fictional life reaches its peak at the end of the game. By that point, she’s practically a legend. Again, I’ll caution that the violent time period in the game is not necessarily one to be glorified. Stages are often painted with blood and destruction. Giant piles of corpses often make up the backdrop. Several cutscenes feature characters killing others. In some cases, this is done in the most brutal fashion as a show of force.
The game’s story does acknowledge that the pursuit of power and glory has its downfalls. Characters show respect for those who do not desire conquest. Yet, these characters don’t notice their own hypocrisy. Many fall from grace after their greed gets the best of them. Some even become demons. As a player, you often slay these characters, ultimately being an observer to history and only sometimes an active participant.
It’s too easy to equate this game to my life as a Black American creative.
Staying relevant in your career space is a constant battle. It requires you to be mindful of your energy, the resources you have available, and whom you’re working with. A series of misguided actions can end it all for you. Still, I appreciate the game for what is it. It’s a game that allows you to make something of yourself with a greater goal in mind. You’re moving toward something with each move, weapon choice, stat boost, arrow, gun or hand cannon.
I’ve been projecting a lot on Koei Temco’s Nioh 2. Much like From Software’s work, it’s a game that allows you to lose yourself in its systems, design and brand of action. I lost myself in Nioh 2, but it certainly felt more purposeful than others of its kind.
There’s another reason I’ve played this title for 150 hours so far, the subject of success and failure. Playing has reminded me that success and failure are part of our personal messy adventures. Wins aren’t picturesque and damn it all, I’m still working to unlearn this. Victory really is taking one step on a flight of stairs to only be knocked down repeatedly. But you learn, gain more experience and until eventually you make some progress. It’s not glorious but you get there eventually with time and grit.
I don’t like ascribing the word escapism to media consumption. However, that’s the best way to describe my time with this game. Stress does things to your mind. Sometimes we want to engage with laid back cooking shows. Maybe we want to listen to wholesome podcasts. In my case? I play a challenging action game in which my character dies often. Still, as I type this, I’m waiting for the extra planned content to prove to myself I can complete it all. Why? It’s better than thinking about how unfair real life is. | https://jrous001.medium.com/nioh-2-analogy-of-a-fair-life-f6e61417ec7f | ['Jeffrey Rousseau'] | 2020-07-27 14:52:58.490000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Videogames', 'Criticism'] |
Data Science’s Most Misunderstood Hero | Data Science’s Most Misunderstood Hero
Why treating analytics like a second-class citizen will hurt you
This article is an extended 2-in-1 remix of my HBR article and TDS article about analysts.
Be careful which skills you put on a pedestal, since the effects of unwise choices can be devastating. In addition to mismanaged teams and unnecessary hires, you’ll see the real heroes quitting or re-educating themselves to fit your incentives du jour. A prime example of this phenomenon is in analytics.
Shopping for the trophy hire
The top trophy hire in data science is elusive, and it’s no surprise: “full-stack” data scientist means mastery of machine learning, statistics, and analytics. When teams can’t get their hands on a three-in-one polymath, they set their sights on luring the most impressive prize among the single-origin specialists. Who gets the pedestal?
Today’s fashion in data science favors flashy sophistication with a dash of sci-fi, making AI and machine learning darlings of the hiring circuit. Alternative challengers for the alpha spot come from statistics, thanks to a century-long reputation for rigor and mathematical superiority. What about analysts?
Analytics as a second-class citizen
If your primary skill is analytics (or data-mining or business intelligence), chances are that your self-confidence takes a beating when your aforementioned compatriots strut past you and the job market drops not-so-subtle hints about leveling up your skills to join them.
Good analysts are a prerequisite for effectiveness in your data endeavors. It’s dangerous to have them quit on you, but that’s exactly what they’ll do if you under-appreciate them.
What the uninitiated rarely grasp is that the three professions under the data science umbrella are completely different from one another. They may use the same equations, but that’s where the similarity ends. Far from being a sloppy version of other data science breeds, good analysts are a prerequisite for effectiveness in your data endeavors. It’s dangerous to have them quit on you, but that’s exactly what they’ll do if you under-appreciate them.
Alike in dignity
Instead of asking an analyst to develop their statistics or machine learning skills, consider encouraging them to seek the heights of their own discipline first. Data science is the kind of beast where excellence in one area beats mediocrity in two.
Each of the three data science disciplines has its own excellence. Statisticians bring rigor, ML engineers bring performance, and analysts bring speed.
At peak expertise, all three are equally pedestal-worthy but they provide very different services. To understand the subtleties, let’s examine what it means to be truly excellent in each of the data science disciplines, what value they bring, and which personality traits are required to survive each job.
Excellence in statistics: rigor
As specialists in coming to conclusions beyond your data safely, statisticians are your best protection against fooling yourself in an uncertain world. To them, inferring something sloppily is a greater sin than leaving your mind a blank slate, so expect a good statistician to put the brakes on your exuberance. Constantly on tiptoe, they care deeply about whether the methods applied are right for the problem and they agonize over which inferences are valid from the information at hand.
What most people don’t realize is that statisticians are essentially epistemologists. Since there’s no magic that makes certainty out of uncertainty, their role is not to produce Truth but rather a sensible integration of palatable assumptions with available information.
The result? A perspective that helps leaders make important decisions in a risk-controlled manner.
Unsurprisingly, many statisticians react with vitriol toward “upstarts” who learn the equations without absorbing any of the philosophy. If dealing with statisticians seems exhausting, here’s a quick fix: don’t come to any conclusions beyond your data and you won’t need their services. (Easier said than done, right? Especially if you want to make an important launch decision.)
Excellence in machine learning: performance
You might be an applied machine learning / AI engineer if your response to “I bet you couldn’t build a model that passes testing at 99.99999% accuracy” is “Watch me.” With the coding chops build prototypes and production systems that work and the stubborn resilience to fail every hour for several years if that’s what it takes, machine learning specialists know that they won’t find the perfect solution in a textbook. Instead, they’ll be engaged in a marathon of trial-and-error. Having great intuition for how long it’ll take them to try each new option is a huge plus and is more valuable than an intimate knowledge of how the algorithms work (though it’s nice to have both).
“I’ll make it work.” -Engineer
The result? A system that automates a tricky task well enough to pass your statistician’s strict testing bar and deliver the audacious performance a business leader demanded.
Performance means more than clearing a metric — it also means reliable, scalable, and easy-to-maintain models that perform well in production. Engineering excellence is a must.
Wide versus deep
What the previous two roles have in common is that they both provide high-effort solutions to specific problems. If the problems they tackle aren’t worth solving, you end up wasting their time and your money. A frequent lament among business leaders is, “Our data science group is useless.” and the problem usually lies in an absence of analytics expertise.
Statisticians and machine learning engineers are narrow-and-deep (the shape of a rabbit hole, incidentally) workers, so it’s really important to point them at problems that deserve the effort. If your experts are carefully solving the wrong problems, of course your investment in data science suffers low returns. To ensure that you can make good use of narrow-and-deep experts, you either need to be sure you already have the right problem or you need a wide-and-shallow approach to finding one.
Excellence in analytics: speed
The best analysts are lightning-fast coders who can surf vast datasets quickly, encountering and surfacing potential insights faster than the those other specialists can say “whiteboard.” Their semi-sloppy coding style baffles traditional software engineers… until it leaves them in the dust. Speed is the highest virtue, closely followed by the trait of not snoozing past potentially useful gems. A mastery of visual presentation of information helps with speed bottlenecks on the brain side: beautiful and effective plots allow the mind to extract information faster, which pays off in time-to-potential-insights.
Where statisticians and ML folk are slow, analysts are a whirlwind of inspiration for decision-makers and other data science colleagues.
The result: the business gets a finger on its pulse and eyes on previously-unknown unknowns. This generates the inspiration that helps decision-makers select valuable quests to send statisticians and ML engineers on, saving them from mathematically-impressive excavations of useless rabbit holes.
Sloppy nonsense or stellar storytelling?
“But,” object the statisticians, “most of their so-called insights are nonsense.” By that they mean the results of their exploration may reflect only noise. Perhaps, but there’s more to the story.
Analysts are data storytellers. Their mandate is to summarize interesting facts and be careful to point out that any poetic inspiration that comes along for the ride is not to be taken seriously without a statistical follow-up.
Buyer beware: there are many data charlatans out there posing as data scientists. There’s no magic that makes certainty out of uncertainty.
Good analysts have unwavering respect for the one golden rule of their profession: do not come to conclusions beyond the data (and prevent your audience from doing it too). Unfortunately, relatively few analysts are the real deal — buyer beware: there are many data charlatans out there posing as data scientists. These peddle nonsense, leaping beyond the data in undisciplined ways to “support” decisions based on wishful thinking. If your ethical standards are lax, perhaps you’d keep these snake oil salesmen around and house them in the marketing dark arts part of your business. Personally, I’d prefer not to.
Good analysts have unwavering respect for the one golden rule of their profession: do not come to conclusions beyond the data.
As long as analysts stick to the facts (“This is what is here.” But what does it mean? “Only: This is what is here.”) and don’t take themselves too seriously, the worst crime they could commit is wasting someone’s time when they run it by them. Out of respect for their golden rule, good analysts use softened, hedging language (for example, not “we conclude” but “we are inspired to wonder”) and discourage leader overconfidence by emphasizing a multitude of possible interpretations for every insight.
While statistical skills are required to test hypotheses, analysts are your best bet for coming up with those hypotheses in the first place. For instance, they might say something like “It’s only a correlation, but I suspect it could be driven by …” and then explain why they think that.
This takes strong intuition about what might be going on beyond the data, and the communication skills to convey the options to the decision-maker, who typically calls the shots on which hypotheses (of many) are important enough to warrant a statistician’s effort. As analysts mature, they’ll begin to get the hang of judging what’s important in addition to what’s interesting, allowing decision-makers to step away from the middleman role.
Of the three breeds, analysts are the most likely heirs to the decision throne.
Because subject matter expertise goes a long way towards helping you spot interesting patterns in your data faster, the best analysts are serious about familiarizing themselves with the domain. Failure to do so is a red flag. As their curiosity pushes them to develop a sense for the business, expect their output to shift from a jumble of false alarms to a sensibly-curated set of insights that decision-makers are more likely to care about.
To avoid wasted time, analysts should lay out the story they’re tempted to tell and poke it from several angles with follow-up investigations to see if it holds water before bringing it to decision-makers. If a decision-maker is in danger of being driven to take an important action based on an inspiring story, that is the Bat-Signal for the statisticians to swoop in and check (in new data, of course) that the action is a wise choice in light of assumptions the decision-maker is willing to live with and their appetite for risk.
The analyst-statistician hybrid
For analysts sticking to the facts, there’s no such thing as wrong, there’s only slow. Adding statistical expertise to “do things correctly” misses the point in an important way, especially because there’s a very important filter between exploratory data analytics and statistical rigor: the decision-maker. Someone with decision responsibility has to sign off on the business impact of pursuing the analyst’s insight being worth a high-effort expert’s time. Unless the analyst-statistician hybrid is also a skilled decision-maker and business leader, their skillset forms a sandwich with a chasm in the middle.
An analyst who bridges that gap, however, is worth their weight in gold. Treasure them!
Analytics for machine learning and AI
Machine learning specialists put a bunch of potential data inputs through algorithms, tweak the settings, and keep iterating until the right outputs are produced. While it may sound like there’s no role for analytics here, in practice a business often has far too many potential ingredients to shove into the blender all at once.
Your analyst is the sprinter; their ability to quickly help you see and summarize what-is-here is a superpower for your process.
One way to filter down to a promising set to try is domain expertise — ask a human with opinions about how things might work. Another way is through analytics. To use the analogy of cooking, the machine learning engineer is great at tinkering in the kitchen, but right now they’re standing in front of a huge, dark warehouse full of potential ingredients. They could either start grabbing them haphazardly and dragging them back to their kitchens, or they could send a sprinter armed with a flashlight through the warehouse first. Your analyst is the sprinter; their ability to quickly help you see and summarize what-is-here is a superpower for your process.
The analyst-ML expert hybrid
Analysts accelerate machine learning projects, so dual skillsets are very useful. Unfortunately, because of the differences in coding style and approach between analytics and ML engineering, it’s unusual to see peak expertise in one individual (and even rarer to that person to be slow and philosophical when needed, which is why the true full-stack data scientist is a rare beast indeed).
Dangers of chronic under-appreciation
An expert analyst is not a shoddy version of the machine learning engineer, their coding style is optimized for speed — on purpose. Nor are they a bad statistician, since they don’t deal at all with uncertainty, they deal with facts. “Here’s what’s in our data, it’s not my job to talk about what it means beyond the present data, but perhaps it will inspire the decision-maker to pursue the question with a statistician…”
What beginners don’t realize is that the work requires top analysts to have a better grasp of the mathematics of data science than either of the other applied breeds. Unless the task is complicated enough that it demands the invention a new hypothesis test or algorithm (the work of researchers), statisticians and ML specialists can rely on checking that off-the-shelf packages and tests are right for the job, but they can often skip having to face the equations themselves.
For example, statisticians might forget the equations for a t-test’s p-value because they get it by hitting run on a software package, but they never forget how and when to use one, as well as the correct philosophical interpretation of the results. Analysts, on the other hand, aren’t looking to interpret. They’re after a view into the shape of a gory, huge, multidimensional dataset. By knowing the way the equation for the p-value slices their dataset, they can form a reverse view of what the patterns in original dataset must have been to produce the number they saw. Without an appreciation of the math, you don’t get that view. Unlike a statistician, though, they don’t care if the t-test is right for the data. They care that the t-test gives them a useful view of what’s going on in the current dataset. The distinction is subtle, but it’s important.
Statisticians deal with things outside the data, while analysts stick to things inside it.
At peak excellence, both are deeply mathematical and they often use the same equations, but their jobs are entirely different.
Similarly, analysts often use machine learning algorithms to slice their data, identify compelling groupings, and examine anomalies. Since their goal is not performance but inspiration, their approach is different and might appear sloppy to the ML engineer. Again, it’s the use of the same tool for a different job.
To summarize what’s going on with an analogy: pins are used by surgeons, tailors, and office workers. That doesn’t mean the jobs are the same or even comparable, and it would be dangerous to encourage all your tailors and office workers to study surgery to progress in their careers.
The only roles every business needs are decision-makers and analysts. If you lose your analysts, who will help you figure out which problems are worth solving?
If you overemphasize hiring and rewarding skills in machine learning and statistics, you’ll lose your analysts. Who will help you figure out which problems are worth solving then? You’ll be left with a group of miserable experts who keep being asked to work on worthless projects or analytics tasks they didn’t sign up for. Your data will lie around useless.
Care and feeding of researchers
If this doesn’t sound bad enough, many leaders try to hire PhDs and overemphasize research — as opposed to applied — versions of the statistician and ML engineer… without having a problem that is valuable, important, and known to be impossible to solve with all the existing algorithms out there.
That’s only okay if you’re investing in a research division and you’re not planning to ask your researchers what they’ve done for you lately. Research for research’s sake is a high-risk investment and very few companies can afford it, because getting nothing of value out of it is a very real possibility.
Researchers only belong outside of a research division if you have appropriate problems for them to solve — their skillset is creating new algorithms and tests from scratch where an off-the-shelf version doesn’t exist — otherwise they’ll experience a bleak Sisyphean spiral (which would be entirely your fault, not theirs). Researchers typically spend over a decade in training, which merits at least the respect of not being put to work on completely irrelevant tasks.
When in doubt, hire analysts before other roles.
As a result, the right time to hire them to an applied project tends to be after your analysts helped you identify a valuable project and attempts to complete it with applied data scientists have already failed. That’s when you bring on the professional inventors.
The punchline
When in doubt, hire analysts before other roles. Appreciate them and reward them. Encourage them to grow to the heights of their chosen career (and not someone else’s). Of the cast of characters mentioned in this story, the only ones every business with data needs are decision-makers and analysts. The others you’ll only be able to use when you know exactly what you need them for. Start with analytics and be proud of your newfound ability to open your eyes to the rich and beautiful information in front of you. Inspiration is a powerful thing and not to be sniffed at.
VICKI JAURON, BABYLON AND BEYOND PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTY IMAGES image used with the HBR article. My favorite interpretation is that the human is a business leader chasing away flocks of analysts while trying to catch the trendy job titles.
If you enjoyed this article, check out my field guide to the data science universe here. | https://towardsdatascience.com/data-sciences-most-misunderstood-hero-2705da366f40 | ['Cassie Kozyrkov'] | 2019-10-19 15:57:45.445000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Towards Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Data Science'] |
Apricot days of Motherhood | Apricot days of Motherhood (Photograph by Dr. Asha Gauri Shankar)
Everybody told me that it would go by fast,
I didn’t believe them
And now that you are one
I do.
I don’t know how in half a blink of an eye
You became a toddler,
And I am no longer supposed to call you a baby or baby you?
But baby, you’ll always be my baby
Even when you are forty and I am eighty,
Baby, you will always be in my heart
Even when your heart will be full of other people.
Your childhood and these days-
When you follow my every action, every word
When I am a celebrity in your universe-
Will hold me, hug me when I am old,
When I’ll no longer be able to see clearly
And hear like I do today,
I will remember these days
When I am your sun.
Baby these days are a gift, a miracle
People complaint about exhaustion, about sleepless nights,
about how they never get to do anything by themselves anymore
But I cherish these days,
Days of exhaustion and self-doubt
These days of such excruciating exhaustion
that sometimes I feel I have lost my mind, lost myself.
Because I realize how numbered these days are, how few.
They will soon be a thing of the past,
You will be out in the wild as you should be
And I really wouldn’t want it otherwise,
But baby these are the very days which I’ll remember
Which will carry me through till the end,
Which will make me say to God-
‘Take me now for my life has been rich’
The seeds in between (Photograph by the author)
These are the days to cherish-
The golden apricot days that are so sweet
That I don’t even mind the seeds in between. | https://medium.com/@indianfitmom/apricot-days-of-motherhood-b78317f976f2 | [] | 2019-02-01 18:26:55.133000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Baby', 'Happiness', 'Poem', 'Life'] |
Solving “Container Killed by Yarn For Exceeding Memory Limits” Exception in Apache Spark | Introduction
Apache Spark is an open-source framework for distributed big-data processing. Originally written in Scala, it also has native bindings for Java, Python, and R programming languages. It also supports SQL, Streaming Data, Machine Learning, and Graph Processing.
All in all, Apache Spark is often termed as Unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing.
If you have been using Apache Spark for some time, you would have faced an exception which looks something like this:
Container killed by YARN for exceeding memory limits, 5 GB of 5GB used
The reason can either be on the driver node or on the executor node. In simple words, the exception says, that while processing, spark had to take more data in memory that the executor/driver actually has.
There can be a few reasons for this which can be resolved in the following ways:
Your data is skewed, which means you have not partitioned the data properly during processing which resulted in more data to process for a particular task. In this case, you can examine your data and try a custom partitioner that uniformly partitions the dataset.
Your Spark Job might be shuffling a lot of data over the network. Out of the memory available for an executor, only some part is allotted for shuffle cycle. Try using efficient Spark API's like reduceByKey over groupByKey etc, if not already done. Sometimes, shuffle can be unavoidable though. In that case, we need to increase memory configurations which we will discuss in further points
If the above two points are not applicable, try the following in order until the error is resolved. Revert any changes you might have made to spark conf files before moving ahead.
Increase Memory Overhead
Memory Overhead is the amount of off-heap memory allocated to each executor. By default, memory overhead is set to the higher value between 10% of the Executor Memory or 384 mb. Memory Overhead is used for Java NIO direct buffers, thread stacks, shared native libraries, or memory-mapped files.
The above exception can occur on either driver or executor node. Wherever the error is, try increasing the overhead memory gradually for that container only (driver or executor) and re-run the job. Maximum recommended memoryOverhead is 25% of the executor memory
Caution: Make sure that the sum of the driver or executor memory plus the driver or executor memory overhead is always less than the value of yarn.nodemanager.resource.memory-mb i.e. spark.driver/executor.memory + spark.driver/executor.memoryOverhead < yarn.nodemanager.resource.memory-mb
You have to change the property by editing the spark-defaults.conf file on the master node.
sudo vim /etc/spark/conf/spark-defaults.conf spark.driver.memoryOverhead 1024
spark.executor.memoryOverhead 1024
You can specify the above properties cluster-wide for all the jobs or you can also pass it as a configuration for a single job like below
spark-submit --class org.apache.spark.examples.WordCount --master yarn --deploy-mode cluster --conf spark.driver.memoryOverhead=512 --conf spark.executor.memoryOverhead=512 <path/to/jar>
If this doesn’t solve your problem, try the next point
Reducing the number of Executor Cores
If you have a higher number of executor cores, the amount of memory required goes up. So, try reducing the number of cores per executor which reduces the number of tasks that can run on the executor, thus reducing the memory required. Again, change the configuration of driver or executor depending on where the error is.
sudo vim /etc/spark/conf/spark-defaults.conf
spark.driver.cores 3
spark.executor.cores 3
Similar to the previous point, you can specify the above properties cluster-wide for all the jobs or you can also pass it as a configuration for a single job like below:
spark-submit --class org.apache.spark.examples.WordCount --master yarn --deploy-mode cluster --executor-cores 5--driver-cores 4 <path/to/jar>
If this doesn’t work, see the next point
Increase the number of partitions
If there are more partitions, the amount of memory required per partition would be less. Memory usage can be monitored by Ganglia. You can increase the number of partitions by invoking .repartition(<num_partitions>) on RDD or Dataframe
No luck yet? Increase executor or driver memory.
Increase Driver or Executor Memory
Depending on where the error has occurred, increase the memory of the driver or executor
Caution:
spark.driver/executor.memory + spark.driver/executor.memoryOverhead < yarn.nodemanager.resource.memory-mb
sudo vim /etc/spark/conf/spark-defaults.conf
spark.executor.memory 2g
spark.driver.memory 1g
Just like other properties, this can also be overridden per job
spark-submit --class org.apache.spark.examples.WordCount --master yarn --deploy-mode cluster --executor-memory 2g --driver-memory 1g <path/to/jar>
Most likely by now, you should have resolved the exception.
If not, you might need more memory-optimized instances for your cluster!
Happy Coding!
Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/emr-spark-yarn-memory-limit/ | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/solving-container-killed-by-yarn-for-exceeding-memory-limits-exception-in-apache-spark-b3349685df16 | ['Chandan Bhattad'] | 2019-11-01 04:46:53.356000+00:00 | ['Spark', 'Big Data', 'Distributed Systems', 'Data Engineering', 'Apache Spark'] |
Quartile – Origin Stories – Stephen | Photo By Oladimeji Odunsi via Unsplash.com
“Stephen, get down here!”
The call was easy enough to hear. After all, fourth-tier housing wasn’t insulated well, and Stephen knew why they were calling. He was dragging them down, and that couldn’t last. His scores were pitiful. Factual knowledge, 82. Word usage and Accuracy, 81. Athleticism, 92. Computational skill, 96. Creative, 99. That made him a composite 90, which wasn’t even at a third-tier level. “You see, Stevie,” Dad lectured him years ago, “if we’re not all striving to score better. We won’t live better.”
But wait, that wasn’t why they were calling. It was the glasses. Fourteen-year-old Stephen had loosened his sister’s frames just enough that one of the lenses would fall out in time for her factual knowledge assessment. It even broke when it hit the floor, which was a bonus. Let’s see her outscore him now!
Ironically, it was one of Dad’s words that he felt best described his school assessments: bullshit. Dad used it after one of his quarterly work assessments. Hypocrite. Stephen’s school and family were both bullshit. The thing is, it seemed like everyone felt the same way about something, but nobody would ever do anything about it. Aside from moments of happiness here and there, people seemed mostly pissed off. It was almost as if the world could come crashing down, and no one would be any less happy.
But why didn’t they see it? People were so blind to how everything connected. If he could be anything better than the fourth tier, why should he try?
Still, there were many other connections they didn’t see. It took Stephen years to realize he could see the physical links within anything, just by touching it. He first noticed his ability when his grandfather, once ranked first among sanitation specialists, complained of pain in his lower back. As he announced it at dinner, the family fell speechless. Stephen later learned this his lowered performance would mean an inevitable drop in quartile. When he grabbed grandpa’s hand that night, he could saw the problem plainly in his mind.
“But Papa, one your parts is broken, can’t they just-”was all he got out before his mother sprung from her chair and slapped him. Through his tears, he saw Grandpa looking like he’d seen a devil or something. It was weird having an adult being scared of him. He almost felt scared of himself.
And now he stood slumped in front of both his parents, studying the interlocking weave patterns in his socks. They must’ve found out about the glasses. The area around the left pinky toe was particularly interesting because the stitching knotted in a way that has to be a mistake. He laughed at the idea of dropping down a quartile because of a sock.
“Your composite is unacceptable and -”Dad started but was quickly replaced by Mom. “And you better get up there and do something about it!” She calmed for a second. He could his sister sitting at the kitchen table, her tears flooding her one-remaining lense. Mom followed his gaze and looked back at him. Then it hit him. She didn’t know he’d done anything to the glasses.
“ Dad and I have decided we’re taking your pencils away. A ninety-nine is good enough in Creative. You need to focus! Now, we need to take your sister to the testing center for an onsite reassessment. While we’re gone, I want you to think about what you can do to raise your scores.”
“What? You can’t! They’re the only way I can handle this bullshit!” The word came out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
“Now you listen to me,” she admonished, “if you don’t score, you can’t survive! We can’t survive!”
Stephen responded at the top of his lungs, “Don’t you mean to move up? That’s all you people care about! How to get more. A bigger house, better friends, everything more, more, more! You don’t give a shit about me or anything we have, all because we’re quartile four! Like that’s all that matters!”
As he poured out his anger, he failed to notice that Dad had gone upstairs and gotten his sketchbook. What was he doing? In it were Stephen’s subway system map, the cat anatomy, and his latest, all 296 parts of the dishwasher. Years ago, he tried to explain his drawings and what they were at a family gathering. Everyone got a good laugh at the idea of a seven-year-old knowing the heating and cooling system’s inner workings. What an imaginative boy! Then it hit him. Because he didn’t have the right words to describe what he saw, they assumed he made it all up.
But he knew what he knew. The seeing part was easy. It was the drawing and describing all the elements of a system that took hours. And now, many of those hours were hanging from Dad’s hand as he used the other one to search for his car keys. And it wasn’t just the time. They were his proof that he could see something other people didn’t and that he wasn’t just some freak.
“What are you doing with my book?” Stephen yelled at his father.
“Mom’s right. This stuff is distracting you! You’re a 99 in creative. You can make it all again if you want,” he said sternly. His eyes darted to where Mom was standing before and to his sister as he asked, “Now, can we leave?” Mom reappeared with Stephen’s bag of pencils. That was typical of Dad to forget what he was told to do – mostly when he was upset.
As Stephen heard the car doors slam, he realized he’d never be free of the visions. He couldn’t touch anything without seeing them, and the only way to make them go away was to draw them, but now he’d be stuck, sinking ever deeper into them. And not only was he stuck with them, but he was also stuck being himself – a loser. How could they do this to him?
He jumped up and threw their poorly-built, piece of crap, kitchen table on its side. Why shouldn’t it suck? Everything else in the house did. As he picked it back up, his pinky touched the floor, and a familiar picture came to mind: their home. He saw the entire structure with its imperfect angles, beams, and supports.
Supports? Then it became clear what was in the basement. He’d need to visit the garage first. Would the bat be strong enough? It was worth a try since he hadn’t used it since his baseball team cut him in fourth-grade. He also grabbed the sledgehammer, just in case.
A minute later, he stood in the middle of their musty basement. No wonder they could throw up houses like his in a week. His Lego creations were sturdier! “The fourth quartile gets what the fourth quartile scores,” his parents and even his neighbors used to say. And maybe they were right. Perhaps they didn’t deserve any more than this shitty house.
But why? Why should he or anyone be slaves to a society that already considered them worthless?
Still, his family entirely bought into it. They’d never say it, but clearly, they thought they’d better off if it wasn’t for him. Every time he didn’t score well, he’d get reminded of their mortgage payment. In Mom and Dad’s eyes, the house was all they had.
That was about to change.
If he wasn’t good enough for this ‘palace,’ then it wasn’t good enough for him.
Leave it to the morons who threw up houses like this to leave one small but crucial weak point in their design. The support beam didn’t look like much – just a grey metal pole. Stephen guessed that it was one of the first things the robots installed after the foundation. Programmed stupidity.
He decided to try the bat first. PONG!!! He barely noticed the sound as the vibration from the blow stung his hands. Reflexively, he lost his grip, and the bat landed squarely on his cold, bare big toe. He collapsed on the damp floor and cursed. Then, as if he was making his last stand against a deadly predator, he grabbed the real weapon, the sledgehammer, and heaved.
To his surprise, his hit was clean, and the beam flew across the room to rattle against their cheap aluminum shelving.
At first, nothing happened. Then Stephen heard what sounded like a dog howling right above his head. Did he mean to do this? He had no time to think as the house’s main support beam bent down toward him. He ran into a corner.
Thankfully it was the right corner because he didn’t get crushed as the house began to implode. The last thing he remembered was the deafening roar of everything they owned coming down at once.
His toe still hurt. He was lying down. Not just lying down, strapped down. A voice was talking.
“Stephen, welcome to Kansas City. I’m Martha,” the voice said. A vibrating wave of pixellated light appeared in the darkness as the voice spoke. He lay in a nicely-constructed bed. He immediately knew that, but Kansas?
“What do you mean?” His slurred words stung his head as he spoke. “What do you mean, Kansas?”
Again Martha’s voice spoke, beginning with a slight laugh, “When I said Kansas City, I meant Missouri!”
Stephen was dumbfounded.
“Stephen, we’re not just IN Kansas City, we’re underneath it. But more on that later. It’s time I explained why you’re here.”
(Check back to meet other characters in the Quartile series. Once you’ve met them all, the action will begin! If you like what you see, be sure to follow me here on Medium and give me a clap!) | https://medium.com/@chris.pawar/quartile-origin-stories-stephen-561714585651 | ['Chris Pawar'] | 2020-12-21 12:00:21.687000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Teens', 'Heroes'] |
“I accidentally killed it” (and evaporated $300 million) | Github user devops199 said on Twitter “I accidentally killed it”. Before anyone can blink an eye, his “accident” has “killed” Ethereum accounts holding over $300M in crypto assets. On average, each of his 4 words cost $75M.
One of those Ethereum accounts belongs to the Polkadot project, and it held close to $90M before it was “killed”.
Someone asked devops199 after the incident: Why did you do it? His response? “I am just a beginner poking around the system!” In another word, he did not know what he was doing. A newbie experiment cost people $300M.
The fact that this is even possible shows us the sad and amateurish state of Ethereum Smart Contract development. It desperately need help. Ironically, the old-hand enterprise developers know how to do this the right way — if only the “cool kids” and “programming bros” can listen.
How is it possible to make money disappear?
In the world of cryptocurrencies, you can have one or more “wallets” to hold your money in the distributed ledger known as the blockchain. Traditionally, each wallet is simply a pair of public and private keys. Those keys are created in pairs. You can create a pair at any time using software on your own computer.
The public key is like the wallet’s account number. You can display and advertise it to the world. People can send cryptocurrencies into your wallet through its public key. For example, here is the public key for one of my Ethereum wallets. You are welcome to send some ETHs or other ERC20 tokens to this address if you enjoyed this article!
0xD69b30FAdf81882253329Ab0149131c67602eEd1
However, in order to spend the money in the wallet (ie to send some to another wallet), you must know the private key and use this private key to digitally sign any spending request. But,
Question: what happens if the wallet owner forgets or lost her private key?
Answer: In that case, no one can spend or touch the fund in that wallet. The money has simply evaporated (or lost, or frozen, depending on your favorite metaphor).
Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone. — Satoshi Nakamoto
Multi-signature wallets
The public / private key wallets are useful for individuals, but very hard to use for companies or projects. The private key should never be shared between multiple people. It should only be known by one person — the private key is just a piece of string data. If it is shared once, it can be shared many times without detection. However, it is also dangerous to have one person control company wallets that contain millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies. Besides the obvious risk of embezzlement, there is a risk for physical violence (i.e. abduction) against the private key holder.
A clever solution to this problem is to leverage Ethereum support for accounts based on Smart Contracts. In this case, the Ethereum wallet is not directly associated with a public / private key pair. Instead, it’s access is controlled by a piece of software residing on the blockchain, known as a Smart Contract. The Smart Contract could require multiple private keys at the same time before it can execute commands to access funds in the wallet.
So far so good! It is obvious that many companies and projects have great needs for multi-signature wallets. Parity developed this Smart Contract and puts it on the Ethereum public blockchain for anyone to use as a library function. In another word, you can also easily write your own multi-signature wallet Smart Contract by simply having your Smart Contract calling key functions in the Parity Smart Contract. Parity itself is using this Smart Contract in this fashion in its own high profile ICO projects such as the Polkadot.
Features become bugs
However, as we recall, Parity wrote its multi-signature Smart Contract as a regular standalone Smart Contract. It was not intended nor declared as a library function. Because of that, it has two “features” that should never exist on a library function.
First, it allows for an “owner” of itself. A properly declared library function should not have an owner as it is used by many. To make matter worse, the function to set owner is not protected and can be called by essentially anyone on the Internet.
Second, as the case for standalone Smart Contracts, the owner can delete the Smart Contract it owns via the kill function.
Now, we know that devops199 poked around random Smart Contracts on the Ethereum public blockchain. He just called the public functions to set himself as owner and then killed the contract to see what happens. He stumbled on the Parity Smart Contract, killed it, and now rendered all Smart Contracts wallets that relied on the Parity Smart Contract inoperable. For now, there is no way to access the funds in those accounts since the Smart Contracts can no longer verify the multi-signature requests without the Parity library functions devops199 killed.
A new hope
Now, isn’t all software system created by humans? Why can’t we just rollback the change or reinstall the Parity Smart Contract as a library to solve this problem? Well, that is precisely the kind of operations the blockchain is designed to prevent! In a decentralized world, there is no “we” to make this change.
A common used analogy in the real world is a bank hack. Say, someone hacked a bank and stole money by making electronic transfers to himself. The bank must ask the police to investigate and convict this person in order to get their funds back. The bank cannot just “revert the database change” simply because it is feasible to do so.
A central idea behind the blockchain Smart Contracts is “code is law”. It takes the fragile and unreliable human out of the decision-making process. What’s written in the software code is faithfully and irreversibly executed by the blockchain. One person’s bug is another person’s feature. In a decentralized world, without a central authority, who to judge what is a bug and what is a feature. The software code as they are written is the only objective representation of any agreement.
Having said that, there are two potential remedies for the Parity bug (we will call it a bug since that’s what most people agree on at this time). Neither of them is ideal.
First, there is a year-old issue on Ethereum development roadmap called EIP 156: Reclaiming of ether in common classes of stuck accounts. Since the Parity bug causes the fund to stuck in accounts, this appears to offer some hope. However, a close reading of the proposed specification shows that EIP is intended to address simpler stuck account problems. But perhaps we can expand the scope of this EIP to resolve the Parity bug as well? There is currently a very active debate in the comments section of this issue on Github. The arguments range from political to technical. Check it out if you are interested.
Second, the majority of the community can always create a hard fork to recover the funds for the frozen accounts. This is not the first high profile hack on the Ethereum blockchain. In 2016, Ethereum suffered from the infamous DAO hack and lost tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH. That incident ended with a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain, which allows the majority of the community to come to an agreement to revert the ledger and recover the fund. However, today the Ethereum network has grown much bigger. The consensus and technical risks of a hard fork have all increased significantly. It is highly doubtful whether the community will support another hard fork when similar software bugs will for sure occur many times in the future.
What do we learn here?
Parity is one of the best-known software developers in the Ethereum ecosystem. It creates core infrastructure software and tools used by many in the community. It also implements blockchain pilot projects for banks. To see such obvious bugs from Parity is very disappointing.
The Smart Contract library that caused this problem is open source. Linus Torvalds once said: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. Open source software achieves security through transparency. But the hundreds of organizations that relied in the Parity Smart Contract library to handle critical financial assets have apparently never audited the code. That is a huge failure for the community as a whole.
However, an even deeper problem is why Ethereum is plagued by bugs and hacks? The Turning complete Ethereum Virtual Machine to execute Smart Contracts sounded great, but it is very hard to program. Without high level tools and frameworks, developers often compare writing Ethereum Smart Contracts to writing assembly language code. As years of experiences in enterprise computing have taught us, secure and high quality software is produced by sophisticated tools, frameworks, and reusable software components. Enterprise stack of frameworks and tools are “bloated” for very good reasons! In contrast, the current Ethereum virtual machine and its software stack appear to be very amateurish.
A code quality review on deployed Ethereum smart contracts reveals 100 “serious” bugs per 1000 lines of code. In contrast, the Microsoft’s released codebase contains only 0.5 serious bugs per 1000 lines of code, and the NASA code contains 0 obvious bugs. The code quality for Ethereum smart contracts us very low.
I believe that blockchain technology can only be adopted by enterprises after we solve the problems of poor developer productivity and software quality. As a community, we must innovate on making Smart Contracts easier to create and making it easier to write high quality / secure code. Our project, CyberMiles, aims to solve this problem by bringing the full stack of enterprise software frameworks to blockchain nodes and have a smart contract language heavily optimized for e-commerce applications. We believe Ethereum’s one-size-fit-all is not the future of public blockchain networks. I see a future of several specialized blockchains, each optimized for a special type of smart contracts (i.e., CyberMiles aims for e-commerce optimization), and those specialized block chains will form an Internet of blockchains through Cosmos or ironically even Polkadot. | https://medium.com/cybermiles/i-accidentally-killed-it-and-evaporated-300-million-6b975dc1f76b | ['Michael Yuan'] | 2017-11-11 05:30:49.136000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Hacks', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Wallet'] |
Powering iOS, Android and web experiences with a backend-for-frontend | All of our seller reporting data is stored in a brand new “data warehouse” service. This service is populated with data through an event-driven system (specifically, SQS) from an upstream “source of truth” service we call “transactions”, as our sellers make sales through the iZettle Food & Drink POS (an iPad point of sale system).
We started building the web experience first, alongside the data warehouse. At first, things were fine, but as the service grew and we started to build out our iOS and Android experiences, we started to hit some problems relating to what’s included in each of the service endpoints, and how they evolve. The mobile apps would end up receiving data that they don’t need, which is problematic when sellers are frequently on mobile internet.
Further, the release cadence of the website and our mobiles apps are necessarily different per platform. The website can be delivered quickly, with changes taking only a few minutes to go out to production, but our mobile apps have a two week release train for new code, because of how app stores work. Deployed versions of mobile apps must also be supported for longer, causing frustration when we’d like to change or deprecate an endpoint that was previously only used by the web.
Ultimately, with our data warehouse, we want to strive for two things:
The time from selling something, to the data appearing correctly in a seller’s reports, should be as low as we can reasonably make it with a complicated distributed system Sellers should be able to request data over time periods that are helpful to them, including over the previous year, and have it appear on their chosen platform as quickly as we can reasonably get it to them
We knew that, unless we changed something about how we get data to our clients, our problems would only get bigger as we added more endpoints, features, and clients.
Working towards a solution
As with all the problems we have to solve, we did some investigation and came up with a few possible solutions:
Have frontend developers own the presentation of data within the existing data warehouse service, requiring them to learn Go Investigate and implement a brand new GraphQL service Investigate and implement a “Backend for Frontend” service, potentially in a language more suited to frontend skills
The team has a lot of micro-service and REST-ful service experience. The cost, for our team, of setting up new services, is relatively small.
Most of the iZettle Food & Drink backend is written in Go. It’s a good language, with great performance characteristics (especially when dealing with large amounts of data), but it’s difficult for frontend team members to learn, contribute to, and context switch between when delivering their other work, which is written largely in Typescript, Kotlin, and Swift.
Other sections of the business use Kotlin to build their backend services already, and I personally have a lot of Kotlin experience, so we felt like that was a good bet.
Our team has little experience with GraphQL and less appetite to own and maintain a brand new paradigm in our area for getting data to clients, when a more typical REST service will get the job done and let us ship quicker. It did look promising, and it is used elsewhere in the business, but we decided it wasn’t the right fit for us at the time.
Given all the above, we decided to try making a “Backend for Frontend” service, written in Kotlin, to focus on getting data quickly and efficiently to our clients with great native experiences. It would be owned and maintained by the frontend team, with help from backend team members to make sure everything was up to standard. 💪
Building the BFF reporting service
We picked Ktor as a service framework because I had some experience from other projects, and it can be as lightweight as you want it to be.
To make spinning up this new kind of service nice and simple, and inspired by my colleagues’ work on a Go-based service chassis internally called izettlefx , I put together a Ktor-based service chassis, exemplified by one of the tests:
I’m really impressed with how easy Ktor makes unit testing services. With a small amount of glue code, we have separation between our “request contexts” and “response handlers”, meaning we can thoroughly test our code at multiple levels. withTestApplication in Ktor (shown above) lowers the cost of doing a more integration-style test enough that we have many of them for the service chassis, and we can be much more confident that the integration of the features is working as intended.
In the BFF reporting service itself, request handlers often aggregate data from upstream services— combining seller information like their business details, and seller data from several different endpoints exposed by the data warehouse.
We built the service in a way which frontend team members are comfortable with. We use ReactiveX a lot, so it made sense for us to use this tech for wrangling upstream requests to make our mobile landing page. Relatively complex upstream request combinations become simple:
Finally, requesters built to fetch upstream data from services can be reused for different endpoints and platforms — the requester that provides payment type information to our web-based Sales Report, in component-form, is reused to provide the same information in the mobile sales reports.
Conclusion
Ktor has been great to work with. It has a really solid set of building blocks with which we built a small service framework. The new service is very much focused on solving a particular set of problems, without being a kitchen sink. When we need another piece, we add to the service framework incrementally.
Trust within the team is really important — everybody took the time to listen and discuss solutions when we started to have problems building new experiences with the existing data warehouse service. Folks helped throughout with backend best practices, and the service is deployed, monitored, and managed just like all our other services, with frontend and backend team members contributing to its ongoing development.
Our data warehouse service stays lean, and the team builds fast endpoints for extracting seller data as we want to. The BFF service worries about the aggregation and presentation, and clients get the data they need in a format that suits the platform. 🚀 | https://medium.com/izettle-engineering/powering-ios-android-and-web-experiences-with-a-backend-for-frontend-e198d55a21cc | ['Skye Welch'] | 2020-09-11 11:13:12.056000+00:00 | ['Reporting', 'Kotlin', 'Engineering', 'Software Engineering', 'Food And Drink'] |
Top Ten Stan Lee Marvel Cameos | Top Ten Stan Lee Marvel Cameos
The world lost an everyday superhero when Stan Lee passed away on November 12. But his legacy lives on through his stories and characters that he created, as well as his cameos in the franchise that he built. Heather Heywood Dec 13, 2018·6 min read
Stan Lee is best known for his contributions to Marvel Comics and the creation of the world’s favorite superheroes, including Spider-Man, Captain America, The X-Men, etc. Stan Lee was a writer ahead of his time, creating complex heroes and villains that aren’t the perfect archetypes of good and evil. “One of the things we try to demonstrate in our yarns is that nobody is all good, or all bad. Even a shoddy super-villain can have a redeeming trait, just as any howlin’ hero might have his nutty hang-ups,” Lee wrote in a column for Marvel’s March 1969 issues.
Lee had a knack for giving heroes realistic traits that allowed audiences to relate more to them. Tony Stark is a narcissist with an obsession of making his deceased father proud. Steve Rogers was just a scrawny guy that wanted to make a difference but was sorely underestimated. Bruce Banner is the victim of an experiment gone wrong and suffers an internal struggle because of the monster he’s become. Peter Parker is just a nerdy kid in high school with extraordinary abilities.
All of these characters aren’t the picture perfect Superman type that were commonplace in protagonists. They had their flaws and showed comic readers everywhere that anybody could be a hero. Stan Lee went against the curve and took risks, no matter what was widely accepted at the time. This is a man who introduced the world to Black Panther, the king and protector of an African nation, in 1966, a time where segregation and the civil rights movement were heightened.
Stan Lee was a creative genius that will forever be remembered through the stories he has created and with his characters that have won over the world. He has made his mark in each of the Marvel films by having a cameo in every one, a trademark that became an anticipated piece of the franchise.
To honor Stan Lee’s memory, here is my list of the Top Ten Stan Lee cameos.
10. Ant-Man and the Wasp
In the midst of an epic car chase and a race against time, The Wasp is throwing out shrinking discs to throw off their foes as they attempt to obtain the shrunken science lab and to get it back to full-size before Hank Pym and Janet Van-Dyne return from the Quantum Realm. One shrinking disc happens to hit a bystander’s car as he is about to unlock the door. Cue a hilarious quip from Stan Lee, the bystander, remarking that the 60’s were fun, but now he’s paying for it.
9. Avengers: Infinity War
As Thanos’s crew arrives in New York City, a bus full of high school students marvels (pun intended) at the space ship descending from the skies, as Peter Parker realizes he needs to jump into action as Spider-Man and readies himself to make a quiet exit from the bus. Stan Lee, the bus driver, expresses that the students should be used to this alien activity, poking fun at how unsurprising this should be after the many unexpected events that have occurred to the everyday citizens in the Marvel Universe.
8. Captain America: Winter Soldier
In order to stop HYDRA, Steve Rogers needs to take out the helicarriers that will be used to take out certain individuals who are threats against the terrorist organization. But Steve Rogers is without his Captain America suit. Luckily, in the Smithsonian Captain America exhibit, Steve is able to “borrow” a replica of the suit he wore in WWII. The poor Smithsonian security guard, played by Stan Lee, realizes he may very well be out of a job upon realizing that the suit is gone.
7. Spider-Man: Homecoming
To get to know the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, the audience gets to see a montage of Spidey helping out with seemingly mundane problems around Queens. He mistakes a car owner for a car thief, webbing his hand stuck to the car and setting off the car alarm. This spawns an argument between the car owner and a few of his neighbors, one of whom is Stan Lee, who tells off a panicked Spider-Man… that punk.
6. Thor: Ragnarok
After being captured in Saskaar, Thor is sold as a gladiator to the Grandmaster and will be forced to compete in the Contest of Champions against his old buddy, Hulk. But to be a gladiator, you need the right look. Thanks to a barber, Stan Lee, Thor looks ready for battle. Though the barber’s hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.
5. Captain America: Civil War
After an epic battle between most of the Avengers and a subsequent confrontation with a trusted ally, Tony Stark helps his best friend, James Rhodes, recover after a nearly fatal fall from the sky during the battle. Tony then receives a package from the FedEx Delivery man, Stan Lee, who hilariously butcher’s Tony’s name. Will the real Tony Stank please stand up?
4. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
While Rocket, Groot, and Yondu jump through space to join up with the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy, they pass over a group, supposedly The Watchers, listening to an informant describing his past adventures as a FedEx delivery man. Who would that informant be? None other than Stan Lee. At the end of the credits, the other Watchers are leaving the informant as he tells them he has so many more stories to tell.
The Watchers are an alien race in the Marvel Universe that seek to understand and compile all knowledge. Not only does this scene hint at their appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it also suggests that all of Stan Lee’s cameos are linked together in continuity, rather than being seemingly random.
3. Avengers: Age of Ultron
The Avengers celebrate a victory with a swanky party at the Avengers headquarter skyscraper in New York City, formerly Stark Tower. Thor introduces some Asgardian liquor, boasting that “it is not for mortal men.” Stan Lee plays a WWII veteran attending the party, who makes the mistake of thinking he can best the foreign liquor. It turns out Thor was right after two other veterans are carrying Stan Lee out of the party, who is clearly inebriated and saying, “Excelsior.”
This cameo is great because it’s a tribute to Stan Lee’s catchphrase: Excelsior, which means “higher” in Latin. Stan Lee explained the meaning behind his catchphrase at a Comic Con, “I used to have a lot of expressions that I would end my comic book columns with: Hang Loose, Face Front, ‘Nuff Said, and I found that the competition was always imitating them and using them. So, I said I’m going to get one expression that they’re not going to know what it means, and they won’t know how to spell it. And that’s where excelsior came from, and they never did take up on it, thank goodness.”
2. The Amazing Spider-Man
The Lizard discovers Spider-Man’s true identity, following him to his high school, which erupts into an epic battle. The fight moves into the library, where an oblivious librarian, Stan Lee, is unaware of the fight due to having some very powerful headphones on.
The librarian peacefully goes about his job while this huge fight between a lizard man and a high schooler with spider powers are fighting it out right behind him. This cameo is so hilarious and memorable, it has to be at the top of this list.
1. Thor
The Stan Lee cameo that I believe to the best of them all is his appearance in Thor. Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, plummets to the Earth, creating a massive crater on impact. Only he who possesses the power of Thor can pick up the hammer. So when a hoard of local residents discovers the hammer, it turns into a King Arthur-esque game to see who can pull the hammer from its resting place.
A group of locals concoct a plan to tie a chain around Mjölnir and tying the other end of the chain to the bed of a pickup truck. The pickup truck floors it at full speed, the hammer still not budging. After a few more tries, the bed of the truck completely rips off. Come to find out, the truck driver is Stan Lee, who peers out the window, optimistically asking if it worked. This is one scene that I always look forward to in Thor. | https://medium.com/@hnheywood/top-ten-stan-lee-marvel-cameos-24e8de0906c5 | ['Heather Heywood'] | 2021-07-26 21:56:50.542000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Marvel', 'Rankings', 'Superheroes', 'Film'] |
Connecting the Dots: Jeffrey Toobin, Sexism, The New Yorker | Eustancey Tilly connects the dots ©2020 Michele Beaulieux
Here I go again, banging my head against the wall: I just wrote yet another letter to the editor of The New Yorker about sexism in its coverage. I’ll share it once it’s clear that it’s been rejected. In the meantime, I want to connect the dots about why I’m pessimistic that it will be published. [Update: Happy to be proved wrong! My letter on Wikipedia missing women will be published in the December 14th issue.]
In a previous blog post, “My Rejected Letters to The New Yorker,” I shared my previously rejected letters. They’ve got a pattern. Most point out sexism in the magazine authors’ assumptions and writing, sexism so glaring that I question why, if the writers were as clueless as they apparently were, that the editors didn’t step in. It wasn’t surprising, then, upon reflection, that those same editors didn’t find my letters or any other complaints of sexism within the magazine’s pages newsworthy enough to warrant publishing. (In my friends’ and my recollection, The New Yorker hasn’t published any letters calling out sexism in its coverage. If you know of any, please let me know.)
Somehow, though, the powers that be at The New Yorker’s parent, Condé Nast, apparently sprung quickly into action this month when they fired star legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin after he flashed his stuff during a Zoom staff meeting. (Toobin remains chief legal analyst for CNN Worldwide.) As Myriam Gurba of Luz Collective reports, Conor Friedersdorf, a writer for The Atlantic, excused the supposed one-off non-consensual exposure with the “oops” defense. We may not ever know Toobin’s intent but we know the impact: it’s tough to unsee such things.
But this wasn’t Toobin’s first “lapse in judgment.” Toobin, married with children, had a decade-long affair with a younger staffer at The New Yorker. When she got pregnant in 2008, he dealt with the situation less than honorably. The New York Times, despite having reported on the staffer’s battles to get Toobin to step up as a responsible father, apparently did not find this previous issue relevant and so did not mention it when reporting his firing. Other major news outlets had similar amnesia. Feminist attorney Kate Kelly, however, remembered and pointed out Toobin’s pattern of questionable sexual judgment and harassment on Twitter. A decade ago, the Daily News had reported that he had also harassed another female professional.
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple pointed out: “His value as a commentator, after all, flows from his judgment, a commodity now in tatters.” Exactly. In the same opinion piece, Wemple overviews Toobin’s stellar career in a farewell review, pausing to give accolades for Toobin’s ability to recognize that he messed up in his coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid by succumbing to that nasty false equivalence paradigm. Wemple, though, doesn’t see Toobin’s reporting on Clinton as an example of his poor judgment. Toobin’s unfair editorial treatment of the nation’s first female major party presidential candidate, however, is not unrelated to his questionable workplace behavior.
To connect the dots, Clinton lost to Trump, a man whom dozens of women have reported sexually harassed and assaulted them. Toobin, as it turns out, has a penchant for sexual harassment in common with Trump. Toobin’s assessment of a woman’s political capabilities on the national stage was colored by the same sexism that pervades his treatment of women in his professional relationships. He is a prime example of the futility of separating a man from his work.
In light of Toobin’s long-standing behavior pattern, Condé Nast’s response wasn’t so quick. They’d been dragging their feet for more than a decade. Toobin was able to continue his inappropriate workplace behavior because of who he knew and the rape culture in which he was operating. Toobin came to The New Yorker, on the advice of his friend, David Remnick, who is now its editor. The previous editor Tina Brown, who hired Toobin, talks openly about the sexism she faced at Condé Nast.
The good old boys can overlook each other’s transgressions, but I can’t, especially when they are shaping the public opinion that is shaping our nation. Toobin’s personal activities reflected his attitude, and his attitude showed up in his reporting. The writers and editors of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Atlantic may not be connecting the dots, but we can. Let’s.
© 2020 Michele Beaulieux. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). That means you are free to share and adapt as long as you attribute to Michele Beaulieux, don’t use for commercial purposes, and use this same license. And if you do share, I’d love to know! I may revise, so to avoid sharing an outdated version, I recommend linking to this page, where I provide the date of the current iteration. 12.3.2020
✍🏻 former and future daily 🏊🏻♀️ current 🏡🚣🏼♀️ 🚴🏻♀️ 💃🏻@❤️ @ReservoirOfHope View all posts by Beaulieux | https://medium.com/@reservoirofhope/connecting-the-dots-jeffrey-toobin-sexism-the-new-yorker-440eed077690 | ['Michele Beaulieux'] | 2020-12-09 23:40:04.766000+00:00 | ['Sexism', 'Connect The Dots', 'Rape Culture', 'The New Yorker', 'Jeffrey Toobin'] |
Tesla Started manufacturing its Model Y EVs in Giga Shanghai. | The Giant Automobile manufacturer Tesla started its Model Y Electric Car manufacture in GIGA SHANGHAI. As the company tremendous growth in 2020 both in MARKET CAP. as well as NO.OF.CARS PRODUCED Tesla’s Stock reached 661.77(USD) which is nearly close to 50k in INR.
Credits: Tesla.com
Now the company’s market cap is 627.29B(USD) which is double the addition of (Toyato+ Volkswagen+ Ford) annual Market Capital which is absolutely marvelous growth in 2020. The Company also achieved a mile tone of producing the large of cars in 2020 it produced nearly half a million of cars in 2020.
Credits: Statista.com
As the Company’s CEO Elon Musk Stated in 2010 that the Company will produce nearly half a million by 2020.
The Company also yet to construct its Giga factory in Berlin and Texas especially for the production of CYBERTRUCK .But interestingly the company stopped its Model S and X production for 18 days .So hopefully we expect a new design from Tesla by 2021. Until then Tesla had a Wonderful growth in 2020 since the Company was actually started in 2003 .
Credits: nextbigfuture.com
In 2020, Technological Companies really had a good profit in the while comparing their four quaters in 2019. So hopefully we expect a good start in 2021 both in technology as well as in health. | https://medium.com/@haribalaji-r4/tesla-started-manufacturing-its-model-y-evs-in-giga-shanghai-9da21b37dbd7 | ['Haribalaji R'] | 2020-12-27 15:05:44.436000+00:00 | ['Technology News', 'Elon Musk', 'Nasdaq', 'Tesla'] |
Do You Have a Last Wish? | “Do you have a last wish?”
I was not sure if that was the right thing to say. I said it because anything would do to break that terrible silent atmosphere. I had only seen similar situations in the movies and series that I used to watch before the times of war came and changed everything forever. I also said it because I thought that’s how things should be.
I was pointing my gun towards the face of a kneeling, handcuffed and unoffensive man. From a third person’s perspective, you wouldn’t doubt that I was the one in the strongest position. I had this man’s destiny on the tip of my index finger and yet, I was the one with a shaking hand and a hard-beating heart.
The man in front of me was calm and able to address a serious gaze into my eyes. I was holding a gun with eight bullets and yet, it was him who was glaring at me with a drilling look.
Snow was falling so densely that my vision was reduced to a 10-feet perimeter. My face was freezing but I didn’t dare use my left hand to wipe the snow from my face as my enemy would get the most of even half a moment of inattention. And I was not going to give him that.
As I stammered out my question, he sketched an amused smile, looked down and said, “You don’t belong here.”
Before I could think of an appropriate thing to say, he lifted up his head again with a serious expression and continued, “I can see it in your eyes. You’re a good man, not a war man. You don’t belong here. And neither do I, to be honest. Neither does any one of my people nor yours that got trapped into this fucking mess.”
From a bird’s-eye perspective, we were two lost figures in the middle of a clearing next to a frozen lake and surrounded by hundreds of trees covered with a layer of white. Grey smoke waves coming from the near eastern battle areas would come through the scenery every once in a while to accompany the falling snow.
“I never wanted to believe them when they started talking about a third world war. I believed that those things were gone with the past of humanity. I thought that this was the era where humans would seek to achieve the peace that we had been longing for for several generations. But I guess it’s not.”
I knew that this was getting more familiar, not only the meaning of his words but also the situation. That’s what they usually do, try to start a conversation, gain some empathy, maybe distract you a little bit and then get the most of a second of weakness to do their quick move and reverse the situation. That is a basic turn of events you would find in an execution scene of an average quality movie. I’d watched hundreds of those and spent hours reading similar scripts.
But this was different. I was part of the script. I was ready to fire a real bullet and take a man’s life. And this changed everything. I held my gun tight in my hand and kept my eyes focused to be able to detect any suspicious movement. I was not going to fall in the trap.
“Do I have a last wish? I can give you many of those. Go back in time and prevent those bastards from signing the goddamn chart and save thousands of innocent lives. Step back from the military and keep on being the person that I used to be. Man, I was so stupid feeling the obligation to “act like a man” and prove myself among my people and my girl.”
I could not remain insensitive to his confessions. I, myself, felt the obligation to step forward and to take part in the war, leave everything behind and defend our land. Before those times, I was the happiest guy but I had not been aware of it. And now, that someone belongs to the past. I could never be that person again. War changes men forever.
Fate had it that I would be the one in charge to execute this man who had infiltrated our division. The fourth identified spy in less than a month. He obviously had a similar path as mine. Each of us had a life. Each of us made a choice to be part of this human stupidity. Each of us had left the life that we had. We both regretted it. Did we really have a choice? I think we all did. Now, he happened to be on the wrong side of the story. Didn’t he?
“Actually, if I am wishing for things, I would wish to go back and relive one of those easy mornings where I would wake up next to her, not worrying about anything, staring into each others’ eyes until we would lose track of time, never getting enough of it, until she would say how lucky she feels for having me. That’s when I would kiss her on the forehead and she would smile but still nag because I didn’t say anything in return. I wish I could go back to being that happy person before I fucked up and gave up that for this.”
He hit the nail right on the head with those words. Similar memories of mine came back. Actually, he made me have one of those waves of missing a person; the kind of waves that when they hit you, you go from not thinking about that person at all to missing them to the point that you feel incomplete.
“I wish I never kicked that first-grade kid when I was in mid-school in front of his classmates because I thought I was a bad guy and needed to show it off. If I could only apologize to him and give him back his backpack. Do you think he’s in the war as well?”
“Well, it looks like he had some experiences as a kid that could turn him into a tough guy. I bet he is in the war.”
“I wish I could go back in time and leave the way to another one of those spermatozoids running for a place in a game not worth playing.”
The sound of a machine gun firing and other bombings filled up the background and brought me right back to our reality.
I had made a decision. I was going to shoot him, but I was not going to kill him. I couldn’t go back to my base with eight bullets in my gun but I could use one and still miss his vital organs.
I was not going to kill that man because he didn’t deserve to die. And even if he did, I wasn’t the one who was going to decide it. I just couldn’t be another link in the chain. I was better than that.
I aimed my gun right to his left shoulder and pulled the trigger.
The gunshot’s crack stopped time as it echoed in the forest.
Dry, sudden and straight.
A warm transcending pain cracked into my back and propelled me forward. I instantly lost my ability to stand. I fell down on my knees and then face down to the ground.
The pain faded as the warmth spread from my back and filled my entire body.
As soon as my soul started lifting, I was able to see my own body lying on the ground with a pool of blood coloring the thick layer of snow around it.
I saw the man looking around him in disbelief and my killer running to the scene. He shot my dead body with four more bullets, set his ally free and ran with him to the South.
I, 84 kilos lighter, flew up through the clouds, in the opposite direction of the feathery snowflakes, happy to be off to a place that couldn’t be worse than the one I had been in. I could not wish for anything better than leaving a world of darkness and going to an undiscovered one.
I always wanted to see our world from a pigeon’s perspective. Now, I might even be able to learn about their thoughts about what we had been doing with the world we share. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/do-you-have-a-last-wish-7e2d6abc7c4a | ['Omar Gahbiche'] | 2020-05-26 18:35:05.467000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Short Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Literature', 'Conversations'] |
The Trumpet Player | The air is diamond bright and sharp, a chill biting at my face. I place my feet carefully, walking over the snow between the rows of white crosses toward the cenotaph. I join the scattered group of others standing in a loose ring around the towering memorial.
Colours so bright. Blood red poppies placed on white crosses in the snow. Green trees reaching for the sky. My coworker’s bright pink coat. The white marble of the cenotaph against the crystal blue sky.
The trumpet player stands in front of the cenotaph, black jacket and pants clinging to a slight body. Their hair is short, sleek, dark. They lift a silver trumpet from its velvet nest and check the valves and mouthpiece. I am entranced.
Children chatter and giggle to their classmates. Military members march in formation, white gloved hands swinging at their sides, uniforms crisp in the November air. A hush falls over those gathered as a high school student stands to read “In Flanders Fields.”
The trumpet player puts their trumpet to their lips, silver catching the sun as the first notes of “The Last Post” ring out across the cemetery. White gloved fingers dance over the valves and I forget the cold. I can’t take my eyes off them.
As the last notes fade away, groups step up in turn to lay wreaths at the base of the cenotaph. I watch the trumpet player carefully lay their trumpet in its case, nestled in red felt. I watch them stand up and fold their delicate gloved hands. I watch them watch as the wreaths are laid. My chest is tight and my hands tremble.
The Remembrance Day ceremony ends and each person turns to leave, slowly making their way back to school or work.
I never see the trumpet player again. I never spoke to them. I will never know their name. But I will always remember that moment, crystallized in time, standing in a snowy cemetery in November. I will always remember that beautiful person, so perfect in form and grace. I will always remember that silver trumpet, those white gloved hands, that fine boned face. I will always remember. | https://medium.com/prismnpen/the-trumpet-player-670b9d091285 | ['Esther Spurrill-Jones'] | 2020-09-11 08:06:01.121000+00:00 | ['Canada', 'Memories', 'Creative Non Fiction', 'LGBTQ', 'Memoir'] |
5 Ideas for remote employee engagement | Team Lytho competing over who has the best yellow item during our scavenger hunt
By now, most companies have made the shift to a fully operating remote working remote working environment. While it’s important to take every measure to protect the health and wellbeing of your employees, not having your colleagues around in flesh and bone gets old relatively quickly. Team Lytho has been thinking up ideas to keep the team spirit high and jolly to fight the frustration that can creep in with the uncertainty of the current situation. Maybe you’d also like to try some of these activities with your team?
A channel for unscheduled down time
What makes office life fun is the casual connections we have, the ‘water cooler chats’, if you know what I mean. We recommend having an active video link (with the tool of your preference) where anyone can pop in while having their morning coffee or afternoon snack. This channel is meant just for chitchat and connecting with one another when you are taking a quick break. Scavenger hunt
Hop on a video call with the team and organize a fun at-home scavenger hunt. The rules of the game go as follows: One person leads the game and asks the rest to find items in the house that match a certain description. For example, find something that’s yellow, sharp, longer than your arm, or is made of plastic. The person who finds the most items fastest, wins. Bonus points for creativity ! Developer walk-in
This one’s for the product companies among you. You don’t want to miss out on cross-team collaboration just because you are not all in the same office space. Have a designated time for some of your development team members to be on a call and encourage other employees to jump on the line during this walk-in time with their questions or suggestions for your roadmap backlog. Socializing and new product improvement ideas, a win-win for all! Arranged lunch activities
We believe the concept of lunch wasn’t created just because we get hungry (okay, maybe mostly because of that) but also because we need a break from work. To prevent lonely remote lunch hours, involve your employees in fun activities. You could recruit a fitness enthusiast from your team to lead others in a yoga or stretching exercise, or have one of your foodie team members do a quick lunch cooking class for you. Now is the time to show off those hidden talents you and your employees might possess! Youth picture quiz
Instead of becoming separated, choose for knitting an even stronger bond within your staff! If your employees are up for it, this might be a good time to share some more personal information with your colleagues through a quiz. Ask people to send in old pictures of themselves. Then post them on a channel and ask others to guess which one of the team members is in this picture. This exercise can also be done with a picture of everyone’s favourite place or food, your imagination is the limit.
I hope this gives you some ideas on how to boost engagement and lift spirits during the coming days when working from home is a must. Good luck with organizing activities and feel free to tag Lytho on Linkedin if you end up trying some of these ideas and sharing pictures of them, we’d love to see it!
Other related articles | https://medium.com/marketing-and-branding/5-ideas-for-remote-employee-engagement-cae146fdff3d | ['Raul Tiru'] | 2020-12-17 15:03:37.140000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Employee Experience', 'Employee Retention', 'Employee Benefits', 'Employees'] |
Rethinking Political Involvement | Photo by annie bolin on Unsplash
In 1979, Jerry Falwell established the Moral Majority, an organization with the goal of pushing for conservation moral values within the American political sphere. At the time, persuading Christians to join together politically was a logical way to influence the direction of the nation. At the time, 58% of Americans identified as Protestants, along with another 29% who were Catholic (Gallup). These numbers gave conservative Christians tremendous power in the political arena. In its 10 years of official existence, the Moral Majority helped elect a socially conservative president 3 times. Now, over 3 decades later, the scene has shifted dramatically. In 2018, only 35% of Americans identified as Protestant, and the number of Catholics have also fallen (Gallup). In this context, a sense of fear seems to have gripped Christians across America. Because, after decades of political influence, we, as American Christians, are losing our grip on the power that we’ve fallen in love with.
I enjoy discussing political opinions and ideas, although I have no intention of doing so now. Instead, I want analyze and discuss the situation that the American church is in. I don’t care which party you vote for, or if you vote at all. What I care about are the methods that Christians intend to use as they follow Christ’s command to be salt and light to the world. And above all, I care about what God thinks about us, Christians in America in 2019. As I read about what Jesus said, and more importantly, did not say about the politics of his own time, I am deeply burdened that He would not be pleased with the church in America.
On that note, I want to look at what the New Testament says about Christians and their relationship to their respective governments. It is important to point out that the New Testament believers lived under a very different government than our current American government. However, this difference does not change the fundamental principles of the commands in the New Testament. Jesus himself said very little about the political situation of his day. He told his followers to pay their taxes, and his instruction to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s (Matthew 22:21, ESV)” was a warning not to give Caesar the glory that God deserved. Paul instructed the Christians in Rome to respect their authorities, which was a government led by Nero. However, beyond this, there is virtually no mention of politics in the New Testament. Since the political situation of the day was undoubtedly an important subject, this omission in the New Testament is fascinating. Personally, I think that this omission points to the fact the God did not intend his people to be focused on political goals. Whether or not any degree of political involvement is permitted could be debated, but I believe that God did not intend for his church to invest time and energy into political goals. To further prove this point, I want to examine the effect that political involvement has had on American Christianity.
There are probably a number of related reasons why Christians in American became increasingly more politically active. However, the single biggest reason that I would point to is an obsession with the idea of “protecting our rights.” While Christians are worried about their right to worship freely, other traditional American rights have also become a concern for many Christians. The right to own guns, the right for your church to hold a tax-exempt status, and the right to do business without government interference are just a few of the rights that Christians in America have come hold very tightly. And here, I believe, lies the problem. These “rights” were never really ours to begin with. God warned his followers that they would face trials and persecution in life, and for Christians in America to expect freedom as a right is inconsistent with Scripture. As believers, we relinquish all of our personal rights when we commit our lives to Christ. The rights that we receive at conversion are strictly spiritual in nature. Unfortunately, the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” are found the in United States Constitution, but not the Bible. An obsession with “our rights” has led many Christians to expect blessings that Christ never promised us.
With the possibility of losing many of their most prized rights, many American Christians looked to political involvement as the only way to save liberties. Encouraging others to vote for your candidate, giving money to political candidates, and attending political rallies and protests have become methods used by ordinary American Christians to try to influence the political process. On a different level, businesses and special interest groups lobby in Washington D.C., and party members sign up to serve in various election campaigns. As I examine this political involvement, I am fearful that it has cost us, as American Christians, far more than we realize. Of course, my judgment in this area is fairly subjective, simply because these things are very hard to measure. However, I challenge each of you to think carefully about what political involvement may have cost your family, your church, or yourself.
Political involvement has cost the American church the ability to focus on its most important goals: discipling believers and evangelizing the lost. Because, while it is possible to be involved in many different things, it is only possible to focus on a few things. If politics are the focus of a church, other important things will inevitably get less focus. While it is theoretically possible to be involved politically without making it a primary focus, many churches and denominations across the United States have been miserably unsuccessful in doing so. In fact, many Americans have come to think of evangelicals primarily as a conservative voting bloc. This hardly seems like the identity that Jesus intended for his followers.
Beyond simply being a distraction, participation in political affairs has pushed the church to compromise many of its values. This does not mean that every church and every individual Christian in America has compromised its values; it simply means that political involvement creates a very strong temptation to do so. This is due to the fact that all people are inherently biased in their views of the world. As a result, if I support a certain political figure because his policies would benefit me, I will find it very easy to overlook his character flaws. Similarly, if I support certain legislation that I believe will help me, it will be very tempting to ignore how that legislation will negatively affect someone else.
An excellent example of this tendency toward bias is found in the way evangelicals responded to Donald Trump. For years, evangelicals claimed that personal character was the most important factor in evaluating a person’s qualifications for the presidency. Conservative Christians raved against Bill Clinton for his moral failures, and tirelessly attacked Barack Obama for his views on marriage and abortion. However, when Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, these same Christians were more than willing to forgive his dishonesty and moral failures. This is curious, since Trump’s character, by nearly any measurement, was no better than Clinton or Obama. The difference, it seems, was that Trump was more willing to support gun rights, lower taxes, and strong immigration laws, all issues that evangelicals cared about very deeply. When looking at this blatant inconsistency, it seems as though conservative Christians, like most other Americans, are willing to overlook character flaws in order to support a candidate who favors their political views.
An example of this inconsistency can be found by tracing the views of James Dobson, a popular evangelical teacher known for his focus on political issues. In 1998, Dobson wrote an open letter to Christians in the United States about moral failures of President Bill Clinton. In his letter Dobson stated that “As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world! Nevertheless, our people continue to say that the President is doing a good job even if they don’t respect him personally. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, “Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring” (James 3:11 NIV). The answer is no.” Dobson’s viewpoint seems understandable, even if it was politically motivated. However, eighteen years later, Dobson had a much different viewpoint on a candidate who supported his political viewpoints. In giving his assessment of Donald Trump as a candidate, Dobson downplayed Trump’s shortcomings in character, saying in an open statement that “Only the Lord knows the condition of a person’s heart. I can only tell you what I’ve heard. First, Trump appears to be tender to things of the Spirit.” Dobson later added in the statement that “If anything, this man is a baby Christian who doesn’t have a clue about how believers think, talk and act.” It is curious that Dobson’s trusting, forgiving attitude toward Trump was not present when Bill Clinton failed morally, nor was it present for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Instead, Dobson seemed to pick and choose when to forgive shortcomings based on whether or not a political figure agreed with his political viewpoints.
There is one more danger that I believe American Christians need to recognize on this issue. Political issues can be very divisive, and Christians who are politically active run the risk of building walls between themselves and other people around them, particularly unbelievers. It is heartbreaking to see people who desperately need Christ refuse to consider the gospel because of the political ties of the church. The perception that Christians want to force others to follow their morals may or may not be fair, but the American church has done a poor job in dispelling this idea. Ultimately, the political involvement of the American church does not seem to have attracted people to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Because of the intricacies of these issues, I feel confident that no one reading this post will fully agree with me. This is perfectly OK, because my goal is not to have everyone arrive at my own conclusions. Rather, I think it is important for all of us, myself included, to regularly evaluate this issue in our own lives. In spite of the differences believers may have on the subject of political involvement, we should all agree that our attitude toward politics and political involvement will have significant consequences on the American church. We should all carefully consider whether our own approach toward these issues is the approach that Christ would have us to take.
Sources.
Dobson, James. Letter to Friends. September 1998.
Dobson, James. “Dr. James Dobson on Donald Trump’s Christian Faith.” 2016.
Gallup. Religion. 2019. | https://medium.com/christian-perspectives-society-and-life/rethinking-political-involvement-7160ba319bf1 | ['Jacob Zimmerman'] | 2019-10-28 23:36:44.182000+00:00 | ['Politics', '2016 Election', 'Christians', 'Trump', 'Evangelicals'] |
The Beginners Guide To Tron (TRX) — Cryptocurrency | TRON (TRX) is a blockchain-based decentralized protocol that aims to construct a worldwide free content entertainment system with the blockchain and distributed storage technology. The protocol allows each user to freely publish, store and own data, and in the decentralized autonomous form, decides the distribution, subscription and push of contents and enables content creators by releasing, circulating and dealing with digital assets, thus forming a decentralized content entertainment ecosystem.
Peiwo App with over 10 million users will become the first TRON-compatible entertainment APP. Peiwo App is the Snapchat of China.
TRON’s open, decentralized platform and distributed storage technology will allow creators, programmers, app developers of digital content to cut out middlemen such as the Apple Store, Google Play Store, Amazon marketplace, and other content channels to accept real time payments with no fees from consumers.
In the beginning of designing TRON, the following core values are always adhered to:
1.Date creators (users) will have the fundamental ownership of data, and the internet should be decentralized. This was proposed by doctor Tim Berners-Lee at the time when the internet was born and the original intention for creation of the internet.
2.Those who make a contribution to ecological TRON will be entitled to proportional profits according to rules. A value network has the greatest advantage that may digitally capitalize anything in social and media networks.
3.All forms of contribution should be of equal quantitative value. Substantially, the time invested by participants, excellent contents created and attention are of the measure value as equal as the furnished capitals.
4.The fundamental objective of TRON is to provide services for the public. As an ecology operated by a non-profit foundation, TRON is designed to serve the masses who enjoy content entertainment throughout the world, rather than for the purpose of gaining profits. All TRON participants will benefit from its prosperity.
5.Contents should derive from people rather than capitals which should be used to reward people rather than to control people. Cultural and creative industries should be mainly driven by the pursuit of the quality of art and contents by content creators, artists and scriptwriters rather than the capitalists who consume no contents.
With the company seeking long-term investment and pushing away those investors looking to make a quick profit, the TRX token themselves will be able to be locked away to gain TP. Doing so will give users upward mobility in the ecosystem with power moves such as voting rights and higher status. The longer your tokens are locked away, the more TP TRON will reward you.
How Does TRX Work?
This is a long-term project with a set of phases beginning with Exodus in 2017 and ultimately leading to Eternity in 2023. Below are the key features of each stage.
Exodus: The free platform for peer to peer distribution, storage, and content. Odyssey: Economic incentives put in place to encourage content creation and empowerment Great Voyage: Individual ICO capabilities Apollo: Ability for content producers to issue personal tokens (TRON 20 Token)
Steps 5 and 6 both look to further the ability to decentralize the gaming industry. They allow developers to build gaming platforms freely and then achieve monetary incentives upon establishment of said games.
Tron’s Team
CEO and founder of TRON, Justin Sun, is often said to be “the next Jack Ma”, the founder of Alibaba. Sun holds an extremely impressive resume at just 27:
Graduate of the University of Pennsylvania
2015 Forbes China 30 under 30
2017 Forbes Asia 30 under 30
founder of Peiwo APP (China’s Snapchat)
attendee of Hupan University founded by Jack Ma
former chief representative of Ripple China.
Aside from Sun, the team includes other key players. CTO Lucien Chen is a former employee of Alibaba with extensive experience working with first-tier internet companies such as Netease, Qihoo 360, and Tencent.
TRON is already well supported by top Chinese developers on its team yet is continually expanding its employee base with members with veteran technical expertise such as Maorong Lin and Xiadong Xie. Together, the two employees bring years of technical development experience in the entertainment industry and internet commerce.
TRON is backed by notable members of the Chinese business community such as Hitters Xu (founder of Nebulas), Tang Binsen (founder of mobile game Clash of Kings), Xue Manzi (famous Chinese angel investor), Chaoyong Wang (founder of China Equity Group with $2 billion market value), Dai Wei (CEO of OFO bike), Huobi.com, and many more.
Other things to note about Tron:
Tron is not mineable like Bitcoin. At the time of writing, the circulating supply was 67,648,222,9875 TRX with a total supply of 100,000,000,000 TRX.
You have the ability to trade TRX on exchange sites such as Liqui & Binance for either ETH or BTC. New users can purchase BTC or ETH coins on Band deposit it to their wallets on Binance.
You can view Tron’s Github page directly here — https://github.com/tronprotocol
At the time of this article, Tron is running at roughly 6 cent per token with a strong potential future.
You can view their official registration and regulation documents here — https://dn-peiwo-web.qbox.me/tron/Bizfile-Tron-Foundation-2017.07.28.pdf
TRON wants to change the way content is being rewarded through the following features:
Data liberation: free and uncontrolled data Enabling content ecosystem where users can obtain digital assets from content spreading Personal ICO with the ability to distribute digital assets Infrastructure to allow distributed digital assets exchange (such as games) and market forecasting.
I hope you enjoyed this article!
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You can also follow me on Twitter @itswilson8 | https://medium.com/cryptomenow/the-beginners-guide-to-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-fc390bc851b6 | [] | 2018-01-26 07:30:18.606000+00:00 | ['Guide', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Altcoins'] |
Gen Z is missing out on landline fun | Gen Z is missing out on landline fun
How my brother messed up my love connection
Photo credit: NEOSiAM 2020/Pexels
My friend and I had it all planned out. I was supposed to sit quietly on the phone, making sure not to breathe on the other end. Then she would call the guy I liked and ask him how he felt about me. It was a magical plan that would lead to him gushing over me, and then I’d have a new boyfriend. My Cupid homegirl and I knew each other since our Girl Scouts days (and well into college, long after this plan was devised) and came up with plenty of these plots to entertain our elementary school brains.
She dialed the number, shushed me immediately on the three-way call and then we heard his phone ring. I smiled on the other end of the line, just waiting to hear whether he thought I was cute or not. We couldn’t just rush into the conversation, so we’d already planned a few meaningless topics to talk about before we got to the main point of this call. By the time she mentioned my name, I could hear him perk up on the other end. The next question was planned, “So do you like-her-like-her or just like-her?”
But before he could get ready to answer the question, I heard the unsexiest baritone voice known to man.
“Monnie, [insert name here] can’t have phone calls after 10 p.m. Are you going to be off the phone soon?”
I scowled at that second guy’s voice, knowing it was my older brother, who was too lazy to walk out of his room, into the kitchen and into my bedroom. I don’t believe it was even a 30-foot walk, but the kitchen phone was right outside of his bedroom phone. So he just picked it up at the worst possible moment of this three-way call. There was no way to play this off. On the other end of the phone, this guy knew who “Monnie” was. I mumbled an “OK” and quickly hung up. I was boiling hot when I got off the phone, and my brother happily called his girlfriend (now wife of 21 years) to talk to her before her phone curfew. He had no clue that he was a snitch. I still planned my revenge.
These are those stories that confirm why Generation Z has it made. They never had to go through the landline phone trauma that Generation X and Millennials went through. You all have smartphones and control the entire experience.
But there are moments I’ve had on landlines that left me filled with glee, and this is where you all are missing out. | https://medium.com/tickled/gen-y-and-z-are-missing-out-on-landline-fun-1a968ec5e37f | ['Shamontiel L. Vaughn'] | 2020-12-24 03:47:00.288000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Childhood Memories', 'Phone', 'Baby Boomers', 'Generation X'] |
Spanish Medium — It Must Happen! | “I’ve learned to follow the hunch, but never assume where it would go” — Ev Williams
Now that everybody on Medium is buzzing about the redesign of the logo, the new API, and monetization opportunities, it’s time to look at another gap:
Medium must be in Spanish.
A Medium in Spanish is not the same as a Spanish Medium.
We, the Spanish-speaking people, are social animals. We love conversations. Our culture is built on conversations. This is the reason social networks have an incredible penetration rate in Spanish-speaking countries, surpassing, in relative terms, the penetration rate of any other country in the world — including the US.
One of the reasons I love Medium is the lovely people I’ve found here. I like to get involved with people who are doing exactly the same thing as I am: expressing themselves and trying to find their place. These tangles always bring good things. Most of these people are native English speakers. Language is not a problem in my case, but it is really a big challenge for other Spanish speakers who are getting into Medium in search of the same things I look for, and not finding them. And 410 million people, whose culture is dominated by the art of conversation do not have an online, long-form conversation platform.
Then the answer is a Spanish Medium.
Spanish language around the world. Source.
Medium was born in English, and it’s still a toddler. Communities and conversations are flourishing now. Everything is new, and, as anything new, it is yet to be fully built.
Spanish is the third most prevalent language on the internet, in terms number of users (after English and Chinese). Ten percent of the internet is built in Spanish — English represents 30%. Spanish is a first language for 410 million people, and a second language for another 90 million. It’s the de facto second language in the United States, spoken at home by 52 million people. The Spanish language is the gateway to South America and to Spain. We are a huge community and we are willing to be early adopters of any new cool stuff out there. However, Medium is not just cool stuff out there. Medium is the place where, once you’ve stepped in, you want to stay and live.
Spanish has always been a language (and a culture) that values the written word. Some of the most renowned authors are Spanish and Latin American. Think about Antonio Muñoz Molina, about Mario Vargas Llosa, about Isabel Allende — to name just three who are still alive. There is also a growing culture of slow reading; Jotdown, Libero, or Yorokobu are some good examples of this new trend: quality pieces that people love to read and are willing to pay for, just like print magazines or any other merchandising articles brands sell in their online stores.
However, online conversations in Spanish are mainly happening on Facebook and Twitter now. We don’t have any alternatives — for now — to these social networks to spread our ideas. And these ideas are clearly siloed and hard to discover for anyone not following someone. These ideas should be growing and spreading faster, but we are stuck in Facebook…
I know (because of the examples mentioned above) that the Spanish-speaking audience is craving for a site to funnel this need for slow reading + slow writing + relaxed conversations.
And, from what I see, Spanish Medium is the answer.
Yet, despite being the language that 410 million people are speaking at any given time, the language that naturally matches discussion, the language whose culture embraces conversation, there are only 108 publications in Spanish, all of them collected in an index by Medium en Español. But,
many have not been updated for over a year. Some are updated just twice or three times a year.
some are just translations from English language publications or official Medium publications, as are La Historia, En Español, Centro de Ayuda or Motivaciones de Escritura.
some are not 100% in Spanish, but a mix of Spanish and English.
one is misleading, as it has the same name — and purpose — as the official publication, Medium en Español.
This is not the way to attract a Spanish-speaking audience.
Sharing a language shortens the psychological distance between people.
When I started writing on Medium I did it in English, but soon realized some of my topics needed to be in Spanish, so I started writing for Medium en Español, the official publication. I also became a translator because I wanted to share with “my” community some of the great thoughts and ideas I was reading around here. This has also allowed me to get in touch and connect with English authors, which has also enriched my community.
But, how do we attract a Spanish-speaking community? There’s no magic. People are willing to come to Medium in search of a place to read and write quality content. But there’s not enough content because of the language barrier. The platform has to be in Spanish.
Estimates of the number of Internet users by language as of December 31, 2013. Source Wikipedia.
This is not the first time I’ve gone through something like this. I remember when Facebook and Twitter were only available in English. Some of us were able to be there, our English level was good enough; but that’s not the case for the majority of the Spanish community. I like to have language set to English everywhere, on my computer, in the social networks setup, on my cell phone… but, as I say, it’s obviously not the case for most of Spanish speakers. When Facebook reached an international audience, it was soon opened to translation (between 2007 and 2008) by engaged community members because again, we like to see things in our native languages. Same thing for Twitter, though in its case the Spanish version arrived in 2009.
It’s the economy, stupid!
Many people in Spanish-speaking countries learn English, but not everybody is able to understand a long thoughtful essay, and even less so to write their own ideas. A Spanish Medium would have the opportunity to engage in a market of 410 million people that’s experiencing a spectacular growth of more than 800% since 2005.
Spanish-speaking countries share more than the language. They share an economy. It’s estimated that multilateral trade among them exists because sharing the language reduces the cost of business transactions. And we are talking about an economy whose total GDP is more than 5 trillion €. This is not a second class economy.
In addition, we need to take into account that Spanish has also become — over the last decade — a powerful business language in the United States. And it’s still growing.
Spanish-speaking countries, as we have seen, also share a common cultural background. The cultural background might sound absurd when talking about GDP, yet it is as important as relationships between the UK and the US, or between the US and Canada. Culture means money in this context, and if I think about mainly cultural expenses, Spain and South America, for instance, share editorials, share a cinema industry, a music industry… There are no borders when it comes to language, even when slight differences in meanings, as it were, make us smile from time to time. Don’t try to say the verb coger (to take) in Argentina, for example, because this word’s meaning in that country could get you in trouble.
However, understanding a little bit of local cultures is a must before going fishing in a different ocean.
When Facebook landed in Spain, as I said before, the platform was in English. By that time, some tech savvy guys here built Tuenti, completely in Spanish. This social network was a great success, above all among teenagers, and it took Facebook many years to beat Tuenti in terms of number of users, and, of course, in terms of revenue in Spain.
Spanish Medium — how it happens
I’ve spent the last 8 years making things happen online. I’ve won a Bitacoras Award (the most important award for blogs in Spanish) for my project unadocenade.com, a collaborative lists site. I’ve implemented social networks at the regional government level, and have taught many civil servants in City Halls around Spain. I’ve worked with international teams which include South, North American, and European countries.
I want to lead a Spanish Medium because I believe the future of the world is dependent on all cultures sharing ideas first in their native languages and then with others.
Medium needs to hire a small team to make this happen.
Think of Wikipedia. It’s edited by a legion of volunteers, but there’s a team behind it all making sure everything works properly.
A team is needed that combines PR functions, with strong writing/editing skills; a team that has the background knowledge of the cultural differences between the Spanish-speaking countries; a team with strong connections with local celebrities, journalists, and also with writers and bloggers; a team with experience leading writing projects on the Spanish internet; and a team with international experience and connections as well.
This team would lead the troop of volunteers, translators, writers. Exactly in the same way there’s a team working towards Medium’s growth in English.
Popularity matters
Why is Medium so popular? There are a few factors involved. One of them is the community around it. Medium hired a perfect team. Everybody is spreading the word from their own publications, sharing their love, sharing their little corner of the world with their own communities.
Another way it’s getting more popular is by getting some celebrities engaged in the community. It seems these celebrities are already using Medium. I’ve read articles by Bono, Melinda Gates, Mitt… These are globally known people. There are a lot of journalists and TV personalities as well. That’s a key point. Get someone well known to write on Medium and people will follow them. There are no journalists, no TV stars, no singers, no politicians, no thoughtful leaders from any of the Spanish-speaking countries in here, and we need them to engage more and more people. People and companies that are leading the way in these countries are mostly doing self-advertising of their articles on other sites. They haven’t understood anything.
We’ve seen this before.
Medium can make both history and money by building a Spanish Medium.
A relatively small investment could lead to large returns. Saul, I think the time is right for a conversation. I look forward to catching up with you soon. | https://medium.com/digital-identity/spanish-medium-it-must-happen-e6a6af8e3a16 | ['Cristina Juesas'] | 2015-10-22 17:38:09.793000+00:00 | ['Medium', 'Spanish Medium', 'Spanish'] |
Public Speaking: Speak Effectively to Foreign Audiences | Imagine yourself speaking to an international audience and you are just as effective as when you present in your own hometown. You can speak successfully to people who don’t share your first language. Language does not have to be a barrier between you and your audience.
Public Speaking to Foreign Audiences
In this “Public Speaking to Foreign Audiences” course you will learn how to deliver speeches, presentations, PowerPoints and other talks to people in foreign countries or to people who don’t share your native language. There are special challenges when speaking to audiences that don’t speak your language or who don’t have the same understanding of your language as a native speaker. With proper preparation and planning, it is possible to increase your odds of conveying your messages in a memorable way, even with people who don’t share your language.
This course will help you look comfortable and confident, speak in an understandable way, and have your message remembered by foreign audiences. It will also include many advanced techniques to master the arts of public speaking, presenting, keynote speaking, pitching, and PowerPoint Presenting.
Enroll in this class today.
Course updated on July 29, 2017
There is a 100% Money-Back Guarantee for this course. And the instructor also provides an enhanced guarantee.
TJ Walker has more than 100,000 course enrollments from more than 13,000 online students around the globe.
What others say:
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This Public Speaking course is ideal for anyone searching for more info on the following: public speaking — presentation — speaking — public speaking for beginners — kids — first steps into public speaking — debate — first step into public speaking — speech. Plus, this course will be a great addition to anyone trying to build out their knowledge in the following areas: presentation skills — communication skills — storytelling. | https://medium.com/@didaktikacademy/public-speaking-speak-effectively-to-foreign-audiences-1ed6a3f4a8b | ['Didaktik Academy'] | 2021-12-13 21:47:45.499000+00:00 | ['Public Speaking'] |
How to Plan Your First Camping Trip | Camping has become a more and more popular vacation choice, as people look for an experience rather than just relaxation when they get away from it all.
By taking a camping trip instead of a week or two away in a resort, you can see some amazing sights, have a fun and relaxing time, as well as experience the great outdoors in style. You can find great places to camp all across the world, or just a few miles from your doorstep. You have a limitless choice of destinations by taking a camping trip on your next vacation.
With the right amount of planning and preparation, anyone can enjoy a successful camping trip, even if it is their first time. If you decide you want to try sleeping under the stars in the great and wonderous outdoors, then read our quick guide on how to get started.
Choose a Destination and Do Some Research
Your destination is your starting point. Camping allows you to explore and try some fun experiences like rafting or rock climbing. Look for a destination like a National Park or a well-known camping site, and look for activities or beauty spots for you to visit in the area.
Plan an Itinerary
If you want to relax and enjoy the countryside, then this should mostly take care of itself. Many campers try to keep themselves busy, however, either by moving their campsite to explore more ground or by having some fun like whitewater rafting. Give yourself a few things to do while you are away, and plan out your days so you make the most of the trip.
Get Yourself the Right Equipment
When you go camping, you need to strike a balance between having the equipment and tools that you will need with how much you can carry between you and your fellow campers.
Your shelter is one of the most important pieces of equipment you will use. It is a good idea to practice erecting your tent before you take your trip. Food and refreshments are your next concern. Not only will you need some equipment to cook food at your campsite, but you will also need to keep food cool. Check out this Best Backpack Cooler in 2020: Ultimate Buyer’s Guide for a list of the best camping coolers that you can use to keep fresh meat and vegetables cool on your trip.
Prepare for Emergencies
When you are camping, you are self-reliant, and you need to have some plans in place in case anything goes wrong. Accidents can happen, and knowing what to do in an emergency and acting quickly can be very important, even life-saving. Make sure you carry some first-aid supplies with you.
Camping can be a lot of fun, and make an amazing vacation. It gives you the opportunity to explore the world, see unique sights and enjoy new experiences compared to lazing on a beach for two weeks. Why not use our simple guide to get you started, and make your next vacation a camping trip! | https://medium.com/@seopragnesh/how-to-plan-your-first-camping-trip-8efd4aee42e8 | ['Pragnesh P'] | 2020-11-26 06:42:27.425000+00:00 | ['Travel Tips', 'Camping', 'Camping Trip', 'Traveling'] |
United by the flag, divided by payment systems — The hurdle in the rise of Digital India | As I made my way from the Metro to the train station at Chandni Chowk, I looked around at the stripes of e-rickshaws and traditional rickshaws waiting for fares. It was like being in Delhi like it was 2015. I will not talk about them doing business without a mask. That’s a government problem and WHO’s problem to deal with. The missing piece for me was that none had a merchant UPI QR sticker or a UPI pad. And then it hit me, how a small utility like a UPI pad can affect consumer behavior and buying decisions across populations especially millennials and generation Z. I was ready to walk 1 km with a 10 KG trolley bag to avoid the ordeal of me asking them whether they accept digital payment.
As I started walking towards the railway station, I asked one rick if he accepts digital payment. To my surprise, he said yes, I do. This left me confused, as I could not find a UPI Pad. I made my way to the backseat and prayed to avoid any last-minute payment hassle as my train was leaving in about 20 minutes.
“What’s your name?” I asked the rick driver out of curiosity.
“Laxman Prasad” he responded instantly.
“Laxman Prasad ji, do you use Google pay or Paytm?” I asked the rick driver once we took off from the metro station.
“None, sir. I know people at the station who can pay me cash. You can pay them, don’t worry.” He replied in his subtle shyness of not being from the same century.
And I said to myself ‘why am I not surprised.’ The problem is I live in a city where even a street hawker uses a UPI pad for payment. And I am used to the way it works. Looking back to the 90s and early 2000s, we’ve come a long way as a nation. Back then we were divided by creed, culture, and commandment. Such predicaments drove the economy and businesses across India. Now we are divided by habits and our ability to adapt.
We reached the destination in about 10 minutes and Laxman started requesting merchants nearby to help him with the payment. I could tell I was his first fare of the day. Turned out the merchants at the station were not so friendly as Laxman thought. After a few failed attempts, I asked a juice vendor to help him with the payment and me with a fruit shake. And we were on our way.
Why micro-merchants in India are so inexorable? Even after constant efforts from CM Malladi(Co-founder, PhonePe), Sajith Sivanandan(MD, GPay), Vijay Shekhar Sharma(Founder, Paytm) among others only 16% of the Indian population uses Digital payments. Surprised, so was I. Out of 59 Million Micro Merchants in India only 1 Mn are accepting digital payments. These are post-pandemic figures. And yes, they are shocking. Especially for someone for whom digital payment is a part of everyday life.
Hollow marketing efforts will not help 39 leading organizations driving UPI payments in India. A mass drive or a mass peer-to-peer campaign holds the key to acceptability. Remember how LIC rolled, back in the 2000s, recruiting agent after agent till they reached 290Mn policyholders. Or how Sahara successfully on-boarded more than 100Mn scheme buyers. Mass marketing is glamorous. But not so effective when the task is to build trust and change behaviors.
Micro-merchants in India account for INR 23000 Cr’ worth of transactions every year. That’s 1% of India’s GDP, which is suffering. This 1% belongs to the community that earns from hand to mouth. These are people who would die starving before the pandemic gets to them. And hence should be the prime focus for the UPI aggregators to have them on board, make their life easy, and bring about the change they expect. Illiteracy and lack of awareness have crippled them. It will be interesting to see how digital payment leaders will make this happen. And I am sure we’ll see this change in 2021. It’s about time we find out how. | https://medium.com/@robin-singh-kumai/united-by-the-flag-divided-by-payment-systems-the-hurdle-in-the-rise-of-digital-india-648bd1352596 | ['Robin Singh'] | 2020-12-27 11:03:16.741000+00:00 | ['Digital Payment', 'Payment Systems', 'Digital Transformation', 'Technology', 'India'] |
The Real Victims of Trans Bathroom Rights (Or Lack Thereof) | In response to @bring-me-dawn-after-dark‘s post about his friend:
EASILY HELP A TRANS PERSON OUT
My trans friend recently got beat up for using the “wrong” bathroom. They are so brave for continuing to use the guys bathroom after that. My friend is my hero and I was hoping they heared that from not just me but from a lot of other people.
So please, if you could repost this with something nice at the bottom or anon me something kind to show them that would be so kind! Thank you!!! | https://medium.com/add-oil-comics/the-real-victims-of-trans-bathroom-rights-or-lack-thereof-b03f5e7ee273 | ['Jason Li'] | 2016-05-24 16:01:20.394000+00:00 | ['Transgender', 'Bathroom', 'LGBTQ'] |
Why Restaurants Need More than a Phone System? | As a restauranteur, you know how important it is to pick up every customer call and answer every customer’s email immediately. However, in surveys after surveys, the number one complaint that customers report is that restaurants do not answer their inquiries. Not in time, anyways.
According to our 2019 research, even a moderately busy restaurant misses more than $200,000 per year due to ignored customer calls and inquiries.
So why do restaurants ignore their customers and their valuable business?
Maybe because running a restaurant is hard. Sometimes some equipment breaks down in the kitchen, and sometimes the staff does not show up. While you get busy fixing those issues, your customers feel ignored. One person can do only so much, right?
Well, that’s not true anymore.
With a bit of smart automation for your restaurant phone system and your website, you can ensure that no customer gets ignored, ever. This technology is called an Automated Restaurant Assistant.
What is an Automated Restaurant Assistant?
It is an intelligent software that serves as a restaurant host over the phone and online. It automatically answers restaurant phone calls, just like a live host, and also replies to the website requests. What makes it intelligent is that it understands the context of restaurant calls and inquiries and replies to them accordingly, all by itself. In other words, this bot like technology combines the 24 7 availability of an answering system with the skills better than a live host. With this technology, you will never miss any customer ever.
“The best answer is doing.” — George Herbert
In this post, you will learn the top five reasons why you should consider an automated assistant solution for your restaurant.
1. Never miss any opportunity
A restaurant gets inquiries that range from the higher-value Caterings and Private events to Table reservations to Takeout calls.
With an automated restaurant assistant, you will not miss any customer, big or small. For instance, it will share menus & packages for the Event and Catering inquiries. It will take Reservations from phone calls, text messages, and online requests. It will also queue Takeout calls and deliver to multiple phones, and even to tablets or computers.
It is essential to understand that when you need to act, you will get an instant alert, such as in the case of a Catering inquiry. The automated assistant will handle the rest by itself, such as reserving a table. You will also have complete visibility from results, reports, and insights.
2. Always respond immediately
Given the competition in the restaurant industry, it is impossible to overstate the importance of an immediate response to customers. Since the automated assistant is a software, it answers instantly to multiple customers at the same time. No matter how busy your restaurant gets, no customer will ever get a busy tone.
The best answer is doing. The automated assistant also serves the requests. For example, it follows up with the events menu and also accepts reservations. It automatically does most of the repetitive tasks, such as sending follow up emails.
3. Focus on customers
Since the automated assistant will take over your grunt work, you will get back multiple hours every week. You can then use this precious time to build relations with your customers and delight them with your service. They will become your fans.
The automated assistant will get the customer contact information and also send follow-up text messages and emails. It will even alert you about specific customers who need your attention.
4. Filter robocalls
Robocalls are a menace for everyone. They rely on deceiving the unsuspecting live staff. If not controlled, these calls lead to substantial loss of time and money.
The automated assistant is a bot on your side that keeps robocalls away just like bug-screen blocks the insects. Only your customers and sincere vendors will get your attention.
5. Your business Is-On-24
The automated assistant will acknowledge and respond to every inquiry all by itself. You will stop worrying about off-hours calls and emails.
Whether its an early morning, busy evening, or a holiday, your customers will get the same instant response no matter when they call or click. Your business will become virtually 24 7 with no effort.
There you have it. With an automated restaurant assistant, you will never miss any business ever. Customers will love your responsiveness around the clock, and your staff will thank you for eliminating robocalls.
More sales, happier customers, and focused staff, wouldn’t that be awesome?
About IsOn24
The Is-On-24 is an intelligent software that serves as a restaurant host over the phone and online. It automatically answers restaurant phone calls and replies to online requests 24 7, better than a live host.
It shares menus & packages for the Event and Catering inquiries. It takes Reservations from phone calls, text messages, and online requests. It also delivers Takeout calls to multiple phones, tablets, or computers.
Most restaurants use IsOn24 as their Answering system by publishing the local phone number provided as part of their IsOn24 subscription. Others choose to keep their existing phone number and forward their calls to the new IsOn24 phone number as their Answering service.
Every IsOn24 subscription also includes access to the IsOn24 app. It offers unique Event management features such as instant Quote & Approval via text messages and instant chat with guests. The IsOn24 app also offers powerful Marketing features, including dozens of tastefully created marketing templates ready to go, for all seasons. Just tap once to automatically share your message over Email, Phone, and Online.
As a Restauranteur, you are a Hero, and IsOn24 is the sidekick you need.
For more information, visit www.IsOn24.com
Click here to Begin a free trial. No credit card needed. Cancel anytime.
Or Schedule a live demo for your restaurant.
Subscribe to this blog to receive updates. | https://medium.com/@ison24/5-reasons-why-your-restaurant-needs-an-automated-restaurant-host-261bad42f580 | ['Vimal Misra'] | 2020-01-19 20:13:17.753000+00:00 | ['Retail Technology', 'Restaurants', 'Customer Experience', 'Answering Services', 'Phone Systems'] |
New Timeline | Hi,
Lovely morning, lots of presents and delicious food. It’s one of my favourite times of the year.
Nowadays, Christmas got a new meaning — it’s not about presents anymore, it is all about the vibe, family time, and food. Maybe I’ve grown up :))
Sure, I love presents, who doesn’t like receiving them? — but they are not my main focus of the holidays, although this year I’ve got all of the things I’ve wished for ❤ Thank you Santa! | https://medium.com/@martynasmalinauskas/new-timeline-c32f0052fdfc | ['Martynas Malinauskas'] | 2020-12-30 11:17:08.621000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Perspective', 'Present', 'Christmas'] |
Indonesia’s Electric Vehicle Commodities | Indonesia’s Electric Vehicle Commodities
Indonesia has extensive plans to leverage its commodity deposits to develop a thriving electric vehicle industry within the country. The nation has a basket of valuable minerals which are being viewed with enthusiasm in light of the growing international demand for electric vehicles. Not only will this demand facilitate new industries within Indonesia, but it will also strengthen Indonesia’s existing commodities supply chains. As international markets for electric vehicles expand there are significant new opportunities to capitalise on within Indonesia’s mining sector.
“The lithium is two percent of the cell mass [in our batteries]. So it’s like salt in the salad; it’s a very small amount of the cell mass and a fairly small amount of the cost. But it sounds like it’s big because it’s called ‘lithium ion’, but really, our battery should be called ‘nickel graphite’, because it’s mostly nickel and graphite.” — Elon Musk
Technology mogul Elon Musk makes an important distinction. Electric vehicles rely on batteries which are produced from a number of different mineral components, of which lithium is just one. It is their basket of necessary commodities which gives Indonesia a significant advantage when it comes to the development of electric vehicle batteries. Very shortly this will become a thriving marketplace that will create new business opportunities.
Indonesia’s location along the “Ring of Fire” means it has over 100 volcanos stretching along a crescent encompassing thousands of islands. Ancient geological activity has given the nation an abundance of mineral deposits, along with some of the most productive mines in the world. It is these resources and the existing mining sector which Indonesia intends to leverage for the growth of their electric vehicle industry. Nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite and copper are all found in Indonesia’s archipelago and represent the vital basket of commodities necessary to produce batteries for electric vehicles. The primary mineral necessary for electric vehicle batteries is nickel and Indonesia has the world’s largest reserves. The country’s Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry estimates that Indonesia currently has more than 50 million tons which could last over 30 years.
Three of Indonesia’s largest state-owned businesses are joining forces in the push towards developing the domestic electric vehicle battery industry. The national oil and gas company Pertamina, recently rebranded state mining holding company Mind Id and electricity giant PLN intend to found a state-owned battery holding company. This new entity will develop an end-to-end domestic supply chain for electric vehicle batteries. It is estimated that global demand for batteries will increase by 400% within the next seven years to 777 gigawatt-hours (GWh). Indonesia intends to produce between 8 and 10 GWh yearly as it ramps up supply over the next four years. Indonesia’s President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has set a target of having 20% of cars be electric within the next five years.
To encourage foreign direct investment in this industry Indonesia recently passed a new Omnibus Law which intends to improve the investment landscape. The country has often been criticised for high levels of bureaucracy and in 2019 the World Bank ranked Indonesia number 73 out of 190 countries in their Ease of Doing Business Index. The new laws signal Indonesia’s desire to improve this ranking which the government intends to raise to 40 within the next four years.
After talks with Jokowi last week, Elon Musk has agreed to explore opportunities for both Tesla and SpaceX within Indonesia. Leveraging Indonesia’s nickel supplies for electric vehicle batteries holds synergies for both parties. Elon Musk provided insight into his perspective earlier this year when he tweeted:
“Nickel is the biggest challenge for high-volume, long-range batteries! Australia and Canada are doing pretty well. US nickel production is objectively very lame. Indonesia is great!”
Other global manufacturers also have ambitions to invest in Indonesia and its nickel reserves. One of the world’s largest car battery manufacturers, Contemporary Amperex Technology from China, has announced plans to construct a $5.1 billion battery plant in the country. Japan’s Toyota recently pledged $2 billion worth of investment towards developing 10 different types of electric vehicles within Indonesia. Toyota intends to transform the country into a global hub for electric vehicle exports within the next five years. Hyundai Motor of Korea has also committed $1.55 billion in investment towards an electric vehicle manufacturing plant in West Java, which will become operational in 2021.
These illustrious names combined with Indonesia’s mineral reserves guarantee the success of this new industry in Southeast Asia’s largest economy. All the necessary components are aligning — the political will, foreign investment and the necessary natural resources. As the industry grows there will be an abundance of new business opportunities to capitalise on within Indonesia’s commodity sector. | https://medium.com/enegra/indonesias-electric-vehicle-commodities-c21bf278ecb0 | ['Matthew Averay'] | 2020-12-15 04:07:49.745000+00:00 | ['Mining', 'Electric Vehicles', 'Indonesia', 'Technology', 'Elon Musk'] |
What Does Next-Generation Horror Design Look Like? | What Does Next-Generation Horror Design Look Like?
Ihave begun thinking about how I want to approach my fourth book on game design, which focuses on the horror genre. During October I tried to find current and recent titles that I could really dig into and enjoy. Instead, it made me think of my dream concept for a horror game and where I feel the genre needs to go. For today, we’re going to talk about why horror needs to take notes from roguelikes.
Fear of the Unknown
Horror, in any capacity, is about the unknown. The idea that you’re walking into a situation where you don’t know what’s going to happen can itself be terrifying. There are many iconic moments in videogame horror that are just that — the dog jumping through the window in Resident Evil, the first appearance by Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2, and the moment you realize just how much trouble you’re in with Outlast to name a few.
This is not the same as something like the Amnesia series or other examples that use an unreliable memory as a way of keeping the player in the dark. The story, like the character’s memory, will be sorted out at some point for either the twist or conclusion of the game. The best horror is not about having that “aha!” moment when everything is figured out. We can see similar aspects in some of the most iconic horror movies (at least in the early entries).
The problem with the unknown is that “unknown” only works one time. Those moments I mentioned two paragraphs up can only be experienced one time by the audience; after that, it just becomes another story beat that you’ll remember the next time you play.
This is where roguelike design can come in to greatly improve horror, but it must be a specific kind of random.
Defining Random
In my upcoming third book focusing on roguelike design, I talk about the misconception that any kind of random element will work with roguelikes. Good roguelike design is about a targeted form of randomization and procedural generation (in some cases).
The problem with a lot of the jumpscare-focused horror games is that the randomization is not about playing the game but trying to scare the player. In the Five Nights at Freddy’s series, the entire M.O. is about the jumpscare that’s coming to get you. The problem with this kind of random is that it’s not changing how you play the game, oftentimes, the actual way to play them is very mechanical and repetitive. Even if there is not a 100% fixed way to play, the randomization is often simple enough to figure out repeatable patterns.
The best roguelikes designers and their games explicitly target specific aspects of their games, so that the random or procedural generation can be used to get the most value. It’s not about creating pure chaos but having enough variance on the foundation that can lead to different experiences. There are horror games out there that use procedural generation, but it is of the most basic variety. Simply shuffling where the player needs to go in a fixed or small gamespace is not the randomization that we’re looking for.
For my dream concept, I envision a game where not only the enemy positions are different per playthrough, but so are the actual enemies who will appear. On top of that, game-affecting events will be randomly chosen in order to force the player to adapt on top of trying to survive. As we’ve talked about before, the best roguelikes give the player a basic idea of what to expect and then force them to adapt to the changing situations on each run.
The Perfect Pace
Speaking of “runs,” this is another area where roguelike and horror design should go together. The other problem that horror games have besides keeping the player in the dark is the length of the experience. Horror is very hard to sustain over extended periods of time and there is a limit to how much can be added to prolong it. Throwing in more enemies or required tasks to pad out the playtime doesn’t help to keep the player invested in the game. Also, repeating situations and gameplay loops will become tiresome and stretches out the horror, making it less effective.
Horror pacing requires a careful balance of staying long enough to get the point across, but not too long to get repetitive.
Likewise, the longer a horror game, or series, goes on, the less mysterious everything becomes. You can only repeat the “It’s a strange town where strange things happen” plot so many times before people get bored, or you try to explain why it’s all happening.
Pacing is a problem that I’ve seen in the three latest Resident Evil titles, and a concern I have for RE8. Seven felt that it went on too long for the content that’s there, while 2 and 3 were too short on horror and filled most of its time with combat.
Therefore, roguelike design and pacing fit horror (as well as one example I’ll talk about next). Earlier in 2020, I spoke about my love of the upcoming game World of Horror and how it integrates mystery with horror, adapted to the shortened pace of a roguelike run. A typical play of the game is under an hour, but like any good roguelike, what happens in that hour is different each time you play. Implementing a run-based focus would also help to add length to the playtime of a horror game without impacting the game’s pacing.
Micro Horror
Another option that we have seen lately is the idea of microgames focusing on horror elements. The Dread X Collection series is all about compilations of horror titles from well-known indie developers in the space. Each collection features titles made in a short period built on a specific theme, while the design can be anything.
The quality and design are as widely varied as they can be between the games, but more importantly, the Dread X Collection represents a different avenue for horror design. Focusing on bite-sized plays with unique game design, the games are just long enough to get their point across, without overstaying their welcome or losing the tension of playing them.
Having these as compilations also gets around the challenge of selling just one microgame. By putting together a pack, it allows the consumer to get more value and gives them a greater chance of finding one game they really enjoy from the set.
Figuring out Fighting
For our final point, we turn to one that I have talked about many times over: Horror games must have a way to “fight”. One of the major failings in my opinion of modern-day horror has been removing mechanics in favor of nothing. Many developers, such as Frictional with the Amnesia series, will defend this by saying that combat removes the fear and tension of a horror game.
In a way, they are correct, but it’s not as straightforward as that. The problem with horror titles like Resident Evil, Dead Space, Alan Wake, and other AA/AAA examples, is that the combat becomes a form of padding out the game. You can’t sustain a horror game by just adding more combat; it’s why the idea of an 8 hour plus horror game doesn’t work. Likewise, a horror game can’t work if the interaction is minimized.
If the player can only do one thing while playing (ie. run away) then every situation is about that. Instead of thinking on the fly, the game becomes a case of repeating the same thing over and over, which can kill the sense of horror. Combat in a horror game should not be mindless, but tactical. The player should feel that there is an obvious give and take in engaging with enemies. The point isn’t to make the player want to fight all the time but adding weight to each experience.
The Dread X Collection’s focus on micro horror is another alternative for horror design.
Combine this with a shorter pace, and I want to see horror adopt a more “visceral” form of combat. It shouldn’t be about the dangers of fighting 100 enemies, but just fighting one. This is often why we remember alpha antagonists like the Xenomorph of Alien Isolation, Mr. X of Resident Evil 2, and of course, Pyramid Head encounters in Silent Hill 2.
An important note, when we talk about fighting in horror games, that doesn’t always mean “to kill.” You can shoot Mr. X as many times as you want and stop him momentarily, but the player cannot kill him until the boss fights. Enemies should not be set to be triggered by the player but be active participants and hunt for them during the play. Again, the goal of all this is to make each run of a game as interesting and different as possible. There should also be ways to interact with the enemies that don’t involve combat.
I’ve lost count of the number of horror games that are all about avoidance, but never give the player any way of distracting enemies.
The Future of Fear
One of these days I should sit down and re-write my design doc for my horror idea, as I’m surprised more developers haven’t gone down this route yet. With the next generation of consoles coming out, it’s time to rethink horror design and combine that with the variety and tension of playing a good roguelike. We need to stop treating horror games as an eight to twenty-hour experience built on the same pool of jumpscares and hiding inside lockers.
There is a middle ground between the passive horror of the indie space, and the action-horror of AAA titles, now we just need to build on it.
If you’re interested in my books on design, Game Design Deep Dive Platformers, and 20 Essential Games to Study are out now. Game Design Deep Dive Roguelikes will be out in early 2021.
If you enjoyed my post, consider joining the Game-Wisdom Discord channel. It’s open to everyone. | https://medium.com/super-jump/what-does-next-generation-horror-design-look-like-873933ca6fc3 | ['Josh Bycer'] | 2020-11-18 09:45:29.287000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Horror', 'UX', 'Game Design', 'Videogames'] |
by Martino Pietropoli | First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-fluxus/friday-afterparty-7ffe2d2f0530 | ['Martino Pietropoli'] | 2018-02-16 01:31:01.639000+00:00 | ['Drawing', 'Friday', 'Portraits', 'Illustration'] |
Ransomware Task Force Created by 19 Companies Including Microsoft, McAfee | Expect a standardized framework for responding to ransomware attacks next year.
By Matthew Humphries
Ransomware attacks are growing in popularity and have the potential to cause major disruption, especially when they hit hospitals or schools. In response, a Ransomware Task Force (RTF) is being created by a 19 companies, including Microsoft and McAfee.
As ZDNet reports, we won’t see the RTF’s presence on the web until January, but its intention is clear. The objective of the RTF is to create “a standardized framework for dealing with ransomware attacks across verticals, one based on an industry consensus rather than individual advice received from lone contractors.” In other words, whenever a ransomware attack is discovered there should be an optimal way of dealing with it, and the RTF intends to figure out what that is.
The 19 companies and organizations signed up to the RTF so far:
Aspen Digital
Citrix
The Cyber Threat Alliance
Cybereason
The CyberPeace Institute
The Cybersecurity Coalition
The Global Cyber Alliance
The Institute for Security and Technology
McAfee
Microsoft
Rapid7
Resilience
SecurityScorecard
Shadowserver Foundation
Stratigos Security
Team Cymru
Third Way
UT Austin Stauss Center
Venable LLP
According to the Institute for Security and Technology, “This crime transcends sectors and requires bringing all affected stakeholders to the table to synthesize a clear framework of actionable solutions, which is why IST and our coalition of partners are launching this Task Force for a two-to-three month sprint.” With that in mind, we should be looking for the first standardized guidance from RTF by April.
Typically, a ransomware attack sees a company scramble to find a security expert who can help, which ultimate means the quality of advice will vary depending on where you are in the world and how much a company is willing to pay for that help. Hopefully, the RTF goes a long way towards rectifying the situation and could result in security companies around the world offering an RTF-endorsed ransomware response service to customers. | https://medium.com/pcmag-access/ransomware-task-force-created-by-19-companies-including-microsoft-mcafee-1fe1aa35fffb | [] | 2020-12-23 19:02:34.746000+00:00 | ['Cybersecurity', 'Ransomware', 'Microsoft', 'Technology'] |
Talking to Python from Javascript: Flask and the fetch API | Creating a Flask app
We start by building a repository containing an empty templates folder and an app.py file.
App.py
Our app.py file contains the data required to create a web interface. To do this we use the flask ( pip install flask ) python library. For this we can use the following template:
######## imports ##########
from flask import Flask, jsonify, request, render_template
app = Flask(__name__) #############################
# Additional code goes here #
############################# ######### run app #########
app.run(debug=True)
Here we start by importing the required functions, the app structure and the run command to start the app.
Index.html
Having defined our flask app, we now need to create a template webpage. This can be done by placing the file index.html within the templates directory.
<body>
<h1> Python Fetch Example</h1>
<p id='embed'>{{embed}}</p> <p id='mylog'/>
<body>
Since we are using this as a template we can use a react-style replacement syntax for certain keywords. In this instance {{embed}} is to be replaced by the embed_example string in the snippet below.
'/')
def home_page():
example_embed='This string is from python'
return render_template('index.html', embed=example_embed) @app .route(def home_page():example_embed='This string is from python'return render_template('index.html', embed=example_embed)
This defines the code which runs when the home page of the flask app is reached and needs to be added between the imports and the app.run() lines within app.py .
Running the app | https://towardsdatascience.com/talking-to-python-from-javascript-flask-and-the-fetch-api-e0ef3573c451 | ['Daniel Ellis'] | 2020-11-13 19:11:09.783000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Fetch', 'Towards Data Science', 'Flask', 'Python'] |
[MSA] Develop Gateway with Express.js | chimurai/http-proxy-middleware
Node.js proxying made simple. Configure proxy middleware with ease for connect, express, browser-sync and many more… | https://medium.com/@whitekiwi/msa-develop-gateway-with-express-js-a1ed0daabce9 | ['Daily Kiwi'] | 2020-12-06 09:37:28.679000+00:00 | ['Microservice Architecture', 'Gateway', 'Msa', 'Expressjs', 'Reverse Proxy'] |
10 Lessons From A Chinese Immigrant Dad | It’s been a year since my dad passed away and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t miss him. It’s hard to not think about him randomly when I experience new things, see what’s going on in the world or when I sit down to have a meal. I was lucky to have my hero with me my entire life. He provided and taught me so much about life over the years that it’s hard to narrow it down to 10 things but here goes:
1. You will always be Chinese and a foreigner in this country. Always remember the importance of your heritage.
My dad always reminded me of this. He felt it was important especially during my formative years when I was under the impression that growing up in America would present me with unlimited opportunities. He never pushed this on me too hard but he made sure I grew up knowing Chinese values, traditions and history, whenever possible. I always remembered these conversations, especially as I grew up and many of his thoughts came true as I navigated through society and life. When you’re young with your entire life ahead of you, you feel invincible and confident that societal differences and challenges will be overcome, but he always made sure I was proud of who I was and where I came from. He also foresaw the challenges I would face as an Asian American adult in American society and prepared me for them. For this I’m extremely grateful.
“The Chinese civilization spans 2,000+ consecutive years. Modern Western history is a blip on that screen. Think about the importance of that.”
I think this is lost on many second generation Asian American kids because they grow up consuming American television, news, cuisine, music, etc. It’s only natural because I felt the same way. But with that said, our childhood was also filled with Chinese cinema, television, music, food, mah jong and card games. My sister and I always enjoyed listening to his stories about growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, how he escaped to Hong Kong, met my mom, immigrated to the America and then established a life for us. It was through these stories and things that I was able to maintain a connection to my Chinese roots and gradually grew to embrace them. Finding your identity is a tough thing growing up in a diverse society where you oftentimes aren’t seen as an equal. Back then, we didn’t have social media or cell phones and all these outlets where you could easily find others like you to connect with, but I had my cousins and family.
In many ways, our family immigrated to America at the perfect time. The economy was growing and there were plenty of opportunities for my dad and relatives. I watched how hard our parents and relatives worked for us to have the future we have now and I guess in many ways, it was leading by example. To this day I respect action more than words as a result. With China’s rise over the past 2 decades, I also gravitated more towards rediscovering Chinese entertainment, food and culture and find it infinitely more interesting than its Western counterparts because of the values and stories I share with them.
It’s been eye opening reading and learning about Chinese history as well over the past year. Growing up in America, they really don’t teach us anything about it in school. My dad would share bits and pieces with my sister and I over the years but we always wished we had more time and more stories. Truth be told, it wasn’t until I got older that I really started to be more interested in the history of where my ancestors came from. I know my dad would be excited to know I’ve taken an interest in this. Moving forward, I’m going to make sure I learn as much as I can about where I came from.
2. Family should always be the most important thing
I have a pretty large extended family and they were all a huge part of my upbringing. We spent many hours together growing up. My dad always seemed to be the one that would help bring my uncles and aunts together because our grandmother lived with us. Holidays always included a house full of relatives and we always looked forward to this. Dinner was always a combination of traditional Chinese dishes with some American dishes sprinkled in. Of course there was always rice because elders can’t get full without rice. In the old country, sometimes you couldn’t afford more expensive meat so rice would get you full at a fraction of the cost. We didn’t know this at the time because we were spoiled, assimilated Chinese American kids, but it really made me understand the sacrifices that our parents had to go through for their kids later on in life.
So many memories over the years. Sometimes good and sometimes bad. In Chinese there are a lot of phrases that equate to blood being thicker than water or the sum of all parts is always stronger than the individual. These were lessons that my dad always taught me and my cousins. We treated each other more like brothers and sisters than cousins, looking out for each other and helping each other when necessary. As we grew up, some of us drifted apart more than others, but as we enter midlife, I’ve made an effort to re-establish many of those connections again.
When we found out my dad was terminal, the whole family showed up to the hospital on a snowy winter night within hours, traveling from near and far. I can’t express how amazing that feeling was as each and every one of my relatives showed up to support my mom and I that night. I take it for granted that family will just do that, but I know this isn’t the case for many families. It’s something I’ll treasure for the rest of my days and the example that I want to follow.
3. If you make a dollar, save 50 cents
Growing up, I remember we lived very frugally. My parents spent money on the important stuff like a house, but we always ate at home, didn’t drive the fanciest cars, didn’t have the nicest clothes or sneakers.
“Get a white collar job, live like you’re blue collar.”
That’s essentially what I took from this. I’ll have to admit this was a hard one for me when I was fresh out of college. I had gotten trapped in the wonderful Western credit card lifestyle and was spending way more than I was making at the time. Thankfully a good friend of mine set me straight and I was able to get back on track again. Of course you aren’t always able to save that much, but the general concept of not spending above your means should always be prevalent. This includes delaying gratification and being responsible with your money. I’ll say this. Having a competitive personality helps too because once you embrace this thought and challenge yourself, you’ll want to cut whatever unnecessary expenses you have. I like to win and I also like money, not because of what it can buy me, but for the freedom it allows me to have. If I want to walk out on a job because of a shitty work environment, I can do that. No questions asked. That is empowering.
Of course simply saving money won’t make you rich. My dad was always looking for ways to invest as well. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn’t but he instilled in me the mindset to always be looking for those types of opportunities whether it’s in the stock market or real estate. You have to have an end goal in order to have the motivation to get up and do something about it, a purpose. The reality is that I love making money more than I enjoy spending it. That’s the mindset he wanted me to have. You just don’t want to lose yourself in the process and be satisfied with what you have.
4. Always be learning and seeking knowledge
This one was drilled into me at an early age by example. My dad was always interested in a variety of things including reading, cooking, investing, history, fixing things around the house whenever he had the chance. He was always curious about learning even if he wasn’t necessarily interested in the topic. I can’t remember how many times I tried to explain the basic rules of baseball or football to him. I don’t think he ever really cared, but he still listened to me explain it and would sit down next to me and try to watch it.
I’m sure it helped me to train myself to be open minded and listen even if I didn’t necessarily agree with what people or friends would say to me later on in life. It made me challenge every comment and do my own research and develop critical thinking skills. It taught me that the process of learning itself requires curiosity, discipline and practice to perfect.
5. Nothing is ever truly black or white. There’s always a grey area if you look closely.
I remember one of the things my dad always said when I was growing up was that there was a clear difference between how people growing up in America viewed things vs. how how people that grew up in Asia did. There is a very naive, simplified version of how the average American look at things. Part of this is because of how the media portrayed things, but the other part is hubris.
When you are from an uber competitive society like Asia where it’s dog eat dog all the time, you have to learn quickly how to see through the bullshit, identify it, figure out what the real situation is and decide how to process the information or proceed.
You can see that with the advent of social media how polarized society has become. The truth is never right in front of you unfortunately and you have to learn how to figure it out because there are reasons certain narratives are pushed. America is also very good at presenting distractions. So when you mix that in, it’s easy for people to not question what they’re told, accept things as reality and never take a closer look at the facts.
I never really thought much about this as I thought it was annoying that my dad would sometimes make fun of ABCs (American Born Chinese) when I was growing up. I’d oftentimes respond back defiantly with how things are different here in America because of the ideals of our Founding Fathers and the basis on which this country was formed. But as I grew older and saw things such as the bamboo ceiling and how Asians were seen as worker bees not fit for leadership or how certain communities were perpetually held down because of systemic reasons, I realized the truth in his words.
6. Be cheap with yourself, but not with your friends.
My dad was always very generous with his friends even when we didn’t have much. He would always offer to pay whenever we ate out with family friends or acquaintances. I remember I used to get mad that we would spend money on others but not on Nike sneakers for myself.
He would say that if you have the means to take care of your relatives you should and being generous with others would one day pay dividends when you need it. As a kid, I would just get annoyed that I didn’t get nice stuff. But when I saw how some of his friends helped him in his times of need over the years, it made me realize how important this was.
Investing in relationships is important. You shouldn’t always expect something back from someone but you never know who will remember what you did for them one day when you need help.
7. Sometimes you will get the short end of the stick. Don’t let that stop you from being the person you are meant to be.
Life can be frustrating and sometimes you can prepare and do everything right and still fail. Being able to stand back up and move forward was something that my dad always encouraged me to do.
Apparently in the year before my dad married my mom, he lost all his savings in the stock market. He had to hustle odd jobs in order to make back the money. He was eventually able to do this but it was definitely a stressful time for him.
When I was laid off towards the end of 2008 during the recession, I spent months and months trying to find a new job with no luck and was getting stressed out and irritable. I felt like I was letting him and myself down. I remember one night he called me up and told me to relax, that he had thought about some options for me (things that I hadn’t really thought of), said a change of scenery might make sense and encouraged me to think about them. He always had this intuitive ability to analyze a situation, remove emotions from it and be able to come up with potential solutions. As a result of that conversation, I ended up moving across the country to Los Angeles, eventually found a job here, weathered the storm and found myself again. That simple 15 minute conversation opened up possibilities that I hadn’t even thought about, gave me a reset and the confidence to move forward.
8. Sometimes confrontation is necessary
Standing up to people requires courage and justification. You can’t just lose it without reason, but sometimes you need to in order to get your point across.
I remember my dad would always stand up for us against outsiders without question, even if we were wrong. He would scold me afterwards of course, but his first instinct was always to protect his family first.
One time I was driving with my parents in the car and got impatient with a driver in front of us so I went around and cut him off. While passing him, I flipped him off. This driver chased us down and cut us off and got out of the car to give me a piece of his mind. My dad immediately defended my aggressive driving while I was speechless, in shock. He knew I was wrong but still spoke up on my behalf. Then he yelled the shit out of me at home. But he didn’t back down when his family was being threatened.
He didn’t always agree with his siblings. If he felt they were wrong, he’d make sure they knew he wasn’t in agreement but he didn’t dwell on it.
Over the years, he dealt with racism. He would not let people talk down to Chinese people if he heard something derogatory being said. He’d stand up against that.
In life you have to pick and choose your battles, but you have to fight when you need to fight.
9. Be serious when you need to be, but laugh when you should
By all accounts, my dad was a serious man. He was stern with his kids and always had an opinion about how we should spend our free time, what we should study or how late we could stay out. He was honest with his friends when they asked him for his business advice, was always thinking about how to provide for his family and preferred to watch the news over television series.
But he also had a softer side, was great with children, was a good cook (ok maybe he just knew how to make a few good dishes, but they were real good) and had a big, boisterious laugh. He taught us not to take ourselves too seriously, be humble and enjoy the little things in life.
He instilled in us a very well rounded, logical and even-keeled approach to living life and dealing with its ups and downs. You can have emotions but you don’t need to make emotional decisions. This helped us look at the world from a mature point of view at an early age.
10. Learn to be independent so you can stand on your own
My dad was very self reliant. He was always curious about how things worked and would take things apart if they were broken to see if he could figure out how to fix them. Part of this was because he wanted to save money but I think he saw it as a challenge as well.
From a young age, it instilled a sense of curiosity in me that made me want to push harder and look deeper at everything. It taught me to always have a plan, anticipate the unexpected and have a backup ready. This became second nature over time and part of the process by which I tackle situations and things in life. | https://medium.com/@adamcheung/10-lessons-from-a-chinese-immigrant-dad-c4f7696dbd53 | ['Adam Cheung'] | 2020-02-28 18:44:27.558000+00:00 | ['Immigrants', 'Asian American', 'Chinese', 'Life Lessons', 'Immigrant Stories'] |
On Loop | Thought 1: “My chest feels oddly heavy today.”
Thought 2: “Could it be an acid reflux? Muscle ache? Or..Or..Or…. a heart attack?!”
Thought 77,882: “I am unable to smell my perfume!! And I also coughed a bit, could it be…..?”
Thought ‘I have lost the count, but it’s probably midnight by now’ : “XYZ also said I looked paler than usual, while ABC mentioned my weight. I definitely have something wrong going on.”
Above narrated is a preview of overthought thoughts practically leading nowhere yet generating tons of unnecessary panic in the thinker. More often than not; such thought loops begin gradually and then reach a pinnacle of confusion, indecisiveness and desperation, only to synergistically create more loops.
Overthinking is quite literally an art of creating problems that weren’t even there. So it’s basically 9 pm Republic TV version of Arnab, except overthinking strikes a debate 24/7 and nobody; much less the nation, cares about it.
Shakespeare’s very own Hamlet’s tragic flaw was procrastination, cynicism and indecisive thoughtfulness; which ultimately led to deaths of most characters. Likewise, fictional characters such as This Is Us’s Randall Pearson, The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen, Bojack Horseman, Monica Geller, even Ginny Weasley (refer Chamber of Secrets) are frank examples who displayed traits of destructive overthinking and obsessive thought processes.
Frequently chronic overthinking is related with various psychological disorders, but isn’t exactly an explicit symptom. Hence on the outside the person may appear as normal as when Kanye is with Kim, except on the inside, it’s just Kanye and his twitter account. Yet the demarcating factor is consciousness of how deep you have fallen into the overthinking abyss and how much you can cope out of it.
Here’s my two cents along with 5 tricks and tips to unloop:
Avoid expecting perfection
(Except if you are Beyonce)
The concept of perfection is subjective, therefore it is impossible/impractical to wait and wait and wait for a perfect outcome no matter how much thought process one puts in. Also, in pursuit of perfection, mulling over a plethora of “What-ifs” and “Should haves” could be the Tadka to your overthought Dal.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” — Voltaire.
Recognizing this basic truth can help you unloop for the time being and move on.
Let go
Let go of legit most of your views about fear and anything-everything associated with it. The burden of fear is commonly linked with similar situations and memories of past experiences. No doubt, analyzing congruent experiences of past could help make a better decision in present but there’s only a thin line between analyzing and overthinking.
Fearing constantly about what could go wrong may escort us towards paralysis by analysis; meaning you become so afraid to take the wrong decision that you end up taking no decision at all. This might cloud your judgment as well. Hence, to unwind and unloop, imagine having a mental STOP sign that frees you from over analyzing.
If you are aware about it, you are already improving
Awareness about your habit of overthinking; especially about the mindless kind, is a massive step towards its cessation. Just step back or try to hold a broader perspective for those nagging thoughts. Analyze your response and emotions in accordance with your thoughts and then try to address it by changing thoughts and mindset.
Whether you are making a mountain out of a molehill or fussing big time only to create tiny results, your consciousness about your own overthinking is vital.
Doesn’t Matter In five years/months/weeks/days from now? Not worth pondering over. AT ALL!
This one’s the commonest paradigm to follow AND to master in order to unloop. Overthinking generates mental pressure which ultimately results in excessive stress and anxiety. Though a harmless activity, ideally sitting and accessing same hypothetical scenes, past events and conversations only multiplies your loop.
Indulging in alternative activities such as meditation, exercise, painting, sports, taking a walk, learning an instrument or any simple distraction (Michelle Morrone’s IG) might prevent you from succumbing to loops.
Plan Your Stress
Yep, plan your stress. Waking up anticipating stress and pressure will set a sour tone to your day. Instead, allow yourself a specific time alongwith a time limit to stress over a particular issue and arrive to a conclusion. For example, you could put a 5 minute timer for small decisions and as soon as the time is up, you are no longer obligated to ponder over it and can move to the next task.
Apart from planning, minimizing your daily input of information also cushions your unlooping and declutters extra mental baggage. Loading only small chunks of information in segments throughout the day alleviates the loop. So lining up a plan with moderate info consumption could help clear up mental space.
Lastly, to conclude, try and control your loop the next time you catch yourself overthinking. Controlling your own stream of thoughts creates a far better mental picture than the ones thought absentmindedly.
Also, I’d love to know what works best for you to unloop! Leave a comment down below!
Thank you for reading! :) | https://medium.com/@penandpegasi/on-loop-970bb0ea692a | ['Mahima Trivedi'] | 2020-12-26 18:29:26.028000+00:00 | ['Overthinking Tips', 'Blog', 'Overthinking', 'Philosophy', 'Self Help'] |
“The price of bitcoin is close to zero” Kenneth Rogoff / former chief IMF economist | Professor at Harvard University predicts the collapse of cryptocurrency trading.
For some, the cryptocurrencies have a reputation as obscure as a black hole. For others, on the other hand, it is the intangible gold of our times. Nevertheless, there will always be analysts blind to its glitter. One of them is Kenneth Rogoff (New York, 1953), professor at Harvard University and former chief economist at IMF (2001–2003). His voice anticipates the collapse of the bitcoin price — the star amongst the cybercurrencies that currently trades at over USD 8,000 per unit.
Question: Is bitcoin the greatest financial bubble on Earth?
Reply: The price of anonymous cryptocurrencies such as the bitcoin is probably close to zero in the long term. There exists, however, a real potential for those currencies that are traceable and intend to compete with debit and credit cards. But the state regulation will have a considerable impact on the process of identifying winners and losers.
Q. So will the governments create their own digital currencies?
R. In the next 20 years most of the governments will probably offer their citizens digital currencies. The physical money will continue to exist, but only in small denominations. Think $20 notes or smaller. Besides, the tangible money will continue to play its role because it is more suitable for some transactions and provides for privacy.
Q. What does the future hold for the cryptocurrencies?
R. If one analyses the long history of currencies, the usual dynamics is that the private sector is the first to innovate, but at some point, the governmental regulation comes into play They cannot allow anonymous cryptocurrencies on big scale, since it will greatly obstruct the tax collection and abiding by laws and regulations. It is impossible for administrations to stop the people from trading with them completely, but they can indeed make it virtually impossible to use them with merchants, in commerce or bank transactions. If it is not easy to use for acquisition of some common things, its value is very limited. Besides, different governments need to control their own currencies in order to confront financial crises, wars and pandemics.
Q. Can these currencies destabilize the western economies?
R. Absolutely not. The governments have sufficient mechanisms to deal with it. Currently they lag behind in the technological race. Mind you, although the cryptocurrencies face a modest future, the blockchain technology does offer the possibilities of better security and will probably be adopted by a wide variety of platforms.
Q. Some countries seem to welcome the new currencies. Japan, for example has opened its doors to bitcoin. What are the consequences?
R. What Japan did is untenable. They think that by transforming the bitcoin into a legally trading currency, they can turn into the fintech [enterprises that use technology to offer financial services] centre and avoid its slow decline in competition with China. But they will most likely turn into the world leader in money laundering. Switzerland of fintechs. I think that other nations will force Japan to abandon this idea.
The original interview appeared in the Spanish press “El Pais” on 26/11/2017 | https://medium.com/isbi/the-price-of-bitcoin-is-close-to-zero-kenneth-rogoff-former-chief-imf-economist-2627c765e348 | ['Isbi', 'Strathmore Business School'] | 2017-12-04 10:30:42.568000+00:00 | ['Business Training', 'Finance', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Article', 'Bitcoin'] |
The award has found its winner! | Or better said, the award has reached its winner!
The festival called NAFF (Neum Animated Film Festival), which takes place annually in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has awarded the animated film “Dji. Death Fails”.
Franky speaking, it was a long time ago, in July 2014. And the prize was awarded for the best soundtrack. So, we give special thanks to those, who have worked on it:
Music theme — Gogol Bordello, and the sound design — Alexander Bulgarov and Yuri Scutaru.
Finally the reward has reached us! The post offices are still working.
tigan.md | https://medium.com/simpals-studio/the-award-has-found-its-winner-19aa6a3ea386 | [] | 2017-09-15 08:41:28.299000+00:00 | ['3d', 'Festivals', 'Animation', 'Cartoon', 'Storytelling'] |
LIVESTREAM] 49ers vs Cardinals Live Stream 2021 — San Francisco 49ers vs Arizona Cardinals Live >> 2021 | Live Now:: https://tinyurl.com/y9u6rltu
Live Now:: https://tinyurl.com/y9u6rltu
49ers vs Cardinals Live Stream Online Free Watch Reddit Online Free Tv Channel 2020 Saturday night Football, Dec. 27 · Cleveland Browns at New York Jets — 1 p.m. ET · New York Giants at Baltimore Ravens — 1 p.m. ET · Indianapolis Colts
TEMPE, Ariz. — Saturday’s Arizona Cardinals-San Francisco 49ers game at State Farm Stadium will be streamed exclusively on Amazon Prime and Twitch both nationally and internationally instead of being broadcast on TV.
The game, which kicks off at 4:30 p.m. ET, will also be televised in each team’s local markets. It will be on KSAZ in Phoenix and on KNTV in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The game will be available to more than 150 million of Prime’s subscribers in more than 240 countries around the world.
Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury wasn’t aware the game would be streamed.
“But that’s just kind of the deal these days, apparently,” Kingsbury said. “I don’t really know how it will affect me except fewer people probably getting a chance to check it out.”
Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray didn’t know much about the streaming set up.
If people want to watch it they’re going to have to stream it,” he said. “Other than that, I just know we play on Saturday. I’ll be there and I can’t wait.”
The game will have four sets of broadcasters calling the game, including a scout’s feed and a Spanish language feed.
The NFL chose to stream the game through Amazon Prime and Twitch because of the unique reach of both platforms — allowing the league to expose its product to as many people internationally as possible.
The NFL will take a close look at how many people stream the game and where they’re from, said Kevin LaForce, the NFL’s senior vice president for media strategy and business development, as the league tries to learn about the usage habits of its international fan base.
“The Prime subscriber base is pretty big,” LaForce said. “And, so, the reach situation or the reach consideration for us is still one that’s really important. Broadcast television has served us well and continues to do so, but Amazon is starting to achieve these numbers globally, that hopefully can help us do what we want to do, which is reach fans with our games and develop new fans who grow up loving football.”
By putting the game on Twitch, a service that focuses on live streaming video games, the NFL hopes to tap into a new market.
“There’s different audiences in a lot of ways that may not otherwise be tuning in on Twitch, in particular younger audiences,” LaForce said. “We really are trying to innovate how people consume the game, things like interactivity. They have an X-ray feature that creates some interactive elements, which is really important to us.
Saturday, 4:30 p.m. ET | Amazon Prime
Matchup rating: 66.6 | Spread: ARI -5.0 (48.5)
What to watch for: The Cardinals are averaging seven sacks per game the past two weeks and that number isn’t expected to be lower Saturday against the 49ers — especially with the inexperienced C.J. Beathard behind center. Niners quarterbacks have been sacked 33 times this season. Look for another sack party from the Cardinals, especially from edge rusher Haason Reddick. — Josh Weinfuss
Bold prediction: DeAndre Hopkins finishes with 10-plus catches and 100-plus yards for the second time against the 49ers this season. Hopkins had 14 catches for 151 yards in Week 1, and while those are gaudy numbers, it wouldn’t surprise if Hopkins approached or surpassed them again this time. The Niners have allowed five wideouts to go for 100-plus receiving yards this season and Hopkins adds another to the tally. — Nick Wagoner
Stat to know: Hopkins leads the NFL in receiving yards. No veteran player (i.e. non-rookie) since the 1970 merger has led the NFL in receiving yards in his first season with a team. Hopkins can become the first since Harold Jackson in 1969 for the Eagles.
Playoff/draft picture: The Cardinals clinch a playoff berth with a win and a Bears loss. They haven’t made the playoffs since 2015, when they lost in the NFC Championship Game. The 49ers are eliminated from the playoffs, and they are projected to have the №12 pick, according to FPI, which gives them a 37.9% chance to pick in the top 10.
Injuries: 49ers | Cardinals
What to know for fantasy: Hopkins had two more catches than all of his teammates in the Week 1 meeting with San Francisco, catching 87.5% of his targets in the process (all other Cardinals: 57.1%). See Week 16 rankings.
Betting nugget: Since 2015, Arizona is 9–17 ATS as a home favorite (2–4 ATS since drafting Kyler Murray). Read more.
Wagoner’s pick: Cardinals 27, 49ers 20
Weinfuss’ pick: Cardinals 37, 49ers 24
FPI prediction: ARI, 52.5% (by an average of 0.9 points)
The Arizona Cardinals are on the verge of making the NFC playoffs, needing just a win and a Chicago Bears loss to clinch their first playoff berth in five years. Arizona has the opportunity to put all the pressure on Chicago Saturday, squaring off against the San Francisco 49ers — eliminated from postseason contention a year after capturing the NFC title. The Cardinals have won nine of their last 11 meetings against the 49ers, including their Week 1 thriller that set the tone for the changing of the guard in the NFC West.
The Cardinals are 3.5-point favorites to beat the 49ers, according to William Hill Sportsbook, with the over/under set at 49 points. Both teams are 7–7 against the spread and 5–9 on the over/under this season. Click here to see who are CBS Sports NFL experts picked to win and cover this game and the other Week 16 matchups.
Can the Cardinals put pressure on the Bears by beating the 49ers? We’ll find out soon, but here’s a preview of Saturday’s NFL West showdown.
How to watch
Date: Saturday, Dec. 26 | Time: 4:30 p.m. ET
Location: State Farm Stadium (Glendale, Arizona)
TV: None | Stream: Amazon Prime
Follow: CBS Sports App
Prediction
Despite concerns over a shoulder injury, Kyler Murray has been getting hot at the right time. Murray has 22 passing touchdowns and six interceptions over his past 10 games, and he’s rushed for 554 yards and seven touchdowns in that span. Murray led DeAndre Hopkins to a season-high 169 receiving yards in a Week 15 win over the Eagles, which will be huge heading into this game. Hopkins has had at least 10 catches and 100 receiving yards in each of his last two meetings against the 49ers, which will be needed against a top-five passing defense.
The 49ers have turned the ball over at least two times in eight straight games, the NFL’s longest active streak. Their 29 turnovers rank second in the NFL, which is less than ideal against a Cardinals defense that has 14 sacks over their last two games — the most they have had in consecutive games in a single season since the final two games of the 1983 season when they had 17 sacks. San Francisco is in the bottom half of the NFL in sacks allowed with 33, which might allow the Cardinals pass rush to feast again.
The Cardinals have everything to play for while the 49ers are just playing out the string. George Kittle’s return will make a difference, but Arizona has enough riding on the line to avoid the upset.
The 49ers vs. Cardinals game will make history on Saturday, Dec. 26.
When San Francisco (5–9) and Arizona (8–6) kick off at 4:30 p.m. ET, it’ll be the first national NFL broadcast to take place exclusively on Amazon Prime Video and Twitch. There will be no traditional television broadcast on a classic channel, but instead a stream-only broadcast. Thanks to free trials discussed below, this game should be available to anyone who wants to watch it, albeit in a slightly different way than usual.
An important note before we get into more details: 49ers vs. Cardinals will be available for local broadcast in the teams’ home markets. In San Francisco, the game can be seen on NBC affiliate KNTV, while in Arizona, it’ll be on local Fox affiliate KSAZ. (In those markets, those channels can also be streamed via fuboTV, which offers a 7-day free trial.)
Below, you’ll find more information about how the rest of the country can enjoy Kyler Murray’s continued rise to superstardom and chase of the NFC’s №7 playoff seed in Week 17.
How to watch the NFL on Amazon Prime
49ers vs. Cardinals in Week 16 is available exclusively on Amazon Prime Video and Twitch. Prime Video is available to any subscriber to Amazon Prime. If you’re already a subscriber, watching the 49ers vs. Cardinals game is as simple as going to this link and accessing the game.
For those not already subscribed to Amazon Prime, you’re in luck: Amazon is currently offering a 30-day free trial, accessible at this link. It will require you to enter payment information, but it can be canceled at anytime. The sign-up screen will also present an option for a student discount, which you only need a .edu email to take advantage of.
Once you’re signed up, Amazon Prime Video can be streamed on most devices, including a computer, phone, tablet, gaming console or compatible TV.
49ers vs. Cardinals live stream
In addition to watching 49ers vs. Cardinals on Amazon Prime Video, it can also be accessed via Twitch and Yahoo streams.
Twitch, often used for video-game streaming, will show the game on its platform at this link and also at this link. The second link is the Move The Sticks channel on Twitch, a football scouting community that should have a chat attached with more focused football-heavy discussion.
NFL games have been available all season long via the Yahoo app. More information on that service can be found here.
In Canada, the 49ers vs. Cardinals game can be viewed on DAZN, which streams every regular-season and playoff game of the 2020 season.
What time does 49ers vs. Cardinals start?
Date: Saturday, Dec. 26
Kickoff time: 4:30 p.m. ET
49ers vs. Cardinals is the middle of three games on Saturday, Dec. 26, and it will kick off at 4:30 p.m. ET. That’s just five minutes later than the usual Sunday late-afternoon marquee time of 4:25 p.m. ET.
That’ll of course be a different local time kickoff in Arizona, where the game will start at 2:30 p.m. local time. Fans in San Francisco will have to tune in at 1:30 p.m. local time.
What NFL games are on Saturday?
A week after having two games on Saturday, the NFL has come back with a tripleheader to conclude its regular-season Saturday programming. Buccaneers vs. Lions gets things started at 1 p.m. ET, followed by 49ers vs. Cardinals at 4:30 p.m. ET and capped off with Dolphins vs. Raiders at 8:15 p.m. ET.
AFC
CLINCHED:
Buffalo Bills — AFC East division title
Kansas City Chiefs — AFC West division title
Pittsburgh Steelers — playoff berth
CLEVELAND BROWNS (10–4) (at New York Jets (1–13), Sunday, 1:00 PM ET, CBS)
Cleveland clinches playoff berth with:
1. CLE win + BAL loss or tie OR
2. CLE win + MIA loss or tie OR
3. CLE win + IND loss OR
4. CLE tie + BAL loss OR
5. CLE tie + MIA loss
INDIANAPOLIS COLTS (10–4) (at Pittsburgh (11–3), Sunday, 1:00 PM ET, CBS)
Indianapolis clinches playoff berth with:
1. IND win + BAL loss or tie OR
2. IND win + MIA loss or tie OR
3. IND tie + BAL loss OR
4. IND tie + MIA loss
KANSAS CITY CHIEFS (13–1) (vs. Atlanta (4–10), Sunday, 1:00 PM ET, FOX)
Kansas City clinches the first-round bye with:
1. KC win or tie OR
2. PIT loss or tie OR
3. BUF loss or tie OR
4. KC clinches strength of victory tiebreaker over PIT or BUF AND clinches at least a tie in strength of victory tiebreaker over the other club
PITTSBURGH STEELERS (11–3) (vs. Indianapolis (10–4), Sunday, 1:00 PM ET, CBS)
Pittsburgh clinches AFC North division title with:
1. PIT win OR
2. CLE loss OR
3. PIT tie + CLE tie
TENNESSEE TITANS (10–4) (at Green Bay (11–3), Sunday night, 8:20 PM ET, NBC)
Tennessee clinches AFC South division title with:
1. TEN win + IND loss
Tennessee clinches playoff berth with:
1. TEN win OR
2. MIA loss OR
3. BAL loss OR
4. TEN tie + BAL tie
NFC
CLINCHED:
Green Bay Packers — NFC North division title
New Orleans Saints — playoff berth
Seattle Seahawks — playoff berth
ARIZONA CARDINALS (8–6) (vs. San Francisco (5–9), Saturday, 4:30 PM ET, Amazon)
Arizona clinches playoff berth with:
1. ARI win + CHI loss or tie OR
2. ARI tie + CHI loss
GREEN BAY PACKERS (11–3) (vs. Tennessee (10–4), Sunday night, 8:20 PM ET, NBC)
Green Bay clinches the first-round bye with:
1. GB win + SEA loss or tie OR
2. GB tie + NO loss or tie + SEA loss or tie, as long as both NO and SEA don’t tie
LOS ANGELES RAMS (9–5) (at Seattle (10–4), Sunday, 4:25 PM ET, FOX)
Los Angeles clinches playoff berth with:
1. LAR win or tie OR
2. CHI loss or tie OR | https://medium.com/@firstresponderbowl2020/official-livestream-49ers-vs-cardinals-live-stream-2021-san-francisco-49ers-vs-arizona-a6c427326d98 | [] | 2020-12-26 18:08:33.708000+00:00 | ['NFL', 'Cardinals', '49ers Vs Cardinals', 'Social Media', '49ers'] |
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Putting ourselves in each other’s shoes: Shared discovery as a pathway to empathy | When I was in graduate school, I conducted cooperative fisheries research at the University of Maine (go… Black Bears? I want to say? Sorry, not a sports person but sincere shout out to the University of Maine and the Darling Marine Center!). That is, I collaborated with a commercial ground fisherman to study the impacts of trawling on bottom habitats in the Gulf of Maine. Along with my advisor, we all worked to design the methods of the study. Part of that was identifying sampling sites that would allow us to compare currently trawled areas to places that had been closed to trawling for a good five years. This would help us explore both potential impacts and recovery dynamics.
Story about our collaborative work to better understand the impacts of trawling in the Gulf of Maine.
Then, once the work got underway, I traveled south to Portland where his fishing boat was based and spent nearly every week of the summer at sea — collecting sediments samples and video footage to understand who lived both in the sediments and on top. Once the fisherman asked me, “How could we even know if trawling has any kind of impact on the bottom?” I answered, “That depends on the bottom type (muddy, rocky, mixed rock and mud etc.) and frequency and intensity of the trawling.” I also explained, “There have been other studies that give us a glimpse of what we could expect, and a foundation of knowledge and theory in the science of disturbance and recovery.” He looked at me blankly, “Well how do you know if any of that is right? Maybe we just don’t know.”
Me in grad school, out on the fishing boat sifting through sediment samples.
In ocean science, the “we just don’t know” answer can be quite powerful. Sampling and monitoring in the ocean is costly and logistically difficult, often leaving us data poor in trying to figure out ecosystem-level questions or isolating what is contributing to or detracting from ecosystem health. Natural variability alone without even considering climate-driven changes can be tough to account for.
But it’s much more than that. Looking back on that interaction, it’s like we were calling to each other from two different worlds of understanding. Both of us looking at the same thing, but from two contrasting contexts that had shaped more than our knowledge about the ocean, but our beliefs about it. Look, facts are unimpeachable. But beliefs around how facts are generated are not. And that complicates things because facts can come via many pathways.
My research partner, Cameron McLellan, a fifth generation fisherman from Maine.
I realize now the pathway I trust is science. I did then, I do now. I said in my first post that science is about learning how the world — ecosystems, habitats, communities, and animals (us included) — works and interacts. To build on that, science is a system of processes and networks by which we continually construct that vast body of knowledge. Journals to which we contribute manuscripts. Quality control via peer review of methods, results, and application of our findings. Scientific conferences for us to discuss and debate, and much more. Put it all together and it’s a constellation of researchers all over the world producing and reproducing studies, looking at any given research question through a kaleidoscope of scientific fields and methodologies.
The world I as a young scientist at the time was being trained in was one built on the shoulders of others I didn’t necessarily know, publishing the papers I read and the text books I studied. That to me was comforting. But for him it was different. His world of knowledge was far more intimate. Built by family, generations of fathers passing knowledge of fishing and the ocean they fished down to sons through stories and shear personal experiences that put their lives at risk. He used to say (and he’s not the first or only fisherman to say) he knew the Gulf of Maine like the back of his hand. Rather, I saw it as alien. He was at home, while I was in a new mysterious place. Looking at that same patch of ocean, we each loved and valued it, interacted with it, and ultimately understood it from different directions.
Both perspectives have their flaws and blind spots. But both are also discipline driven and highly rigorous, just towards different ends. They each provide answers and insights that complement each other more often than not. Recently, I read a column perspective by Runnebaum et al. (2019) that explored how non-scientist stakeholders — in this case commercial harvesters, processors, aquaculturists, and town managers — evaluate the credibility of scientific information. They identified three attributes: Communication, relationships, and relatability.
Achieving those attributes requires trust. Trust matters much more than the usual ways we scientists evaluate credibility. It is not degrees or number of publications in high-impact journals. And on the fishing side, it’s not the number of days at sea associated with one’s permit or amount of quota share. Building trust starts with walking a mile in each other’s shoes. It is empathy, and one’s pathway to empathy. That last part will be unique to you. Find it. Be present. Listen. Engage. It is worth the effort. Then the rigor of our collective knowledge is not only appreciated, it becomes part of a rich gathering place upon which we can build understanding of our world together.
These days I mostly work in an office. No more spending summers at sea on a fishing boat or participating in fall oceanographic cruises. While I love what I do now, I miss it. But more than that, I know what I’m missing. It’s now a gap in my own knowledge and experience of the ocean that reminds me of how much I don’t know. And how much we need each other.
Reference
Runnebaum, J.M., Maxwell, E.A., Stoll, J.S., Pianka, K.E., and Oppenheim, N.E. 2019. Communication, Relationships, and Relatability Influence Stakeholder Perceptions of Credible Science. Fisheries Magazine 44(4), https://doi.org/10.1002/fsh.10214. | https://medium.com/@emilypknight/putting-ourselves-in-each-others-shoes-shared-discovery-as-a-pathway-to-empathy-1f3c19f59f7 | ['Emily Knight'] | 2019-10-29 18:04:21.581000+00:00 | ['Ocean Science', 'Oceans', 'Fishing', 'Climate Change', 'Science'] |
【精選威脅情資 #2】針對健康醫療產業與公共衛生部門的勒索軟體行動 | 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/cycraft/threat-intelligence-news-2-37b4c4932902 | ['奧義智慧 Cycraft Ai'] | 2020-12-17 06:56:23.370000+00:00 | ['Ransomware', 'Public Health', 'Cycraft', 'Healthcare', 'Threat Intelligence'] |
Secure, Efficient Docker-in-Docker with Nestybox | Docker containers are great at running application micro-services. But can you run Docker itself inside a Docker container? And can you do so securely?
This article describes Docker-in-Docker, the use cases for it, pros & cons of existing solutions, and how Nestybox has developed a new solution that allows you to run Docker-in-Docker securely and efficiently, without using privileged containers.
Docker users (e.g., app developers, QA engineers, and DevOps) will find this article useful.
TL;DR
If you want to see how easy it is to deploy Docker-in-Docker securely using a Nestybox system container, check this screencast (best viewed on a big screen):
In the rest of the article, we explain what Docker-in-Docker is, when it’s useful, some current problems with it, and how Nestybox has developed a solution that solves these problems.
If you want a quick summary, go to the end of this article.
What is Docker-in-Docker?
Docker-in-Docker is just what it says: running Docker inside a Docker container. It implies that the Docker instance inside the container would be able to build and run containers.
Use Cases
So when would running Docker-in-Docker be useful? Turns out there are several valid scenarios.
DinD in CI pipelines is the most common use case. It shows up when a Docker container is tasked with building or running Docker containers. For example, in a Jenkins pipeline, the Jenkins agent may be a Docker container tasked with running other Docker containers. This requires Docker-in-Docker.
But CI is not the only use case. Another common use case is software developers that want to play around with Docker containers in a sandbox environment, isolated from their host environment where they do real work.
Yet another use case is a system admin on a shared host that wants to allow users on the host to deploy Docker containers. Currently, this requires giving users the equivalent of “root” privileges on the system (e.g., by adding users to the “docker” group), which is not acceptable from a security perspective. In this case, giving each user an isolated environment inside of which they can deploy their own Docker containers in total isolation from the rest of the host would be ideal.
For all of the above, Docker-in-Docker is a great solution as it provides a lighter-weight, easier-to-use alternative to a virtual machine (VM).
DinD and DooD
Currently, there are two well-known options to run Docker inside a container:
Running the Docker daemon inside a container (DinD).
Running only the Docker CLI in a container, and connecting it to the Docker daemon on the host. This approach has been nicknamed Docker-out-of-Docker (DooD).
I’ll briefly describe each of these approaches and their respective benefits and drawbacks.
I will then describe how Nestybox offers a solution that overcomes the current shortcomings of both of these.
DinD
In the DinD approach, the Docker daemon runs inside a container and any containers it creates exist inside said container (i.e., inner containers are “nested” inside the outer container). The figure below illustrates this.
DinD has gotten a bad rap in the past, not because the use cases for it are invalid but rather due to technical problems in getting it to work. This blog article by Jérôme Petazzoni (until recently a developer at Docker) describes some of these problems and even recommends that Docker-in-Docker be avoided.
But things have improved since that blog was written (back in 2015). In fact, Docker (the company) officially supports DinD and maintains a DinD container image.
But there’s a catch, however: running Docker’s DinD image requires that the outer container be configured as a “privileged” container, as shown in the figure above.
Running a privileged container is risky at best. It’s equivalent to giving the container root access to your machine (i.e., it has full privileges, access to all host devices, access to all kernel settings, etc.) For example, from within a privileged container, you can easily reboot the host (!) with:
$ echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq && echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
Because of this, running privileged containers should be avoided in general (for the same reason you wouldn’t log in as root in your host for your daily work). It’s a non-starter in systems where the workloads running inside the container are untrusted.
Another problem with this solution is that it leads to Docker “volume sprawl”. Each time a DinD container is created, Docker implicitly creates a volume in the host to store the inner Docker images. When the container is destroyed, the volume remains, wasting storage in the host.
There is plenty of pain out there with Docker’s DinD solution, especially in CI/CD use cases. The need for privileged containers is causing heartburn.
As explained later, however, Nestybox has now developed a solution that allows running DinD efficiently and without using privileged containers, and one that overcomes the inner Docker image cache problems as well as others.
DooD
Due to the problems with DinD, an alternative approach is commonly used. It’s called “Docker-out-of-Docker” (DooD).
In the DooD approach, only the Docker CLI runs in a container and connects to the Docker daemon on the host. The connection is done by mounting the host’s Docker daemon socket into the container that runs the Docker CLI. For example:
$ docker run -it -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock docker
In this approach, containers created from within the Docker CLI container are actually sibling containers (spawned by the Docker daemon in the host). There is no Docker daemon inside a container and thus no container nesting. The figure below illustrates this.
This approach has some benefits but also important drawbacks.
One key benefit is that it bypasses the complexities of running the Docker daemon inside a container and does not require a privileged container.
It also avoids having multiple Docker image caches in the system (since there is only one Docker daemon on the host), which may be good if your system is constrained on storage space.
But it has important drawbacks too.
The main drawback is that it results in poor context isolation because the Docker CLI runs within a different context than the Docker daemon. The former runs within the container’s context; the latter runs within host’s context. This leads to problems such as:
Permission problems: the user in the Docker CLI container may not have sufficient permissions to access the Docker daemon on the host via the socket. This is a common problem causing headaches, in particular in CI/CD scenarios such as Jenkins + Docker.
Container naming collisions: if the container running the Docker CLI creates a container named some_cont , the creation will fail if some_cont already exists on the host. Avoiding such naming collisions may not always trivial depending on the use case.
, the creation will fail if already exists on the host. Avoiding such naming collisions may not always trivial depending on the use case. Mount paths: if the container running the Docker CLI creates a container with a bind mount, the mount path must be relative to the host (as otherwise, the host Docker daemon on the host won’t be able to perform the mount correctly).
Port mappings: if the container running the Docker CLI creates a container with a port mapping, the port mapping occurs at the host level, potentially colliding with other port mappings.
This approach is also not a good idea if the containerized Docker is orchestrated by Kubernetes. In this case, any containers created by the containerized Docker CLI will not be encapsulated within the associated Kubernetes pod, and will thus be outside of Kubernetes’ visibility and control.
Finally, there are security concerns too: the container running the Docker CLI can manipulate any containers running on the host. It can remove containers created by other entities on the host, or even create un-secure privileged containers and put the host at risk.
Depending on your use case and environment, these drawbacks may void the use of this approach.
Solution: DinD with Nestybox System Containers
As described above, both the Docker DinD image and DooD approaches have some important drawbacks.
Nestybox offers an alternative solution that overcomes these drawbacks: run Docker-in-Docker using “system containers”. In other words, use Docker to deploy a system container, and run Docker inside the system container.
A Nestybox system container is a container designed to run system-level software in it (like systemd and Docker) as well as applications. You deploy it with Docker, just like any other Docker container. You only need to point Docker to the Nestybox container runtime “Sysbox”, which you need to download and install in your machine. For example:
$ docker run --runtime=sysbox-runc -it my-dind-image
More info on system containers can be found in this Nestybox blog post.
Within a Nestybox system container, you are able to run Docker inside the container easily and securely with total isolation between the Docker inside the system container and the Docker on the host. No need for unsecure privileged containers anymore, as shown below:
The Sysbox container runtime takes care of setting up the system container such that Docker can run inside the container as if it were running on a physical host or VM (e.g., with a dedicated image cache, using its fast storage drivers, etc).
This solution avoids the issues with DooD and enables use of DinD securely.
And it’s efficient: the Docker inside the system container uses it’s fast image storage driver and the volume sprawl problem described earlier is solved.
The screencast video at the beginning of this article shows the solution at work. There are written instructions for it in Sysbox Quickstart Guide, as well as in the Nestybox blog site.
The system container image that you deploy is fully configurable by you.
For example, you can choose to use Docker’s official DinD image and deploy it using the Docker’s official instructions, except that you simply replace the “— privileged” flag with “ — runtime=sysbox-runc” flag in the “docker run” command:
$ docker run --runtime=sysbox-runc --name some-docker -d \
--network some-network --network-alias docker \
-e DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR=/certs \
-v some-docker-certs-ca:/certs/ca \
-v some-docker-certs-client:/certs/client \
docker:dind
Alternatively you can create a system container image that works as a Docker sandbox, inside of which you can run Docker (both the CLI and the daemon) as well as any other programs you want (e.g., systemd, sshd, etc.). This Nestybox blog article has examples.
Fundamentally, this solution allows you to run one or more Docker instances on the same machine, securely and totally isolated from each other, thus enabling the use cases we mentioned earlier in this article. And without resorting to heavier VMs for the same purpose.
In a Nutshell
There are valid use cases for running Docker-in-Docker (DinD).
Docker’s officially supported DinD solution requires a privileged container. It’s not ideal. It may be fine in trusted scenarios, but it’s risky otherwise.
There is an alternative that consists of running only the Docker CLI in a container and connecting it with the Docker daemon on the host. It’s nicknamed Docker-out-of-Docker (DooD). While it has some benefits, it also has several drawbacks which may void it’s use depending on your environment.
Nestybox system containers offer a new alternative. They support running Docker-in-Docker securely, without using privileged containers and with total isolation between the Docker in the system container and the Docker on the host. It’s very easy to use as shown above.
Nestybox is looking for early adopters to try our system containers. Download the software for free. Give it a shot, we think you’ll find it very useful.
Some useful links: | https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/secure-docker-in-docker-with-nestybox-529c5c419582 | ['Cesar Talledo'] | 2020-11-02 06:39:27.011000+00:00 | ['Microservices', 'Kubernetes', 'Containers', 'DevOps', 'Docker'] |
Falling In Love With Life Again | This has no other purpose except to help me keep track for myself. I am unsure whether I have ever been in love with life, but for the sake of this I will be saying ‘again’. I cannot promise perfect grammar, spelling or even consecutive ordering if I’m being honest.
I have been diagnosed with Anxiety and Depression. Nowadays that is not anything out of the norm and might even make me ‘fit in’ more than being mentally well. While I think it’s important to normalize mental illnesses and reduce stigma, I think there is such a thing as too much normalcy. If everyone has a mental illness, shouldn’t I have one to fit in? If I don’t pull all nighters or post on my story crying am I not normal? If I don’t want to kill myself do I not fit in? Why does no one want to get better anymore?
I was always considered one of the happiest kids when I was younger. I was carefree and enjoyed learning and school. The most stress I had was that I had to walk my dog every day and take out the trash every Sunday to get my allowance. When did it shift? When did I start spending the days alone in my room on my phone instead of hanging out with friends and family or reading a book?
Life is really hard and it's okay to develop mental illnesses. I’ve had anxiety all my life and this is my second time going through depression. But I have had enough with crying myself to sleep and never feeling like I’m good enough for anything of importance. I will learn to love myself and my life. There are things I can’t change, my injuries which do not allow me to do sports or do full and extreme workouts. I moved a year and a half ago and I don’t have the same amount of friends as I used to. Other than reaching out and being friendly towards everyone, any other time and energy I spend on that will be a waste and just cause more anxious feelings of not being good enough.
I am going to start by changing things in my every day life. Maybe I’ll pick up a book again, or play with some of my online friends instead of forcing myself to do schoolwork instead. I want to fall in love with reading again, and I want to get out of the poison that is my phone. I want to live in the moment instead of constantly thinking about the past or the future.
So maybe that's what this is, a place to record progress, trying to better myself and maybe try to inspire others to better themselves as well, if this does ever reach anyone. I’m sick of wallowing in my own sorrows and feeling bad for myself. I’m better than this.
12–18 love, max | https://medium.com/@maxatnight/falling-in-love-with-life-again-9f1e1202537b | [] | 2020-12-18 19:05:12.239000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Journal', 'Mental Health', 'Anxiety'] |
Environment to get helping hand as Set4Earth launches new platform | Environment to get helping hand as Set4Earth launches new platform
Blockchain startup Set4Earth has launched a new platform which encourages community environmental action and provides funds for social enterprises.
The new eco-friendly marketplace enables users to back eco-friendly ideas, projects and products through a Save Environment Token (SET).
“The aim is to create a community of like-minded people who want to protect the earth for future generations,” said Chief Executive of Set4Earth Ravindran Nambiar.
“Funding and promoting environmentally friendly initiatives has typically been through government bodies. SET puts the responsibility of saving the planet directly into the hands of the community.”
The Save Environment Token goes beyond a cryptocurrency, with one of the benefits being that it is a mechanism to reward users for supporting the planet.
Investors can use their SET coins to hire, for example, bikes and in the process reduce their carbon footprint.
Leading parking operator Multic in Poland has given the green light for users to redeem coins for parking.
Other products include anti-pollution devices such as home and car air purifiers, as well as hydrogen water bottles.
In addition to encouraging environmental action, the platform also promotes eco-friendly products to create an R&D fund for social enterprises.
The project, which began eight months ago, is spearheaded by some of the world’s leading Blockchain experts from the United States, India and Australia all with the aim of creating a greener environment.
“This is a team with unrivalled green credentials. Together, we’ve already set up a range of initiatives from fossil fuel reduction and air purification to waste management and renewable energy products,” said Mr Nambiar.
The platform is open anyone to buy, sell or invest. The current token price is US$0.90 with a total of 45 million tokens on offer. | https://medium.com/coincast-media/environment-to-get-helping-hand-as-set4earth-launches-new-platform-a0f95d5c237d | ['Monica Sacroug'] | 2018-07-13 03:35:54.927000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Environment', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Token Sale'] |
How to become a UX Designer at 40 with no digital or design experience | What is User Experience Design?
User Experience Design is the process of enhancing a persons experience with a product or service and involves an understanding of their behaviour to create a successful design.
Example: A business has an app, they want the sign-up process to have a great User Experience (UX). You have business requirements. You find the engineers (computer programmers) limitations. You research, collaborate with designers and others. You create ideas and prototypes to test. You develop what is the best, test more and iterate on that. That’s UX.
There is a great demand for good UX Designers. If you have no previous digital or design experience don’t panic. I had neither and managed to get into the world of UX. I chose to be a UX Designer because it was creative, in technology and in demand (and I didn’t need to wear a suit to work!). My journey was not easy, I’ve had bumps along the way but I wouldn’t change a thing.
If you are willing to work hard, be patient, and work outside your comfort zone, it’s a really exciting career.
___________________________________________________________________
Your journey into UX Design
Topics I’ll cover:
Studying UX Design, the tools to learn, your UX portfolio, getting a job, the UX process, how to design, user testing , people you’ll work with and ongoing learning.
___________________________________________________________________
1. UX Study On Campus:
Bootcamp study provides you with a good foundation of working in User Experience Design. In Sydney General Assembly and Academy Xi are great places to start your UX journey. They don’t fully prepare you for the real world of UX work, but it certainly helps you in the door.
General Assembly
General Assembly is in several cities around the world and has a solid reputation. It focuses on short immersive technology learning courses.
In Sydney, it has a 10 week, 5 days a week, full-time immersive UX course. They also do a part time course for 10 weeks 2 evenings per week. I suggest if you are serious to move into UX (and have no experience) commit to the immersive 10 week course. Susan Wolfe taught me in Sydney in 2014 and I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher.
The 10 week UX Immersive (as of March 2017) : $13,500.00 (AUS)
The 10 week part time UX Course (as of March 2017): $5,000.00 (AUS)
General Assembly, UX Design (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane)
Academy Xi
Academy Xi is the new kid on the kid on the block in Sydney and they to have a good reputation. They teach full and part time technology courses. In Sydney they have a 10 week full time UX course. They also teach UX Design ina 10 week part time course 10am-4pm on Saturdays.
The 10 week UX full time UX Course (as of March 2017) : $10,000.00 (AUS)
The 10 week part time UX Course (as of March 2017: $3,500.00 (AUS)
Academy Xi, UX Design (Sydney, Melbourne)
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2. UX Study Online:
There are quite a few companies that do UX courses online. For me online wasn’t an option. I wanted to get an immersive experience and learn quickly.
A few courses worth a look:
Springboard
This would be my choice if I did an online course tomorrow. You get a mentor and it sets you up for an entry level UX Design job. It is also the best value of the online courses here.
The self paced 2–4 month UX Course (as of March 2017): $299.00 per month (USD)
www.springboard.com
Design Lab
I did a UI course with Design Lab and they are great. You get a mentor and the content is substantial.
The full time 12 week or part time 24 week UX Course (as of March 2017): $2799.00 (USD)
www.trydesignlab.com
General Assembly
There part time course is reasonable value. You get a mentor and can do it outside your working life. I would not advise this if you have no previous experience. They say allow 8–10 hours per week.
The self paced 5 week course (as of March 2017) : $850.00 (USD)
www.generalassemb.ly
Career Foundry
These guys are bit more pricey but go more in depth.They state it will be 10 months at 15 hours a week study. Looks interesting but is a big commitment.
10 month course (as of March 2017): $6000.00 (USD)
www.careerfoundry.com
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3. UX Design Tools:
Sketching on paper
Pick up a pencil or pen, some paper and doodle. Sketching is an important part of UX design. You DO NOT need to be a born artist to be able to sketch meaningful designs. You just need to get in the habit of sketching out ideas, app or web screens and customer journeys. I am not a sketcher or an artist, but getting into the habit of sketching has been invaluable. With sketching you can look at ideas quickly. If they don’t work you can throw them away and get onto the next idea..
I recently did a community college course in Sydney to practice cartoon drawing. I am no master but I wanted to create my own style to storyboard ideas. The Napkin Academy would be a great way to start your journey in sketching your ideas.
www.napkinacademy.com
Sketch
What is Sketch? Sketch is the modern day tool for UX Designers. In days gone by Adobe’s photoshop and illustrator where the tools to use. I never used Adobe’s software so jumped straight into Sketch. This will be slightly daunting at first but just dive in and get going. Go online and do some lessons. Be patient, practice everyday and you’ll get there.
www.sketchapp.com
Sketch lessons
Other options instead of Sketch?
New tools called Figma and Adobe XD have some great features. My advice would be to learn Sketch to get started.
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4. Prototype Tools:
There are lots of new prototyping tools coming out all the time. Here is a snapshot of what to learn to get started:
Sketching out wireframes
The most simple of prototypes. This is a quick option to get things in front of users. Sketched or printed up designs can be a great way to get some quick user validation on an idea. You can even add sketches to make clickable prototypes with Pop App by Marvel.
www.marvelapp.com/pop
Invision
This is a great tool for prototyping straight forward web and app journey’s. You design the screens in Sketch and export out and add to Invision. You can then create a clickable prototype. You will not able to do advanced interactions but it is a must learn. Don’t worry if this doesn’t fully make sense at the moment, it will.
www.invisionapp.com
Intro to Invision
Principle
Principle is a more advanced prototyping tool than Invision. It lets you create great little animations pretty quickly. Don’t learn this until you’ve learned Invision.
www.principleformac.com
Principle for beginners
Lessons in Principle
Kite
This is a new tool that could overtake Principle. Essentially it will allow you to do a bit more that Principle can do. Don’t worry about this until you have learned Invision and got a hold of Principle. Just a good one to keep in mind for the future.
www.kiteapp.co
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5. The UX Portfolio:
The UX Portfolio is the story of who you are and what you’ve done in your UX career. When I finished at General Assembly I decided to code my portfolio. I enjoyed the process but you DO NOT need to code your own UX portfolio. There are lots of great tools to help you do a great and simple portfolio to tell your story.
I will write a fuller article on the UX portfolio at some stage. Make sure you have a brief ‘about’ section with your contact details. Then have your portfolio cases. Document the problem you had to solve for each case and how you solved it. UX Managers will want to see your process. Remember to keep it simple with not to much jargon.
PDF Document
In many ways, this is a sensible option when you’re starting out. You avoid focusing too much time on the technical side of the portfolio and more on the content and UX. You can design it in Sketch (once you have got your head around Sketch!). It can be done in A4 pages which can then be sent as a PDF to the potential employer.
Squarespace
Squarespace has great website portfolio templates you can use off the shelf. Bit of thought is required but the results can be impressive.
www.squarespace.com
Dunked
Like Squarespace Dunked has portfolio website templates where you can add your content without too much trouble.
www.dunked.com
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6. Getting a UX Job:
This’ll feel scary. You’ve studied and got your head around some of the tools. You don’t feel like a UX Designer, you feel like an imposter! Everyone started here, don’t panic, feeling like an imposter is part of the journey!
Linkedin
Get your profile on Linkedin up to date. Put in a simple photo. Give yourself a straight forward intro focused on your strengths. Put in your experience with a snapshot of your roles. Same for your education, plus add any short courses you may have done related to UX.
People want to get a snapshot of you on Linkedin, they don’t want to read a book. Keep the bullshit out, write naturally and avoid jargon and buzzwords.
Pay for the premium Linkedin if it helps you. You can direct message people with Linked Premium. This can be a great way to talk to a company that you’re keen to work at.
Good Tip: Message UX designers to ask questions about work at their company. This can be a great way to get in the door.
Meet up.com
Photo from Meetup.com: Tech Talks at Pivotal Labs, Sydney
Give them your email for regular news and updates for your area. When you go to a meet up, ask questions, say hi to people, be open. I am not a big crowd person but you need to meet people, this could be the door you need.
UX Design Meet Ups in Sydney
Good Tip: set up a new email for all your UX stuff. This will mean it will not get lost in your sea of regular emails. Avoid being [email protected], just have your name or something close. I had UXGuy and it pains me to see it now!
Recruiters
Photo from helloerik.com
Recruiters are good and bad. Stay away from recruiters who don’t know what UX is. If the role includes coding forget it. If you’ll be the only UX Designer at the company, don’t bother. If like me you have no previous experience, find somewhere that’ll have good people to mentor you. It is nice to get offers from recruiters, but do your research.
The Interview
There is a great article by Springboard about the questions you’ll be asked at a UX interview. Read up and be prepared.
www.medium.com/the-7-questions-youll-be-asked-at-a-ux-design-interview
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7. UX Process:
What is the UX process?
The UX process is the structure that UX Designers follow to get a desired outcome.
Research > Insights > Design Concepts > Test Prototypes > Develop
There are many variations to the UX process. Typically there is a common sense A to Z journey to get the outcome. My advice would be to look at the options and create your own process. Not all projects will use the full journey, but it’s great to have a structure to follow.
Work for a business that follows a UX process
Many businesses don’t follow a UX process. They don’t see it as important. Working for companies with no process will make life tough. I did this for a UX contract when I started and it was no fun. It did nonetheless teach me what not to do!
Work for a business with a UX process, as you will learn so much more. A mature UX business will really give you a great start to your UX career.
Do a side project and go through your full UX process
A side project can be great for your learning. Once completed you can add it to your portfolio. A side project could be a re-design of an existing website or app, provided you are solving a genuine problem. Or you could work for a business that can’t afford a full time UX Designer but would like some help.
UX books
Here are some great books to get started in UX Design:
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
2. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk
3. Don’t Make Me Think (revisted) by Steve Krug
4. Simple and Usable: Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne
5. Smashing UX Design by Jesmond J. Allen and James J. Chudley
6. The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garret
7. A Project Guide To User Experience Design by By Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
8. Sketching User Experiences by By Saul Greenberg, Sheelagh Carpendale, Nicolai Marquardt and Bill Buxton
9. Universal Principles of Design by By William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler
10. Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
11. Measuring the User Experience by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert
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8. How to Design:
Don’t be precious with your designs
One great trait of a designer is to be flexible. Don’t get attached to your designs. You need to be able to throw them away if they don’t work. Embrace failure of your designs, it means you are one step closer to reaching the end goal.
Don’t be scared to get feedback
Get up from your desk and talk to designers, developers, managers, whoever. My experience is that if you talk to five people at least one comes up with great feedback. The quicker you do this, the quicker you can fail and go on to create a great experience.
Talk to developers
You need to confirm with the developers that what you have designed can be developed and how long it’ll take. Normally this would be done at the sketching stage but be sure to confirm when designed. When showing stakeholders you want to be able to clearly state that your designs can be developed and the time it will take. Gaining trust from stakeholders by having this information is invaluable.
Concept Designing
It’s great doing concept work for a project if you have time. This is a good way to stay inspired and some of the work may filter through to get developed. My advice would be to do designs that disrupt what is being done. This can open the innovative culture in your team. I don’t do enough of this, but I can see the value and plan to do more.
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9. User Testing:
User testing is a crucial part of the UX process. Get into some user testing yourself to see the process. At Tabcorp we have a great UX Research team. They give us great direction in how we should test our designs, to get the best insights.
Great free e-book on testing: www.uxpin.com/guide-to-usability-testing
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10. People you’ll work with:
Be thoughtful of your fellow designers
Give positive feedback. When something seems odd maybe “looks great but might be worth looking at the option of…”. Never makes sense to trample on someones designs, doesn’t benefit anyone.
UX Researchers
UX researchers will organize and often do the user testing. If you need to get prototypes to UX Researchers be thoughtful. They may have lots of different prototypes so make their life easy. Check the prototype links on test day to make sure all is in order. If you are testing beta sites then make sure everything is in order. The research team does such an important job, so it’s worth keeping them onside.
Choose your battles and learn to fight
As a UX Designer you need to fight your corner.
“If you don’t battle you’ll end up a UI Designer” (wise words from an old colleague of mine)
There will come a time when the business wants to do something that is bad for the customer. Go to battle with stats, testing results or any info that provides proof that it’ll be a problem. Your opinion alone will not be enough, so be prepared. Andrew Doherty (a designer at Google) writes a brilliant article about being prepared to fight:
www.medium.com/good-ux-designers-must-be-prepared-to-fight-
Choose your allies wisely
Once you’re settled into your new job, find your allies. These are the ones you can ask the stupid questions to. It’s so important to have a few go to people who can help you out when needed. I have a few people at Tabcorp that can always help me out when I need.
Don’t miss out on lunches with your team
Any chance you get to do social stuff with the team do it. This is a great time to make some mates at your work. Creating relationships with your colleagues is key to making the team work well together.
No doesn’t always mean ‘No’
Ask a team lead if something can be developed, they may say ‘no’. Ask a developer the same question and they may say ‘yes’. Different people in the business have different priorities. A team lead may be saying no because of a time constraint. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, so ask a few people before you park a great idea.
Get up from your desk and talk to people
Insights can come from anywhere. You normally don’t find them looking at your computer screen. The real insights come when you talk to people in the kitchen, at their desk or at the pub. Be open to peoples ideas from a top manager to a developer intern. Everyone’s voice is important, so keep your ears pricked!
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11. Ongoing Learning & Staying Inspired:
Find UX mentors
People who have lots of experience are gold. I have a few friends who are gold but I don’t use them enough. Experienced designers are great mentors. They are also very giving. Chose the people that you want to be like and learn from them.
Have a strategy to stay inspired
“It’s easy to be creative but more difficult to stay inspired.”
I read the above quote on Medium but forget who wrote it. It could have been Julie Zhuo, from Facebook. There are lots of online resources to keep you inspired. I use Panda which a great Chrome plug in which lets you flick through lots of different tech and design news. I spend 15 mins a day flicking through news. Any articles that interest me, I save them and read later. UX Weekly and Sidebar are also good resources.
Go to Conferences
This is a great way to get out of the office and refresh. Going to conferences or workshops can be inspiring. You meet new faces and with that comes new ideas.
Carry on learning
This is a must as a designer. You are always learning and always growing. Read medium articles, on your Kindle or on your computer. Don’t stick to just UX Design. Read about programming, product management and other areas that you work with. Great to get some insights on what is happening around you. Take short courses that fit with your life. When you are at your desk instead of listening to music try a few podcasts instead. This is a great way to learn and work. Product Hunt have a great list of design podcasts that are worth listening to.
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12. Final words:
Use Android & Apple phone
Learn the patterns of these two operating systems. If you are an Apple user then switch to Android and vice versa. Get a feel for what you don’t know. Look at Google’s Material Design guidelines and Apples iOS ones.
Listen
To become a good UX Designer you need to listen. Lots of listening and noting down comments.
Avoid Jargon
The tech world has too much jargon for me. Too many buzzwords and not enough straightforward talk. Say things as they are and you should make good headway.
Have humility & fail fast
This is a great quality for any designer. Humility comes from being humble. Being humble allows you to fail fast.
Be authentic & don’t bullshit
This is a life rule. You are never the smartest one in the room in a tech company. If you attempt to know more than you know, you’ll get yourself in a pickle. People can see through it so keep yourself honest. If you don’t know something, you can get back to people once you’ve figured it out.
A must read article for new Designers
Alana Brajdic (a fellow UX designer at Tabcorp) has a great article on ‘22 things new UX Designers should know before entering the workplace’. Make sure you read it.
Alana’s article
Conclusion
Having UX Designer as your job title is easy. Getting your head around the full process takes time. Study, learn the tools, read lots, do projects, get your portfolio out there and get a job. Once you have a job this is when the learning really starts. Enjoy the journey as it is a unique time to be a UX designer. Good luck!
For further learning have a read of my article ’53 Tech Terms you need to know as a UX Designer’ | https://uxplanet.org/how-to-become-a-ux-designer-at-40-with-no-previous-digital-or-design-experience-5c96af46b73c | ['Guy Ligertwood'] | 2019-05-21 08:56:30.036000+00:00 | ['UX', 'Design', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity'] |
Benefits of a Keto Diet. Having a Regular Keto Diet is… | Having a Regular Keto Diet is essentially good for health and human well being. In General Keto Diet is an eating plan that focuses on foods that provide healthy fats, proper amount of protein and very low carbohydrates.
Let’s start with how the Keto diet actually works?
The diet works by decreasing the body of its sugar reserves. as a result, it will start to break down your body fat for energy. hence resulting in production of Ketone molecules which your body uses as its fuel. when body burns fats, it will eventually lead to weight loss!
Now let’s get ahead with benefits that a Keto diet has to offer..
Reduces risk of certain cancers Reduces acne Supports good weight loss Improves Heart health Potentially reduces seizures May protect brain function
This Essential Keto Cookbook by Louise and Jeremy Hendon offers different comfort foods that you can make or bake at your home! The following book contains-
10 Keto Breakfasts that Will Break You Out of Your Bacon and Eggs Funk 8 Mouth-Watering Keto Desserts that Will Delight Any Sweet Tooth Keto Lunches and Dinners that Your Family and Friends Will Swear Aren’t Keto
Over 50k people have ordered this essential Keto cookbook for a ketogenic diet.
And the main thing about this book is You Don’t Need Any Cooking Experience to Make These Delicious Keto Meals and Eat Delicious Foods That You Can Be 100% Sure about.
Click Here to Order your new Essential Keto Cookbook and enjoy your journey with the weight loss!
The link above is an affiliate. | https://medium.com/@etedtoday/benefits-of-a-keto-diet-when-you-do-it-right-c4ed60780de1 | [] | 2020-12-24 15:59:02.310000+00:00 | ['Keto', 'Weight Loss', 'Diet', 'Ketogenic Diet', 'Weightloss Foods'] |
detailed error message in NPE,java14 feature | I think Almost every Java developer At some pointed in our life would have encountered with NPE in java, and what’s worse then getting NPE is that stack trace only gives you the line number where it occurred so you gotta debug it further to check which part /variable of your expression caused it.
Let’s take an example.
Integer x= y*z \\Line 10
If above line throws a NPE then it could be because either y or z is null and we won’t know it until we debug it .And for much more complex expression it becomes more difficult.
So what’s new in Java 14?
Since Java 14, NPE will have a detailed message in its stack trace . JVM throws a NPE whenever code tries to dereference a null reference, the JVM will determine precisely which variable was null , and describe the variable (in terms of source code) with a null-detail message in the NPE. The null-detail message will then be shown in the JVM's message, alongside the method, filename, and line number.
Error message is going to have two part, first part will contain consequence(What failed because of NPE) and second part will consist of reason for NPE. Let us understand it with a better example.
For the expression doFoo().b[i][j] = 99; where doFoo() is an static method in a class named as Foo , If doFoo().b[i] is null then error message would be something like this “Cannot store to int array because Foo.doFoo().b[i] is null” .
Detail null-message is by default disabled in java14 ,we can enable it by command line argument -XX:+ShowCodeDetailsInExceptionMessages .
But the question becomes why would they keep it disabled by default ?Why wouldn’t anyone want to have such an amazing feature? Here are few reason for that. | https://medium.com/boredguy/detailed-nullpointerexception-from-java-14-f77b51aeb064 | [] | 2019-12-26 19:00:40.899000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Npe', 'Java14', 'Programming', 'Java14 Features'] |
Summer 2019: Product Management Intern @ NYC Planning Labs [FILLED 5/5/2019] | Summer 2019: Product Management Intern @ NYC Planning Labs [FILLED 5/5/2019]
Join a modern tech team building the future of city planning
Application deadline: April 25, 2019 (Apply here)
We’re looking for a student or recent graduate with digital product experience who’s excited about bringing modern software development into city government. In this paid summer internship you’ll work with Planning Labs’ Product team, supporting our entire portfolio of apps.
About NYC Planning Labs
NYC Planning Labs is a division of the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP) that embraces progressive civic tech values including open technology, agile development, and user-centered design to build impactful products with NYC’s Urban Planners.
We work with modern tools and languages. We embrace mature frameworks, with an eye towards maintainability and long-term stability. We’re on the forefront of web mapping, and we intend to make our mark in open-source data engineering. We’re building an emergent UI language and tackling unique design challenges like bringing city planning mapmaking into the digital world. And we’re just getting started.
What you’ll do
Help prioritize and track engineering and design tasks using GitHub and other agile project management tools
Conduct user research to inform critical design decisions and identify potential product improvements
Test products and new features to confirm usability and identify bugs
Contribute to product strategy and success metrics, including Key Performance Indicator (KPI) models, monthly analytics, roadmaps, etc.
Collaborate in the creation of product development and management documents, including roadmaps, project briefs, and user stories
Assist in the design process and creation of prototypes and other assets
Your work will help us develop product strategy and ensure that our team is working effectively. It will involve understanding a complex mix of user needs, helping prioritize bugs and enhancements, while balancing constraints of technical skillsets, deadlines, and other inputs that affect work prioritization. You will be working with engineers and designers in an agile/scrum framework, gaining experience with front-end development (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Git/Github, etc).
We’re looking for someone who is civic-minded, with outstanding communication and organizational skills. Familiarity with web development or similar creative project management is a plus.
Details
Program Duration: June 3rd - August 9th 2019
Hourly Rate: $17.50
Deadline to Apply: April 25th
Apply here. We look forward to hearing from you! | https://medium.com/nyc-planning-digital/summer-2019-product-management-intern-nyc-planning-labs-bffc80066172 | ['Hannah Kates'] | 2019-05-24 15:23:27.289000+00:00 | ['Nyc Planning Labs', 'Agile', 'Jobs', 'Product Management', 'Urban Planning'] |
6 Tips for Surviving 6 Months on $600 — You Won’t Believe #1–6 | 6 Tips for Surviving 6 Months on $600 — You Won’t Believe #1–6
Congress is furiously working on a second stimulus package. Well, technically House Democrats already passed several additional relief packages, but this time Republicans are pretending to care…about corporate liability shields…and additional corporate tax cuts. The good news is we might all be getting $600…after nine months of a global pandemic…that’s killed over 300,000 Americans…and put tens of millions out of work…$600…to make it through the next 6 months…or pay bills from the last eight months. $600.
$600.
Maybe.
$600.
If Mitch says it’s okay.
I don’t know about you, but that $600 is going to last me forever! In case you are struggling to figure out how to survive on such a big check or what to do with all of your surplus cash (plus all that leftover money from the first $1,200 that was supposed to last for eight months), here are 6 survival tips:
Stop eating so much! Do you really need to eat multiple times a day? We all know the key to homeownership is cutting out coffee and avocado toast, or being born rich…mostly being born rich, but have you tried not eating at all on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays? Food insecurity in America is at an all-time high. People are starving. Food banks are running out of food. Lines are miles long. But don’t worry — it’s all going to be solved by a one-time $600 check…that we may or may not get. $600. Work harder. Everyone knows your financial success is solely dependent on how hard you work, or being born rich…mostly being born rich, so work harder! That’s especially true during pandemics. Have you thought about just working harder during all of this? So get those bootstraps ready because you are about to do some serious pulling yourself up! Stop using so much heat and electricity! People didn’t have electricity for centuries, do you really need it now? Didn’t you save up all that excess heat from the summer? C’mon, winter isn’t going to last forever, but if you follow these tips that $600 just might! Want success more. Jared Kushner’s key to success is just wanting it more, or being born rich…mostly being born rich. Have you tried just wanting it more? Or being born rich? When you’re lying awake at night worried about how you’re going to cover your bills and keep your family safe and secure, have you thought about just wanting it more? It seems so obvious when you say it out loud! I know when my mortgage comes due every month I pay that bill with sheer force of will. Become a corporation. Want Republicans to care about you? Be born rich. What about tax cuts, rebates, and all sorts of loopholes made just for you? Be born rich. If you weren’t born rich, then become a corporation! You can’t expect the government to help you by using your tax dollars on stuff you need to survive— that’s socialism. But you can expect them to help giant corporations and people born rich — that’s freedom! Already have been rich pre-pandemic. I know this is a little bit of woulda, coulda, shoulda but every financial guru will tell you the best way to navigate your finances is to make a budget, live within your means, and be born rich…mostly be born rich. So try going back in time and being born into a wealthy family. That inheritance isn’t going to earn itself!
So, there you have it. No more worries about stretching your $600…if we even get that! Fingers crossed! | https://medium.com/satire-the-state/6-tips-for-surviving-6-months-on-600-you-wont-believe-1-6-584bcae5acf8 | ['Matt Fotis'] | 2020-12-17 23:54:12.762000+00:00 | ['Congress', 'Satire', 'Stimulus Check', 'Covid 19 Crisis', 'Covid-19'] |
Pro-choice Woman Talks about her “Brutal” Abortion Experience | On July 2, the New York Times ran an article by a young woman who had an abortion. Lisa Selin Davis, a self-proclaimed feminist, describes an abortion she had in the mid-90s. A gung ho pro-choicer, she did not expect her abortion to be difficult or upsetting.
Pregnant from a relationship with a married man, Davis had no qualms about getting an abortion:
This [abortion decision] didn’t seem as big a problem to me as it might have for other young women. This was the mid-1990s. Reared on protest marches, I had a NOW poster affixed to my bedroom wall. I was an unwavering believer in the fierce rhetoric of pro-choice. And now: a poster child.
She even saw the abortion is an artistic opportunity. She says, “In addition, in college I had essentially majored in experimental feminist video. I could make art out of anything.”
Davis called her boss, who referred her to an abortion clinic. Though slightly put off by the price of the abortion ($350) Davis seemed to be excited about the opportunity to have an abortion and make her film:
The money intimidated me but the mission didn’t. Not only was this the right I’d marched for, it was an opportunity. It could provide material for the kinds of film I’d voraciously consumed in college, in which women transformed their most traumatic experiences into emotionally stirring and awareness-raising images: Margie Strosser’s “Rape Stories” or “The Body Beautiful” by Ngozi Onwurah, about a mother undergoing a radical mastectomy. An abortion today, a debut at Sundance tomorrow.
So, dreaming of fame, she eagerly set forth to take advantage of her “right to choose.”
She hired a driver, and when he found out she was having an abortion, he pleaded with her to reconsider.
Davis relays the conversation:
“I have to go to the doctor,” I kept telling him. “Why? You don’t look sick.” “I have to have a procedure.” “What? What procedure?” Finally, I told him. Why not? I was proud and un-conflicted. I was exercising my right. I was making a video. He pulled over to the side of the road, right there on the Brooklyn Bridge — not only illegal but dangerous. “Please don’t kill the baby,” he said. “Please don’t kill the baby.” “What are you doing?” “Don’t kill the baby.” He wouldn’t move the car, though horns blared all around us. “Keep driving! I have an appointment!” I shook his headrest. This was not part of the script. “Please don’t kill the baby,” he said again, turning around to face me. He had beautiful big brown eyes — almost black. “I will take care of you and the baby. I work two jobs.” “Drive,” I told him. “You are going by yourself?” he asked. I said, “Drive.” He drove.
Davis squandered the opportunity to change her mind and rebuffed the cabdriver’s offer of help. She was still determined to have her abortion, still viewing it as a feminist right and a creative opportunity. When she got to the clinic:
At the clinic’s counter, the receptionist asked me what I’d come for. I said, “Um …” “Termination of pregnancy?” she asked in her best would-you-like-fries-with-that voice. I nodded.
Davis then says:
They gave me pamphlets, a paper gown and paper slippers. They sat me in a room filled with women, one of whom told me she’d been there eight times before. “They used to have terry cloth,” she said, lifting her toes in the paper slippers. It had never occurred to me that people had serial abortions, but it confirmed my expectations: abortion — safe, legal, no big deal.
Yet the stark reality of the situation, the indifference of the clinic worker, and the despair of the women around her began to trouble Davis. She began to question whether her abortion would really be such an easy thing to go through:
Yet as I looked around the room, my expectations began to shift. This wasn’t the liberating environment I’d expected to enter. The uncomplicated message of those protests led me to think that legal abortion would be light. Lite. I wasn’t prepared for the saturnine cloudiness of the room, all those sad-looking women burying their faces in tabloid magazines. The video camera stayed sleeping in my lap.
Davis originally asked to have local anesthesia, but the clinic told her they did not allow it. When she told them that she wanted to film her abortion, they told her at once that it would not be possible. Taping an abortion was not permitted “for legal reasons.”
One wonders what those “legal reasons” were. With the clinic trying to hide the reality of the procedure from Davis? Were they trying to hide the gruesome and grisly nature of abortion from their patients and from the public? They did not want anyone to see the operation.
Davis never says how far along she was, but at just seven weeks the unborn baby has fingers and toes. After an abortion, the baby, even at this early stage, is ripped apart and leaves behind recognizable body parts. So it is not surprising that the clinic workers wanted to hide the gruesome details from Davis and her potential audience.
The clinic offered no counseling to Davis, no opportunity to examine her motives. They did not ask her if she was sure abortion was what she wanted to do; they did not inform her about fetal development or the emotional and physical risks of the procedure, they didn’t explain to her what her options were. There did not seem to be any “informed consent.”
Davis describes being prepped for the procedure. She says, “My hands shook, the camera wobbling in my grasp. I was freezing inside my paper gown.”
She describes how she felt when she woke up, her baby gone:
The first thing I thought when I awoke from the anesthesia was that I’d never be pregnant again, that I had just squandered my only chance at motherhood. I was sobbing — I had arisen from the depths of the medication this way — as they rolled me into the recovery room where the other women were lying, almost all of them with a friend or partner or relative to brush their hair back or offer them ice chips. I could not stop crying, big heaves and gulps of it. The nurse came over at first to soothe me and then to quiet me. “You’re upsetting the other girls,” she said. “It hurts.” She sent the doctor over. “Sometimes we have to massage the womb,” he said, inserting his hand inside me and pressing. This did not stop the crying, but eventually it stopped the pain.
Despite going in with a gung ho pro-choice attitude, Davis had come to realize that abortion was not an easy thing for a woman to go through. She calls abortion a “brutal choice.”
Or, at least, it stopped the physical pain. The begging cabdriver and the woman on her ninth abortion and the shocking suction in my womb: It was too traumatic for me to make art of. Or maybe it was just that I wasn’t a good enough artist to transform that level of trauma into something that others could learn from and use. I had been taught that a woman’s right to choose was the most important thing to fight for, but I hadn’t known what a brutal choice it was.
Davis says that when she got home, her hands were still shaking.
This “brutal choice,” which Davis had fought for and believed in, still seems to haunt her 20 years later. She remains pro-choice, however:
Abortion rights, yes, I’ll always support them, but even all these years later, I wish the motto wasn’t “Never again,” but “Avoid this if there’s any way you possibly can, even if it’s legal, because it’s awful.”
She wishes her pro-choice friends had prepared her for how difficult the abortion would be:
I wish that someone had alerted me to the harshness of the experience, acknowledged the layers of regret that built and fell away as the months and years passed. I want my daughters to have the option of safe and legal abortion, of course. I just don’t want them to have to use it.
Davis’s story conveys the tragic impact abortion can have even on a woman who goes into the clinic without doubts or ambivalence. Deep down, Davis may have known that her baby had been taken away from her. Two decades later, she remembers her abortion as a traumatic experience in her life.
I am reminded of this quote by a clinic worker named Steph Herold. The quote was in the book Generation Roe: inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement by Sarah Erdreich. Herold was venting her frustration that most of her patients did not become proabortion activists:
We need our patients, who we do everything for, to stand up for us. We don’t need them to tell their abortion stories to everyone they know, although of course that would be great. We need them to fight for abortion access in whatever way makes sense to them. If one in 3 US women has an abortion by age 45, where are these women? Why don’t they stand up for us?
While the one in three statistic isn’t accurate, it is true that many women have abortions, and that most of these women do not go on to become hard-core pro-choice activists.
Many women end up regretting their abortions, and even those that never admit to post-abortion regret seem to want to put the experience behind them. They want to forget about their abortions; they do not become diehard abortion rights advocates (though of course there are exceptions).
Herold seems hardened to the reality of abortion, unaware of how difficult and traumatic it can be for women. She is frustrated that more post-abortion women do not rally to the pro-choice cause — and, in her frustration, doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that many of her patients may have found their abortions to be traumatic and difficult.
Davis’s article shows that abortion can be a very negative experience for a woman to go through, even if she is pro-choice. | https://medium.com/the-secular-seamless-garment/pro-choice-woman-talks-about-her-brutal-abortion-experience-7c208e775e45 | ['Sarah Terzo'] | 2020-12-03 01:37:52.341000+00:00 | ['Abortion', 'Pro Life', 'Pro Choice', 'Feminism', 'Women'] |
What is the Pattern Library? | Pattern Language For Game Design
What is the Pattern Library?
The website patternlanguageforgamedesign.com is a Pattern Library. It holds the game design patterns from the book Pattern Language for Game Design. It also contains patterns that students and game designers have created, using the techniques discussed in that book. The patterns in this library are not object-oriented programming patterns as discussed in the well-known Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. These patterns are broader, and cover all aspects of game design. Based directly on the ideas of Christopher Alexander, they are focused on helping designers create better games.
The patterns in this library are deeply interconnected through keywords, the design problems they address, and explicit parent and child relationships. Any developer can come to this library and build a collection of patterns, forming a Pattern Language that will help them shape a game that addresses specific design problems.
This site is partly a resource for viewing great design patterns proposed by others, but perhaps more importantly, it’s a place where any developer can record the patterns they develop using the techniques described in the book. Even if a developer never makes any of their patterns public, this site will allow them to record and connect their patterns, building out a personal framework for understanding game design.
When developers do decide to share their patterns, they can make them public so that the whole internet can access them, or they can post them solely for review by the groups they’re a member of. Using this group functionality, a class or a studio can build a private pattern language for their game projects.
In addition to housing the Pattern Library, this site hosts a Games Reference. This reference contains basic information about all of the games that are used as examples in the Pattern Library. Using this reference, any developer can read a pattern, then click through to the details about an example game they are not familiar with. Each reference contains a description of the game, links for further information, links where you can buy or download the game if available, and trailers and playthroughs of the game on YouTube.
Order a copy of Pattern Language for Game Design from:
Below are links to other short articles giving the details of different aspects of the site that are coming soon! | https://perspectivesingamedesign.com/what-is-the-pattern-library-f9d6211d2db8 | ['Chris Barney'] | 2020-12-06 16:09:26.831000+00:00 | ['Christopher Alexander', 'Game Design', 'Pattern Library', 'Games Industry', 'Game Development'] |
Excluded: Gender and Jim Crow in The U.S. Criminal Justice System | Tracing the historical contributions made by Black, Indigenous, Women of Color inside the prison-industrial complex.
Figure 1. Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash
On the eve of the 2020 US presidential election I find myself talking to Kelsey, a young woman from rural Wisconsin. Kelsey is a pseudonym and our conversation is taking place under the proviso that I keep her identity confidential. Kelsey was one of the many formerly incarcerated students from Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College, based in Sawyer County, who responded to a call out to aid me with my research. As a former prisoner myself, I was keen to learn more about the iniquities experienced by other Black, Indigenous, Women of Color in the criminal justice system whose stories are often marginalised.
Despite the late timing and the fact that she has only had a short time to decompress following a busy day at work, Kelsey is bright, funny and engaging. Had I not been to prison myself, I would immediately have been taken aback from the moment she turned on her camera during our Zoom call. She is the very antithesis of what you expect a former female prisoner to look and sound like. Both of us are painfully aware of the ‘façade’ that society expects female offenders to conform to: either mentally unstable, prone to anger or just plain needy. The last two habits are easy to pick up when you’re placed in an environment where you have to rely on guards for ordinary items that are treated as luxuries on the inside; this includes everything from sanitary towels, toilet roll to underarm deodorant. I can still remember the first time I met with my college mentor who guessed I would come under the plain needy heading by virtue of being a woman. Unlike male offenders, women who have been to prison are assumed to be emotionally damaged, if not at the start of their sentences then definitely by the time they have finished paying their debt to society. While this presumption makes it easy to win the sympathy vote, especially from the small number of organizations that specialize in helping female offenders cope with trauma, you’re often met with indifference by the same organizations if you present as being well adjusted and resist their attempts at infantilizing you. My college mentor, probably mistaking my happy-go-lucky attitude for a front, grew increasingly frustrated when I proved reluctant to share all that I could about my time inside despite me having left prison a good nine months before. Most female offenders that I know choose to keep quiet about their sentences because often they’re given very little opportunity to do anything more apart from playing up to the stereotype of the former prisoner made good.
Sentenced to under two years, Kelsey made the deliberate decision to treat going to prison as a ‘learning opportunity’, enrolling in in-prison courses such as parenting and criminal justice classes. If she’s aware that she’s the exception — according to a 2016 study the average rate of recidivism among former Wisconsin female inmates stands between 25 and 30 per cent — she doesn’t give it away. While acknowledging that ‘there is a stigma’ against women who have been to prison which affects their ability to find suitable employment or even take out car insurance, when she walked past those prison gates for the final time, she told herself with absolute conviction: ‘I’ve been to prison. I’m done with it.’
Later that night when I’m in the middle of transcribing Kelsey’s interview, I can’t help myself from saying aloud ‘good for you’ every so often whenever I relisten to Kelsey discussing the obstacles she had to overcome to land a good job and resume her studies that, like myself, she accomplished in a relatively short space of time. Stories about incarcerated women of color are rare and when they are featured in the news usually it’s a semi-humorous account of a former prisoner who gets caught shoplifting hours after her release. Or a report of the violence being inflicted on incarcerated women. Before I had experienced prison myself, I remember reading a story of a newly arrived prisoner who had to be held down while officers sliced off her clothes because she refused to take them off herself. Apparently, the officers involved hadn’t bothered to explain why she couldn’t take the clothes she was wearing with her to the housing unit and responded with physical coercion when she resisted. The story made an impression on me for about five minutes before my attention was caught by the article underneath it. However, I probably wasn’t alone in reacting like this. The most powerful advocates for prison reform tend to be those who have been directly affected by it. It’s amazing how indifferent you can be to the suffering of others when they’re portrayed as being irredeemable or hopelessly tragic.
Whenever I tell people that the US has the highest female incarceration rate in the world I’m treated to mostly blank expressions. This is despite the fact that it is a trend that shows no signs of abating, with roughly 213,000 women incarcerated in jails while a further 1.2 million women are under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Unsurprisingly, women of color are disproportionately more likely to be imprisoned, with Black women representing the fastest-growing group of prisoners while Native prisoners are the largest group per capita. In Wisconsin alone the female Native population has more than doubled since 2000.
Inside, there were times when I felt as though I was literally being disappeared alongside thousands of other black and brown women, whenever I was told to put my books away because my prisoner status meant that my life was effectively over so why waste everyone’s time by attempting to improve myself. It wasn’t until I was released that I realised that American prisons are actively disappearing human beings, the main victims being women from low-income backgrounds or racially marginalised communities. This deliberate act of disappearing takes two forms: disenfranchisement and discrimination. Presently, one in every fifty Black women is ineligible to vote because of their criminal record. The data for Native and Hispanic women is unknown given the lack of research in this area despite their high rate of incarceration. However, the aggressive targeting of women of color by our criminal justice system also subjects them to legalized discrimination in employment, education, and housing. This ensures female offenders continue to have worse socioeconomic outcomes in comparison to their male counterparts. Women of color are disproportionately more likely to be single mothers, and households led by this group are more likely to be living in deep poverty: 48 per cent for Native women, 42 per cent for Hispanic women and 40 per cent for Black women. However, the discrimination these women will encounter once they’ve finished their sentences allows for the intergenerational transmission of poverty from them to their children, that will affect their access to adequate education, healthcare and even housing. I still remember that sensation of dread when I was applying to different colleges shortly following my release, wondering like Kelsey: ‘What happens if I declare?’ While some of these issues can be addressed before a woman is released, both Kelsey and I found we were on our own as soon as our sentences were served even though most female prisoners cite employment, education and life skills services as being their greatest area of need. In my case, I was told only the day before my release date that I’d be released homeless despite receiving assurances from the prison casework team during the last few months of my sentence that they would arrange for me to go into temporary accommodation. As a black or brown woman, these barriers are still felt years after you’ve served your time. One married student I spoke to, Liseli, who also attends Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College, told me that she ‘got denied twice this week for apartments’ due to her criminal history. This deliberate disappearing of women like me was one of the main reasons why I chose to reach out to former prisoners. To find out why, and exactly whose purpose it serves. My search took me back to the beginnings of the American penal system.
Figure 2. Spivak, John. L, Convict Leasing, Children, 1903. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Convict-leasing_children.jpg. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution may have abolished slavery in general terms but made an exception for prisoners who could be legally transformed into ‘slaves of the state’.[i] This led to the rapid expansion of convict leasing, a system of forced penal labor in which the Southern states leased prisoners to commercial entities such as private railways and coal mines. This enabled the state to exert control over the physical bodies of formerly enslaved African American men, women and children whose free labor helped to rebuild the fledging Southern economy. In the case of Alabama, the total revenue derived from convict leasing increased from 10 per cent in 1883 to 73 per cent by 1898. The traditional narrative contends that convict leasing disproportionately targeted Black men who were arrested for criminal acts such as vagrancy or violating the Black Codes that included ‘walking without a purpose’ or ‘walking at night’. However, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954), an African American civil rights activist and suffragette, once declared Black female prisoners to be the principal victims of the convict lease system.[ii] Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Black women continued to outnumber Black men in prison, 47.5 per cent to 29 per cent. In states such as Virginia, Black women were classified as ‘field laborers with a productive capacity equivalent to that of men’, meaning they were just as likely to be arrested when seen out in public, and once sent to convict lease camps were made to dress in men’s clothes and perform manual labor, such as building railroads, digging ditches and growing cotton. No provision was made for the separation of men and women, which made women vulnerable to sexual abuse from the officers and male inmates. In the convict camps, where the manacled prisoners were housed, the ritual of publicly whipping half-naked Black women, who were made to stand in a sexualised stance with their heads placed between the overseer’s knees, prevailed.[iii] Any children born to them often found themselves trapped performing hard labour alongside their mothers. Those who refused to work, including children under the ages of ten, were punished, or in some cases beaten to death. Death rates among leased convicts were ten times higher than the death rates of prisoners in non-lease states in part due to the inhumane conditions they were forced to work in, and the physical abuses inflicted on them by the authorities that necessitated the creation of secret graves to conceal the high body count. Women in the convict camps endured conditions that were harsher than those they had experienced under slavery, as the private companies had no ownership interest and prisoners could be replaced at low cost. Despite public outrage that stemmed mainly from prominent female members of the African American community, convict leasing was defended on the grounds that it could bring about ‘the rehabilitation of an incarcerated person’, but rehabilitation was strictly reserved for those deemed capable of reform — white prisoners.
When the convict system was finally eliminated in 1908, it was replaced by the chain gang, where a group of prisoners dressed in white and black striped uniforms were chained together and forced to perform manual labor such as breaking rocks or building railways. When we think of the chain gang, just as we do with convict leasing, we tend to visualise Black men who were portrayed in songs such as Sam Cooke’s Chain Gang as ‘working on the highways and byways’ until ‘the sun is goin’ down … moanin’ their lives away’. However, the painful sounds of women on the chain gang, who up until 1936 were made up entirely of women of colour, could also be heard.[iv] These women were shackled together and made to carry out back-breaking work in public that had the effect of making female deviancy synonymous with ethnic-minority women. On the rare occasion that white women were sent to convict lease camps or chain gangs (between 1908 and 1938 only four white women were sent to Georgia’s chain gangs in comparison with nearly 2000 Black women), they were given light work such as mending uniforms, or they were released early. They were spared from wearing irons that could weigh as much as nine pounds that not only meant falls could prove fatal, often injuring several women at once, but the irons caused some women to suffer from shackle sores, gangrene, and other infections. Despite their gender, punishments continued to be as brutal as those carried out under convict leasing.
Although the chain gang was generally disbanded in the mid-twentieth century, that did not stop the Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County from reintroducing it in 1995 to Estrella’s female prison before it was eventually disbanded once more nearly a decade later. The chain gang may have fallen out of vogue but heavy-handed methods continues to persist. Even when I was in prison, I would witness groups of male guards surrounding a sole female prisoner who had either answered back or refused to work. In no time at all she would then be jumped on by multiple men and pinned faced down to the ground while the female guards stood back and watched. Strip searches, though carried out by female guards, were common and often ordered by male guards intent on punishing and intimidating women who either offended them or refused their sexual advances.
The 1908 Parole Act may have allowed prisoners back then the possibility of escape, although under parole, female prisoners were often placed with white families and obligated to perform hard domestic labor. However in most cases the women learned they had swapped one prison for another, with the warden now a white housewife who had the power to send them back to prison for minor transgressions. In some ways, this practice of confining female prisoners of color to the fields or a white household was a reaction to the Great Migration that saw six million African Americans migrate from the rural and urban South to the urban North from 1916–1970. Fears of a labor shortage followed, particularly in relation to Black women, who were needed to perform domestic service, leading to disproportionate rates of arrest and imprisonment among women of color. Convict leasing, the chain gang and parole had the effect of permanently associating Black women and those from other ethnic groups with low pay, hard labor and degradation. This even applied when prisoners achieved positions of responsibility, such as Georgia’s Mattie Crawford, who was made ‘sole blacksmith of the farm’ having been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing her stepfather who was abusing her.[v] Her status as a prisoner meant she would forever be stranded between ‘a free labor market that refused to admit her as a skilled worker’ and the prison labor system ‘that would only allow her to work in chains’.[vi] When women of color attempted to stray beyond these boundaries either they were arrested and ‘made to construct and maintain the very same roads upon which they were policed’ or harassed until they either quit or were fired.[vii] A case in point is the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of August 1897, when the white female workers objected to the hiring of twenty Black women despite ‘multiple failed attempts to hire white women for these jobs’.[viii] Despite the fact the Black workers would have been stationed in a separate corner of the factory far away from their white employees, the company’s owner had crossed racial lines by hiring Black women to carry out the same jobs as his white female employees. In the end, the Black workers were dismissed.
Throughout the evening when I was speaking to Kelsey, one thing we definitely agreed on was that prison was ‘definitely not rehabilitative’. Whether it was seeing women who threw tantrums being rewarded for their behaviour or having to play the waiting game whenever we identified opportunities that we thought could help us to better ourselves, prison did not seem rehabilitative to us. In the end, Kelsey was only able to identify two prison programs that led to viable routes of employment: the cosmetology program and the construction program. Both ran for two years, but a woman needed to have been in prison for a minimum of two years before she could be placed on the waiting list; this meant prisoners with sentences of four years or less were ineligible to apply. In relation to the jobs women could do around the prison, there was a choice between ‘kitchen work and janitorial work’. Laundry, I’m told, was the highest paid at ’47 cents a day’ and geared towards the lifers who liked the routine.
This practice of restricting women to courses or employment that tie them to low-paid or unskilled labor extends beyond Wisconsin. In Texas there are twenty-one job-certification programs available for male offenders that include technology and advanced industrial design. For women, there are only two programs: office administration and culinary arts. When I was in prison, I was given a stark choice between training to be a hairdresser or becoming a cleaner. Had I not achieved a high level of education prior to my imprisonment, my inability to handle a backcombing brush let alone a blow-dryer would probably have sent me on a downward spiral. Like most women, my background or my hopes for the future were not taken into consideration, and while we could in theory apply to undertake distance learning degrees in subjects such as Business and Accountancy, this very rarely happened. In my experience, women were only encouraged to take up learning activities that prepared them for jobs that were dull and repetitive, or in the case of the beauty industry, badly paid. While there were exceptions, opportunities that allowed for academic advancement that went beyond the basic level were usually handed out to white prisoners. Unfortunately, women of color are still presumed to be illiterate, slow learners or simply unworthy of teaching. I can still recall one episode when a judge who was brought into the prison to chair a disciplinary hearing, immediately began to spell out the name of the month in a long, drawn-out way designed to put me in my place when I asked when the next hearing would take place, despite him having witnessed me taking down detailed notes throughout our session. However, that barely compared to being asked by a visiting solicitor whether I was literate despite informing her that I was employed as a library orderly at the time. Even external employers that worked with the prison exercised different recruitment practices for female prisoners depending on the color of their skin. One semi-luxury hotel that has chains across the country had an unofficial policy of recruiting white female prisoners to work in their more upscale locations while consigning ethnic-minority women to their less exclusive urban centres that tended to have fewer vacancies. They defended their policy on the grounds that ethnic-minority women work better in diverse settings, refusing to even let them work in their more luxurious chain on a trial basis. I cannot help but think that prisons today replicate ‘the racial apartheid social structure’ of our early prisons, consigning women of color to perform jobs that no one else wants or denying them opportunities altogether.
Even when female prisoners are trained like Mattie Crawford to perform skilled work, they are still caught inside the trap of the prison-industrial complex. Nowadays, even training in making circuit boards or lingerie for luxury brand Victoria’s Secret does not earn a female offender equal rights to fair treatment. She is prized when her labor means ‘no strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits’ or ‘unemployment insurance’ and discarded once her chains are lifted and she demands to be treated like an ordinary employee.[ix] It makes returning to prison look like the easy option. Currently, 66 per cent of women released from American jails are rearrested within three years. When women attempt to break the cycle of reoffending, they find the odds stacked against them. Some 93.3 per cent of these women are actively looking for work, however 75 per cent of employers have admitted to legally discriminating against them. Formerly incarcerated Black, Hispanic and White women have an unemployment rate of 40 per cent, 39.42 per cent and 23.20 per cent respectively, compared to 6.4, 6.9 and 4.3 per cent of Black, Hispanic and White women who have no criminal convictions. I am still unable to find data on how unemployment impacts on formerly incarcerated Native women. However, the unemployment rate for other former incarcerated women of color, who are often of prime working age, exceeds that of men from the same ethnic backgrounds. When formerly incarcerated women of color do find work, it is more likely to be part-time and with an income that pays way below the poverty line irrespective of prior experience or educational qualifications. In the prison I went to, some women nearing the middle or end part of their sentences could work outside for companies that had existing relationships with the prison. Of course, they were paid significantly less than their never-been-to-prison colleagues and worked in industries staffed by poor immigrants or ethnic minorities that experienced very high turnovers. Very few of these women managed to secure permanent employment with these companies after their release and it was taken for granted that if we did find jobs, it would be for companies where we would have no bargaining power as we would be expected to be permanently grateful for being hired in the first place.
Most of the women I spoke to from Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College left prison feeling positive. Kelsey cited the education she’s receiving as keeping her on track: ‘Without education I would not be as stable nor as successful as I am today. Education has given me opportunities, especially when staying busy was essential.’ Even Liseli, who’s had difficulties finding a home to rent for her family, confided in me that she wouldn’t ‘change that prison time for the world. I used that time to learn, change, grow’. However, I’m painfully conscious that I and the women I spoke to are a minority within a minority. As women of color who have been to prison, the lives we’re living now should not be so positive, at least not according to the statistics. When I left prison there were many officers who believed I would end up right back where I started — in a cell. At the time of leaving I had no home and no identifiable employment prospects. While having a positive mindset helps, perhaps the fact that Kelsey, Liseli and I were all old enough to know who we were when we went to prison and what we were capable of, meant we paid no attention to the low expectations other people had of us.
However, sometimes when I walk around my local neighbourhood and see groups of young girls, I wonder what life may have in store for them. Girls of color are becoming increasingly more vulnerable to criminalisation. Black girls in the US are three and a half times more likely to be incarcerated than white girls, while Native girls are four times more likely to be incarcerated, and Latina girls 38 per cent more likely. Often these girls will be incarcerated for low-level offences such as truancy and running away. However, a criminal record even at a young age often locks them out of the labor market, making them more susceptible to falling into a life of crime and poverty as they grow older. Most of the young girls I spoke to in prison, who were barely eighteen, seemed resigned to living life on the margins once they finished their sentences. Locked out of learning anything that could prove useful to them on the outside and taunted by guards and even members of their family who told them no decent employer would ever hire them, it was hardly surprising that many of them fell under the influence of older prisoners and believed the only way they could make decent money would be through selling drugs or their bodies. Prison represented a decent recruiting field to many career criminals who took advantage of girls’ fears about their future, bragging openly about the luxury lifestyle a life of crime had netted them, though as Kelsey summed up perfectly, ‘Nobody knows who anybody is outside of the prison.’
When the Black Lives Matter protest erupted during the summer, like most people, I thought we were entering a new era of race relations, where society would be held accountable for the discrimination experienced by people of color, especially within the criminal justice system. However, the lack of testimony from women trapped in the prison-industrial complex whose sufferings continue to be ignored by society, has made me aware of the disregard we’ve always shown to incarcerated women of color who became the silent victims of the racial apartheid that emerged following the abolition of slavery. To embrace women of color in debates surrounding Black Men and mass incarceration does not dilute the issue but rather strengthens it. We cannot right the wrongs of a discriminatory criminal justice system and achieve racial equality if women continue to be left out of the conversation just as they have been for centuries.
References
[i] LeFlouria, Talitha, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 8.
[ii] Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 134.
[iii] Ibid., 92.
[iv] Ibid., 4.
[v] LeFlouria, Talitha, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 4.
[vi] Ibid.,
[vii] Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 35.
[viii] Ibid., 63.
[ix] Davis, Angela. “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” History Is A Weapon. Accessed Nov 4, 2020, https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisprison.html. | https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/excluded-gender-and-jim-crow-in-the-u-s-criminal-justice-system-3acdb331c481 | ['Sophie Campbell'] | 2020-12-23 15:58:08.563000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Women', 'Gender Equality', 'Politics', 'Racism'] |
⚡️️Bitcoin Mempool Spikes & Pushtx.com💥 | Mempool spikes, the nightmare for every bitcoin user. They prevent you from sending or receiving your beloved BTC, leading one to wonder “Why is my BTC transaction taking so long to complete?”
The Bitcoin mempool is the location where transactions get sorted for confirmation, however depending on a variety of factors that we will go over in this article, you may end up waiting for far too long.
Whenever the mempool is overloaded, we say that it has spiked i.e. there is a “mempool spike.” What this means in reality is that there are too many transactions to fit in the next Bitcoin block. Due to block size constraints, Bitcoin miners must have a way to prioritize transactions.
That is where fees come into play, and they are the culprit that’s preventing you from completing your very urgent transaction. Usually, you can get by with almost any fee. Your transaction will be mined and included in the next couple of blocks.
However, when Bitcoin experiences a lot of traffic, meaning too many people sending transactions at the same time, a sort of auction starts to take place. A fee market. Users try to outbid each other in order get their transaction into the next block.
Bitcoin mempool spike, 2017, colorized. Source: Giphy
PushTX.com the simple & fast solution to get your BTC transaction confirmed
In 2015, Bitcoin developers introduced a “Replace by Fee” feature that enables users to get their transactions unstuck. RBF requires a strong technical know-how and additionally, using this feature requires a fully functional Bitcoin node which is a 307 GB commitment that is rarely an option for the average user.
This is where Pushtx.com, a Poolin product, comes in to help users with stuck transactions in an easy, cheap, and FAST way. All you need is your transaction hash and cryptocurrency (Litecoin, Lightning payment, Dogecoin, Zcash, DASH) to boost the transaction.
Mempool spikes often come without any warning and they may happen when you really need to make an important Bitcoin transaction.
When there are hundreds of thousands of users making simultaneous transactions, it’s easy to end up at the back of the line, even with fast settings.
Pushtx.com regularly sees a significant boost in users during mempool spikes. We noticed this recently in November and decided to parse some data to see if there was a consistent correlation between mempool spikes and increased Pushtx users.
Here’s what we gathered:
As you can see on the graph, throughout 2020 PushTx.com has been a popular destination for users during mempool spikes. Stuck Bitcoin transactions can end up waiting for days before they are finally confirmed.
How to avoid getting your Bitcoin transaction stuck in the first place?
Bitcoin transaction priority is calculated on a sat/b (satoshi per byte) ratio. The easiest way to find out what is the best current ratio is Poolin’s mempool explorer where you can easily get the best possible price for your needs.
Poolin’s mempool explorer updates every minute, so you can also see how many people are making transactions before you commit. However, if your Bitcoin transaction ends up getting stuck every one in a while, Pushtx.com is here to help you. | https://medium.com/poolin/%EF%B8%8F%EF%B8%8Fmempool-spikes-pushtx-com-b1a26e14b277 | [] | 2021-02-10 09:53:54.968000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Transaction Fees', 'Btc', 'Mempool'] |
Video: On a Highway to Scale — Machine Learning as a Platform (Hebrew) | On a Highway to Scale: Machine Learning as a Platform — Ben Amir (Hebrew)
When you’re handling lots of data, you come across many issues and problems, including ones associated with model training. At Riskified, we also handle lots of data and face problems, which forced us to scale up our ML platform.
In this talk, Ben Amir covers how we speed up to the process of handling massive amounts of data and shorten the way to production using our new machine learning platform orchestration. Ben shares our insights from the process of building it up from scratch and how we leveraged Apache Spark and Kubernetes as key infrastructural players.
Ben is the ML Platform team lead at Riskified. After serving 12 years in the 8200 unit, he joined Riskified and fell in love with fighting fraud. He is a real fan of new technologies, trying new stuff, innovation and hard work. When Ben is not near his laptop, you can find him watching (or playing) basketball, walking around the city with his dog and probably grabbing some good food.
*Talk is in Hebrew | https://medium.com/riskified-technology/video-on-a-highway-to-scale-machine-learning-as-a-platform-hebrew-e2d9e167e43d | ['Riskified Technology'] | 2020-09-23 09:16:06.591000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Videos', 'Spark', 'Apache Spark', 'Engineering'] |
Going to the Bethlehem | I am going to Bethlehem
Just like the three magi who became
Three Wise Men
I am going to Bethlehem
Just like joseph a carpenter who became
A Father to Jesus
I am going to Bethlehem
Just like mary a innocent women who became
The Mother of God
I am going to Bethlehem
In search of my God
In search of that message
That saves me not only Christmas Day
but everyday, every hour, and every second
of my life | https://medium.com/@annethanyamendis/going-to-the-bethlehem-c8298d499d37 | ['Anne Mendis'] | 2020-12-20 13:39:25.941000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Jesus', 'God', 'Faith', 'Catholic'] |
VACC gets a new usecase — exclusive staking rights for partner rewards! CORD-BNB-LP & CORD-VACC-LP move to PancakeSwap V2 | VACC gets a new usecase — exclusive staking rights for partner rewards! CORD-BNB-LP & CORD-VACC-LP move to PancakeSwap V2 cordfinance May 3·3 min read
As many are aware, PancakeSwap updated their liquidity pool smart contracts, and asked projects to move liquidity to their V2 pools. This has necessitated a number of actions at CORD.Finance.
First, we have migrated our CORD-VACC liquidity to the V2 contracts. If you hold CORD-VACC-LP on the V1 contracts please remove that liquidity and re-add it to the V2 CORD-VACC-LP. You can no longer stake the old LP tokens.
We could not do that right away with CORD-BNB-LP however, since we have locked that liquidity for 3 years on UniCrypt. It took UniCrypt a few weeks to develop a migration contract. It is now complete and we have migrated our CORD-BNB-LP to V2 also. For more details see more recent Medium articles like this one: https://cordfinance.medium.com/cord-bnb-liquidity-now-migrated-to-pancakeswap-v2-99-locked-for-3-years-5a5e3d937ce7
How does this affect VACC holders? It adds another powerful usecase! Already we have the global VACC hodler’s multiplier which produces extra rewards in all pools (including partner pools) just for holding VACC in one’s personal wallet — no spending required. This usecase puts VACC in very high demand, because only 37 people on Earth could ever achieve the max VACC hodler’s bonus awarded at a level of 50k VACC. But now is an even more direct usecase, because we will have direct VACC -> Partner token vaults. You will need to stake VACC in order to earn partner rewards, it will never be the CORD vault. This means if you have already acquired 50k VACC, you may want to collect even more! because you want some VACC to stake also to earn partner rewards.
The upcoming vaults will be as follows
CORD -> VACC
CORD-VACC-LP -> VACC
VACC -> COVAL-BNB-LP
COVAL-BNB-LP -> VACC
There is quite a bit of new contract deployment to manage this time, so the new vaults will go live in a few days.
Contract for CORD on Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
0xa3506A4f978862A296b29816C4e65cf1a6F54AAA
Contract for VACC on Binance Smart Chain (BSC)
0xb01228C32F85db30b8F9fc59256B40C716b0E891
To buy or trade CORD-BNB on PancakeSwap V2, enter the BSC contract address of CORD in one of the PancakeSwap V2 exchange token fields, and select BNB in the other field.
https://exchange.pancakeswap.finance/#/swap
To buy or trade CORD-Sushi on SushiSwap, enter the BSC contract address of CORD in one of the SushiSwap exchange token fields, and select Sushi in the other field.
https://app.sushi.com/swap
To buy or trade CORD-VACC on PancakeSwap V2, enter the BSC contract addresses of CORD and VACC in the PancakeSwap V2 exchange token fields. https://exchange.pancakeswap.finance/#/swap
So get your excess VACC ready to stake in our new partner vaults fellow CORDians, plus hodl that VACC for your multipliers!
- The CORD.Finance Team | https://medium.com/@cordfinance/vacc-gets-a-new-usecase-exclusive-staking-rights-for-partner-rewards-3dc4080d34fa | [] | 2021-09-09 14:42:36.459000+00:00 | ['Yield Farming', 'Cord', 'Finance', 'Defi', 'Partnerships'] |
THE IMPORTANCE OF EDTECH DURING COVID-19 | Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
Although the unexpected lockdown of COVID-19 paralyzed the world economy and shook almost every industry, Education Management maintained stable from the very beginning. Countries have quickly adapted the best EdTech solutions to replace traditional education.
Today distance education and online learning during COVID-19 are still evolving quickly. Technological innovations, student mobility, government regulations are emerging.
Custom Software development companies, EdTech companies all around the world have already started developing and utilizing technology for the large-scale, national as well as private institutions in support of remote learning. The already existing e-learning platforms, online schools, or classrooms are implementing complex tech solutions for remote education.
The importance and demand for Education Software Solutions now is assessed more than ever.
CodeRiders has also experienced the above changes in EdTech industry, thus we continue our series of articles about the impact of COVID-19 on some industry sectors. Our previous article was about Telemedicine. This time we’ll speak about EdTech industry’s functional updates during COVID-19 pandemic.
Before we dive in, let’s highlight some ways that Education Software Solutions make our lives stress free and more organized. EdTech solves the following issues that are common in traditional learning.
· Scattered resources — Learner, Educator, and Learning Material
· Limited mobility
· Non-organized, sometimes vague collaboration between teachers, mentors, students, and parents
· Waste of time on Research and Development
· Absence of integrated platforms for specific groups
· Absence of multimedia content (pictures, graphics, sound, videos, online-based content)
If you’re a state or private education institution or an e-learning platform looking for more advanced software solutions during Coronavirus pandemic, this article is for you.
In this article you’ll learn about:
EdTech Solutions (Best practices) ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), online learning during COVID-19 pandemic in various countries in the world Post COVID-19 EdTech Industry
Paperless Education: Best Practices
One of the common and more ‘’corporate software’’ is Learning Management System, which may sometimes be referred to as a collective of specific education software.
1․ LMS (Learning Management System)
LMS is a frequently used abbreviation and stands for Learning Management System, a software that is generally implemented to deploy and track online training initiatives.
However, LMS software is used for the specific company’s objectives, online learning strategies, and desired outcomes. Thus it’s highly customized. Assets are uploaded to the LMS, which make the education process possible from any corner of the world. It’s natural, that LMS quickly became one of the most crucial factors in the effective organization of online learning during COVID-19.
Overall, LMS is a vast repository where you can keep and track information. Anyone logged in the system can have access to various online learning courses. LMS users are either online learners who use the software to fulfill online training courses or a specific team or a group of people who rely on LMS platform to disburse information and update online learning content.
LMS solutions are beneficial for various establishments starting from educational institutions to different consumer groups, such as companies specializing in e-commerce, CRM, online training courses, SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses), etc.
These consumer groups get their big data organized and safely stored, an opportunity to analyze and track students’ learning progress and performance, improve resource allocation, personalize online training experience, and more.
Various functions may be included according to the specific consumer’s requirements. Most of the countries’ governments organized their online learning during COVID-19 by integrating the following functions:
· Training sessions
· Online meetings and virtual classrooms
· Issuing reminders for recording sessions, audit-proofing, improving content availability, etc.
· Intuitive user interface and LMS navigation platform
· E-learning assessment tools
· Compliance and certification support
· Gamification features
· SCORM based LMS (makes the format of e-learning content shareable across the board)
Learning Management Systems also have several deployment options. Such as:
· Cloud-based (SaaS)
These LMS platforms are hosted on the cloud, which means that the LMS vendor maintains the system and carries out any upgrades or updates. There is no need to install any software. Users login to the LMS with a username and password.
· Self-hosted
The self-hosted LMS requires software downloads, which may be either a direct download from the site or a request for physical software discs. Nowadays, the first option is more popular. One of the essential advantages of such an option is advanced customization and creative control. A disadvantage may be paid updates or IT know-how requirements.
· Desktop Application
The LMS application is installed on your desktop and may be accessible on multiple devices, which makes team collaborations easier.
· Mobile application
The LMS application is installed on your mobile thus it’s accessible from anywhere as soon as you have your mobile with you. Online training content can be uploaded for learners to track online learning initiatives.
We, at CodeRiders also enjoy building Education Software Solutions. We’ve successfully had experiences collaborating with Educational institutions and businesses to build the tech systems enumerated in this article.
Our recent educational project was for a Hong Kong based English School. We built a web platform and a mobile application to connect teachers with parents/students, as well as to track and mobilize the school’s education system. The system is still under development but its beta version is available both on Play Store and App Store.
The project will soon be added to our portfolio section, so you’ll be able to check for more details.
2. Virtual Classrooms
Virtual classrooms have also become popular and essential alternatives for organizing online learning during COVID-19. These are online learning environments that allow live interactions between mentors, teachers, and students. Virtual classrooms and virtual lessons usually happen via videoconferencing. In this kind of virtual interaction teacher is the moderator of the online learning process and individual or group activities. Both participants have tools to implement or represent learning content or online activities in various formats.
The tools used during virtual classes include:
· Videoconferencing
· Instant messaging
· Breakout rooms
· Online whiteboard for live interaction and collaboration
· Tools for participation control
3. Online Examination Systems (E-examinations)
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of the Education Industry was conducting examinations during Coronavirus lockdown. However, this sector became the most suffered one. State Education Ministries in various countries had to pare down the number of obligatory examinations to enter higher education institutions or enroll at high schools.
However, the examination system hasn’t met a total collapse during Coronavirus pandemic due to E-examinations.
E-examinations or online examination systems are conducted as open-book examinations. The system provides concrete exam duration. After the time is expired, the answer paper is disabled automatically and answers are sent to the organizer. Afterwards answers are reviewed and evaluated by the examiner and the results are imported onto the system. The results are usually being sent to the students’ emails or are being published on the website. The post-exam notification process can be done either manually or automatically. This software implementation aims to cut out too much time spent on manual work and minimize the human factor.
E-examination software also has various features, minor functions, and tools and the overall structure of the system depends on the specific company’s or government sector’s requirements.
The minimum automated e-examination system is scalable, has a well-maintained database, allows teachers and students to view the exams and marks, and have an admin, who automates the user and exam system.
4. Authoring Systems
Authoring systems are another commonly used online learning methods during COVID-19. These are mostly built for teachers and mentors. Authoring systems help teachers create electronic flashcards or index cards, which are very productive and effective ways to mentor students on specific content. Authoring system software is also used to create multimedia content, such as lessons, tutorials, or reviews. There can be also web-based alternatives, which help teachers create multimedia web content that is used on a website.
5. Graphic software and desktop publishing software
COVID-19 lockdown evoked financial investments and total re-organizations of education management systems in various countries. However, it’s out of denial that the input of education software solutions made students’ learning process more fun and entertaining. The biggest examples are graphic software solutions. This software helps students create and edit pictures on the internet or in the program. Students mostly use it to create online presentations.
Desktop publishing software is another example of engaging learning process. This software is used for creating designing handouts, flyers, etc. It’s a great solution to design a creative invitation for specific events.
6. Drill & Practice Software and Tutorial Software
Drill & Practice software is often used by teachers to prepare their students for exams or tests. This software has been used by a vast majority of teachers during COVID-19 lockdown. Tutorial Software is used both by teachers to prepare and present new lessons and by students to practice new skills on their own. It’s also a very effective tool to evaluate progress.
7. Educational Games Software and Reference Software
One of the problems of organizing online learning during COVID-19 for the younger generation is the ability to maintain discipline remotely. Educational games have become frequently used software solutions to grab the students’ attention. Educational games software motivates and encourages young adults to develop new skills through entertaining activities. While Reference Software is used for older generation students for research projects. This software gives access to atlases, encyclopedia, thesauruses, and various dictionaries.
Countries That Quickly Implemented Education Software Solutions During COVID-19 Lockdown
As mentioned earlier most of the countries in the world had a rapid response to the remote education system following the Coronavirus lockdown. The following countries implemented best practices for convenient remote education.
CodeRiders analyzed the updated information by The World Bank, an organization that constantly supports countries worldwide to obtain and use best practices of omnibus education.
· Argentina
After the COVID-19 lockdown, Argentinean Ministry of Education quickly developed educ.ar education platform, that connects teachers, administrators, students, and families. It also provides curated resources. The Ministry of Education and The Secretariat of Media and Public Communication developed a program called “Seguimos Educando”, which has started broadcasting educational content since April 1, 2020.
· Chile
In Chile, students use the Aptus platform that hosts digital learning materials. The platform is financed by the Chilean Ministry of Education, which made the learning content available also to other countries in the region after COVID-19 lockdown.
· Czech Republic
An online learning platform called “Distance Education” was launched by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, on March 12, 2020. The platform aims to help students and teachers to continue classes via online learning during COVID-19 lockdown. The website has links to online educational tools, updated educational content on each class.
Italy
Italian government also created a website to continue the work of educational institutions virtually following the terrific emergency in the country. The website includes links to various tools developed for online education.
· Armenia
According to EAIE (European Association for International Education) Armenian educational institutions have also switched to remote learning following the COVID-19 lockdown. Short-term solutions have been implemented to organize virtual education. Due to the highly developed IT and ITC industries in Armenia, private software development companies utilize advanced Education Software Solutions with the government. This slowly and firmly transfers traditional education onto the digital world in the whole country. Educational institutions and establishments use various tools, distance, and digital modes. Lessons are being broadcasted by a new educational TV channel called “Hybrid Edu”, using such tools as Zoom, Moodle, Blackboard, Google Hangouts, and WhatsApp, as well as integrated materials from MOOCs via Coursera.
To Sum Up
To sum up, after the combat of COVID-19, we’ll see a more thriving EdTech industry in the whole world. At the end of 2020, educational systems, e-learning platforms, Learning Management Systems will be common and popular features not only for private virtual learning environments but also state schools, educational institutions, and those that once had limited Education Software Solutions.
EdTech will make Education Management entertaining and engaging starting from elementary school to PhD students and above.
Post COVID-19 world will be more welcoming in terms of remote learning opportunities.
What’s most important, COVID-19 made the world more vigilant in terms of Education Management during an emergency. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/the-importance-of-edtech-during-covid-19-e39dcab53695 | [] | 2020-06-30 12:22:08.541000+00:00 | ['Edtech', 'Software Solutions', 'Remote Learning', 'Software Development', 'Covid 19'] |
Seattle Seahawks vs Dallas Cowboys Free NFL Spread Pick, 12–24–2017 | Seattle Seahawks vs Dallas Cowboys Free NFL Spread Pick, 12–24–2017
Free NFL Pick by Frank Moone of King Sports Picks
Seattle Seahawks (8–6) vs Dallas Cowboys (8–6)
NFL: Sunday, December 24, 4:25 PM EST
Line: Cowboys -5, O/U 47
Last Meeting: 11/1/15 SEA 13 DAL 12
Trends:
Seahawks are 9–3–1 ATS in their last 13 games following a SU loss
Cowboys are 1–5 ATS vs. a team with a winning record
Underdog is 4–0 ATS in their last 4 meetings
At the beginning of the season, this matchup would have been circled as one of the top NFL games to watch in 2017. Circumstances have shifted a bit and while we’re not watching this game to see which team gets the #1 seed in the NFC, but these teams are fighting for a playoff spot. The Seattle Seahawks travel to AT&T Stadium to take on the Dallas Cowboys. Both teams enter this contest with an 8–6 record and both teams are in dire need of a win.
After beating Philadelphia three weeks ago in an impressive, dominant win over the top team in the NFC the Seahawks have tapered off the last two weeks. Seattle has lost two straight games to the Jaguars and Rams, two very good playoff bound teams but they were run out of their building last week vs the Rams.
Dallas will get a shot in the arm as they welcome back All-Pro running back, Ezekiel Elliott fresh off his six-game suspension. If Dallas can seize control on the ground in the first couple of offensive series than it figures to be a nice first game back for Elliott and another long afternoon for Seattle’s defense. Dak Prescott has had his ups and downs since ‘Zeke’s departure but the pressure will be lessened if the Cowboys can establish the run game. Dallas has won three straight games vs three non-playoff contenders, however, two of the three wins were convincing enough to prove they could win out and clinch a wild card.
Offensive line play figures to be a significant factor in this one, as the Seahawks need to keep Russell Wilson upright and find some way to run the ball. Meanwhile, the Cowboys may be without their All-Pro left tackle, Tyron Smith. Considering the Cowboys are getting Elliott back with fresh legs and not off an injury will be a big boost for this offense. This team was built around the run and you can bet they will give Elliott as many reps as he can handle. I expect this to be a close game with both teams fighting for their playoff lives. Take the Seahawks and points.
Seahawks vs Cowboys FREE Pick: Seahawks +5 | https://medium.com/verifiedcappers/seattle-seahawks-vs-dallas-cowboys-free-nfl-spread-pick-12-24-2017-f8dc096c6b69 | ['Vc Sports Monitor'] | 2017-12-24 12:01:52.474000+00:00 | ['NFL', 'Dallas Cowboys', 'Seattle Seahawks', 'Sports Betting', 'Gambling'] |
What Would You Change? | If you could change one thing, what you change? Your hair, your weight; Maybe your job? How about changing someone else’s life?
If you can’t change your life how in the world could you change someone else’s you ask? Show kindness, that’s how. Have you ever had someone pay for your order at a fast-food drive-through? Taken breakfast to a co-worker? Given $5 for gas to a single mother who would never ask for it?
There are small ways to change someone’s life. Offer someone a smile who doesn’t have one. Open a door for someone with their arms full. Hold a door open for a young mother struggling with rambunctious children.
Don’t think of random acts of kindness, plan them. Make kindness a verb, with your actions and with your thoughts.
This year has been a dumpster fire, let’s change that. | https://medium.com/the-shortform/what-would-you-change-96528de7a2dd | ['Patricia Rosa'] | 2020-12-21 11:43:50.928000+00:00 | ['Kindness', 'Random Act Of Kindness', 'Dumpster Fire', 'Charity', 'Giving'] |
A message to you all: this year I am not going to DNS | A message to you all: this year I am not going to DNS
Three days to go. Four days and it will be done. Four days and I’ll be wondering what I was so worried about. Honestly you’d think I’d never swum the bloody Channel – the amount of stress, nerves and self doubt I have accumulated over a 10km swim. In my younger days I’d have been relieved at the prospect of a mere 10km swim.
Anyway. There’s a pattern that you should know about.
Mid November I start getting excited about the following year’s open water season. I enter, and pay for, a *marathon swim event or two. With the benefit of a six month stretch until my first event, I smugly enjoy the thought of the preparing for, and completing, a swim that has required a reasonable amount of effort to train for and complete.
January training begins. I’m full of resolve and hit the pool with focus.
March I realise I haven’t got any faster, in fact I’ve got slower.
May I am full of self doubt and loathing, despite the mileage and distance training going to plan.
June, the date of my first marathon swim event looms close. I find a reason not to show up to the event I’ve entered.
I whisper my excuses to anyone who cares, but mostly to myself.
I DNS. “Did Not Start”.
Did Not Start. Did Not want to die during an event. Did Not want to finish last. Did Not want to admit that I’m not the swimmer I once was. Did Not want to have one more stress piling on an already large pile of self doubt. Did Not realise that it would be so easy to quietly let myself down.
This year, though, is different. I am not going to DNS. This year I Will Start. There, I’ve told you and now I have to do it.
This year I have done a good volume of training. This year I’m slower and, yeah, I’m going to try my hardest not to care about that. This year someone has to come last, and it might as well be me. This year I am going to finally realise that doing something that you find mentally challenging is the hardest scariest and best thing of all. This year, Jubilee River 10km, I’m coming to get you.
I’ll see you on the start line.
*A marathon swim is a distance of 10km or further. At the speed I’m swimming right now, that will probably take me 5 hours. | https://medium.com/postcardsfromthepool/a-message-to-you-all-this-year-i-am-not-going-to-dns-93016babcf79 | ['Sally Goble'] | 2019-06-06 15:03:15.094000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Wild Swimming', 'Swimming', 'Open Water Swimming', 'Competition'] |
A Death in Luhansk | Photo by Akent879 | pixabay.com | Public Domain
A Death in Luhansk
We were minding our own business,
driving and laughing and making fun.
It was all we could do with the world
falling in shards around: a crushed
pysanka under the boots of men
and boys playing at their games.
We did not see the soldiers nor
the armed and running ballot thieves.
We drove between a cacophony
of guns and screams. Vanya lost
his voice, his chest burst open, a blooming
flower the color of his car.
I felt a horse kick my back;
then all was numb. Vanya’s eyes
were empty as if something had
disappeared; and so it was. | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/a-death-in-luhansk-ae514f353b8 | ['Darryl Willis'] | 2017-07-11 21:24:23.256000+00:00 | ['War', 'Poetry', 'Ukraine', 'Ukraine Donetsk Luhansk', 'Grief'] |
Australian Coach Justin Langer keeps Faith in Marcus Harris | Australian coach Justin Langer has kept faith in Marcus Harris, who has been locking in an under-fire opener for the Boxing Day Test in addition to a poor start in the Ashes.
A Fall in the Broad form at Test level :-
Marcus Harris is yet to score 23 runs from four innings in this series. Having declined to extensive form at Test level. where he has averaged 12.6 in his last 14 innings.
Also read:- STR vs HEA Dream11 Prediction Today with Playing XI, Pitch Report & Player Stats
But Justin Langer backed Thursday morning. That the Scarborough product would be given another opportunity to prove its mettle at MCG.
Justin Langer said, ‘He will play in the Test, there is no worry about that. “This is their home ground. He has played enough at the MCG.
https://twitter.com/ICC/status/1473839565966303236
Australian Coach Justin Langer keeps Faith in Marcus Harris
“He hasn’t been able to score the number of runs he wants to score so far, but he fears domestic cricket,” he said. So he knows he knows how to play.
A Good Partnership with Davey Warner :-
“He is a great player all around the team… and we know he is a very good player.” For him and for us, we are confident that he will play well and Davy Warner in this Boxing Day Test match. Will have a good partnership with you.”
Usman Khawaja is expected to be out for Sunday’s third Test as Australia look to consolidate the Ashes urn with a win or a draw. Harris’s Test average of 22.19 is the lowest among all regular Australian openers in 128 years.
But as did Steve Waugh and others, when Langer’s position was under pressure during his own playing career, Australia’s coach would stand by his opener.
Australian Coach Justin Langer keeps Faith in Marcus Harris
Read more:- Marnus Labuschagne Becomes №1 Test Batsman in ICC Test Rankings
Waugh once famously answered a reporter’s question about what advice he would give to Langer in 1999: “To stop your s-t”. Langer averaged only 32.65 at the time and he responded with a match-winning innings in Hobart.
While Langer was not as blunt as Waugh on Thursday, he has made no secret that he believes Harris can succeed at the top.
“It’s one of the most important things in life, knowing that people have your back,” Langer said.
Australian Coach Justin Langer keeps Faith in Marcus Harris
Allan Border said :-
“My experience, when Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Mark Taylor or Allan Border said ‘you’re on the team’, you feel like Superman.” are important too.”
Australia’s faith in Marcus Harris is made even more significant by the fact that Davy Warner has had 13 opening aides in his 10-year Test career.
Justin said, ‘I think the opening partnership is very important. “We are really sure that Marcus has got what it takes to become a successful Australian opener.
Australian Coach Justin Langer keeps Faith in Marcus Harris
Read more:- Tom Purst becomes Captain of England Young Lions team in 2022 Under-19 World Cup
“And what we see in the nets, what we see in domestic cricket, all that is imaginable is a very good Test career.”
“One of the courting blocks of a great team is the opening partnership and the top three.” “We’re strong enough to get that hegemony.” | https://medium.com/@babacric/australian-coach-justin-langer-keeps-faith-in-marcus-harris-c7497bd5dd54 | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-12-23 05:47:07.959000+00:00 | ['Cricket', 'Australia', 'Marcusharris', 'Justinlanger'] |
In a Pandemic Year, Podcasts Offered an Escape for the Ears | Studio71 has its biggest year in podcasting yet, with over 30 shows launched in 2020.
In a Pandemic Year, Podcasts Offered an Escape for the Ears
2020 has been a big year for podcasts. In a year where everyone’s routines were interrupted, the reliability of podcasts as a source of entertainment and escape has proven especially valuable. When other mediums like TV shows, movies, and books lagged behind the day-to-day reality of life during lockdown, podcasts were there. Hosts recorded podcasts in their closets under blankets. Guests called in via Zoom. The limitations were real, but somehow, it all worked. A medium whose popularity preceded the pandemic took on new relevance at a time when audiences craved comfort, knowledge, and escape — all without having to look at a screen. Businesses in tech and entertainment took notice. Amazon has its eye on acquiring podcast studios. Spotify continued its expansion into pods with a few key acquisitions and deals, from Joe Rogan’s record-breaking exclusive move to the platform to the recently-announced signing of literal royalty. Following the success of Amazon’s Homecoming, studios like HBO and Hulu have started optioning more and more podcasts to adapt into series and films.
The Shadow Diaries
Here at Studio71, podcasts have become an increasingly large part of our business. We launched a division devoted to the medium back in 2018 and have already made our mark in the field with engaging, original content.
This year alone, we launched over 30 unscripted shows, and dove into new territory with our first scripted narrative series, “The Shadow Diaries,” starring Madelaine Petsch (Riverdale) and Kara Hayward (Moonrise Kingdom). The series, written by Zack Imbrogno and K. Asher Levin, who also directed, launched in time for Halloween.
This month, as end-of-year lists started rolling in, we picked up an iHeart Radio nomination for best tech show for “Waveform” hosted by Marques Brownlee. Brownlee, known to fans as MKBHD, started as a YouTuber and translated his passion and deep knowledge of tech into the audio space. He’s in pretty good company alongside fellow nominees “Rabbit Hole” (The New York Times), “Recode by Vox” (Recode), “Reply All” (Gimlet)
and “TED Radio Hour” (NPR).
Waveform with Marques Brownlee
But we’re not in it for the awards. We’re in it for the creators. That’s why growing our podcast division has been a natural progression for our brand. Podcasts, perhaps more than any other kind of entertainment, rely on an intimate relationship between hosts and their audience. People listen to podcasts because they want to feel connected, informed, and entertained. Whether it’s a news show, a talk show, or a scripted series, the small, scrappy teams that make podcasts happen are what keep listeners hooked. By supporting the talent behind the mic, Studio71 helps creators do what they do best. We’re proud to be part of the podcast boom and can’t wait to see what 2021 has in store for our slate of creators and the industry as a whole. No matter what the next few months bring, we’ll be keeping an ear to the ground. | https://medium.com/@studio71/in-a-pandemic-year-podcasts-offered-an-escape-for-the-ears-2e2e6da2ef5f | [] | 2020-12-18 20:24:01.933000+00:00 | ['Entertainment', 'Apple', 'Spotify', 'Covid 19', 'Podcast'] |
FALSE: This resignation letter from Uganda’s Police spokesperson is fake | FALSE: This resignation letter from Uganda’s Police spokesperson is fake
The Police Force has distanced itself from the letter and Commissioner of Police Enanga continued with his duties on 14th December when the letter was circulated. PesaCheck Follow Dec 16, 2020 · 3 min read
A letter posted on Facebook with a claim that Uganda Police spokesperson Fred Enanga has tendered in his resignation is FALSE.
The letter, which is dated December 14, 2020 and addressed to the Inspector General of Police, Okoth Ochola, claims that Commissioner of Police (CP) Enanga has resigned and will be accepting a position in a private practice office.
Additionally, the letter has been signed off by both the police spokesman and IGP Ochola.
However, the header of the resignation letter appears to be fabricated as it does not look like the regular Uganda Police Force’s documents as seen in this press release.
Additionally, the police dismissed reports that the institution’s spokesperson had resigned, further branding the letter fake.
Further, on the same day the letter circulated online, CP Enanga continued his duties, holding the weekly media address on the general security situation in the country at the Uganda Media Center, contrary to the claim he has resigned.
CP Fred Enanga told PesaCheck on the phone that the letter was false and that he is carrying out his duties normally.
PesaCheck has looked into a letter posted on Facebook with a claim that Uganda Police spokesperson Fred Enanga has tendered in his resignation and finds it to be FALSE. | https://pesacheck.org/false-this-resignation-letter-from-ugandas-police-spokesperson-is-fake-1ca9fb962620 | [] | 2020-12-16 11:36:49.904000+00:00 | ['Police', 'Uganda'] |
Icons in Web Design | There are icons that users don’t like. They say that the icon is unclear, ugly, or simply cannot explain what they dislike. The reason is simple — in such icons, one or more fundamental principles of their construction are violated. The information in this article can help you avoid mistakes and create icons that users will definitely like. The principles are relevant to both website and application icons and can be applied to all types of icons.
Let’s start with some basics. Icons in web design are small elements only in size, but not in importance or significance. They are needed to indicate information. These are visual anchors that help capture the user’s attention and direct them to perform the targeted action.
Icons help to:
attract attention;
understand the meaning;
navigate the interface;
save visual space;
make a connection with the user.
The usage of icons is not as easy as it seems at first glimpse and requires design competence and a thoughtful approach. (It’s good if a separate specialist deals with icons.)
The biggest worry of some designers is whether or not their icons look neat, are correctly centered, and whether the pixels are perfectly matched. They align elements according to formulas but forget the most important thing.
What are the most important principles for creating icons that everyone likes?
1. Simplicity
Users don’t like complicated things.
A good icon should be simple and easy to “read”. It doesn’t need a textual explanation. You can test the icon by showing it to a person far from design. If they haven’t guessed what it roughly means, there is probably something wrong with this icon.
Key enemies of simplicity:
excess elements
unnecessary detailing
They hamper perception, distract, and confuse users. As a general matter, the fewer elements the icon contains, the better. An icon with 3 or more colors stops being a pictogram and becomes an illustration.
A pile-up of elements and color accents makes the icons visually undifferentiated and unclear:
Excessive details don’t make the icon clearer, but, on the contrary, make it difficult to perceive:
A lot of emphasized and small elements also sets off the simplicity:
considered detailing
The detailing of the icons should be reasonable.
Don’t think that detailing is some kind of evil, and the saying “The devil is in the details” was invented by web designers. Yes, any detailing makes icons complex. However, it’s justified if it matches the design concept and is made professionally.
For example, your goal is to get the user to look at the icon narrowly so that they stay on the page for a while. Then the detail makes sense. In most cases, users don’t tend to strain their eyes and cannot “read” a complex icon on the fly.
There shouldn’t be a lot of detailed icons on the page. Don’t place them too close to each other. The background for them must be sole-colored, and the color palette — limited.
For beginners, we would not recommend starting with detailed icons. Their creation requires solid experience, artistic taste, and mastery.
2. Perspicuity and informativeness
Users don’t like things they don’t understand.
An unclear icon needs to be “decrypted”, and users don’t like it. If it doesn’t have any meaning, this is also a big disadvantage. The main purpose of the icon is to instantly convey information. Therefore, our task is to remove all unnecessary things that prevent it from doing this.
These icons are not clear to users
good and bad simplification
Users don’t like interface elements and even are uptight about them. Therefore, it’s very important that the icons are easy to “read.” The recognition of icons depends on their simplicity, comprehensibility, and metaphoricity. However, there are different types of simplicity. Simplicity is not a guarantee of clarity. You can simplify the icon beyond recognition.
An example of oversimplified elements
Excessive simplification or, on the contrary, the complication of forms can make the icon unclear to the user.
Don’t take advice in the style of “solid icons are easier to read” seriously. Any well-designed icons are easy to read.
sizes
The size of the elements also affects the recognition of icons. The more small elements are there in the icon, the more difficult it is to understand what it symbolizes.
An example of a poorly made icon:
The shape of the first icon doesn’t evoke the necessary associations, and small elements hamper its recognition. The sizes of these elements don’t correspond to the sizes of the other two icons, line thickness and color also differ. Here is a violation of the stylistic unity, the absence of a suitable metaphor, an excess of small elements. All these are the reasons for the “illegibility” of the icon.
clarity of metaphors
Good icons are universal for people of different cultures, ages, and backgrounds. However, you should study your target audience and choose the colors and metaphors that are most appropriate and understandable for this group.
Suitable metaphors guarantee that icons are clear and informative.
These metaphors are clear even to a child:
And here’s an example of puzzling icons:
Users don’t like meaningless things.
In a creative outburst, designers love to create beautiful but meaningless elements. This approach deprives icons of their main function: to instantly convey information.
However, sometimes an icon must visualize a complex or abstract idea for which it isn’t easy to find a metaphor. In this case, it’s permissible to make the icon abstract and convey the meaning using text. An example from our case:
In this situation, icons are eye-catching anchors, while the necessary information is conveyed through text with large fonts.
The use of icons that don’t contain metaphors is possible if the icons are needed only as visual accents that balance the design, and their informativeness is supported by the text. However, even in such cases, it’s desirable to find suitable visual associations.
3. Unity of style
Users don’t like disharmonious things.
This is the case when people can’t explain what they don’t like about the icon. We all feel disharmony intuitively. The path to harmony lies through the unity of style.
The unity of style suggests that the icon design matches the brand style and design concept.
brand requirements
Icons should reflect the essence and values of the brand, be its organic part, not only visually, but also psychologically. A brand’s style can be perceived as tough or soft, luxurious or economical, formal or intimate, elite or democratic, etc. Icon design must in the first instance meet the requirements that the brand dictates.
design requirements
Unity of style supposes common parameters for a set of icons, such as:
consistent color palette;
graphic and typical unity (raster or vector, 2D or 3D, solid or outline);
equal size;
equal line width;
equal visual weight;
equal balance of elements;
the same level of detailing;
uniform principle of emphasizing;
uniform rhythm, static or dynamic character;
identical shadows (if any);
compliance with the logo style and overall design concept;
visual correspondence to the fonts.
Designers often have to use icons from ready-made collections on the web or take them as a basis. However, the collection may not have the necessary icons, and it’s necessary to create them yourself. A common mistake is that your “own” icon differs subtly from a set. The reasons are violations of one or more of the abovementioned parameters of unity.
Icons made in the same style:
Unity of style is not only a tribute to the aesthetics and support of the brand’s style. The consistency of style makes the perception of the icons easier, simplifies navigation, and contributes to positive user experience.
More on this topic: Unity of Style in Web Design
4. Uniqueness
There are two types of uniqueness — the uniqueness of the icon set and the uniqueness of each individual icon.
the uniqueness of the set
The first type of uniqueness hardly needs any explanation. This is a design that allows to distinguish a set of icons from many similar ones, to make them special, interesting, and memorable. The uniqueness of the icons contributes to the uniqueness of the brand.
Uniqueness doesn’t mean that you need to create icons that the world has not yet seen. You can’t imagine a better way to frighten the people away. Internet users are used to certain standards and stereotypes, and breaking them is a bad idea. These stereotypes limit creativity, but make UI elements predictable and understandable. People shouldn’t strain themselves in an attempt to comprehend what they saw and waste time solving rebuses.
Use metaphors that are familiar to everyone, but make their visual implementation unique. Users don’t want to decipher riddles.
Simple icons (stickers) with a unique realization:
the uniqueness of the icon
The uniqueness of an icon should be understood as its difference from its neighbors in the set. In striving for unity, designers sometimes sacrifice the most important thing — the meaning of the icon. It shouldn’t be forgotten that unity and monotony are far from the same thing. Each icon has its own purpose. (The slogan of a modern icon designer is E.I.M. — Every Icon Matters.)
A beautiful set with visually indistinguishable images won’t be appreciated or understood by users. People become embarrassed, unable to distinguish one icon from another.
“Unified” does not mean “the same”!
An example of a design with visually identical elements (uniformity of style is maintained):
5. Visual balance
This point is a special case of point 3 “Unity of style”, but deserves a special mention.
Optically unbalanced icons are the icons that users don’t like at first glimpse. People feel imbalance intuitively and immediately, barely looking at the image. Errors in the alignment of elements also refer to balancing interferences. However, despite all the importance of the alignment of elements, minor irregularities in their alignment aren’t the main reason that the icon is visually unpleasant. In many cases, errors in alignment and centering are not the cause of imbalance.
The balance is disrupted due to the disconformity of shapes and color emphasis.
This is the first thing that strikes the eye of users, and not the shifting of an element by a pixel or two.
Unbalanced icons example
Related articles:
Balance in Composition: How to Balance Design?
Emphasis in Design. How to Draw Attention
Summary
Designers know very well how many requirements are imposed for icons. For this reason, they are ready to improve them endlessly, polish every detail, and count every pixel. We in no way call not to do all this. We just want to say that these efforts are meaningless if the fundamental principles of creating icons are violated. And namely the following:
Simplicity and clarity;
Metaphoricity (and therefore informativeness);
Unity of style (and therefore visual harmony);
Uniqueness of design and individuality of each icon;
Visual balance.
Following these principles is the guarantee that your icons will be clear, aesthetic, and functional. This means that everyone will definitely like them!
Always happy to help,
The Outcrowd team. | https://medium.com/outcrowd/icons-in-web-design-824f57cb2db0 | [] | 2020-11-10 09:55:56.545000+00:00 | ['UI Design', 'Icons', 'Icon Design', 'Web Design', 'UI'] |
Spark Optimization Techniques — Broad Cast Join | Why do we need Broad Cast Join ?
While joins are very common and powerful, they warrant special performance consideration as they may require large network transfers or even create datasets beyond our capability to handle.
As the saying goes, the cross product of big data and big data is an out-of-memory exception.
Another factor causing slow running spark jobs could be the join type. By default, Spark uses the SortMergejoin type which must first sort the left and right sides of data before merging them.
What is Broad Cast Join ?
broadcast join is also called as broadcast hash join (or) Map-side join.
When 1 of the data frame/RDD is small enough to fit in the memory, it is broadcasted over to all the executors where the larger data frame / RDD resides and a hash join is performed.
This has 2 phases:
broadcast-> the smaller data frame / RDD is broadcasted across the executors in the cluster where the larger data frame / RDD is located.
hash join-> A standard hash join is performed on each executor.
There is no shuffling involved in this and can be much quicker.
What are the important properties in Broadcast Join ?
spark.sql.broadcastTimeout:
This property controls how long executors will wait for broadcasted tables.
Default value: 300 seconds (5 minutes or 300000ms)
spark.sql.autoBroadcastJoinThreshold:
The high-level APIs can automatically convert join operations into broadcast joins. The property name where you can set the threshold value for Broadcast join is Spark.sql.autoBroadcastJoinThreshold. If the size of the table is smaller than the this property value then it will do broadcast always.
If table size is < 10 MB size → Broad cast join will be used
If table size is > 10 MB size → sort merge join will be used which is the default join in spark 2.3
Default value: 10485760 (10 MB)
if you set spark.sql.autoBroadcastJoinThreshold to -1 then it will disable the broadcast join
Broad Cast Join Hands-on:
let’s pretend that the captainsDF is huge and the citiesDF is tiny.
Let’s broadcast the citiesDF and join it with the captainsDF.
We can Force BroadcastHashJoin with broadcast hint (as function) as follows:
scala> val joinedDF = captainsDF.join(
| broadcast(citiesDF),
| captainsDF(“city”) === citiesDF(“city”)
| )
joinedDF: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame = [first_name: string, city: string … 2 more fields]
scala> joinedDF.explain()
== Physical Plan ==
*(2) BroadcastHashJoin [city#6], [city#22], Inner, BuildRight
:- *(2) Project [_1#2 AS first_name#5, _2#3 AS city#6]
: +- *(2) Filter isnotnull(_2#3)
: +- LocalTableScan [_1#2, _2#3]
+- BroadcastExchange HashedRelationBroadcastMode(List(input[0, string, true]))
+- *(1) Project [_1#19 AS city#22, _2#20 AS country#23]
+- *(1) Filter isnotnull(_1#19)
+- LocalTableScan [_1#19, _2#20]
Spark is smart enough to return the same physical plan, even when the broadcast() method isn’t used. (Look at the screen shot)
Important points about broadcast join:
* Spark broadcast joins are perfect for joining a large DataFrame with a small DataFrame.Broadcast joins cannot be used when joining two large DataFrames.
* If both of the tables are huge then using the broadcast hash join on them is not a good strategy.Because both huge tables cannot sit in a single machine & they have to be distributed into the partitions & put into multiple machines.
* If both the tables are < 10 MB, then the Smaller table should be last of the join and that will be broadcasted
it broad casts which ever table defined latter in the query and that table size should be in the limit of the configuration mentioned.
* In broad cast hash join, full copy of the small DF will be sent to each executor. If that small DF does not fit into the executor’s RAM, then it will lead to OOM errors.
If Broadcast Hash join throws OOM issues, we can Increase the storage memory of executors. You cannot increase specific ones, it’s Increasing the memory of all executors.
Connect with me on linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/vamsi-krishna-0636441ba/ | https://medium.com/@vamsi-krish601/spark-optimization-techniques-broad-cast-join-6838baf68e45 | ['Vamsi Krishna'] | 2020-12-05 08:57:01.621000+00:00 | ['Hadoop', 'Spark', 'Spark Optimization', 'Big Data', 'Broadcast Join'] |
16/6/2021 — Wednesday. Wednesday | English Version
Today is 16 June 2021. The time is 09.20pm. I woke up at 09.00am today. I had 2 courses today and their names are the same, “Introduction To Networking” but one is lecture and another one is tutorial. The lecture’s professor is an Indian. His accent makes me difficult to understand the words he has spoken. The whole time of the course was spent on requesting to control the lecturer’s computer to register the ‘Cisco Netacad’ and I was so panic because the request system is first come first serve. I was so panic and worry because I couldn’t request it(too much people were requesting). I was too panic that I couldn’t focus on and pay attention on what he was saying. I just know he was introducing the module. Luckily that there is a recording of the course.
I didn’t workout today. I just took a bath and wrote this diary. I drank a coffee at afternoon. But I was still unable to concentrate on the classes maybe I had have tired. I spent 4 hours to study at the morning from 09.40am until 01.40pm. I rest for 20 minutes and joined the first course which will be started at 02.15pm. After 2 hours of registering, We joined the next course immediately at 04.15pm. I had already dead at that moment. The lecturer is a mandarin. He is so gentle and soft. I am not talking about his style or his attitude but also the way he used to speak. We had tired at that moment. After the course, our brain were screaming and we should have to take a nap. But, I drank coffee. This was so torment. Luckily, the lecturer spent 1 hour and left instead of spending 2 hours.
I joined the ‘Cyber Security’ of Whatsapp group which is created by students without lecturer. I feel less stress because if I had some questions, I could ask for their helps. I rest for 1 hour and had a dinner with my family. After washing the dishes, I watched Youtube videos for 1 hour long. Then, I took a bath.
So I will keep studying and watch the recording later. I will save it as a draft first and the time is 09.57pm.
——————————————11.20pm——————————————
I watched a recording of the first course. I realized that I have to replay and replay some sentences which is ambiguous for a few times. I will watch another video and keep studying or do revision. Goodnight ❤
Online learning will never replace the physical learning. I bet RM5.
Chinese Version
今天时6月16日。时间时候9时20分。我今天在早上9点起床。我今天已经上了2堂一样名字的课，叫网络入门。不过一堂是演讲，一堂是教学。第一堂的讲师是一位印度人。他的口音让我很难听明白他说的内容。一整堂课都在抢着用讲师的电脑来注册Cisco Netacad。因为那个系统是先到先得的。我很紧张因为不能抢到。也因为这样，我不能专心在他的内容上。我只知道他在介绍科目的内容。幸运的是有录制影片。
我今天没有做运动。我刚洗了个澡就写这篇日记。我在中午喝了一杯咖啡。不过我还是无法专注在课堂上，也许是因为已经累了。我花了4个小时，从早上9时40分开始学习到下午1时40分。休息了20分钟，继续准备上下午2时15分的课。经过2个小时的注册课，我们马上到下一堂下午4时15分的课程，我们已经很累了。这位讲师是一位华人，他很温柔，说话也是，简直在催眠。结束后，我们的大脑都在尖叫，我们需要睡个午觉。但是，我喝了咖啡。真的很折磨。幸运的是，这个讲师提早1个小时下课。
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
我加入了Cyber Security的群组。我感到安全感因为如果我有问题能够在里面寻求帮助。我休息1个小时后就和家人吃晚餐。清理碗盘后，我看1个小时的Youtube影片。然后洗了个澡。
我会继续学习和重看影片。我先存稿，现在时间是晚上9时57分。
———————————————11时20分——————————————
我看了第一堂课的重播。我发现我需要一直不断重复听一句模糊的句子才能听明白内容。我会再看另外一部重播影片和继续学习和复习。晚安❤
网课永远取代不了实体课。我赌5块。
16/6/2021 ‘How time has spent’ chart
🚩Long-term Goals(Very important)(MUST HIT EVERYDAY)(Start from 14/6/2021)
☒ Practice programming for 2 hours per day
☑ Write a story everyday | https://medium.com/@witson/16-6-2021-wednesday-b767035f746a | ['Witson Blog'] | 2021-06-16 15:33:56.872000+00:00 | ['Tired', 'Diary', 'Hardworking', 'Study', 'Busy'] |
Why You Shouldn’t Punish Yourself When You Make Mistakes | Sometimes I Wish I Knew Better
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed on an equal or greater benefit.” — Napoleon Hill
Think about a recent mistake and consider how things could have turned out differently for you. Whilst hindsight is a wonderful faculty, it can often make us feel guilt and remorseful for our actions. I want to reassure you that every choice we make is made with the awareness and level of consciousness available to us at the time. However, this does not excuse us from repeating the same mistakes.
We are the product of our thinking and until we expand our consciousness, we are bound to repeat our mistakes. That’s where hindsight works to our advantage. With a new level of awareness, we can look forward to the future knowing we are not constrained by our mistakes but learn to make better decisions based on the past.
Many people make mistakes they regret. How about you? Are you still holding on to regret from the past or have you made peace with them? I realise it is difficult to let go of the past. But, we can take comfort knowing we did our best at the time and hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes. This is why we mustn’t punish ourselves but notice what we’ve chosen and simply choose again; this time more wisely.
I’ve made countless mistakes in my 20’s regarding my health and career choices. Sometimes I wish I knew better, however I didn’t have the awareness as I do now and I was choosing to the best of my ability. In a recent conversation with a coaching client, she complimented me on my ability to help her overcome her challenges.
As I considered the compliment, it reminded me of the countless mistakes I made over the years. In fact, gaining wisdom has little to do with the books I read, the courses attended or the people I surround myself with. Whilst they are important, it was the numerous mistakes I made, and the lessons gained that cultivated good judgement.
Photo by George Gvasalia on Unsplash
It Is About Finding Clarity
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” — Oscar Wilde
Can you reflect on earlier mistakes that contributed to your personal growth? Sometimes we experience growth while other times we are destined to repeat the same mistakes until we receive a wake-up call. Nothing teaches us valuable lessons other than life’s experience.
No matter how often you feel obligated to help a loved one through a crisis, ultimately they must learn the lessons on their own. My experience as an author, life coach and speaker shows that people are not ready to receive advice unless they ask or pay for it. I mention this because we ought to refrain from giving advice on how others should live their life or overcome their problems.
In fact, the best thing we can do is listen to their problems with an open mind and help them gain clarity on the situation. If you’ve ever worked with a coach or mentor, you will notice they ask many questions and seldom give advice. Rather, they help you gain clarity on your issues and lead you towards self-enquiry, so you are better equipped to find the answers yourself.
Considering this, think back to an earlier time when you faced a difficult challenge and consulted other people. Perhaps you received conflicting advice at the time? In those instances, did you find your own solution or rely on the advice given? Similarly, if you followed the advice, did it work out in your favour? If you arrived at the solution yourself, were you more empowered as a result?
It is my experience, the answers to our most pressing problems are always contained within us, yet we don’t have enough clarity to recognise it or put it into action. We get stuck on life being a certain way and if it doesn’t eventuate as we expect, we get angry and disillusioned.
What we ought to do is keep searching for answers and work with our intuition to make sense of the situation. It is a matter of consulting the guidance we receive and interpreting it through logic.
In light of this, return to the recent mistake I asked you about at the beginning of the article. Contemplate the following questions: What do I need to learn about this situation? What is this experience calling me to understand about myself or life? Where is the growth contained within this experience?
Assuredly, when we pose empowering questions, we align ourselves with the right solutions instead of feeling disempowered. Punishing yourself when you make mistakes does not serve you other than to reinforce a despairing mindset. We must notice what we’ve chosen then ask empowering questions, so we are destined not to repeat those mistakes.
Call To Action
Do you want to lead a remarkable life? Are you committed to taking action despite your fears and doubts? Have you had enough of not achieving the success you seek? If so, download your FREE copy of my eBook NAVIGATE LIFE right now, and start your amazing journey of greatness today! | https://medium.com/the-mission/why-you-shouldnt-punish-yourself-when-you-make-mistakes-17a93d3a0fb0 | ['Tony Fahkry'] | 2020-05-24 02:41:27.813000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Mistakes', 'Inspiration', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement'] |
Thinking About being a Freelancer, Here are the basics…. | Undoubtedly freelancing has seen such a huge popularity that it needs no introduction. When freelancing began back in the year 1819, the perspective was quite different as it was used to address short term paid army officers, who serve the nation in times of necessity (specifically, war). Today it is a complete different scene where freelancing is a term that refers to a person who is employed in his own terms and is in the business of serving to multiple clients or employers by their skills until a project is done.
There might be people who would think that “freelance” is what you do when you don’t have a real job. On the other hand, “freelancers” believe that nothing is more real than being a self owner, director and financial manager at the same time. By next year, globally 50% of total workforces are expected to take up freelancing.
With more than 20 million Indians alone, opting to renounce traditional occupations and start a freelance business, that gives them greater flexibility to create lifestyle they desire, we have seen an unprecedented shift in the way global companies operate around the world. Companies now search for a project based hiring system. These rising rate of short term contracts are not only profitable but provide a rare opportunity for people with useful skills to start a freelance career. There are several reasons why you should also take up freelancing. Some of them are mentioned here:
Extra income — You can start earning more by taking freelance works even around your regular job for extra pay off.
Lower expenses — Utility costs, equipment costs, insurance and operating business from office buildings have become too expensive. If the profit is insufficient, the work may fail due to the accumulation of these costs. On the other hand, Freelancers don’t need to make such investments and quickly start if you already have the skills and equipment to do the job. Hence, It’s affordable. Freelancers can even operate from their own house & even if they encounter difficulties, there is almost no one to judge if they overcome the crisis with the toast and soup in their bag.
Multiple Platforms available to procure contracts — Just register on freelance websites such as Fiverr, ODesk, Freelancer and UpWork to start getting contract.
Getting paid more for performing multiple tasks — Unlike Job, freelancer is not bound to work for a single company (unless of course bound by a contract), freelancers can work on multiple projects in parallel, hence, can in parallel from multiple projects. This shows that they continue to receive further education, continue to expand their network of contacts, and strive to acquire new skills, so that they can be more competitive in their work.
Freedom to work — Freelance allows for greater independence over a job, often flexible working hours, allowing you to work part-time or during off-business hours while a traditional job holder dreams of getting this independence. They are far away from the reach of doing works on their terms because of boss bashing all the time. While dressing up gives you confidence sometimes but dressing up on a particular code everyday is not a freelancer’s life. Since they’re mostly working from home , they can enjoy wearing whatever they want and don’t have extra burden.
One of the biggest advantage freelancers enjoy is taking a vacation whenever they want and obviously, if you want you can work on holidays. No matter when and how they’re working, if they are working hard and smart, very quickly they starts advancing both professionally and financially.
Freelancing seems very enticing, right? Of course it is — but among all the plus, you should be aware of the fact that being a freelancer isn’t always easy; it has its proportion of ups and downs in the journey. Lifestyle of a freelancer perfectly resembles the saying of Eleanor Roosevelt “With freedom comes responsibility.”
Our next topic : | https://medium.com/@team-welance/thinking-about-being-a-freelancer-here-are-the-basics-a1726df68d26 | ['Thinking'] | 2020-12-14 20:03:27.515000+00:00 | ['Freelancers', 'Freelancer Life', 'Freelance', 'Freelancing'] |
Finding the truth behind growth hacking myths and faces | Any hype or trend is easy to become detached from reality and overgrown with myths. It takes just several wrong readings or subjective opinions for an idea to go far away from it’s original message. It happens often. When we talk about growth hacking the story is no different. That is why it’s important to dig out the truth behind this term.
5 most common delusions about growth hacking
Nowadays growth and the strategy of its’ achievement is one of the trendiest theme to discuss in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are seeking to hire the growth hackers and to develop their own growth strategy. Today you can learn about five delusions that may lead your growth hack strategy into the wrong place and give it wrong goals and hopes.
Delusion 1: Growth Hacking is a universal cheat-sheet to use for growth
Real picture: There is no one secret universal toolset, but for your business to grow you should think differently
Growth hackers are usually mistaken to be some universal gurus that know the secret recipe of success. People think that such managers can easily create a successful startup from scratch in a matter of seconds. People also think that growth strategy is a book of secrets or a universal guidebook to lead you through the promotion and channel distribution. The delusion here is that every growth hacker has a secret tool hidden somewhere in his mind. In real life every growth hacker goes to success with hard work and prioritisation.
Sometimes growth hacks can be found in basic instruments of product marketing that were able to raise the bar in your own certain occasion. There is no magic behind growth hacking, — it’s just a certain mindset that focus on things most companies and startups forget to consider: usually it’s all about distribution. When growth hacker advise something, his advice is rarely is a completely new thing for business, usually it’s a thing you decided to put aside for future investments. There are many roads available for your business to blossom, but things that correspond for growth are usually forgotten or laid aside for long-term future.
The founder of 500 startups Dave McClure once said that many startups focus on their products, while the main risks of their companies lay somewhere in distribution field.
Delusion 2: Growth Hacker can solve any company problems
Reality: Growth hacking is not something that can be made overnight and it cannot solve all the problems with your product.
It’s rare thing to grow in a matter of a day. Viral growth and tools to make it happen are not applicable for just any strategy of business. Moreover, even if some thing was successful for one company, it’s not necessary to help in your occasion. Nobody can guarantee that exact hack will bring you the same success as for your competitor.
‘Not everything can go viral’, — said the founder of streaming platform Bebo Michael Birch. ‘It takes great time and great number of diligence. Before the success and actual viral thing you may face long list of falied experiments’. ,
Moreover, there are two different types of growth — small and big wins. Growth hackers are usually look on things that lay outside the standard optimisation. They consider some predictions about features that may burst. It means that growth cannot be something that happens easily, especially when it means not only finding new clients, but retaining the old ones too.
If you decided to hire a growth hacker — never hire a person who only makes some A/B testings and focus on local things. The real growth hacker is someone who can ask deeper questions and plan the growth of your product in a long-term.
Finding the answers to the complex questions takes great deal of focusing on changing exponents and quick iterations. Tactically, such strategy must focus on testing results, not just some features found in business books.
‘Somehow it’s similar to stock investments. Even if there was a formula of success, nobody will talk about it’, Ivan Kirigin from Dropbox mentioned. ‘I think all strategies are saying that you need to create a process that will give you an ability to learn and to test many things faster in order to make the possibility of success clearer’.
Delusion 3: Growth Hacking is some new and unknown animal
Reality: Actually, growth hacking is not entirely new
Facebook and LinkedIn were the first to try growth hacking, because right from the very beginning they focused on the growth strategies and user engagement into working with their services. It happened long time before the term growth hacking was actually introduced.
The truth is, for the long time such type of strategical thinking didn’t have its’ own unique name, but it still existed.
Delusion 4: Growth Hacking is marketing
Reality: Growth hacking and marketing have the same goals, but use different tactics
Good product strategy based on data is a key to business growth. There is no place for marketing strategy. Many growth hackers believe that it’s necessary to be engaged in all product activities from the design to development. Promoting your business is just a small part of huge strategy.
For example, if you have 1000 visitors that you need to convert into clients, — it’s marketing and lead generation. If you want to take a product and with its’ help to convert 1000 visitors to 10000 clients — this is a growth strategy. Growth hacking takes you more far away than marketing. Usually the growth is achieved with viral engagement to the product, not with general clicks on links and landing pages.
Delusion 5: Growth Hacker is a one man
Reality: Growth is rarely an achievement of one person
In the beginning of the project one man, usually it’s the founder of the business, may be responsible for growth. However, with the growing of the company and product features one person can transform into the whole growth department. It depends on needs of the company. Just remember that the most objective results can be achieved in team collaboration only.
Long-term growth strategy is a complex work that require many tests even before you can find the one that is the most suitable for your business. It’s necessary to track metrics and results that you want to achieve beforehand or your growth strategy will be changing constantly and will lead to nothing.
If you’ve decided to go further with growth strategy, be ready to face some difficulties. Such strategy requires different view on product and priorities. Things you considered important before may become unnecessary and vise versa.
3 most common characteristics of a growth hacker
It’s time to share some common characteristics that growth hack managers need to have. There are many different things, but they all have three common characteristics as their base.
Data
Growth hackers are real maniacs to calculations and metrics comparison. Growth hacker feels nude without having data and his metrics. Strong focus on data helps growth hackers to find the solutions that help your business to grow quickly. For such people metrics are not just statistics and reports, but also an inspiration and a way to create a better product with tests and theories.
Creativity
Often you can hear that growth hacking is a mix of art and science. Together with data usage mentioned above, growth hackers are staying on the front line of the creative approach to problem solving. Such person never gives up and goes further.
The mix of analytical thinking and creativity can be easily defined as a main characteristic of a growth hacker. Real unicorns appear in places where one man can see the value of a project and product from all sides at the same time.
Curiosity
Every growth hacker appears to be a curious person. How the regular users transform into clients? Why some products are more popular than others? Growth hacker will never stop until he finds all the answers. Growth hacker always looks for a method to turn conversions and user behaviour where he needs to. For example, Facebook, has more than 1 billion users already, but it never stops and still has its’ own growth department.
“You just can’t stop in a middle of the way. If you stop, you’ll loose”, — Heads and Hands team thinks.
Growth hackers always want to learn something new. From every novelty such person can grip something that he can use in his own business.
No matter the age of the term itself, there are many growth hackers around the world. Many of them became what they are due to needs of their companies — they created their business with no budget to spend on marketing.
To summarize growth hacking
The main thing that differs growth hacking from the regular approach to work is a fail fast principle.
As it was said before, growth hacking is full complex of work to gain traffic, analyze it and work permanently with conversions. Complex work is more often to lead towards synergy of results. Fail fast principle helps to avoid long and fatal mistakes.
Why create a complex service when you can firstly test its’ main feature with prototype? Why spend money on a website if landing page is enough? Moreover, why create if not analyze?
To summarize, growth hacking isn’t a checklist or a guidebook to lead you toward success. It’s a mindset and clever usage of analytical tools. | https://medium.com/the-mind-of-heads-and-hands/finding-the-truth-behind-growth-hacking-myths-and-faces-ce7a55fab45 | ['Heads'] | 2017-02-02 07:33:01.482000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Data Science', 'Mobile App Development', 'Growth Hacking'] |
Flodesk the best email marketing tool to grow your business! | Taken From Flodesk.com
I’ve used quite a few email marketing tools, ones that are free to use, and others you need to pay for. Which one is the best?
From my experience, the best tool by far is Flodesk. Their pricing is super simple. For $38 per month, you get unlimited subscribers and access to all features.
Special offer: if you sign up through our link, you’ll get 50% off — it’ll be just $19/month!
Flodesk has a lot of features that you can use. Here's a list of them…
The Flodesk Email Builder
Flodesks email builder not only is it beautiful but it’s very intuitive to use. The email builder is simple to use, a simple glance of it and you will instantly know how to use this tool.
Let's head into the email builder for an in-depth look.
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The email builder shows you a list of templates for you to use. They also have a neat feature that asks what is the purpose of your email, to better highlight which templates you should use.
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When selecting a template, it will give you a brief description and allows you to preview it on desktop and mobile.
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When choosing a template, you can select a few layouts for your email. But you can also add links to certain texts and also blocks which give you the following features…
Logo
Link bar
Image
Layouts
Instagram Feed
Text
Button
Divider Line
Spacer
Social Icons
Footer (This contains the “unsubscribe” link. You can choose from a selection of different footer messages.)
Address
Additionally, Flodesk has 30 pre-formatted text and image layouts that you can add to your emails. This allows you to change fonts, colors, and change the content layout of your blocks.
Which will result in your email looking incredibly unique!
Something else that is worth mentioning most email providers have a small selection of fonts, but with Flodesk you have a collection of over 100 fonts that look high quality.
Click Here To Get 50% OFF For Life On Flodesk
Flodesk Analytics
Flodesks analytics shows you a few things, the open rate of your emails, click rate, and also the number of recipients you have.
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However, you can go even further by clicking on the “View Results” button. This will give you a more comprehensive overview of how your email performed.
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But it's important to note, a few of the individuals that I have talked to about Flodesk, have reported a few of the email sents were sent to the spam folder of their readers, whereas others have expressed an increase in the open rate of their emails.
In conclusion, you will need to try out Flodesk for yourself to determine if it's a viable switch to do.
Subscribers
Flodesk has the ability to show you your subscribers from all of your audience segments, and also the number of subscribers you have for specific segments.
Here are a few of the features they have…
Subscriber status — active, unsubscribed, bounced, marked as spam
Activity — active within a certain timeframe
Source — CSV import, manual addition, opt-in form
Custom data field
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If you click on the subscriber’s email address, it will give you more detailed analytics. Including their lifetime open rate, lifetime click rate, and the total number of emails they have opened.
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This information can be incredibly useful for you to analyze what type of content your subscribers want, or the type of content they’re more engaged with.
Click Here To Get 50% OFF For Life On Flodesk
Segments
Flodesk allows you to organize your subscribers using segments. Flodesks segment feature allows you to manually add your subscribers, either individually or by uploading a CSV file.
You can also automatically sort subscribers into a segment when they sign up through a specific form.
Lastly, Flodesk gives you the ability to send an email to your entire list and not just a specific segment. It’s important to note, that if you have subscribers on both segments, Flodesk will only send an email to one of them. Which will prevent subscribers from receiving duplicate emails.
Flodesk Forms
When clicking on the Forms tab, you will be able to see all of your forms at a glance.
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Flodesk has six popups, inline, and full-page form templates for you to choose from.
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You can customize them with your own colors and images, including a dozen of Flodesk’s provided fonts.
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Most forms on Flodesk look amazing, however, the inline form that allows you to show a picture of your lead magnet has one devastating flaw. The mobile breakpoint is too wide and the mobile version of the form does not display the image.
But what does this mean you may ask?
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It means this form shows up like this on the desktop version of my blog:
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This can be very disheartening when you are putting a lot of effort into one design, that won't be translated to your website.
Click Here To Get 50% OFF For Life On Flodesk
Workflows
Workflows are a tool to build email sequences in Flodesk. The workflow page on Flodesk has a beautiful interface that shows all of the next sequences of your email in a nice simple view.
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When you click to build a workflow, the first thing you will see is a selection of templates for you to choose from.
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But if you want to, you can also create one from scratch. Workflow has 4 types of templates…
Nurture Sequence
Welcome Sequence
Lead Magnet Delivery
Sales Sequence
Which will surely fit all of your needs, it is also very friendly for beginners.
Workflow Triggers
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When creating a workflow, it is vital to set a trigger. The trigger will allow you to do multiple things, like sending a subscriber an email when they opt-in or send them an email 2/3 days after signing up
Workflow conditions
Currently, there are 4 types of conditions you can set for workflow.
Email
Time Delay
Condition
Action
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The email condition lets you select an email to be sent as the next step of your workflow.
The time delay gives you the option to delay any further action for the specified amount of time.
This could be minutes, hours, days A certain day of the week (you can set multiple days of the week.) A certain time of the day. A certain day of the year, which you can also set the date and time.
The condition condition sets your workflow to take a certain action if some requirements are met, there are currently 4 choices for setting a condition
Take action if a subscriber is in a specific segment Take action if a subscriber opened a certain email in the workflow. Take action if a subscriber clicked on a link in a specific email. Take action if a field matches a specific value, please note the only fields you can currently match are their first and last name fields.
The action condition allows you to automatically add or remove a subscriber from a segment. These will allow you for detailed segmentation and also automation. And whats even more amazing is, that I’ve never seen a builder that is incredibly easy to understand for a user.
Click Here To Get 50% OFF For Life On Flodesk
Integrations
Due to Flodesk being quite new, it doesn’t have that many integrations. However, they have an integration with Shopify, which will allow you to send a follow-up email after a sale.
They also have an integration with stripe for your use.
additional features
Due to Flodesk being the new kid on the block, it doesn’t have all new features and integrations. However, here is a few other features that Flodesk has…
Double OPT-IN GDPR Consent Checkbox A/B Testing Subscriber Tags Resend To Unopens
Flodesk Pricing
Flodesk is very competitive in the pricing name of things. Flodesk currently costs $39 a month. However, they do not put a cap to how many subscribers you have, which is amazing for people who have huge email lists.
My thoughts on Flodesk
Currently, although Flodesk doesn’t have many features at the moment, I do think its pricing point is a steal. Especially with the discount mentioned.
However, if you are looking for an email marketing service to handle your sales, then at this point in time I can not recommend Flodesk. I recommend Flodesk for bloggers, as it has all of the features we currently need to run/operate our blogs. | https://medium.com/@luispereira1/the-number-one-best-tool-to-use-for-email-marketing-e549228a2dac | ['Luis Pereira'] | 2020-12-23 13:17:22.278000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Foldesk', 'Content Marketing Blogs', 'Convertkit', 'MailChimp'] |
Running Dialyzer for Elixir Projects in GitHub Actions | In this blog post I’ll show you how to set up GitHub Actions to perform type analysis on an Elixir project with Dialyzer. I’ll also share optimal settings for Dialyzer PLT caching.
Running automated tests for every commit or pull request has become common practice and is a good way to validate the correctness of your Erlang or Elixir software. Type checking with Dialyzer is another way to ensure the quality of your code changes.
I have previously written about how to run Dialyzer in a Jenkins build and here I’ll share how to do the same with a GitHub workflow.
Adding Dialyzer
You need to have dialyxir installed as a dev dependency for your project for it to be available in the GitHub workflow. If you don't already have dialyxir installed, add the following to your project's mix.exs file:
defp deps do
[
...
{:dialyxir, "~> 1.0", only: [:dev, :test], runtime: false}
]
end
Then run mix deps.get .
Creating a GitHub Workflow
On many of our Elixir projects we have a dedicated Dialyzer workflow that is triggered when pull requests are opened, updated, reopened, or when a new commit is pushed to the main branch. Below is a GitHub workflow for running Dialyzer:
name: Dialyzer
on:
pull_request:
types:
- opened
- synchronize
- reopened
push:
branches:
- main
jobs:
dialyzer:
name: Run Dialyzer for type checking
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
# Checkout the Elixir project's source code
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
# Use the erlef/setup-elixir action (https://github.com/erlef/setup-beam)
# to setup Erlang and Elixir
- name: Run Dialyzer
uses: erlef/setup-elixir@v1
with:
otp-version: '23.2.3'
elixir-version: '1.11.3'
# Install the dependencies and run dialyzer
- run: mix deps.get
- run: mix dialyzer
Caching PLT Files
The above will work fine but each run will take a substantial amount of time. On my projects it typically takes 10–12 minutes. Most of this time is spent building up the PLT file with type data from the applications that comprise Erlang and Elixir as well as your project’s dependencies. Caching the PLT files (the PLT file itself and the .hash file for it) between runs will dramatically speed up the workflow.
Caching files is possible with the actions/cache action. While it’s not the simplest build artifact caching system I’ve seen, it’s relatively easy to set up once you understand how it works. It helps to first understand how cache keys and scopes work.
Cache Keys
Every time files are saved in a cache they are saved under a unique cache key. If a cached file changes, so should the key for it. An easy way to generate a unique cache key for PLT files is to take a hash of the mix.lock file and use it as part of the key. Then when the dependencies change the key also changes. (It may also be helpful to include the Elixir and Erlang versions in the cache key so when they change the key will change as well).
Cache Scopes
The cache is scoped to the key and branch. The default branch cache is available to other branches. — https://github.com/actions/cache#cache-scopes
Workflows will not be able to access caches from any other branch except the default branch (typically main or master ). Scoping is important because an existing cache for one branch may not be useful to another branch.
Restore Keys
Restore keys are used to locate the cache to use when there is a cache miss on the exact key defined in the workflow. Restore keys are a list of strings that are either exact or partial key matches.
The cache action first searches for cache hits for key and restore-keys in the branch containing the workflow run. If there are no hits in the current branch, the cache action searches for key and restore-keys in the parent branch and upstream branches. — https://docs.github.com/en/actions/guides/caching-dependencies-to-speed-up-workflows#matching-a-cache-key
Typically restore-keys is a list of patterns that are progressively more broad.
Since PLT files contain analysis for Erlang and Elixir libraries, as well as your project’s dependencies, changes to either results in Dialyzer adding or removing data from the PLT file. Thus, when storing PLT files, we want the key to indicate what dependencies they contain. The easiest way to do this is to generate a hash of the mix.lock file and use it as part of the cache key. That way on later runs we can restore to a PLT file that contains the exact same dependencies that the current commit of the code contains. If we don't find an exact match we can fall back to another PLT cache on the same branch. Here are the GitHub action steps for this:
# Step for generating the mix file Hash used in the cache key
- name: Set mix file hash
id: set_vars
run: |
# hashFiles is a GitHub Actions function for generating a hash
mix_hash="${{ hashFiles(format('{0}{1}', github.workspace, '/mix.lock')) }}"
echo "::set-output name=mix_hash::$mix_hash"
# Step to setup caching and cache restoration
- name: Cache PLT files
id: cache-plt
uses: actions/cache@v2
with:
# Cache PLT and PLT hash files after the job has finished
path: |
_build/dev/*.plt
_build/dev/*.plt.hash
# Key to use when restoring the cache and storing the results of this dialyzer run
key: plt-cache-${{ steps.set_vars.outputs.mix_hash }}
# Key patterns to fall back to if we don't find an exact match for `key`
restore-keys: |
plt-cache-
Here is how the resulting cache restore process works:
Look for a matching PLT cache key (remember it contains the mix.lock hash) on the current branch (e.g. a feature branch) If not found, fall back to any PLT cache on the current branch If not found, fall back to a matching PLT cache key on the main branch If not found, fall back to any PLT cache on the main branch If nothing is found, run dialyzer without an existing PLT file
Saving to the cache is a much simpler process — after every run the PLT files are saved to a cache identified by the key value.
Putting It All Together
The completed Dialyzer workflow with caching looks like this:
name: Dialyzer
on:
pull_request:
types:
- opened
- synchronize
- reopened
push:
branches:
- main
jobs:
dialyzer:
name: Run Dialyzer for type checking
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Set mix file hash
id: set_vars
run: |
mix_hash="${{ hashFiles(format('{0}{1}', github.workspace, '/mix.lock')) }}"
echo "::set-output name=mix_hash::$mix_hash"
- name: Cache PLT files
id: cache-plt
uses: actions/cache@v2
with:
path: |
_build/dev/*.plt
_build/dev/*.plt.hash
key: plt-cache-${{ steps.set_vars.outputs.mix_hash }}
restore-keys: |
plt-cache-
- name: Run Dialyzer
uses: erlef/setup-elixir@v1
with:
otp-version: '23.2.3'
elixir-version: '1.11.3'
- run: mix deps.get
- run: mix dialyzer
Conclusion
I have shown how to create a simple and effective caching strategy designed to reduce time-consuming re-builds of PLT files. With this approach Dialyzer only takes about 2 minutes to run when there is a cache, making it viable to run on every commit. GitHub Actions provides sufficient tooling for running Dialyzer in a workflow and for effective caching and restoration of PLT files between workflow runs. Understanding how the cache action works can be challenging at first, but once understood it can be used to create almost any caching mechanism you need.
References | https://blog.rentpathcode.com/running-dialyzer-for-elixir-projects-in-github-actions-e0594220b272 | ['Trevor Brown'] | 2021-04-14 17:45:20.846000+00:00 | ['Dialyzer', 'Type Checking', 'Github Actions', 'Elixir'] |
Part-time Jobs for Students: Quick Money or Career Starting Point?, ✍️ — Bookwormlab | When you hear a word-combination “part-time job”, what is the very first image of a perfect employee that pops up? A student of 1–2 years of study, right? Why is that? Pretty simple. Part-time jobs are perfect for students, as being overwhelmed with the college assignments, they can still earn some money for leisure time and thus become more independent. But still, job, be it full or part-time is not all about the money. So, students, who are aware of that, search not only for vacancies that are flexible and provide good wages, but for those that can also offer development opportunities, useful experience, skills and knowledge for the future career. “Is that possible at all?” will you ask. To answer that very reasonable questions let’s explore your options.
1) Waitering.
Rumor has it that bar work is a piece of cake for students — easy, flexible, highly paid and sociable. But what else do you get? High stress dealing with capricious clients, late shifts and almost no career development or promotion opportunities. It may do just fine for those, who need money urgently. As for the rest we wouldn’t really recommend waitering as long-lasting part-time job. Same applies for similar options like babysitting, shop assistant, etc.
2) On-campus jobs.
That can be pretty much everything. You can do tutoring, work as tour guide or IT supporter, be a gym attendant or student barman. These jobs are usually well-paid and the location is perfect, as you won’t have to waste time on commuting. Other big plus is that they must ensure you don’t miss your classes and have time to prepare for them. So, if you plan to become a researcher, professor or IT technician and find something appealing on campus — go for it!
3) Freelance writing/translating.
If writing is your forte, it’s the best opportunity for you! Writing job will help you improve your writing and editing skills. Moreover, depending on your efficiency it can bring descent money. Translating as a freelancer for some private enterprises is also very convenient both regarding time spent and money earned.
4) Internship.
We find it to be №1 choice for part-time job as a student. For internship you don’t need much experience and you can try practically anything. The experience you get is huge, and connections will help you get desired job after graduation. Of course, money isn’t that good, but what you get in perspective is more important. Any career-related job will look fantastic on your CV! Thus, when you fellow students will still be bar attenders at the end of the college with the very same wage, for that time you might already be senior manager or even have business of your own. If you are still hesitant about your future career, a part-time job can help you decide. By gaining practical experience in the field you can evaluate your future sector of employment. If somehow you are too caught up with your awesome freshly picked part-time job, you can choose a professional writing service to help you out.
5) Private tutoring.
The money vary depending on you qualification and reputation. Some teach for minimum amount, others manage to even make living out of it. Tutoring has one huge advantage as a part-time job. By explaining something you have learned to others, you get the real understanding of the subject and motivation to study harder. It can also give you an idea of what to do next, whether you want to enroll yourself in this field of study or not. | https://medium.com/@99papers/part-time-jobs-for-students-quick-money-or-career-starting-point-%EF%B8%8F-bookwormlab-4502b60783cd | ['Jennifer Wilson'] | 2020-03-13 13:31:00.903000+00:00 | ['Internship Program', 'Part Time Jobs', 'Freelance Writing', 'Campus Life'] |
Resources During COVID-19 | Check out the community resources available for San Antonio residents.
Healthcare & COVID-19 Testing
Federally Qualified Clinics for Uninsured Persons
Housing and Rental Assistance
Utility Assistance
Request for Utility Assistance — This program assists with utility assistance for CPS Energy and assists with an Affordability Discount Program Application. Seniors, families with young children, individuals with disabilities, and individuals using critical medical care equipment are eligible to apply.
— This program assists with utility assistance for CPS Energy and assists with an Affordability Discount Program Application. Seniors, families with young children, individuals with disabilities, and individuals using critical medical care equipment are eligible to apply. Residential Energy Assistance Partnership — Are you in need of utility assistance? You may qualify for the Residential Energy Assistance Partnership (REAP) by CPS. Click here to find out more on qualifications.
— Are you in need of utility assistance? You may qualify for the Residential Energy Assistance Partnership (REAP) by CPS. to find out more on qualifications. AT&T is providing 60 days of free internet service
Food Resources
Family & Childcare Assistance
Childcare Assistance — The United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County are providing emergency childcare assistance for residents who qualify.
— The United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County are providing emergency childcare assistance for residents who qualify. United Way Helpline -2–1–1 is a social service hotline that helps people in the region find information about local resources in their community.
-2–1–1 is a social service hotline that helps people in the region find information about local resources in their community. COVID-19 Emergency Childcare Assistance — Financial assistance for those in need of childcare assistance.
Financial Assistance
Endeavors — is offering immediate financial assistance for qualifying veterans. If you are a veteran in need of assistance can call (210) 469–9664 or email [email protected] .
— is offering immediate financial assistance for qualifying veterans. If you are a veteran in need of assistance can call (210) 469–9664 or email . VITA is offering 5 locations to help with tax services — Free tax services for the community.
Small Business Assistance
Employment and Workforce Development
The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) is issuing guidance to unemployment claimants concerning their continued eligibility for unemployment benefits should they refuse rehire.
concerning their continued eligibility for unemployment benefits should they refuse rehire. Career in Focus — UTSA has launched workforce initiatives for San Antonio citizens. Programs such as Job Jumpstart and Career Builder Badges are being offered online and many are completely free of charge.
— UTSA has launched workforce initiatives for San Antonio citizens. Programs such as Job Jumpstart and Career Builder Badges are being offered online and many are completely free of charge. Bartender Emergency Assistance Program
Consumer Protection
Beware of price gouging. It is illegal to raise the cost of necessary supplies at any point during a declared disaster. Call the Office of the Attorney General’s toll-free complaint line at (800) 621–0508 or file a complaint online.
Libraries and Digital Access
Senior Planet — Senior Planet harnesses technology to change the way we age. Our courses, programs, and activities help seniors learn new skills, save money, get in shape, and make new friends.
Senior Planet harnesses technology to change the way we age. Our courses, programs, and activities help seniors learn new skills, save money, get in shape, and make new friends. Bibliotech- BiblioTech features several collections of downloadable ebooks and audiobooks for all ages, including best sellers, classics, graphic novels, indie picks and much more.
Physical and Mental Well-Being | https://medium.com/@sad7/resources-during-covid-19-43c26ae6ab3a | ['District Councilwoman Ana Sandoval'] | 2020-09-05 14:01:57.511000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'San Antonio', 'Resources'] |
Maximum Depth of Binary Tree — Day 37(Python) | The question requires us to find the maximum depth of the tree, which means we have to find the height of the tree. To find the height of the tree we would have to start from the root node and go until the leaf node. There can be multiple leaf nodes, we need to find the maximum among the recorded heights. We will be using recursion to solve this problem.
Before we use recursion, we need to understand what needs to be our base condition.
When the root is None, we should return 0.
Okay, now let's look at the code snippet.
class Solution:
def maxDepth(self, root: TreeNode) -> int:
if root == None:
return 0
return
max(self.maxDepth(root.left),self.maxDepth(root.right))+1
Complexity analysis.
Time Complexity
We are visiting each node once and hence the time complexity is O(N) where N is the number of nodes in the Tree.
Space Complexity.
We are visiting each node recursively, hence the space complexity is O(N). | https://medium.com/@atharayil/maximum-depth-of-binary-tree-day-37-python-d4898e14ffde | ['Annamariya Tharayil'] | 2020-12-03 04:41:27.568000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Python', '365dayschallenge', 'Leetcode Easy', 'Trees'] |
How to Build Confidence Like a Chess World Champion | The Confidence Cycle
Part of Kasparov’s skill in chess was his confidence. He fed off of it, using it to play faster and more aggressively. He made bold moves that intimidated his opponents. It was his weapon of chess power.
It is often said that having confidence helps you to perform at a higher level. But, as is evident with Kasparov, the reverse is also true: Playing as if you are already at a higher level helps you to develop your confidence. The more boldly you play, the more confident your mindset becomes. Each big move you make is proof to yourself that you can make big moves like a confident person would. Your confident play gives you more confidence, and your new confidence raises your skill level; it’s a powerful compounding effect.
You can use this compounding effect of confidence to your advantage. Whenever you’re feeling anxious or lacking confidence, ask yourself: how would I act if I were already at a higher level? Asking that simple question can often reveal the very simple thing that you need to do to succeed. You make one higher-level move, which then gives you even more confidence to make another. And another, and another.
Let your actions inspire your confidence, and your confidence inspire your actions. Work like you’re the best in your industry. Talk like you’re an expert in your field. Dress like you’re a strong and sexy person.
When you convince yourself to act like you’re already at a higher level, your performance and skill will come out naturally. Your mind and body adapt to perform at the required level because you’ve convinced yourself that’s who you are. Eventually, the compounding effect of confidence will take hold and turn you into a confident person in every way. | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/how-to-build-confidence-like-a-chess-world-champion-b3c50f6dcaff | ['Mighty Knowledge'] | 2021-03-24 12:10:14.986000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Inspiration', 'Chess', 'Confidence'] |
5 Key Considerations for Monitoring Blockchains | Businesses are increasingly investigating and adopting Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and Blockchains (together “blockchains”) as alternatives to traditional centralized use-case solutions. As these blockchains are built and tested, companies need to actively monitor and audit their platform. The team here at BlocWatch, the leading blockchain monitoring solution, suggests these 5 key considerations for monitoring your enterprise blockchain implementations.
Know your Actors
As with any solution, security is imperative, and organizations should understand their network boundaries as well as who is able to have access into the network perimeter. With private blockchains, this means understanding what nodes have access, the manner in which they connect, and what roles they play. Some of the key metrics for actors that should be tracked include:
Authentication: IP addresses, network segments, API Key, Timestamps
Network Statistics: Data transfer, Uptime, Hours of operation
Roles and Privileges: Are actors accessing what they should, and are they limited
2. Perform Benchmark Testing
After the network is established, it’s time to benchmark the network to understand its limitations, and consequences of when the limits are met. Understanding these limitations allows architects to create guidelines for operations, and to determine preemptive scaling procedures. Some common performance indicators include:
Minimum/maximum bandwidth
Transaction success rate
Transaction read throughput
Transaction read latency
Host resource consumption (CPU, Memory, IO, Bandwidth)
3. Baseline Your Metrics
Your organization now knows it’s blockchain network limitations, and the next step is to understand what’s considered normal behavior in daily business operations. On a test network, sample transactions at expected volume and conditions should be sent to the network from the various actors to capture and establish the baseline.
This baseline can then be used alert on critical or unexpected events.
4. Alert on Critical Events
One of the most valuable features of a monitoring platform is the ability to alert using metrics and critical events. If transaction volume goes outside the expected range at a given time, an alert should be sent to the associated team to verify state and operations of the blockchain network. Some of the recommended events to trigger on are:
Unexpected spikes in transaction volume
Decrease in nodes
High number of transaction failure
Changes in smart contract/chain code
5. Smart Contract Change Control
Changes in Smart Contracts, or Chaincode in Hyperledger Fabric, are sent using transactions from peers; if endorsed and approved, these code upgrades can modify the functionality, approval process, or implications of the smart contract itself. Code upgrades should be isolated and alerted upon in order to confirm the validity of changes and to verify they are coming from approved sources.
Conclusions
Technology monitoring tools have been around for decades but unfortunately have historically been an afterthought for many organizations. It’s imperative that any enterprise or business system to monitored and alerted upon, and blockchain is not exempt from that. Production systems should have proper controls put into place, escalation paths, as well as incident response procedures. Depending upon your underlying chain format, tools such as Hyperledger Caliper or Amazon Managed Blockchain can help with items 2 and 5. BlocWatch can then assist with items 1,3, and 4 — and will integrate with these other tools.
If your blockchain requires a comprehensive monitoring solution, contact us at [email protected] for more information on how we can help your business meet its monitoring objectives.
Varun Jain is the Director of Solution Architecture at BlocWatch, a startup focused on monitoring, analytics and alerting on Distributed Ledger Technologies. BlocWatch provides a complete solution for enterprise blockchain enablement. Our software enables users to monitor chain health and transactions, identify suspicious actors, and alert on significant activity. We also provide independent third-party validation and attestation to enable customer assurance and ensure compliance satisfaction.
If you are interested and want to learn more, please contact us at [email protected]. You can also immediately start a free trial at app.blocwatch.com | https://medium.com/@CanadianVJ/5-key-considerations-for-monitoring-blockchains-def10a92fda | ['Varun Jain'] | 2019-02-07 17:55:21.048000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Distributed Ledgers', 'Private Blockchain', 'Hyperledger Fabric', 'Quorum'] |
Creating A Live Dashboard with Bokeh | Recently, I completed a project creating an analytics dashboard for a client. I used Bokeh for the visualizations and wanted to share my experiences.
Overview
I’d like to describe the dashboard I created and then talk about some of the steps it took to create. You can see the finished product below:
In the top left corner we have statistics for three servers with line graphs representing CPU, memory, and disk usage. If any graph has a reading above 75% it, its title, and its plot turn red like this. When the readings drop, things go back to normal. Moving downward, we have two line graphs plotting users currently connected to our system and how fast our system is processing their messages over time. At the bottom is a live Google Map of users in the field that are transmitting, with colors representing different user states.
On the top right we have various tables showing running processes, versioning, jar info, uptime, and open file statistics (when available). Below that, we have an alerts area displaying faults, overflows, and server errors. The figures change to red when they exceed certain parameters and the drop downs are shown as needed. Finally, we have the ‘firehose’ on the bottom right that’s fed from tails of various logs from two boxes, colored coded to keep it straight. It’s not shown in the photo, but the log scrolls fairly like a terminal, albeit quickly (my client said they wanted it ‘for peace of mind’, even though the logs fly by at light speed).
Close Ups
You can see some of the elements close up in the images below:
Full Sized Shot
And here is a shot showing the dashboard updating over time:
Development Strategy
My game plan for the project was to create each module grouping (server stats, long line graphs, GPS, tables firehose) separately and then fit them together in whatever way made the most visual sense. I felt this approach allowed me to pay closer attention to the details of each module and adjust the over all app layout as needed without much issue. All modules are comprised of only two Bokeh elements, HTML divs (including the Google Map) and line graphs. Periodic callbacks update everything, except the Google Map that hits a local Flask API periodically via Javascript instead. I did this because at the time of writing there were some issues with Bokeh’s GMapPlot (but that should be resolved in the next release). Error handling was mostly concentrated to handling data from the various Bash commands used to source server stats and dealing with their output, expected or otherwise.
Back End Setup
I tried to stay with the “server app” design similar to those shown here and kept my folder structure as prescribed here to try and keep things simple, with all my Python in a common folder and a HTML file in a “templates” folder. This was done so Bokeh’s Tornado server would find the HTML file and use it as a template for the app. I also used threads and unlocked callbacks for pretty much every element in the app to keep things responsive. The data for all modules is sourced from three daemonized threads, responsible for information from SSH, HTTP, and SQL. They are started by server lifecycle hooks described here, init when the server is launched, gather data from their respective source, and make it available to the dashboard. And since the dashboard gets data from the a general cache, N users are able to share info cached from a single database, SSH, and HTTP connection. Awesome. This also allows the dashboard to scale nicely, especially with Tornado’s help.
Next Steps
I didn’t have enough time to give the dashboard a memory, so when you log in you can’t see anything from previous runs. My client didn’t see this as a deal breaker, having dedicated plasma screens and projectors for this kind of thing (with some instances showing months of cached data). But it’s kind of problematic if anything should happen to those systems, or even the browsers on them.To remedy this, I’d like to save data using locally to a SQlite database and initialize the dashboard with cached data from it to show a week or more of data.
Author: Josh Usry | https://medium.com/bokeh/creating-a-live-dashboard-with-bokeh-7564fc9ee07 | [] | 2020-07-06 22:33:57.118000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Open Source', 'Data Science', 'Bokeh', 'Data Visualization'] |
Learning to Belong | What does it mean to belong? Not to another person, not to a family, not to a community but To Belong: to feel a part of one’s surroundings, to the world, to be present in the Universe. Imagine, if you will (which goddess knows I could not until fairly recently) if you felt you did not Belong. When others have looked out at the canyon in my backyard, oohing and aahing over it’s grandeur, I could not comprehend what it meant that I was part of the world I was born into and currently living in. The pristine beauty of nature teeming with wildlife adjoining my home left me feeling only more isolated in my solitary existence.
Early in 2016, soon after my mother’s death, I said to my therapist, “I want to be a real person.” Then I spent months trying to figure out what that entailed. What did it mean to be a real person? Why did I not feel like a real person? How was I defining myself in not being a real person? After almost 6 months of allowing it to sit on my bedside, I began to read the book I had purchased on his recommendation. Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship by Aline LaPierre and Laurence Heller. As with all the academic/scholarly books I have read on trauma in the past fifteen years, reading this book left me shaking with recognition and resonance. It took me several weeks to read it, even though I am a fairly speedy and competent reader. This is because I have learned through difficult experience that it is best to allow the mind/body to absorb and process only as much (or as little) new information as they are able to do, and to do it (for the mind/body are one me) at her own speed.
For some survivors of childhood trauma the connection to their mother (traditionally the primary caregiver), their family, then community, then the wider world, is either stymied by the trauma, or no connection forms at all. Because they may feel unwanted or invisible, or the boundaries to their bodies may have been compromised as mine were, they either do not develop (or lose) the ability to engage with the world. When we feel no connection to the tribe of our birth family, it is nearly impossible to feel a part of the human tribe. Not present to our own body, or our body not present to our environment, we are like Pinnochio, drifting through the world not feeling “real” but wanting it more than anything, wanting to be a “real boy”.
Then one day early in spring of 2017, without knowing exactly when the transformation had happened, I walked out into my backyard and saw the mountains beyond my canyon as if for the first time. I saw the residual snow on the tops of the peaks, saw the multitude of green across their expanse, I SAW the mountain. I marveled that the same stardust that made up the mountain, made up the stars, made up the Universe, was present in every moment within my body. I had a right to be born, I had the right to be alive, I had the right to live as I chose. I finally, and for evermore, Belonged.
For more on this Universal connection I invite you to read Living with the Stars: How the Human Body is Connected to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Planets, and the Stars by Carolus J. Schrijver and Iris Schrijver.
In Life as in the land, the green of living and the brown of renewal continuously cycle. Image by JkM.
Thank you for reading, and for being a part of this Medium tribe.
©Jk Mansi 2020 | https://medium.com/good-news-daily/learning-to-belong-66000619e205 | ['Jk Mansi'] | 2020-12-06 13:02:40.904000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Neuroscience', 'Philosophy', 'Outdoors', 'Spirituality'] |
Baby Sleep Training Program | A mother loves all her kids. But the feeling of being a mom for the first time is something different! The first child is always like a gift from nature. Nothing in the world can compensate for the feelings, excitement, emotions, and thoughts that a female has when she becomes a mother!
Being a mother is a beautiful feeling but still, it is a responsibility and not an easy job! Newborn babies have different times for sleeping, feeding, or diaper changing! Babies are not able to speak. They communicate to their mom by crying out loud. They cry and then the moms understand what they want or need. How beautiful is this! Right?
Newborn sleep pattern:
Newborn babies sleep a lot. They wake up, cry, and drink milk, cry, and sleep. And this cycle continues. According to the observations, newborns sleep 8 to 9 hours in the day and 8 to 9 hours in the nighttime. But this timing varies. The babies have little tummies so they wake up for milk after few hours.
A mother can control her baby’s sleep pattern if she observes the baby’s sleeping and eating cycle. This cycle is easier to observe and is predictable when the baby is almost 2 months old. And you can make a schedule for the baby easily.
But how would a new mom make a schedule? How would she judge or observe without any experience? Hey new moms! No need to be worried. That is what we are here for!
If you are a new mom-to-be or you are a new mom. And looking for a baby sleep pattern then you are on the right spot. Let us have a glance at the importance of a sleep training program!
Importance of sleep training program:
The sleep training program is for the help and guidance of mothers. The main goal is to make the baby sleep on its own and prevent catnapping. The baby would be able to sleep comfortably for several hours. Moreover, after an uninterrupted sleep, they would wake up being fresh and active.
The training program will help the baby learn to soothe themselves. They will fall back asleep on their own after the short awakenings. You can get a lot of tips and tricks about babies from the Baby Sleep training Program. This program is developed by one of the best pediatricians and sleep experts. You will get complete guidance and information about the tips and tricks of how to manage the schedule or finish the catnapping issue.
Baby Sleep Training Program serves you the weird tricks to get any baby to sleep. All these tricks are explained by Child’s psychologists with years of observations. All the shared techniques are based on the newest scientific research. These techniques and tricks will help your baby sleep trained and they could sleep comfortably for 9 to 12 hours at night. Not only the baby but also, mom and dad would be able to sleep restfully. Especially moms which are already recovering and suffering from post-pregnancy insomnia or depression. So the new moms need to sleep more and take a rest!
We care for the mothers and their babies. Restful sleep is important for both, the mother and the baby. Our program serves scientifically proven techniques that let the babies sleep like clockwork. So, just click on the link and get this astonishing program that will help you and the baby get uninterrupted and restful sleep at night. The program is affordable and easy to use. We also care for your satisfaction so we serve a 100% money-back guarantee too!
You do not need to buy expensive programs or pacifiers. Our Baby Sleep Training Program is completely safe for children of all ages. New moms can use this affordable and trustworthy program to get complete guidance about any issue related to post-pregnancy depression or baby restless sleep!
You are just one click away from this extraordinary Baby Sleep Training Program. Buy it and get the ocean of the advanced tips and techniques by amazing child psychologists and pediatricians! | https://medium.com/@skilldrills-co/baby-sleep-training-program-248ee00e7fb3 | ['Skill Drills'] | 2021-09-03 16:10:59.659000+00:00 | ['Baby Sleep Miracle', 'Baby Sleep Routine', 'Baby Sleep Training', 'Baby Sleep Miracle Method', 'Baby Scheduling'] |
Peaceful Points | Image by Quang Nguyen vinh from Pixabay
Peace is the foremost human need for personal & social happiness & sustainability in every society. Peace has two parts- one, internal at personal or individual level and second, external at inter-personal or social level although both can affect each other. Internally, one can stay peaceful by adopting the practice of meditation, being closer to nature and pursuing one’s passions among other ways. Externally, peace is function of mutual harmony, non-violence, non-conflict, justice, equality across all inter-personal social relations.
Similarly, the internal & external energy & environment also determines the level of peace at any point of time & place. The presence of some person can either make a room warm or cool; stressful or peaceful. Every person holds energy vibes that can alter the state of environment around them. On the other hand, environment of a person also affects the energy vibes of a person. Hence, we feel peaceful around hills, sea, parks, temples and similar places of nature & religion. Thus, we can be peaceful by choosing & changing our energy & environment.
Peace at the societal level partly depends upon the state of economy- such as economic freedoms & fairness, economic growth & employment. However, it also partly depends on the political freedoms, state of democracy & corruption in the society. Finally, it also depends on the religious freedoms, religious tolerance and ensuring that religious practices functions within the boundary of moral universal human values.
If peace is the desired state of humans, then why humans engage in wars with each other? The history of humans teaches us that most wars have been fought for resources while some for justice. Indeed, accumulation of wealth and power were the primary drivers behind the war followed by welfare of people.
In the current world, economics of war is justified in the disguise of national security. Instead of giving primacy and promoting preventive positive measures of peace among people and nations, the proliferation of hi-tech arms & ammunition industry instead threatens to minimize the levels of peace for so long as arms are produced, so long they will be (mis) used. To extend & reverse the logic, wars are ‘manufactured’ and some people are killed or sacrificed so as to keep ‘weapon’ industry running for profit of some people. Moreover, if one individual or nation has a special weapon, another would also find the way to get it and then the former would try to build some new & more powerful followed by later and so on.
In an ideal highest peaceful world & society, no nation should have any nuclear weapon and perhaps no weapon at all for in the long run, we cannot induce & sustain peace by negative threat but instead by engaging in positive fair mutually prosperous sustainable partnerships. | https://medium.com/@echopoints/peaceful-points-b800a231ba4b | ['Shrikant Taparia'] | 2020-05-20 07:08:29.889000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Development', 'Peace', 'International Relations', 'Humanity'] |
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