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What Is Your Money Blueprint? And How Do You Change It? | Being good with money isn’t just about saying no to bright shiny things that you want and need, now, now, now. Being good with money is a state of mind — a feeling of being cool with the ~it’s complicated~ status between you and your bank account.
Money comes and goes. You earn it, you spend it — they designed it that way. There are times when you’re comfortable money-wise, and times when you’re not.
One can, by the way, change their money blueprint by changing one’s beliefs about money, about people who have it and about the way in which it will affect one’s relationships with others and with themselves.
There are ten questions that paint our money blueprint. These are:
I am not rich because I refuse to understand finance.
And that is because I do not consider money important and a part of my life.
Being rich would make me feel secure.
When it comes to rich people, my parents always told me that they are immoral and exploit the honest working people.
If I focused on getting rich, it would make my partner/spouse feel left behind.
A rich woman is one who is independent.
What keeps me from taking more risks to get rich is the fear of losing it all.
When it comes to handling money, I get embarrassed.
I feel money is dirty and un-important.
A rich woman strikes me as ruthless.
Your money blueprint is essentially how you have been programmed to respond to money and wealth throughout your life, beginning in your childhood. Every time you heard your parents spout comments like “money is the root of all evil” or “money doesn’t grow on trees” and then subsequently seeing them make it rain at the shopping centre on a Saturday, you were being imprinted with beliefs around money.
These beliefs form your blueprint — they impact your approach to cash and your attitude towards wealth, and permeate through to your spending habits and general financial attitude today. The trickiest part is you likely aren’t aware of your beliefs or habits, because your money blueprint is deep-rooted and subconscious.
No matter your money blueprint though, changing your money mindset and spending behaviour is only a few thoughts away. Here are some ways you can re-program your thinking around money.
Wealth is about so much more than money!
If your desire to be wealthy stems from a negative or insecure thought, then it won’t make you happy. This one seems obvious enough but how often do we really listen to it? With Instagram feeds full of #goals and Yeezy always launching new kicks, it’s difficult to not get caught up in thinking that material objects will make you happy.
Money is an abstract concept. Economies change, currencies differ, and inflation happens. Rather than let the stress of financial goals take control, learn to find fulfilment elsewhere. This will surely take the pressure and anxiety away from your finances. Learn to spend time on your hobbies or with family and friends. Energy and time spent on personal endeavours will give greater rewards than an afternoon of mindless spending and next-day buyer’s regrets. Oh yeah, there is such a thing!!
You can actively think in ways that support your success and financial goals!
Whatever your attitude toward money, you can make yourself more financially confident by adjusting your outlook and thoughts towards spending and saving. Thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to actions, which then leads to you being able to look at your bank account without covering your eyes first, afraid at what you might see and then slamming your laptop shut.
Support your positive attitude towards finances by changing your approach towards financial flow: money enters bank account; money leaves bank account. It’s the circle of life. We have to pay for things in order to live. Understanding that wealth is fluid will encourage savvier spending choices and remove unnecessary negative thinking and stress.
Nothing has meaning except for what you attach it to!
Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is the meaning and value of money. OK sure, there’s the basic price tag of living that I just mentioned, but beyond that, wealth and success are entirely subjective. Some may not agree with this assertion but then again it’s my opinion.
How you view your finances and monetary goals can be completely curated according to your personal brief. Don’t care about the latest fashions but want to spend money on 9 month trip around the world? Only you have the power to ignore financial trends that you don’t consider important and choose where your money goes. And that’s a pretty powerful thought.
Change comes when you actually make a change!
Toxic relationships are the worst. It isn’t cool to surround yourself with unsupportive nay-sayers who only bring you down, so why have that relationship with your hard-earned cash? Phase-out the toxic and start implementing money habits that promote your success and positively shape your money blueprint. Just like shocking a muscle when exercising so do the same principals apply here.
Start with a small positive change. Are you spending too much on Menulog and complaining about how broke you are? Or do you feel sad about the size of your bank account and then drop $300 on a new pair of sunnies three days later? Adjust your thinking and make healthy financial choices. Ride out the negative emotions when they appear and try to keep your self-destructive spending habits in check. Whatever change you make, keep at it until it becomes a habit. Habits become values, and eventually, you will relish seeing your bank account with eyes wide open. Whoop Whoop!!
If this still doesn’t work, find yourself a money role model to learn from and inspire change in your habits. If you’re are looking for a total champ to look up to, read about James Altucher, a self-help guru who went from needing $100 million to be happy to owning only 15 things.
Try to be mindfully aware of your money blueprint and see how your relationship to your savings and spendings are influenced by those around you — if you can do that, then you’re bound to keep the money-relationship drama at bay.
If you are interested in learning more about this then click here: https://onlinebusinessbuilderchallenge.com/enter/enroll?aid=38899
* If you purchase anything through a link in this article, you should assume that I have an affiliate relationship with the company providing the product or service that you purchase, and that I’ll be compensated in some small way at no extra cost to you. | https://medium.com/@justusowaka/what-is-your-money-blueprint-and-how-do-you-change-it-3a95f27dc4e1 | ['Justus Owaka'] | 2019-10-12 07:12:14.274000+00:00 | ['Money Mindset', 'Money Management', 'Affiliate Marketing', 'Money', 'Online Marketing'] |
How to Find a Good Nanny (and Keep Them) | Photo by Nathan Dumlao
We all know how challenging it is to find good childcare, especially since Covid has changed our lives so drastically. I decided to write this piece from a nanny’s perspective (I actually prefer the term childcare provider). I’m a professional childcare provider, with over two decades of experience. I’ve also worked as a firefighter. I have an advanced degree and am also a writer. That said, many incredible nannies don’t have degrees. I work full-time with one family.
I live in a large west coast city, and my job comes with all the benefits of a good full-time position: PTO, sick days, 2 weeks vacation, a healthcare stipend, a living wage (full disclosure, my pay is above $30 per hour), and snacks. Because I cook for my family (yes, I call my employers my family), I also take home dinner most nights. (I am actually what’s called a nanny/household manager, which typically has more than just “kid” duties).
Now, first I want to say that our country (U.S.A.) has a major childcare crisis. This article isn’t addressing that. Often when I state the work and pay conditions that childcare providers deserve, I am told that I expect too much, and that there’s a problem with childcare in the U.S. The latter is true, the former is not. Childcare workers have been historically underpaid and undervalued, and that’s not okay.
Burnout is common in childcare. The kids I work for rarely thank me for the things I do, and if their parents don’t show me appreciation, I can begin to feel taken for granted. Taking care of kids can be incredibly rewarding, but it’s also very draining. I have to be “on” all the time, and, unlike parents, I can’t lose my cool. Making sure the kids I work for feel safe and loved is something I love doing, but it’s also exhausting.
If you’re a family employing a nanny for either your singular unit or a share, These are some things you can do to make sure you find a stellar nanny, but most importantly to keep them employed with your family for years to come. Having a high turnover isn’t great for child development, and ideally you would find one person and have them blend into your family as long as you need them to.
But nannying is often a high turnover job, because families are unaware of the ways in which they undervalue their childcare providers (it can even be subconscious). Nannies experience what we call “job creep,” where the details of a position can be clearly stated at the beginning, but slowly begin to erode if the nanny isn’t constantly reinforcing boundaries (for instance: it’s stated that the parents arrive home at 5pm, but they are often late, and the nanny has to continually remind them to be on time). This is exhausting and often results in nannies starting a new job search.
In my nanny groups, some of the most common complaints are that the parents aren’t cleaning up after themselves, are overloading us with work, aren’t respecting the space we need with their children (especially with working from home), are passive aggressive communicators, forget to pay their nannies (yes, this happens often), and nickel and dime their nannies.
Micromanaging is a huge issue, as is not trusting your nanny— while it’s understandable that trust takes time, a continual lack in trust could be a red flag that it isn’t a good fit, or a red flag that the parents need to do some personal work in letting go.
Nannies often do the “dirty work” of family units, clearing space for parents to be present with their kids while they aren’t working. They also deeply enrich the lives of their children, and often spend more time with the kids than the parents do. Their work should be respected, and they should be valued.
I’m going to address the complaints that come up in nanny groups, and more, so that you can make sure you’re doing everything you can to be what us nannies call a “unicorn family.” That’s what we call the family we’ll stay with forever.
Be clear with your schedule and work needs when going through the hiring process. Often families won’t be entirely clear about what they need when they’re looking for a nanny. Take some time to create your dream childcare scenario. Are you looking for five days a week, 9–5, or would you rather have four ten hour days? Are you looking for someone who is going to cook for you? Make adjustments in your pay-range and ask for what you want. Make sure you’re offering pay that’s typical for your area- but if you want a stellar nanny, you may need to be willing to pay more. Trust your instincts: This goes for nannies and families. When you’re hiring, always trust that gut feeling. If something feels off, it’s probably not a good fit. Have a (paid) trial day: Whenever you ask your nanny to meet (other than the initial interview) pay them for their time. Have a trial day, and then keep the first month as a trial, to make sure it’s a good fit. Never let a nanny go without paying them. If something comes up and you don’t need them anymore, give them a week’s pay. All benefits should kick in on day one, though. Have a contract: There are tons of templates online. Writing up a contract protects both you and your nanny. Don’t try to negotiate down from asking pay: When hiring, always offer a nanny pay within their pay range. For instance, if your favorite candidate is asking for $33-$38 per hour, offer within that range, and preferably on the upper end. If you can’t afford the nanny and it feels like a great fit, most nannies will negotiate down. But if you can afford to pay the nanny what they’re asking, do it. Your nanny will quickly find out that they’re being underpaid, and this will likely start both of you off on the wrong foot. Give your nanny guaranteed hours: For most of my nanny career, I was at the whim of my families. Some families wanted to bank hours (which means that I’d work 40 hours a week, but if they only needed me for thirty one week they could “use” the other ten hours whenever they wanted. This is now illegal), and families who, when they decided to go on vacation or take a day off, simply didn’t pay me. This made it difficult to budget and plan. Figure out how many hours you need your nanny for, and then pay them for their hours no matter what. Even if you don’t need them. If you want to be extra generous, give them time off when you take time off. If your nanny is live-in, don’t pay them less: Having a live-in nanny is a luxury for you, not for the nanny. The boundaries between work and home are blurred, and your nanny can end up being on call. Giving them a place to live doesn’t mean you’re doing them a favor. It’s actually the other way around. Pay them accordingly. Give your nanny health insurance: This should be common sense, but unfortunately it’s not. Either provide health insurance (and dental) for your nanny, or give them a stipend that will go towards it. Even if it doesn’t cover the whole sum, your nanny will be grateful (but also, make sure it covers most of the cost). Don’t try to wiggle out of paying overtime: If your nanny works over forty hours in one week, you need to pay them time and a half. There’s a reason people get paid more for overtime. If you try to wiggle out of this, your nanny will start to resent you, and feel undervalued. Paid time off: The standard for PTO is two weeks, with an additional hour accruing for every forty worked. If you can offer more, do it. If you can find ways to give your nanny an extra day off here and there, or let them leave early sometimes, do that too. It’s very likely that your nanny would gain a lot from an offering like that, and feel appreciated. Pay extra if you’re asking them to stay low-risk: If your nanny is unable to do certain things (like go to the store or see family) because of your Covid comfort level, make sure to compensate them accordingly. Travel Pay: Traveling with your nanny is a luxury. Most nannies require round-the-clock hourly pay if they’re not given a room of their own. If traveling for an extended period of time, an off-site apartment, fully equipped, is necessary. If that’s not doable and the nanny has to share space with your family even on their days off, they should be paid a daily stipend (from $25-$150 a day) to make up for this inconvenience. Imagine if your employer asked you to leave home for more than a week. How would you be paid and accommodated? That’s how you should treat your nanny. Snacks: Find out what your nanny likes to eat and provide it. This doesn’t mean. you fill your refrigerator with foods they love, but it does mean keeping a few things in there you know they’ll enjoy. It takes a lot of energy to take care of kids! Gifts and thank yous: You certainly don’t have to shower your nanny with gifts, but if they go above and beyond, a thoughtful gift or cash bonus every once in a while would be greatly appreciated, even if it’s just sharing a company discount. Holidays and Birthdays: The most unicorn of unicorn families always gives a holiday bonus. This is something that your nanny can’t ask for, but deserves. Giving them a little gift is nice, but cash is even better. Many families give their nanny the sum of one week’s paycheck as a bonus. Some give a couple hundred dollars. Some give fifty. No matter how much, your nanny will be appreciative, and it’s very like that they spent a lot of time and thought (and possibly money) on the gifts you received from them. Ask for what you want, and speak up if there’s an issue: This is huge. If your nanny is doing something that makes you feel uncomfortable, or they’re doing something wrong, communicate it immediately (with tact). Because nannying is such an intimate job, parents sometimes let things go. First, figure out (with your partner, a trusted friend, or a therapist) if it’s worth addressing, and if it is, make sure to address it. Create an open path of communication. Listen to your nanny’s feedback: Make time every month to sit down with your nanny and discuss how things are going. Make sure that, within that time, you ask your nanny if they’re happy, or if there’s anything they’re having trouble with. Definitely make sure you say thank you if your nanny is doing a good job. When given feedback, practice attentive listening and try not to react with defensiveness.
Nannying is not “babysitting.” Many professional nannies have advanced degrees and decades of experience. We should be paid accordingly, and treated with respect. Make sure you’re not taking your nanny for granted. It’s very likely that they’re doing things outside of their assigned hours to keep things running smoothly. If you try to cut corners with them, or complain about petty and/or minuscule issues, they may not be with you for long.
But if you treat your nanny like a member of your family, and show them that they’re valued and seen, they’ll probably stay with you as long as you need them.
If you’re looking for a more economical way to have a nanny, I suggest a nanny share.
Feel free to comment and ask questions on this article. | https://anastasiacalliope.medium.com/how-to-find-a-good-nanny-and-keep-them-c9f7ed468dfa | ['Stacy Selby'] | 2020-12-25 15:01:14.396000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Children', 'Teaching', 'Childcare', 'Work'] |
Imagining a world with AI, UBI and Passion Economy | How can we fit these three promising concepts in the economic system?
Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash
The economic panorama after the Coronavirus outbreak doesn’t look very promising, and this is exactly why we should realize that it is time to change some social constructs related to economy, work and technology.
Yes, we are living times of job losses and economic uncertainty. The pandemic left many people in a long-term unemployment period, but with an online world full of possibilities.
What happened during the first wave’s quarantine? From all those who had access to the internet, one part was creating and sharing content, and the others were fully paying attention to the screens at home. It was easier to create and engage digital audiences. From the other side, governments were trying to help businesses with liquidity. Now, content creators identified a revenue stream from these online audiences and also, our perception of the government changed after seeing them flexing their financial muscles and controlling the economic activities.
The pandemic accelerated the expansion of the Passion Economy and helped to reconsider concepts such as Universal Basic Income, a monthly payment provided by the government in spite of the employment status.
In a nutshell, Passion Economy is about doing something you really like and getting profit out of it. However, it should come with a great story that engages audiences and creates interactions. From the marketing approach, it can be just a new concept for trying to stand out from the rest to sell something. Nothing new. But if it’s analyzed in the context of the Covid Era, where unemployed people need income and technology allows reaching any market, it can resonate more.
The Passion economy is not just being your own boss, it’s offering unique content and engaging communities. Technology plays the role of enabler, not intermediary. How? With SaaS platforms that facilitate the creator’s life by providing not only a way to share their “passion” but also a payment system. It is also a space for community building. This may sound as another social media platform, but the difference could be that these platforms are more personalized according to the creator’s needs, and less invasive for the fans in terms of advertising. In fact, the recent awareness about how social media is playing with our minds and wasting our time is an advantage for these platforms.
The concept of Passion Economy allows a new way of looking at “jobs”, but still has not changed much of the fact that if you don’t work, you are poor. It all comes to our economic system.
Do the UBI and the Passion Economy fit in the current economic system?
Imagine a world where we could have income from doing what we are passionate about, plus receiving a check from the government.
Ok, maybe you don’t have any hobbies or you haven’t found your passion, and you actually hate your job. Here’s where Artificial Intelligence appears. Now, your job is easier and less demanding because of intelligent automation. Because in this perfect world, indeed, AI technologies are based on human-machine cooperation, not human displacement. Now you have time to do something meaningful rather than just sit in front of the computer for eight hours straight or stand in the kitchen for the whole day.
Imagine a world where sustainability is the first priority, where we can work together with AI to make our lives less complicated, where we can work in something we like, not just because we need to pay the rent. In this world, the concepts of leisure and work would be reframed.
“Like humor and satire, utopias throw open the windows of the mind. And that’s vital” -Rutger Bregman
So, do the UBI and the Passion Economy fit in the current economic system? The Passion Economy seems to fit well. It is based on engaging an audience with the aim of making money. As for the UBI, critics say that it could only work if capitalism changes. This is because if the income increases, the prices will do as well. But then, is it time to realize that the government should regulate more? It is more than clear that free markets are not sustainable. In this perfect world, the government would tax the rich more heavily and benefit the ones in need.
Intelligent automation is also challenging the current system. Past philosophers and economists have predicted human displacement for a long time, but it didn’t affect the labour market in the way they imagined it would be. They thought that at some point, leisure would be a problem. Too much free time thanks to the machines. But nowadays all economic interactions are looking for limitless growth, instead of sustainability.
The pandemic was a game changer in many ways. UBI is catching the attention of some governments.The European Commission is evaluating an initiative on this topic and countries such as Ireland and Germany included trials for the upcoming future. The concerns are that people would not be motivated to work, and that only those who really need it should receive it. Finland did a trial between 2017 and 2018, with a sample of unemployed people, unlike Germany, in which the sample is considering people independently of the employment status. Indeed, Finland’s study cannot be understood as an UBI experiment, since it was partial basic income only for young and long-term unemployed.
UBI started as a solution for inequality and intelligent automation, but nowadays it could be a way to recover from the crisis and build an economy that gives people a chance to breathe and enjoy life.
Hopefully, the next generations are more open to new systems that are not just capitalism or socialism, which help to build upon sustainability and inclusion, where the legislation promotes equality and AI is designed in a way that benefits the human kind. | https://medium.com/predict/imagining-a-world-with-ai-ubi-and-passion-economy-eb6b9867f630 | ['Alejandra Rojas'] | 2020-12-09 19:52:19.009000+00:00 | ['Passion Economy', 'Economics', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Universal Basic Income', 'Covid 19 Crisis'] |
Debugging Abstractions: The Benefits of Mindfulness for Software Engineers | It’s been a wild week. You and your team have been engaged in an all-out war with the codebase for the past two sprints. There’s this new integration with a partner that’s close to being shipped, and it promises bountiful revenue and voluminous web traffic. And you’ve been working on the part of it that’ll seal the deal and let your squad deploy, come Monday morning.
This lesson was originally published at https://algodaily.com, where I maintain a technical interview course and write think-pieces for ambitious developers.
You find yourself on the Friday night before launch, 6pm, absolutely fried at your desk. Everyone else on your team already left to attend the company happy hour, or has gone home seeking sanity from work. For the past several hours, you’ve been tracking down a nasty, horrendous bug that could prevent the feature from shipping next week.
But you introduced it.
Caught late in the game, with the marketing team eager to deploy, there were no other options. Thankfully, you’re close to patching things up. Your thoughts have been a web of abstractions all night, looking something like this:
I’ve looked at SuperClass , but the stack trace is from ChildClass .
, but the stack trace is from . Alright, so ChildClass imports the function from HelperModule ...
imports the function from ... HelperModule uses a bunch of functions from CrazyLibrary . Let's do a search. Great, CrazyLibrary has no documentation.
uses a bunch of functions from . Let's do a search. Great, has no documentation. Wait, did I check out the latest master yet?
yet? Oh wait, the error wasn’t actually on the server. Let’s look at the client.
HugeReactComponent is making the call. Maybe the type is wrong?
is making the call. Maybe the is wrong? Oh man, it uses DatabaseModernClientApi ... I don't know DatabaseModernClientApi .
... I don't know . Wait no, it’s in MiddlewareClientServer ...
At 7:30pm, you’re sure you’ve nailed it. It was a silly conditional that got in the way. Boom, problem solved. After merging a PR that switched the broken ternary statement around, off to the happy hour you go.
Beaming with pride from merging the bug fix, you walk in, and notice your team chatting with folks from a sister team. You recognize some members of the sister team, but not everyone. You go and try to introduce yourself.
“Hey y’all, what’s happening?!”
Both your team and the sister team sheepishly smile at you. “Hey man”, one of them says, “long day?” You look around, and suddenly notice that some people have startled looks on their faces. Then you realize they had been having a low-key conversation, and that you’d jumped into the conversation at quite the high decibel.
“Yeah, haha”, you play it off, “Oh boy, working on the PartnerIntegrationProject this week was awful! Whoever wrote SuperClass created a complete mess. Must've taken 10 hours away from my life."
Everyone in the circle stops smiling. Eric, who wrote that class, nervously chuckles. “Yeah, I guess it could be better, huh?” Oops. Bad move. You feel the energy drain out of the conversation they were having.
You stay silent for the next half hour or so, and everyone keeps chatting, but it feels weird. You keep noticing people’s expressions and body language. There’s some more forced conversation before a few folks excuse themselves. Then everyone disperses.
And for the rest of the evening, you can’t shake off the feeling that everyone’s thinking something about you. That you did something wrong. You get a sense that the energy was off, and blame yourself.
But you’re not to blame! Everything was probably fine, and no one was judging you. You were just in code mode.
What Happens In Your Brain When You Program?
Ask any developer, and “code mode” is a real thing. We seem to be so drawn into our innermost thoughts of classes , modules , syntax , and systems -- that we lose track of how to mentally function the rest of the time. Some call it "monkey mind" or restlessness, but we all recognize it. It's the brain on hyperdrive, going 200 miles per hour when the speed limit's about 50.
It’s the thinking, or rather, the overthinking, that is almost always unnecessary. And for reasons unbeknownst, this always tends to happen when we need to deal with other people.
Now, that doesn’t seem problematic, right? Being stuck in code mode is harmless. So you overthink the occasional small talk session, and can’t really pay attention to long films, but is it really harmful?
No, not really. But understanding why it happens helps us understand how to make the gear switch a little bit smoother, which is behind my upcoming pitch for meditation. If you’re able to leave the programmatic thought patterns behind anytime you’d like, you have greater control over your life.
Of course, we want to be sure of our assumptions. After all, the argument for meditation requires a somewhat well-formed paradigm of what’s happening when we read and write code. It’s important to take into account exactly which thought patterns we “execute” while in code mode.
What’s Going On Up There?
There was a push in recent years to allow programming to replace the study of a foreign language. Around that time, Norman Peitek, Janet Siegmund, and a team of researchers conducted a study that observed 17 participants in an fMRI scanner while they were comprehending short source-code snippets. Their key finding was that despite the stereotype of math and logic being the major concern in programming, the brains of the participants showed greater activation of its language centers than expected.
Now, this may be confusing to you, as it seemingly contradicts the idea of code mode. After all, if the language centers are activated, shouldn’t we, as social beings who communicate through the use of language, not be affected by these lingering cognitive thought patterns?
This could be so. But if we dig deeper into the results of the sudy, we actually find that the programmer mind is activated more traditionally than the above finding would suggest:
In essence, we found five relevant activation clusters, all in the left hemisphere.
The function of the left hemisphere is thought to be for control of the right side of the body, and “is the more academic and logical side of the brain”. The right hemisphere is associated with creativity, visual/spatial perception, and emotional management and expression.
Because this has been disputed recently, I took a look at what naysayers of the “left-brain, right-brain myth” were saying. It turns out, most of the rejection of this “myth” stems from the fact that people are not usually left-brain or right-brain dominant. However, the fact of the matter is, the left hemisphere is still associated with logical operations and analytical functions, and the right with more “emotional” or “creative” activities.
In fact, a 2013 University of Utah study on brain lateralization examined the brains of more than 1,000 people and found no evidence for people having a dominant side of the brain. Even though each side of the brain does more work for certain functions, such as language being localized on the left and attention on the right, this doesn’t vary by person. All of the study participants, whether they were engineers or musicians, used their entire brain equally, debunking the left-brain right-brain myth.
In addition to programming being left hemisphere dominant, there’s also a lot going on. The earlier study referenced found that the activated regions while coding found were:
Middle frontal gyrus (division of attention, silent word reading, verbal/numeric problem solving) Middle temporal gyrus (categorization) Inferior parietal lobule (verbal/numeric problem solving) Inferior frontal gyrus (verbal/numeric) Inferior frontal gyrus (silent word reading, problem solving)
If this sounds like a surprisingly high amount of brain activity merely for understanding source code, I would agree. And if it sounds like you’d be surprised if all this happened when trying to sleep or talking to a friend, you’d probably be right. Thus, I’d argue that one should choose to believe that quite a bit is going in mentally when we program, and mostly in the left hemisphere.
But Isn’t It Fun?
An interesting note to add is that this kind of intensive brain activity sounds painful in a challenging way, but is actually desirable. Many call it the “flow” state. Courtland Allen and Vincent Woo talked about it in their interview on IndieHackers:
Courtland says:
That’s funny because it reminds me of the first two years after I moved to San Francisco. I started a startup and I basically just coded for sixteen hours a day, every day for two years, and the problem is that if you’re in flow for that long and you don’t vary your activities… you don’t make new memories, everything just blurs together, so I have a two year block of time in my life where there were zero memories, and I swore that I would never do that again.
To which Vincent replies:
That’s kind of what I suspected happened to that sixty year old plus guy at Amazon, I think he just sat down to code one day and then he woke up, and he was sixty. I don’t know, I think flow is both really seductive and also kind of boring in its own way.
A fascinating take-away of the above conversation is the conflation of two different ideas: flow state and code mode . From our good friend, Wikipedia:
In positive psychology, a flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Here, I argue this point, and I want to be succint: flow and code mode appear to be two sides of the same coin. That specific coin is neurotransmitter-fueled activity, causing us to hone in one problem (or consecutive problems) for an indefinite period of time. However, we generally use the term flow to refer to the good parts of it, and I'm using code mode as the detrimental aspect.
I think we’d all agree that 16 hours spent on something is not good for your health, mentally or physically. Especially the art of programming — your back aches, your eyes burn, and you leave the coding session feeling unsatisfied. This is what we want to avoid, and the mental fatigue this imparts on you will carry over to other parts of life.
In fact, here’s a follow-up passage from the above Wikipedia article on flow state:
The flow state shares many characteristics with hyperfocus. However, hyperfocus is not always described in a positive light. Some examples include spending “too much” time playing video games or watching television and getting side-tracked and pleasurably absorbed by one aspect of an assignment or task to the detriment of the overall assignment. In some cases, hyperfocus can “capture” a person, perhaps causing them to appear unfocused or to start several projects, but complete few.
But you may be wondering, does this state really carry over to later activities? Can’t we “easily turn off” this abstractions level sort of thinking after we’re done with it?
Shouldn’t the code mode end, and lead to — say, “happy hour mode”?
Turns out, it’s not that easy.
The Stickiness of Code Mode
Patterns of thought stick around. Ever switched schools or jobs, and found yourself en route to the old place?
In Source Code and Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution, the concept of stylometry is discussed. Stylometry is a marker of author identity through writing style, and can be used in source code to identify the author of a program. When I first read this paper, it blew my mind, especially this snippet:
Programmers can obfuscate their variable or function names, but not the structures they subconsciously prefer to use or their favorite increment operators. Following this intuition, we create a new feature set that reflects coding style from properties derived from abstract syntax trees. We reach 99% accuracy in attributing 36 authors each with ten files.
So essentially you have a “handwriting” in crafting software. Your placement of if statements versus ternary statements, your naming conventions, the complexity of your calls, etc.-- they're never pulled from thin air. Rather, you cultivate and inhabit these patterns over time, which is why we recommend studying problem-solving patterns for technical interviews. The patterns also appear to linger in later work.
But of course, we cannot assume causation from this. How you think while programming certainly carries over to other times you write code, but we still haven’t substantiated concrete evidence that it’s sticky in the rest of life. Why does this pattern of thinking remain when we go to happy hour?
Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be research on this exact claim, but the mere existence of articles like 7 Tips On Turning Off Work Mode When You’re Not At Work and Your Company (Not to Mention Your Family) Needs You to Stop Taking Work Home shows it’s a problem that people deal with. Software engineers are not excluded:
I just really started my life in the professional world. I am a very active, 24 year-old. I am used to lifting/running 3–5 times a week, maintaining a blog on the weekends, and going out 1–2 nights per week. Since I started the new job, I am coming home DESTROYED. I can’t motivate myself to workout, clean my room, or anything. The job itself isn’t very stressful, though I am sitting down for long periods of time. Any ideas on whats going on or how to get out of this funk would be most helpful!
I won’t continue to belabor the point. Clearly, your work as a software engineer has sticky, lingering effects on the rest of your life, especially with regards to patterns of thought — and how much you think. Those patterns, be they negative or positive, will lead to other thoughts of the same nature and magnitude. Learning to control this mechanism, and not letting it master us will prevent overthinking and the overuse of programmatic paradigms outside of writing code.
“The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities,” said Edsger Dijkstra, of Dijkstra’s Algorithm “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”
The awkward social interaction presented at the beginning is merely one manifestation of this. The necessary amount of thinking and abstraction-handling to correctly fix a bug is overkill for other situations. Knowing when to, quite literally, get out of our heads, can be tricky. Luckily, there’s a tool everyone knows about but probably doesn’t practice.
The Mindful Programmer
What’s happening in the brain when meditating?
I can’t speak for other techniques, but when you practice mindfulness, you’re doing one of two things:
Simply noticing feelings and thoughts as they come, and more importantly, go away. You’re coming back and re-focusing on being aware of the present moment.
Originally an ancient Buddhist meditation technique, in recent years mindfulness has evolved into a range of secular therapies and tools for the restless mind. And the term”restless” doesn’t need to be chronic — in fact, challenging software engineering leads to this type of mental chatter, for the mental dialogue we turn on helps us solve hard problems.
The purpose of meditation is to help one see the world more clearly. Programming, I would argue, is the opposite — there are quite literally abstractions (that is, layers of models) that take us away from real life.
How I’ve Benefitted From Meditation
As a programmer, I noticed I used to live the beginning scenario all too often. Between work and side projects, I was constantly sucked into a screen, practicing the act of holding onto a million things in my head and ignoring everything in search of that hit of dopamine. I stayed in the mode for hours, even after logging off, overthinking every interaction and situation. I found I had a serious inability to just enjoy the present moment, and let go.
Now, if I find myself in that mental position, I meditate, even if just for a few minutes. It’s like a release valve that waves goodbye to the day’s work, and moves me onto the next activity. The simple act of focusing on my breath, noticing my environment, and feeling my body appears to release the body’s problem-solving tightness.
It lets me move beyond the code, the internet, and the world of screens.
Because when all is said and done, you might be like Vincent Woo.
I can’t do it anymore, I can’t program for eight hours anymore, like I tried, I just can’t do it anymore.
Sources: | https://medium.com/swlh/debugging-abstractions-the-benefits-of-mindfulness-for-software-engineers-d298607633e | ['Jake Zhang'] | 2020-09-01 10:59:15.605000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Meditation', 'Careers', 'Software Engineering', 'Mental Health'] |
Life is a journey of twists and turns, peaks and valleys, mountains to climb and oceans to explore. | Life is a journey of twists and turns, peaks and valleys, mountains to climb and oceans to explore.
Photo by Matilda Wormwood from Pexels
I received the ultimate “Can I pick your brain?” email. Quarantine had just begun here in Spain, but I was already feeling burned out from everyone’s initial infatuation with Zoom.
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“Is it cool if we just do an old-fashioned phone call?” I replied.
“I’d prefer video,” the man immediately shot back. “There’s something cool I’d like to show you.”
I wanted to insist, but after giving him a warning that my apartment wasn’t very big and I didn’t always get to chose when my youngest son cries, I gave in.
The next day, however, not even 5 minutes into our call, he asked to do a screen-share and tried to sell me on a product he was pushing.
Despite not being able to see my knuckles turn white, I thought for sure he’d picked up on the fact that my face was cemented in a permanent yawn.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to cut him off as shortly after he started his pitch our apartment exploded into tears and I jumped on the opening to end the call.
Much like in “real” life, during video calls, some people have said or done something that rubbed me the wrong way. But for every call that could have gone better, there have been just as many that have turned out well.
A big part of this is because someone said something that traveled straight through my ears and hit me hard in both my head and heart.
When it comes to building relationships, few exercises are more valuable than keeping track of the phrases that both light people up and those that bring people down. Then either adopting them for yourself or making a point to banish them from your vocabulary.
Since the world decided to get weird on us six months ago and video calls have become the norm, I’ve been collecting both the kind and questionable phrases people have said to me.
To kick things off below are a handful of the phrases people have said that made me instantly like them. | https://medium.com/@smarkwolfor/life-is-a-journey-of-twists-and-turns-peaks-and-valleys-mountains-to-climb-and-oceans-to-explore-9f0ffd58823f | [] | 2020-12-10 22:37:33.499000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Relationships', 'Journey', 'Communication', 'Leadership'] |
The 6 Principles of Effective Data Visualization | The 6 Principles of Effective Data Visualization
Data visualization is an essential step in the data science process. It’s where you present your findings and communicate the results of your analysis in a graphical format that is both intuitive and easy to understand.
Data visualization takes hard work, and tons of cleaning and analysis go into distilling and manipulating messy data into beautiful graphs and charts. But even with data prepared, one still has to adhere to certain principles or methodologies to produce useful and informative graphics.
That said, in this article, I will be taking inspiration from Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence, which encapsulates six principles for how to make data graphics that are useful and informative. It’s these principles that separate useful graphics from those that aren’t.
This article is also largely inspired by Roger D. Peng’s book Exploratory Data Analysis in R. It’s available free on Bookdown, and you can read it to learn more about EDA.
Now let’s dive into the principles. | https://betterprogramming.pub/the-6-principles-of-effective-data-visualization-9f98d1f7dade | ['Benedict Neo'] | 2020-12-18 17:15:15.111000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'MySQL', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Data Analysis'] |
My Eyes Witnessed Love | My Eyes Witnessed Love
A beautiful sunset warms my heart and fills it with joy.
Photo Credit: Pinterest
One of my favorite things to do is to watch sunsets. I think the sunset is God’s way of sending me love and to remind me of one of the rare treasures on this planet. Sunsets are filled with such radiance and the colors that paint the sky are warm and stunningly beautiful.
Living in Florida, I am afforded many days with skies filled with God’s artistry and no two sunsets are ever the same. Each day, the sky refreshes back to a blank canvas waiting for God to paint a new masterpiece and I was always front and center to witness the phenomena.
Paint your masterpiece
On the blank canvas blue sky
My eyes witnessed love
After work, my favorite thing to do was to watch the sunsets while curled up in my oversized armchair and let my imagination run free. Dreaming of a life in a faraway land, walking on a beach with my future dog and my future husband. My heart was always filled with joy and my soul set free.
I recently moved, so I no longer get to witness the sunsets as often, but just knowing they are there, brings me comfort. I know God didn’t forget about me and I will one day return to witnessing God create sunset masterpieces while looking out from the balcony of my future home, with my future husband, and future dog, as I enjoy a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.
My eyes will witness love again. | https://medium.com/illumination/my-eyes-witnessed-love-4f9a35742544 | ['Melanie J.'] | 2020-12-31 12:33:56.426000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Self Love', 'Love', 'Sunset', 'Self-awareness'] |
Breast Cancer Detection Using Logistic Regression | Are you aware that 1 among 8 women in the United States is being diagnosed with breast cancer? Breast cancer is a disease in which the healthy cells of the tissue in the breast are invaded and mutated, which further grow in large numbers to form a malignant tumor. It can most likely occur at any age.
Few risk factors that contribute to breast cancer.
It occurs 100 times more in women than in men
Genetic factors such as mother, father, sister or brother had been diagnosed with ovarian or breast cancer.
· Early puberty, late menopause or child birth at an older age or no child birth can increase the risk
Dense breast tissue can also surge the risk of breast cancer. Detection can also be delayed due to the compact nature of the tissue.
Obesity, alcohol abuse, poor nutrition and exposure to frequent radiation can also increase the risk.
Early detection increases the survival chances by almost 99%. By realizing the symptoms and signs, this cancer can be detected early. Self-examination and clinical examination can be conducted for detection of lumps. Mammography is a technique where the breast is exposed to a small dose of radiation to capture the images of the affected area. It can detect cancer before the formation of lumps.
Detection of Breast Cancer Using Classification Algorithm
Unsplash image by National Cancer Institute — Mammography
Early detection of the malignancy of a lump is the key to high probability of survival. Many imaging techniques have been developed for detection and possibility of cure and decrease the mortality rate due to breast cancer. Although Mammograms are one of the best tools for breast screening, there are other imaging techniques such as Breast Ultrasound and Breast MRI.
To facilitate accurate classification of images using Machine Learning algorithms, the data processing is divided into 3 stages, namely preprocessing, feature selection and classification. Feature selection is the most important stage in algorithm building. The dataset generally contains several features and feeding too many features decreases the performance of the algorithm. Features can be extracted using Recursive Feature Extraction (RFE). Ensembling/Combining two or more algorithms could boost the performance of the model. They avoid overfitting and substantially contribute towards improving the accuracy and recall values. In the classification algorithm here, VotingClassifier has been used to combine two logistic regression models using various hyper parameters to classify the dataset. VotingClassifier combines models by giving importance to each, based on the weights assigned to them. Other boosting methods are:
AdaBoost (Strong classifier with low weights)
XGBoost (Extreme gradient boosting)
Catboost (Comes with good initial parameters and can automatically encode categorical variables)
Objective
The aim of this analysis is to use Logistic Regression to classify the data into two classes of diagnosis— Malignant & Benign. The evaluation metrics used are accuracy, ROC, confusion matrix, precision-recall.
Dataset
The Wisconsin Breast Cancer (Diagnostic) dataset has been extracted from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. Features are computed from a digitized image of a fine needle aspirate (FNA) of a breast mass. They describe characteristics of the cell nuclei present in the image.
Class distribution: 357 benign, 212 malignant
benign, malignant Number of instances: 569; Number of attributes: 32
Attributes: Ten real-valued features are computed for each cell nucleus
a) radius (mean of distances from center to points on the perimeter)
b) texture (standard deviation of gray-scale values)
c) perimeter
d) area
e) smoothness (local variation in radius lengths)
f) compactness (perimeter² / area — 1.0)
g) concavity (severity of concave portions of the contour)
h) concave points (number of concave portions of the contour)
i) symmetry
j) fractal dimension (“coastline approximation” — 1)
Preprocessing
The dataset provided is already clean and does not have any missing values. As a part of the preprocessing stage, the data is standardized using Standard Scaler library. It transforms the attributes to normal distribution
# Read data
dataset = pd.read_csv('data.csv')
# drop the last column from the data
dataset = dataset.drop(['Unnamed: 32','id'],axis = 1) # Impute the only categorical column
dataset["diagnosis"].replace(to_replace = dict(M = 1, B = 0), inplace = True)
dataset.head() #check the value count of the benign vs malignant cases
target_count = (dataset['diagnosis']).value_counts()
sns.countplot(dataset['diagnosis'])
pd.Series(dataset['diagnosis']).value_counts()
print('Proportion:', round(target_count[0] / target_count[1], 2), ': 1')
Proportion: 1.68 : 1
Correlated Features
A correlation between variables indicates that as one variable changes in value, the other variable tends to change in a specific direction. Scatter plots and heat map are good visualization techniques to view correlation between continuous variables
Correlation Matrix
Positively correlated features are the ones where the value of one variable increases as the other increases resulting in an upward slope indicating a positive correlation with all the data points falling on the line. Following are positively correlated features.
Positively Correlated Features
Negative correlated features represent cases when the value of one variable increases, the value of the other variable tends to decrease producing a downward slope.
Negatively Correlated Features
Features with high correlation are more linearly dependent and hence have almost the same effect on the target (diagnosis) variable. So, when two features have high correlation, one of the features can be dropped.
Evaluation metrics for classification
Accuracy cannot be completely relied upon as an evaluation metric for Classification.
Confusion Matrix: It is a matrix representation of the results of any binary testing. In this study, the hypothesis is to validate if the person having the lump is malignant or benign. Confusion matrix is used to represent the actual values and the prediction values
Confusion Matrix
True positive (TP): Malignant lump correctly identified as malignant
True negative (TN): Benign lump correctly identified as benign
False positive (FP): Benign lump incorrectly identified as malignant
False negative (FN): Malignant lump incorrectly identified as benign
Accuracy : Accuracy is the proportion of true results among the total number of cases sample : (TP +TN) / (TP + TN + FP +FN)
: Accuracy is the proportion of true results among the total number of cases sample : (TP +TN) / (TP + TN + FP +FN) Precision : The proportion of predicted Positives that is actually positive : TP / (TP + FP)
: The proportion of predicted Positives that is actually positive : TP / (TP + FP) Recall OR Sensitivity OR TPR : The proportion of actual positives correctly classified : TP / (TP + FN)
: The proportion of actual positives correctly classified : TP / (TP + FN) Specificity: The proportion of actual negatives correctly classified : TN/(TN + FP)
The proportion of actual negatives correctly classified : TN/(TN + FP) F1 Score: F1 score kind of maintains a balance between the precision and recall for the classifier by giving equal importance to both precision and recall. Lower the precision, lower is the F1 score. Lower the recall, lower is the F1 score. The F1 value is between 0 and 1 and is the mean of precision and recall : 2 * (Precision * Recall / Precision + Recall)
AUC ROC : Area Under Curve (AUC) is the area covered under the ROC. Receiver Operating Characteristics. ROC is the ratio of True Positive Rate (TPR) and False Positive Rate (FPR) where TPR is proportion of actual positives correctly classified by the model and FPR is the proportion of false positives classified by the model. We have the above values (TPR, FPR) from the model. We can use various threshold values between 0.1–1 to plot the sensitivity and 1-Specificity on the graph. The curve derived is the ROC curve. Lower threshold can increase the number of FP and decrease the number of FN. Higher threshold can decrease the number of FP and increase the FN.
Classification using Logistic Regression (Using RFE for feature elimination)
After splitting the data into training and test set, the training data is fit and predicted using Logistic Regression with GridSearchCV. GridSearchCV is a function that belongs to the sklearn library. It is a process to optimize the model performance by tuning the hyperparameters, automatically, by setting a few parameters in the function. Choosing optimal features for model training is an extremely difficult task to achieve. Feature selection is a key technique to improve the performance of any model. Feature selection can be done using Principal Component Analysis, but it provides us with the principal components which are achieved by a combination of features. It does not clearly declare the features, used to calculate the principal components.
Recursive Feature Elimination technique selects individual features by recursively training the data for a given model. Thus a set of features with high importance is used to improve performance of the model.
# Using GridSearchCV in Logistic regression param_grid = {'penalty' : ['l2','l1'],
'C' : [0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000]
}
log_clf = LogisticRegression(random_state = 42)
CV_log_clf = GridSearchCV(estimator = log_clf, param_grid = param_grid , scoring = 'accuracy', verbose = 1, n_jobs = -1) CV_log_clf.fit(X_train, y_train) best_parameters = CV_log_clf.best_params_ log_clf = LogisticRegression(C = best_parameters['C'], penalty = best_parameters['penalty'],random_state = random_state) selector = RFE(log_clf)
selector = selector.fit(X_train, y_train) y_pred = selector.predict(X_test)
y_score = selector.predict_proba(X_test)[:,1] # Confusion maxtrix & metrics
cm = confusion_matrix(y_test, y_pred)
class_names = [0,1]
plt.figure()
print('Confusion matrix :
',cm)
plt.show() show_evaluation_metrics() # ROC curve
fpr, tpr, t = roc_curve(y_test, y_score)
plot_roc()
Confusion matrix :
[[106 2]
[ 2 61]]
Accuracy = 0.977
Precision = 0.968
Recall = 0.968
F1_score = 0.968
ROC using scoring = “accuracy” as hyper parameter
With a cross validation of 5 folds and a threshold > 0.53 and a recall = 98%, following is the performance score of the Logistic Regression model with accuracy as the hyper parameter.
Accuracy = 0.988
Precision = 0.984
Recall = 0.984
F1_score = 0.984
To further improve the performance of the model optimize the hyper parameter scoring = ’recall’ in GridSearchCV on Logistic Regression
# Using GridSearchCV in Logistic regression with Recall
param_grid = {'penalty' : ['l2','l1'],
'C' : [0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1000]
}
log_clf = LogisticRegression(random_state = 42)
CV_log_clf = GridSearchCV(estimator = log_clf, param_grid = param_grid , scoring = 'recall', verbose = 1, n_jobs = -1)
CV_log_clf.fit(X_train, y_train) best_parameters = CV_log_clf.best_params_
print('The best parameters for using this model is', best_parameters) CV_log_clf_1 = LogisticRegression(C = best_parameters['C'],
penalty = best_parameters['penalty'],
random_state = random_state) CV_log_clf_1.fit(X_train, y_train)
y_pred = CV_log_clf_1.predict(X_test)
y_score = CV_log_clf_1.decision_function(X_test) # Confusion maxtrix & metrics
cm = confusion_matrix(y_test, y_pred)
class_names = [0,1]
plt.figure()
print('Confusion matrix :
',cm)
plt.savefig('6')
plt.show() show_evaluation_metrics() # ROC curve
fpr, tpr, t = roc_curve(y_test, y_score)
plot_roc()
Confusion matrix :
[[106 2]
[ 1 62]]
Accuracy = 0.982
Precision = 0.969
Recall = 0.984
F1_score = 0.976
ROC using scoring = “recall” as hyper parameter
Ensembling two models by using Voting Classifier
Maximizing precision and detect all malignant tumors (high recall value) can significantly improve the performance of the classifier. This can be done by combing/ensembling two or more models with a 5-fold cross validation and selecting an optimum threshold > 0.5
Confusion matrix :
[[106 2]
[ 1 62]]
Accuracy = 0.982
Precision = 0.969
Recall = 0.984
F1_score = 0.976
ROC using VotingClassifier
Precision Recall Curve
The precision-recall curve shows the tradeoff between precision and recall for different threshold. A high area under the curve represents both high recall and high precision, where high precision relates to a low false positive rate, and high recall relates to a low false negative rate. High scores for both show that the classifier is returning accurate results (high precision), as well as returning a majority of all positive results (high recall) for a threshold > 0.5.
Precision Recall Curve
That’s it!
You can get the code here!
References | https://medium.com/swlh/breast-cancer-detection-using-logistic-regression-7bef0110aff5 | ['Ranjani Rajamani'] | 2020-11-04 09:37:13.253000+00:00 | ['Logistic Regression', 'Precision Recall Curve', 'Breast Cancer', 'Voting Classifier', 'Confusion Matrix'] |
Python Project: Looking at the US Census Data | Table of Contents
About the topic About the Data Retrieve, clean, and manipulate data Planning and identify possible analyses (skip here for graphs & analysis) Findings & Reasoning Recommendations
1. About the topic
According to the Pew Research Center, young adults today are much better educated than their parents and grandparents, as measured by the level of bachelor’s degree attainment. Millennials, now aged 25 to 37, have a 39% of earning a bachelor’s degree or higher. This number among GenX’ers, Boomers, and the Silent/Traditional generations are roughly 29% for the former two and 15% for the latter.
Intrigued by this dynamic, I wanted to further investigate the preferences to degree type attainment across these age groups.
2. About the Data
Dataset: ‘Field of Bachelor’s Degree for First Major’ (S1502)
Tool: Python
The dataset ‘Field of Bachelor’s Degree for First Major’ (code name S1502) from the U.S. Census Bureau captures the count and percentages of college degree attainment by the first major across three different age groups of adults over 25 years old across 52 states of the United States in 2018. The data is collected by the American Community Survey (ACS) and in tandem with the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Programs to produce the final and official estimates for the national and local population and housing units.
Regarding data accuracy, the data on the geographical division of states and counties are from 2010, so the data might not reflect as accurately the current population and housing units of states. It is also a self-reported survey in which respondents can report more than one major for their bachelor’s degree without specifying the degree earned. Thus, comparisons between states might be different with a more updated dataset, and reported degree types should be regarded as a preference rather than degree obtained.
The data contains 1-year estimates so I aim to perform basic aggregate functions to get an overview of the data. Time-series or causal inference analyses are not suitable for this dataset.
‘Field of Bachelor’s Degree for First Major’ is a MultiIndex (although data was transformed to one-dimensional after download), in which there are two main dimensions: degree type and age group. There are 5-degree types identified, including:
Science and Engineering
Science and Engineering Related Fields
Business
Education
Arts, Humanities and Others
There are three age groups, namely:
25 to 39
40 to 64
65 and over
I regarded these groups as Millennials, GenX and Boomers, and Seniors, respectively.
The data also identifies male and female populations, which are reported values for each index.
3. Retrieve, clean, and manipulate data
Link to GitHub:
https://github.com/nhb-uyen/US_Census_with_Python/blob/master/New%20Steam%20Project.ipynb
Data retrieval: download from the website as csv.
Clean: filter out N/A, rename columns, group columns.
Manipulate data: aggregate functions, create pivot tables, create plots.
4. Planning and identify possible analyses
Steps:
Identify possible ways to look at the data. Identify trends (highest, lowest, changes across groups). Identify possible explanations for the data trends. Arrive at a conclusion on each trend. Identify the next steps to further data findings.
Possible analyses:
Bachelor’s degree attainment by age groups.
Does a larger proportion of the younger age group attain higher education compared to the older age group? (Gen X vs. Millennials?)
Bachelor’s degree attainment by age groups across states.
Is there a difference across states on the percentage of the population with a bachelor’s degree?
Are there more preferred degrees in some states?
Bachelor’s degree attainment by sex across various degrees.
Does degree type preference differ among males and females in the U.S. in general?
Bachelor’s degree type preference by sex across states.
Does degree type preference differ among males and females of different states?
5. Findings & Reasoning
By geography
California has the highest rate of higher education attainment overall, followed by Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois.
The spikes can be explained by the fact that these are the most populous states in the U.S., having established a strong technological and industrial establishment that appeals to all generations. A further investigation of the data shows that the top three states for millennials (age 25 to 39), gen-X’ers and boomers (age 40 to 64) are California, Texas, and New York. For the Silent Generations (age 65 and over), it is California, Florida, and Texas — Florida being the popular destination for retired home-owners.
The concentration of college degree owners in several states indicates a higher populace within these states, but might also indicate migration trends. More accurately, as the ACS data is consolidated with the geographical and population census from the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program, we are looking at where college degree owners choose to live after college. Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois are all highly industrialized states with an advanced and booming technological industry. Thus, it is no surprise that young adults from generations before until now still choose to relocate to these cities. | https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/my-first-python-project-6ee3b3640110 | ['Uyen Nghb'] | 2020-10-13 19:07:21.129000+00:00 | ['Jupyter Notebook', 'Data Science', 'Data Analysis', 'Big Data', 'Python'] |
Comparing Ourselves to Others | Abbie Parr (2019) | Getty Images
Late Thursday, reports came out that the Los Angeles Dodgers acquired all-star outfielder Mookie Betts from the Boston Red Sox as a part of a three-team trade that also involved the Minnesota Twins. Up until last night, the two teams rumored to be in heavy pursuit of Betts were the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres.
When the deal was announced, my social media feeds were flooded by disappointed Padres fans, bummed out at the tease of getting a premium player of Betts’ caliber and even more angry at the fact that he landed with the bitter rival Dodgers, who have been utterly dominant over the last decade while my Friars have scuffled near the bottom of the division each year. In many respects, my feelings align with those of all the pissed off fans who thought San Diego would come out of this deal on top.
“Of course we didn’t get Mookie Betts — we’re the Padres! But why the Dodgers?! Come on!”
In this circumstance, it’s easy to be upset about the trade, especially considering how close the beginning of the season is. From a fan perspective, that is okay. As fans, we opt for the dramatic and tend to wear our feelings on our sleeve. We are not the ones putting on a uniform and competing every night. From the perspective of the team, giving up on the year because of a trade that didn’t go your way would be pretty concerning.
This particular situation for the Padres brings to mind a simple life reminder: we have nothing to gain by comparing ourselves to others.
Image from @MiserableSDFan on Twitter
In 2019, the Padres finished with a record of 72–90, exactly 36 games behind the Dodgers, who finished a whopping 106–56. In 2018, they finished 25 1/2 games behind them. In 2017, 33 games.
The gap between the two teams is much greater than the sum of what one player, even Mookie Betts, could provide. Would Betts have made the Padres significantly better in 2020? Absolutely. Seeing him, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado at the top of the batting order would have been beyond exciting. Would adding Betts have helped the Padres win the division and dethrone the rival Dodgers? Highly unlikely.
Comparing ourselves to our peers is a taxing, tiresome and demoralizing way of thinking. Spending too much time dwelling on what we can’t do because of what we don’t have, as opposed to thinking of what we can do with what we do have, doesn’t help us get any closer to achieving our goals and improving our lives.
For Padres fans, the sting of losing out on Mookie Betts to the Dodgers will probably linger for a while. We will gripe and complain throughout spring training, and depending on how April and May go, maybe even through the first chunk of the season. For the actual players on the team, worrying about Betts and the Dodgers will bring no benefit to their performance on the field. All they can worry about is their season and how they can best prepare to win games for themselves. | https://roberto-johnson.medium.com/30-day-writing-challenge-day-8-comparing-ourselves-to-others-7a3c5f3f139b | ['Roberto Johnson'] | 2020-02-20 17:23:43.524000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Personal Growth', 'Baseball', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement'] |
Indian National Congress’s 1931 Resolution: Why We Need To Review the Fundamental Right to Bear Arms! | Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely- Edward Abbey
The Karachi Resolution that was passed by the Indian National Congress in 1931, declared the need for “Purna Swaraj” (Complete Independence) and put forward a list of fundamental rights and principles. One of the primary being, the Right To Bear Arms for Individual Citizens! This resolution and the right to bear arms was advocated by both Nehru and Gandhi as well.
Now more than ever, as Independent India transitions to become a world power. The right to bear arms for every free and sane citizen without a criminal intent as a fundamental right must be reviewed again. As it can promote not only freedom but a check on crime, corruption, and exploitation by anti-social elements as well its own Government!
The Karachi Resolution, in its directive principles for the State, states “vii. Right to keep and bear arms in accordance with regulations made in that behalf and such reservations as may be required- for public safety.”
It is a very carefully written principle, and it does ensure that the right to keep and bear arms be given with “REGULATIONS” meaning, a check on the mentally insane or criminally driven folks not be handed over the complete right to arms! Certain restrictions and rules, on the usage of arms in the public and many such checks and balances, to ensure the basic freedom of owning a firearm for self-defence, of one’s body, and one’s property doesn’t lead to exploitation and lawlessness.
But you might ask. Why should the right to bear arms be fundamental in the first place? Abraham Lincoln once said “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.”
We all know the undermining fault in a democracy, though it is the best system in the world. History has shown us that, Governments grow powerful as the interests of big elite corporations, individuals and the yearning for the power of leaders all collide to ensure an oppressive regime controlled by a Police Force leads to a strict Police State of oppression, and exploitation of the public. Often such regimes are possible and arise from democracies. Where soon the basic fundamental rights of citizens like freedom of expression, freedom of owning property, and the freedom of assembly and press are hijacked and destroyed by a Police State. The best examples that stand between our eyes today are nations like China, North Korea, or even the Former USSR whose decline lead to a failed state of oppression and seizure of fundamental rights of citizens post the rule of Lenin. With dissenters and those who spoke out against the Government being sent to forced labour camps (Gulag).
Sometimes, the institutions whose sole purpose is to protect citizens and their interests like the military, intelligence agencies and police forces grow so corrupt they themselves are hijacked by malicious intentions! Another best example of this is our next-door neighbour Pakistan, which is Governed by its elite intelligence service Inter-Services Intelligence and its army! As opposed to elected officials or its people!
The only way to prevent a coup d’etat or takeover of power by malicious people through the use of Government! Is to ensure citizens are armed as a militia that cannot be oppressed or controlled by the barrel of a gun! In which case, Governments will be afraid of their people, and not vice versa!
Hitler famously said “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjugated races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjugated races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or native police.”
Hitler, who later became the de facto dictator of Nazi Germany, and oppressed his own citizens, taking away their fundamental rights prevalent in a democracy himself has explained in a nutshell. An armed free population will ensure their nation doesn’t fall into the hands of dictators or the corrupt!
Even Mahatma Gandhi, with a multitude of reasons such as this, backed the right to bear arms as a fundamental right. During World War 1 first openly expressed his support for private citizens to own arms, stating:
‘Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.’
Furthermore in 1931, in a letter to Lord Irwin. Mahatma Gandhi about British rule wrote:
“It has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration which the country can never afford. It has reduced us politically to serfdom. It has sapped the foundations of our culture. And, by the policy of cruel disarmament, it has degraded us spiritually. Lacking the inward strength, we have been reduced, by all but universal disarmament, to a state bordering on cowardly helplessness.”
This letter was followed shortly by the Karachi Resolution of 1931, by the Indian National Congress that advocated the right to bear arms to the sane private citizen!
In this letter to Irwin, we can clearly Gandhi suggesting that disarmament is what made the Indian nation weak, and pushed into a state of helplessness that made it easy for the British to loot and exploit the nation of India. An essential question, we have to ask is. Would the Bengal Famine have occurred if the poor had guns to defend their food stock from the British? Would such a gruesome Jallianwala Bagh have occurred if the protestors had arms to defend themselves?
Similarly, we must also be wary that even our own Governments can become as worse or even worse than the British in the future, as India’s economical might grows so, so will the resources of a Government. What if one day a Big Brother or a group of Big Brothers decide to use the Indian Government as a tool of oppression against its own people? The warnings of history are as relevant as today. And Gandhi and Lincoln’s beliefs on Gun.
Lord Acton once said, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely!”
The Karachi Resolution was vehemently opposed by Ambedkar and ultimately stuck down during the writing of the Constitution! The Arms Act of 1959 was passed later, an act even more anti--Gun than the one British passed! Making it illegal for citizens to defend themselves!
The era and relevance of Ambedkar’s opposition to the act are long lost. He simply said as to why he opposed the act:
“ I personally myself cannot conceive how it would be possible for the State to carry on its administration if every individual had the right to go into the market and purchase all sorts of instruments of attack without any let or hindrance from the State.”
The relevance and logic of Gandhi’s support for the right to bear arms, as well as the support for it for the intellectual brass of the Congress in 1931 still holds true today! And shall hold true for centuries!
Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s words when the Arms Act of 1959 was passed by Nehru’s Government, should perfectly sum it up:
“The present Bill seeks to repeal the Indian Arms Act enacted by the British rulers eighty years ago with a view to disarm the whole nation. Apart from the consideration of safeguarding the Empire, this policy of depriving the whole people of arms was motivated in the main by a sense of deep distrust and an attitude of contempt towards the Indian people. I am sorry to note that even after twelve years of independence, the present Government have not been able to shake off completely the legacy of their predecessors. The present Bill as by the Joint Committee is an improvement on the original Bill no doubt, but traces of this distrust linger still, and restrain the Bill from going as far as it should. Hence this note of dissent.
“The right to bear and carry arms is an inviolable and sacred right of every free citizen and though this has not been included in the list of fundamental rights enumerated in the Indian Constitution, the right of self-defence accepted and guaranteed by the Indian Penal Code implicitly acknowledges the right to possess arms. Since India is not in a position to run into a race of armaments with big powers, or their satellites, surrounding our boundaries and having hostile and expansionist designs against us, the only course open for us is to arm our people and make military training compulsory for all adults and able-bodied citizens….
“….The present Bill seeks to liberalise the licensing provisions, but the liberalisation is very halting, the procedure of securing a license still remains irksome and dilatory and the license-seeker left to the whims and caprice of the bureaucracy….”
A discussion nationally is much needed amongst the young citizenry of a New India about the need to make the right to bear arms a fundamental right! | https://medium.com/@vedaitharaju/indian-national-congresss-1931-resolution-why-we-need-to-review-the-fundamental-right-to-bear-99c9feb5a00b | ['Ved Aitharaju'] | 2020-11-17 08:37:16.787000+00:00 | ['Nehru', 'Indian National Congress', 'Gandhi', 'Congress', 'Guns'] |
Salesforce Consulting Partner | Salesforce Development Company | Every company would love to rely on an expertise, verified and accountable consulting partner to give device on salesforce initiation.
With regards to extending your business and settling on genuine choices that influence its prosperity, it’s critical to have a board of prepared experts to enable you to out. By and by, time will be of the embodiment, so putting resources into Salesforce counselling administrations will satisfy.
Since outside salesforce consulting partners have an impartial feeling, they will have no issue looking at any shortcomings that may influence your business. Along these lines, you’ll get to really set aside cash by having the option to manage any potential issues.
Regardless of whether you plan on fixing said issues or simply dispensing with them is absolutely up to you. Be that as it may, realizing that they exist is the initial step to maintaining an effective business whilst running salesforce development company.
Believing that essentially executing salesforce can end up being negative to your business? For the most part, when another business association executes Salesforce in their undertaking, they start it in with an appropriate preparing of the workforce and rollout, which is critical so as to prepare their workforces to make the Salesforce usage an effective undertaking. It, along these lines, is basic for you to work with a Salesforce Consulting partner.
Salesforce consulting partners can get you adaptable answers for every one of your issues so as to set aside valuable time and cash. Salesforce specialists incorporate other ERP related applications with Salesforce according to your business’ needs. He will Configure and Customize your Salesforce Org by utilizing the best Out of the Box highlights, thoughts, and practices. He will accelerate the effectiveness by systematizing the compound procedures and work process frameworks. Thus, getting a Salesforce consulting partner enables you to develop the company better. | https://medium.com/@gravityinfosolutions/salesforce-consulting-partner-salesforce-development-company-69d9ca71fb76 | ['Gravity Infosolutions'] | 2019-09-23 11:39:18.448000+00:00 | ['Salesforce Consulting', 'Salesforce Partners', 'Salesforce Development', 'Salesforce Productivity', 'Salesforce'] |
How to Turn a Bad Day Around. | If you are reading this, you’ve had a bad day. And that’s not because you are a failure, or because you just can’t figure out how to “adult”. It’s because you are human, (unless you’re an alien, in which case, do you have bad days?) and all humans have bad days. Regardless of how successful you are, and how often you meditate, you’ll have bad days. Here are some tips on how to turn a bad day around.
Forgive yourself
Probably the biggest part of turning your day around is letting go of the fact it has turned or started off bad. This morning, I slept in an hour past when I planned to get up. Then I proceeded to watch TikTok for almost half an hour after breakfast. This is obviously not unprecedented, but with less time to accomplish my list of tasks, it really didn’t help.
Ultimately, I realized what was happening. I was wasting time doing things that were not good for me in any way. Then I had this feeling of failure. “Why did I let this happen?” “Why did I sleep in?” “Why did I eat that full pizza last night which made running harder?” (No joke I did eat an entire pizza last night) But I realized spending time beating myself up is silly. So, I decided… “hey, you’re only human, get over it, and press on.” So, I did just that.
Do what gives you clarity
You will have to try different things and pay attention to how you feel, but find what bring you clarity. For me, it’s running. For others it may be, journaling, playing an instrument, brewing their coffee, going for a walk, drawing, singing, listing to Metalica, whatever it is, find it and recognize the power it has to help you center yourself.
Once you know what centers you, use it to reset yourself when you catch yourself letting your day get ahold of you.
Get small wins
As Friday is winding to an end, I often make a list of things to do on the following day when I’m still in a work mode. This list can often be large, but when I put my mind to it can often be crossed off in a short amount of time. For me, if I’m struggling with a bad start to my day, I aim to check off the easy things on the list. The things that I would do anyway, like trim my beard.
If you don’t like lists, then focus on what you did well that day, and/or focus on how good you felt a time that you did something that was hard. Oftentimes that gives you the push you need to start rolling in the right direction.
Use incentives
One of the only things that got me to do the things on my list, was the fact I was going to dinner with a friend. It was planned earlier in the week, but I had committed to meeting him at a certain time, so knowing that pushed me to get done the other things on my list.
Another way I used incentives this week was when I told myself if I get up at 6 o’clock on the dot, without hitting snooze, I would owe myself a vanilla bean donut from Donut Planet. Let me tell you something, it worked.
Prioritize
Something that is hard to do, especially if you work off of a list like myself, is push something into the next day, or erase it. However, that’s what you need to do sometimes. If that thing is not the most vital, and especially if it will stress you out all day, and you know you can’t get to it, just move it to a different time, or remove it altogether.
Think about the times you’ve done well
I mentioned this in “Get small wins”, but it also deserves its own space. One thing that has really helped me, is to recall the times I succeeded in beating concupiscence (the tendency towards the easy). For example, I think about how great it felt that time I went to bed at 9:30 without watching any TikTok. I remember vividly how great I felt the next day, and I want that feeling again, hence I make it happen, well…I get close to it.
Avoid media
This one has been a huge one for me. Whenever I watch an episode of New Girl or Space Force, or when I spend time scrolling Twitter, I feel terrible. My personal tendency on the weekend is to literally do all kinds of lazy things because my logic says, it’s rewarding yourself for working 50 hours. The reality is, I actually don’t feel good about myself when I do that. If I read a book, wrote a blog post, learned some German, or went for a run, while it would appear to be exhausting, it actually fills me up.
Media can be really dangerous because it’s like a firehose of dopamine rushing into your brain which then becomes addictive to the point where you can’t put it down (TikTok is the best at this IMO). The reality is our subconscious is upset that we didn’t get the things “we” wanted/needed to get done. It’s really incredible how our brains make us dissatisfied when we have not taken care of ourselves, or have not made time for what we have said is important to us.
End the day well
In my estimation, this is the single most important thing you can do. It is in your power at the end of the day to decide which direction you are going to end in. Even if your day went really poorly, it’s up to you to decide how the day ends. Take stock, forgive any ill feelings you have against yourself, and thank God (or whoever you thank) for all the good things of that day. Things like a house, a job, sunshine — the little things. Then end your day well with the determination that tomorrow is already off to a good start. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-to-turn-a-bad-day-around-3ee6983806c4 | ['Silas Mahner'] | 2020-07-20 18:10:40.768000+00:00 | ['Meditation', 'Productivity', 'Mental Health', 'Self Care', 'Focus'] |
Fascism Expert: Don’t Expect Trump To Leave WH, If He Loses | Fascism Expert: Don’t Expect Trump To Leave WH, If He Loses
Ben Ghiat Says Trump’s following ‘authoritarian playbook”
President Donald Trump and Maj. Gen. Michael Howard, commanding general, U.S. Army Military District of Washington. (Elizabeth Fraser)
Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat teaches Italian and History at NYU. Her expertise is “fascism, authoritarianism, war, propaganda, and Donald Trump,” according to the college’s website. I reached out to her to get her opinions on Trump and America’s descent into fascism. This is the conversation.
Is President Trump Fascist? | NYT Opinion
Otiko: As an expert in fascism, at what stage do you think America is?
Ben-Ghiat: Every authoritarian experience is different, but Trump has now amassed a loyal following, gotten many Americans to hate the press, has control of paramilitary-style forces (CBP, ICE, militias,) and the “right” right-wing men in key positions, like (William) Barr as attorney general. His next step is to secure his election no matter what — fraud, foreign-assisted infrastructural emergencies, voter suppression, martial law. We will see.
Many people who know Trump, like his former lawyer Michael Cohen, don’t think he will leave office if he loses. He will likely declare the election fraudulent and refuse to accept the results. Authoritarians will do anything to remain in office, and Trump needs to stay there to keep immunity from prosecution and the corrupt system he has for making dollars off the presidency going. — Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Otiko: Were you surprised by the rise of Trump and his descent into fascism?
Ben-Ghiat: I have been writing about Trump since fall 2015 to warn Americans that he is following an authoritarian playbook, so nothing has surprised me, no.
Otiko: Trump blew through so many checkpoints. His rise can be blamed on the failures of the media, the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Is there one group you blame the most?
Ben-Ghiat: I don’t think it’s useful to single one group out for blame. Trump is a symptom of a democracy already corroded by GOP voter disenfranchisement, support for white supremacy, and more general structural racism and adrift among voters toward more authoritarian attitudes.
He came along and energized many already formed tendencies, and through charismatic leadership, got a mass following. Certainly, every institution and branch of government helped his rise, and cowardice and denial did their part too.
Otiko: Why does Trump still have supporters at this stage, when he threatened to turn troops on American citizens?
Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU)
Ben-Ghiat: Historically once people bond to authoritarians, and, for elites, make their deals with him (they support him, seeing him as a vehicle for doing things they have wanted to do for years, as with the
Evangelicals and all those wanting to reverse gender and racial emancipation of the Obama years) they generally stick with these leaders until the bitter end. It takes an economic crisis, losing war or other large event to cause defections.
Otiko: As an expert in fascist regimes, how do you see this ending? Will Trump leave voluntarily if he loses in November?
Ben-Ghiat: Many people who know Trump, like his former lawyer Michael Cohen, don’t think he will leave office if he loses. He will likely declare the election fraudulent and refuse to accept the results. Authoritarians will do anything to remain in office, and Trump needs to stay there to keep immunity from prosecution and the corrupt system he has for making dollars off the presidency going. | https://medium.com/politics-fast-and-slow/fascism-expert-dont-expect-trump-to-leave-wh-if-he-loses-5fef5b03883c | ['Manny Otiko'] | 2020-06-12 13:37:16.555000+00:00 | ['Fascism', 'Democracy', 'Politics', 'Trump', 'Election 2020'] |
Road to Web3: Filecoin + Ethereum | Recently, Protocol Labs Founder Juan Benet talked about why Filecoin and Ethereum are better together and the vision of building Web3 with them at EthCC 2021, here’s the summary of the talk written by LBank Mining.
About Filecoin
Protocol Labs is a company that is driving breakthroughs in computing, it is best known for its protocols such as IPFS and Filecoin. Filecoin is a decentralized storage network designed to store humanity’s most important information, it is the storage network of Web3. The goal of Filecoin is to use crypto economic incentives to summon a large network of storage providers that eventually build the cloud but with crypto. Another component of Filecoin is to create a retrieval network in the later stage.
Filecoin network launched on Oct 15, 2020, and the network’s storage capacity has already reached 8EiB. Filecoin can be seen as a two-sided market, where on one side there are clients, such as individual users, companies that have a lot of data, and applications, on the other side there are storage providers that add the storage facilities to the network, adding 60PiB everyday – about the size of the entire internet archive.
Filecoin builds the large amount of capacity first, then turns that capacity into useful storage over time. The size of Filecoin’s storage deals is currently about 18PiB, this means that there’s a lot more capacity left on Filecoin network which is basically free to use.
Filecoin + Ethereum
NFT storage
One cool thing that Ethereum and Filecoin are doing together is NFT storage, 1.5million NFTs, which are mostly coming from Ethereum, are addressed in IPFS and backed up with Filecoin. NFT.Storage provides free NFT storage service for Web3.
Dataverse
Filecoin and Ethereum make it possible to create a dataverse where we can start making data on the network more useful and more valuable, Filecoin can be seen as a way to transact on moving or storing the data, and now we can start layering other kinds of economic values on top of it, NFT is one version of this, and there are other things like data feeds and the utility of those or being able to auction those or sell those to different parties.
Composable DeFIL
Putting market orders like asks, bids, and deals through a DEX to see how the market really values those orders. Building new financial structures like hardware futures on hard drive, SSD, GPU and so on, or even create futures on the storage contracts themselves.
Video NFTs
VideoCoin built all the machinery to connect their processing engine with Filecoin storage, now we can use their tooling to do all the video processing like small movie clips, vine style short video clips or full-length movies. Minting an NFT on Ethereum, storing the video and metadata on NFT.Storage.
Pay-per-view media
Making pay-per-view media like token-protected pages with full-length movies, music, arbitrary web pages.
NFTs as productive asset
NFT should provide the rights to use it as productive asset, so that it can be way more useful and valuable. If we can share the right to distribute the thing or charge for viewing the thing to the buyer, artists can focus on producing the art, not have to worry about marketing too much. This will blow up the NFT market, make it much larger than it is now. We can do this for large contents such as movies, 3D environments and dynamic environments like games.
Storage auction house
Filecoin Plus makes certain verified quality deals have notarized verifiable claim that lets them create deals that gives 10x the block rewards, clients can auction off those very valuable deals to miners, miners who really want those extra block rewards might bid with decreasing storage prices, dropping all the price completely to zero or potentially negative pricing. Creator or collector of valuable data can earn the money for giving the right to certain storage provider to store their data and serve it to the rest of the world.
Other things that Filecoin and Ethereum can build together are Airbnb-style marketplace, DEX order books, Web3 media apps, Web3 photo and video archives, Web3 social apps, open access science platform, DataDAOs, open access music, games, VR asset distribution, Metaverse and so on.
With the ability of building so many wonderful things, Filecoin and Ethereum together are leading us on the road to Web3.
#ad LBank Mining’s new Filecoin mining project is coming soon, please keep an eye on our new information if you are interested in Filecoin mining. | https://medium.com/@LBank_Mining/road-to-web3-filecoin-ethereum-93a33071aa5d | ['Lbank Mining'] | 2021-08-10 04:12:34.966000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Web3', 'Nft', 'Filecoin', 'Ipfs'] |
Perpetual Peace by Emoji | Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground is all emoji. His Book from the Sky was all invented text. The former was contents without form, the latter form without content; in Kantian terms. Xu Bing’s terms are Buddhist, his strategy Zen: not so much to show without tell as to show without even showing. Neither the kataphatic approach from the ground, not the apophatic approach from on high, can help us; he seems to say. The fear must be that ‘universal man’ from the ground, up, must prove as objective but abstract as a foreign revelation.
Now that a book has been written in emoji, a lot of people will be — rightly — very happy.😀 People who would never and could never learn one another’s languages will all be able to read out the same emoji text, each in her own tongue. Like the initial dream of the internet, it is a great sign of hope for perpetual peace in the world through exchange.
It also means that language will not be about language. It will be about content.🤨 It is not even really exchange: it is the emoji objects themselves we have in common not the ways of reading them out. They are shared objects, but that does not make for social relations between persons.
That is a great reversal. Written language made a break from pictures five thousand years ago. Once a picture represented a thing to which we gave a sound, that picture could also represent the sound; a pictogram was a phonogram. Phonograms let us build up new pictures from combinations of sound; alphabets broke syllables down into new part-sounds to build with. Thus literature; thus the whole magic of not what you say but just how you say it, and a hundred ways to say ‘I love you’ were said with more or less wonder. It was in language, not content, that this difference resided.
Thus — you might think — the human being. The human being is not just what, arranged differently, would be a banana or a chimpanzee. It is how it can behave once the parts are arranged as ours are and amount to more than their sum — as we do. The mystery is the dignity of the human being.
Fred says Like it ❤
Dave says Like It ❤
Fred and Dave are richly different individuals
Leonardo Boff once wrote an essay suggesting that his father’s cigarette butt had been a sign of the holy for him. The essay caused some offence and ridicule, putting an extinguished cigarette on the level of the sacraments: yet every father who speaks of love says what he has to say how he says it. It is not just animal instinct on his part, that my father loves me — and we cannot live fruitfully by thinking so. It is not only the content: it is the particular story. The most ardent reductivist thinks like an idealist when it comes to his own private loves and he may even recite poetry with his whole heart.
Written language and the human being went together because both displayed agency. This is what makes both humans and their language, human. I decide how I write what I have to say even when you force me to write the content you demand. Written language was part of my free will because it preserved my grip on what I had done in the language. An author could frame a sentence in ways that made certain replies ungrammatical and the point of writing was to steer the reader to realise not only, the content of a communication, but also, the frames of reference and interpretation which could make sense of that communication.
That was possible because language was partly about the language itself. Pictures do not do this — even when they are partly about the pictures themselves. That had been said (when it came to art) to have been their great advantage — that there no right answers, and that the ‘grammar’ of pictures was really another language to learn. But until now, pictures were not words. Writing in words amounted to retaining some degree of control over one’s own observations, when irony, complexity and reserve could be required rather than hoped for.
So this great step forward to peace and understanding by emoji is also a great denudation of everything that could make public life secure and democratic. It hands over my meaning to whomever wishes to use it. It is, in short, the opposite of what it seems. It is a step towards the public space becoming, like the art gallery, a place in which people turn from each other convinced that the other viewer is an idiot but saying for social purposes that X or Y means what it does to them. It is a step not toward peace, but a step away from truth. Among the various meanings — the pictures for which we may have a use or may not — there will be no way to decide together except by force, since there will be no truth to appeal to.
You may think all this is to make too much of an emoji text, of course. Such changes do not happen in one go and even at this latest stage it is hard to see this one step as a sign of great losses. Yet the book in emoji, clever, hopeful and delightful, really is another proof that data and not persons have become the paradigm for knowledge. It shows our creeping anti-humanism. Weight, not feel; quantity, not quality; abstract and objective, not human and actual; manipulable, not changeable. Think of the people who dismiss ‘anecdotal remarks’ unless for extraneous reasons they count as ‘lived experience’. Think of those times when a ‘nuance’ is categorised either as a ‘micro-aggression’ or ‘a misunderstanding’. It is force of numbers which is coming to decide these conflicts.
Think of the vast apparatus in our schools which subverts the humanities with the kind of assessment which makes sense for elementary arithmetic (and for reports to directors of studies). In schools, 93% is used as a metaphor for ‘really good’ but teachers forget this. They develop a deluded belief in it. Then they punish each other over the gap between 90% and 93%, and make decisions that change people’s lives over this completely imaginary difference. (At least customer conversion rates are actual, trackable, sackable events!)
Private Eye used to have a joke journalist called Phil Space, but now we really do have ‘content’ rather than words. Language used to be our way to remote-control the range of ways in which what we said, could be understood, but in emoji-world, language is becoming multivalent re-purposable data, over which others will have the control.
We are often told what Orwell said: that sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. A long time ago a battle was lost in schools over how things ought to be spelled or punctuated, which was said to be dictatorial and not emancipatory. What publishing calls ‘grey publishing’, business communications, now proceed at such pace that elegance would sometimes be an unacceptable expense and solecisms are understood to be inevitable. This is not about imposing rules for how to speak, however; nor even about the rise of flaccid thinking. What an emoji book should awake us to is a future in which once we have written, our language will no longer be ours to command. It is hard to think of a surer way to reduce the human being to stuff and to shape her to ends other than her own. | https://medium.com/@andrewmacdonaldpowney/perpetual-peace-by-emoji-db163a6eecf3 | ['Andrew Macdonald Powney'] | 2020-12-26 11:32:41.615000+00:00 | ['Language', 'Humanism', 'Art', 'Content Writing', 'Democracy'] |
Just Raise Some Money. Creation Takes Capital. | I have this habit of immediately turning my family and friends’ passions into strategies for million-dollar businesses. It’s what I do; I’m a legacy builder. I’ve done it my whole life, starting with my mom. I made her so successful one year for Christmas she spent the whole thing in an anxiety-filled haze, crying while sitting at her sewing machine until 2am every night to get all the orders done.
It was a disaster.
She’s asked me not to “help” anymore.
Same, my dad’s cattle waterer company (are you tired of breaking ice in water troughs every winter?) Same, my brother’s spice company (are you tired of trying to go keto and not being able to find spices without sugar?) I made an entire career out of making men millionaires (a few were even capable of getting out of their own way and following the plan to success; most weren’t.)
I am surrrrrrrrrounded by geniuses. People are so dang creative. (I kinda feel like Data when he’s searching for Little Life Forms except I’m looking for Little Genius-es.)
It happened again today. My roommate just came up with The. Most. Genius. Scavenger. Hunt. Ever. It’s how we’re doing Christmas presents for the boys this year (at their request). She’s BRILLLLLLLIANT at it. It is, unquestionably, an amalgamation of her Unique Abilities.
So…I went into millionaire mode. Within an hour I had an entire strategy figured out, up to and including the questionnaires for parents; I’d deconstructed our entire process and figured out what was scalable and what wasn’t, where the tiers were, how much she should charge, and how to make it sustainable.
And if I’d have drawn that up in a neato package and handed that to her, it likely would have freaked her the fuck out and she’d have been overwhelmed by the size of the hard.
It was visions of Christmas with my mom all over again.
Since I’m in the process of writing this Tesla book, my mind is also on a parallel track of The Old Way v. The Tesla Way.
Tesla died penniless.
He’s been upheld as the Poster Child for struggling scientists and makers and creators. He’s been uplifted as the antithesis of capitalism. (I, too, am SO guilty of this; it’s been this deep-dive into his life and words via this book that have allowed me to remove him from the pedestal and see him not as a perfect inventor and scientist who got screwed, but as a fallible human.)
What’s the TRUTH? I, along with most of history have fallen into the trap of telling a story from an Old Way point of view. Yes, he died in debt. A lot of debt. But that’s because he wasn’t the best businessman, not because he eschewed the idea of money, or didn’t have it — he raised FOUR MILLION DOLLARS for Wardenclyffe. As with most any startup, he hit the rule of 4 — it was going to cost him four times as much and take four times longer than his original estimate. He needed another seed round, that’s all.
SO DID ELON MUSK.
Several, in fact. I haven’t looked it up, but Elon’s probably in his fourth, fifth, tenth round of funding. His first round didn’t get him there. Tesla’s didn’t either. Elon is surrounded by smart business people who are helping him raise. So was Edison. Tesla didn’t have that. So he did what worked the first time and he went back to his original investor — and never looked elsewhere. A terrible strategy that cost him the project’s completion. He didn’t get screwed, he just didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Tesla made a lot of decisions that impacted the bottom line of the business. The royalties he returned to Westinghouse so HE could raise money from investors would have kept Tesla well funded throughout his life (far better than Edison) and likely would have changed his trajectory.
But what of his legacy?
It was Edison’s fear of losing his royalties that created the war of the currents, allowed Westinghouse to underbid him for the World’s fair, and ultimately allow Tesla’s polyphase motor to become the world standard — his truest legacy that now accounts for 100% of the technological age in which we live. Had Tesla done the same, Edison likely would have won the bid, the war of the currents, and Tesla would have been nothing more than an employee of Westinghouse, forgotten to all of history.
Edison eventually went bankrupt and rebuilt another business from the ground up. In that, he was the far better businessman. He was The Old Way.
Money is a simple exchange of energy.
Our entire home was OVERFLOWING with the energy of the creation happening with that scavenger hunt. When I get to work on a client’s project, I am in the zone and yes, there are hard less-fun moments, but it’s all satisfying and makes me feel good. When I work on something like this, something that is the amalgamation of not only my unique abilities but a topic I am passionate about, I hit another level.
Edison’s first invention was an improved stock ticker, his most profitable, the battery. He sold his first one for $1.2M in today’s money, allowing him the freedom to create things he was passionate about without having to worry how they were going to make money. The lightbulb came a full DECADE after his first invention.
If my Mom could have sold her first sewing pattern for $1.2M she could have made a kajillion kids tents and hired a CEO and marketing team.
If my Dad could have sold his first waterer patent for $1.2M he could have gone to a kajillion expos and hired someone to run the business while he met with clients and sold units.
If my brother could have sold his spice recipe for $1.2M he could have stayed in the kitchen and come up with a kajillion other options and hired someone to deal with the marketing and sales.
If my roommate… Do you see the pattern?
Not all creatives can wear all the business hats it takes to get a startup off the ground. Elon Musk didn’t invent a car company, he stepped in and ran someone else’s.
Not all creatives can sell their first product for $1.2M and generate a multi-year runway to cover that Rule of 4 until we become an “overnight” success.
The Old Way says hobbies have to be side hustles. Edison’s was until he sold it. The Tesla Way is different. I think that by following this roadmap Tesla left us, there’s a way for side hustles to stop being side hustles and reward us with not only money but abundance in far greater ways.
The Tesla Way is the blueprint for how to leave a legacy. It’s a way to take our talents, our gifts, our very genius and turn it into something far bigger than a paycheck, something far grander than a 401k.
We have to stop using The Old Way.
Most of us run our hobbies as side hustles. We trade hours and blood and sweat and tears for something we believe in, something that is as delicate as an ember and must be tended to with extreme care and caution. Tesla devoted a lifetime to his wireless energy; it’s still a tiny ember. This Tesla project of mine? It would have been the sidehustliest of the side hustles, for it is like no other writing project I’ve ever taken on; I’ve allowed it oxygen and room to breathe. I’ve studied, I’ve learned, I’ve given it the best possible chance to become a wildfire. I could 100000% use an investor to license the rights to it so I can keep adding runway for future pieces.
Over the summer I got a COVID grant. That money is what’s allowed me to work on this project without stressing about how I’m going to pay my bills. I’ve had Edison’s freedom to create. What has been borne from that space is nothing short of genius. I’d like to sell it for $1.2M so I can continue to create.
And that is The Old Way. Plus, holymotherofcreation raising money is damn-near impossible; I know, I’ve tried. This is also Tesla’s only foible on the road of his legacy.
The vision for this project is grand. It’s masterful. It’s guided by the Man Himself. I am, as always, building a legacy. Two, actually. One for Tesla. One for me.
But I’m done building legacies The Old Way.
These are being built The Tesla Way. | https://medium.com/@jengreyson/just-raise-some-money-creation-takes-capital-7aeff356e2ca | ['Jen Greyson'] | 2020-12-22 21:08:16.375000+00:00 | ['Legacy', 'Raising Capital', 'Nikola Tesla', 'Tesla', 'Capitalism'] |
Discovering Happiness in Your Life. | Happiness is a choice. It’s true. You can choose to let life’s circumstances get you down or you can choose to be happy no matter what challenges life brings.
Happiness is already within each of us and we are born to be naturally happy! For example, have you ever noticed how infectious a baby’s giggle is? So why is it that, as we get older, we forget where to find happiness within ourselves and, instead, allow outside forces to determine our happiness?
You can determine your own happiness by following these simple strategies:
· When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Cliché, I know, however, it’s so true. You don’t have to let life’s troubles and problems get you down. Yes, there will always be troubles because no one is perfect, but you can choose your reaction to situations. Look at the positive side of things and work hard to see the good in people and circumstances.
· Find something you love to do and do it. Do you have a lifelong dream or desire? If so, start working toward it. Taking baby steps towards a dream or goal will help you feel like you’re accomplishing something. You’ll find drive and determination to reach that goal when it’s something you love to do.
· Do you have a gift or talent you’re not using? One reason so many people are unhappy is that they’re not doing what they’re called to do with their God-given talents. Each one of us has a purpose in life. You have natural gifts and talents to help you achieve your purpose, so use your gifts effectively!
· When you’re feeling down, don’t wallow in your sorrows alone; do something about it. Call a friend who you know is positive and cheerful. Talk about your feelings and listen to their advice. So often, people allow themselves to go deeper and deeper into self-pity or depression because they think it has to be that way. The truth is, you don’t have to be sad and you shouldn’t be. You can decide to be happy. You just have to make up your minds to do so.
· Think about all the things you have to be thankful for. Often you get so caught up in what’s wrong with your life that you forget to look at what’s right and good. Take a step back and reflect on your life. How far have you come from, say, six months ago?
o Do you have children or family to be thankful for? Yes, they may not be everything we’d like them to be, but imagine life without them. Now, be thankful that you have them in your life.
o Do you have a job? Maybe it’s not your dream job, but in today’s economy, those of us who have a job should be thankful for it.
· When you’re feeling down, journal your thoughts and feelings. Often you’ll find that just getting your feelings down on paper will allow you to work through them, helping you to feel better about yourself and your beautiful life!
If you’ve been prone to look at life negatively, then you’ll have to put more effort into seeing and choosing happiness. But don’t let that stop you from being happy! You, too, can learn to be happy.
Practice the steps above and train your mind to focus intensely on the positives. When you feel a negative thought coming on, or your mind gravitates toward the negative, learn to recognize it, stop it in its tracks, and then start thinking happier thoughts.
Starting from this moment onward, make the conscious choice to be happy!
If you’d like a free digital copy of my “Happiness Journal” that I’ve created to help us, as we go through this subject, you can get it from here.
Roy Clayton
Uberhappylife.com | https://medium.com/@royclayton/discovering-happiness-in-your-life-33d83978f237 | ['Roy Clayton'] | 2020-12-21 11:13:20.160000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Joy', 'Happiness', 'Gratefulness', 'Gratitude'] |
📚Do You Remember… | 📚Do You Remember…
When I was just about murdered by books?
Illustration by Rolli
The very first thing I ever posted on Medium was a humorous essay, with drawings, called “I Was Just About Murdered by Books.”
The piece did well. It was curated by Medium in several categories, reached a wide audience, and earned some decent $.
Those days, of course, are over. Endless, unwanted, cost-cutting algorithm changes now ensure that creative writing earns nothing, and is seen and read by practically no-one.
For the sin of criticizing Medium, as well, I’ve been blacklisted from further curation.
These are grim times, indeed. I’m still happy with my first essay, though. Have a look:
Here’s to the good old days, friend.
Cheers,
Note №1
Due to Medium’s constant, baffling and unwanted algorithm changes, whose apparent purpose is to drive creative and/or intelligent people from the platform forever, this post will earn no money. If you enjoyed it, please consider buying me a coffee. More coffee=more posts for you to enjoy.
Note №2
My latest book is The Sea-Wave. You might like it. Grab a copy at your favorite independent bookstore. Or Amazon (Amazon USA, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK).
Note №3
NEVER MISS A POST. Subscribe to my monthly newsletter. It’s free. | https://medium.com/pillowmint/do-you-remember-720d79a14a97 | ['Rolli', 'Https', 'Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites'] | 2020-12-27 04:28:51.413000+00:00 | ['Other', 'Humor', 'Medium', 'Life', 'Books'] |
What you need to know about those “selfie girls” | There’s this thing we do lately. Parents shame their kids on Facebook or Youtube when they step out of line, people shame moms for nursing their hungry babies in a restaurant, and on and on, and now THIS.
Maybe you watched this video when it came across your feed. And maybe you rolled your eyes or shook your head at how the girls behaved during the baseball game. Honestly? I did.
But those “selfie girls” reminded me of something important.
Here’s what you should know.
1. The audience at the baseball game was ASKED to tweet selfies as part of a contest.
2. So these girls in the audience…took selfies. In other words, they participated in the event that was designed to engage the crowd.
3. By the looks of it, the girls had fun. They were being silly. Enjoying themselves. For this, the announcers mocked them. Shamed them. Their mockery went viral, and these girls had their faces plastered all over social media.
4. To apologize for the viral shaming incident, Fox Sports and the Arizona Diamondbacks offered free tickets to the girls.
5. The girls declined the free tickets. Instead, they asked Fox and the Diamondbacks to donate the tickets to families at A New Leaf, a non-profit that supports victims of domestic violence. Plus, with October being Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the girls used their newfound SHAME-FAME to encourage people to donate to the cause.
That sounds like the behavior of a girl I’d be proud to call my daughter.
Well played, girls. And thank you for reminding me that I don’t always have the full story. | https://medium.com/endless/what-those-silly-selfie-girls-taught-me-a6085d9f1c20 | ['Kelly Holmes'] | 2019-08-08 21:00:39.511000+00:00 | ['Sexism', 'Feminism', 'Social Media'] |
Lessons learned while optimizing Spark aggregation jobs | Lessons learned while optimizing Spark aggregation jobs
In this third article of our Apache Spark series (see Part I, Part II and Part IV), we focus on a real-life use case, where we tried several implementations of an aggregation job.
Business Context
At Teads, we distribute ads to over 1.5bn people every month within professionally-produced content.
One of the main components of our platform is responsible for handling bid requests (an opportunity to display an ad) and for sending back a bid response (the ad to display and the associated price).
An advertising campaign can be set up with delivery constraints :
target specific users, depending on their geolocation,
target specific devices, OS, browsers,
etc.
As a result, ads are filtered according to these requirements.
In order to analyse the ad delivery, we generate a log for each bid request, containing the reasons why an ad was filtered (we also use this log to train our prediction models). For example, a filtering reason can be geolocation, if an ad targets users from a specific country. For the sake of simplicity, we will use four filtering reasons: from A to D.
This article will focus on how to implement a reporting job that counts these filtering reasons for each ad. Such a job can be used to build troubleshooting tools.
Specification of the job
Input data
Here is the schema of the log.
root
|-- filtering_reasons: map (nullable = true)
| |-- key: string
| |-- value: array (valueContainsNull = true)
| | |-- element: string (containsNull = true)
The field filtering_reasons is a map with ad identifiers as keys and arrays of filtering reasons as values.
Expected output
Let’s take an example with 2 bid requests.
Request 1
ad1 is filtered by reasons A and B
ad2 is filtered by reasons A and C
Request 2
ad1 is filtered by reasons A and D
ad3 is filtered by reason C
scala> df.show(false)
+---------------------------------------------------------+
|filtering_reasons |
+---------------------------------------------------------+
|Map(ad1 -> WrappedArray(A, B), ad2 -> WrappedArray(A, C))|
|Map(ad1 -> WrappedArray(A, D), ad3 -> WrappedArray(C)) |
+---------------------------------------------------------+
So, ad1 is filtered two times with reason A, one time for reason B (in request 1), never for reason C, and one time for reason D (in request 2).
If we do the same exercise for ad2 and ad3, we see that the expected result is:
+-----+---+---+---+---+
|ad_id|A |B |C |D |
+-----+---+---+---+---+
|ad1 |2 |1 |0 |1 |
|ad2 |1 |0 |1 |0 |
|ad3 |0 |0 |1 |0 |
+-----+---+---+---+---+
Technical Solution
Preliminary notes
A variable named allFilteringReasons contains all possible filtering reasons.
Implementation 1
The idea is to explode the map to have an ad column and then group filtering reasons by ad with an aggregate function. The desired aggregate function doesn’t exist in Spark, so we have to write a custom one.
Let’s have a closer look, step-by-step.
Explode — An explode method returns two columns when applied on a MapType column : one for the key and one for the value. There is also an as function made for this specific case, that takes a sequence of aliases.
Here is the resulting DataFrame :
+-----+-----------------+
|ad_id|filtering_reasons|
+-----+-----------------+
|ad1 |[A, B] |
|ad2 |[A, C] |
|ad1 |[A, D] |
|ad3 |[C] |
+-----+-----------------+
na.fill — An ad may never have a given filtering reason, resulting in null values. The na.fill replaces all null values by 0.
Custom UDAF — For the record, here is the UDAF code (that’s not the aim of the article). The basic idea is to accumulate each filtering reason in a Map whose key is the reason and value is the counter.
SQL Plan
A note on Catalyst: When using the DataFrame/Dataset API, a query optimizer called Catalyst is used. This optimizer rewrites the query based on predefined rules.
For performance reasons, Spark tries to group together multiple operators inside a Whole-Stage CodeGen. In order to do that, Spark generates Java code on the fly and compiles it with Janino (see here for further details).
On the Web UI, in the SQL tab, we can click on a query to see a graphical representation of the physical plan.
Here is the plan for this implementation:
The Generate operator corresponds to the explode method in the implementation,
operator corresponds to the explode method in the implementation, Generate breaks the WholeStageCodegen in two,
breaks the WholeStageCodegen in two, Exchange corresponds to a shuffle operation between 2 stages,
corresponds to a shuffle operation between 2 stages, SortAggregate appends twice (before and after the shuffle) because Spark performs the aggregation locally on each mapper before sending results to a reducer.
Implementation 2
Can we do better?
In this second iteration, the idea is to avoid using a UDAF, by transforming each row with a UDF and then use built-in aggregate functions (that could be better optimized by Spark).
If we look at this step-by-step we first have the same explode as in implementation 1.
User defined function — For each row of the dataset, filtering reasons are transformed into a Map. Hence, built-in aggregate functions sum can be used.
Aggregation — All values for a given key must be aggregated together.
There is a not so well known syntax to access a given key on a MapType column $"map.key" .
syntax to access a given key on a MapType column . Another possible way is $"map".getItem(key) . Note: if the key doesn’t exist in the map, null is returned.
Hence, we can do: sum($"map.key")
SQL Plan
The only difference with implementation 1 is that the SortAggregate is replaced by a HashAggregate .
Implementation 3
This time we want to avoid the use of the explode method by mapping directly on existing partitions.
Here, the aggregation by ad is made manually, inside the loop.
A given ad may appear on multiple partitions, so we need an additional step to aggregate each result on the ad_id .
SQL Plan
The plan is quite different from implementation 1 and 2, with the apparition of new operators : DeserializeToObject & SerializeFromObject
DeserializeToObject : with the DataFrame API, a lot of operators work on InternalRow, the optimized representation of a row into memory. But the MapPartitions operator works on a standard Scala object. We need to use an operator, DeserializeToObject , to convert data from an InternalRow to a Scala object.
: with the DataFrame API, a lot of operators work on InternalRow, the optimized representation of a row into memory. But the operator works on a standard Scala object. We need to use an operator, , to convert data from an InternalRow to a Scala object. SerializeFromObject : this operator is used to go back to the DataFrame world.
Implementation 4
We can also embrace a more functional programming style.
Here, we chain together the following methods :
flapMap : to replace the explode
: to replace the groupByKey followed by mapValues
followed by reduceGroups to aggregate values
SQL Plan
Similar to implementation 3 with some additional operators.
Interestingly enough, even if we use groupByKey and reduce (reduceByKey does not exist), a partial aggregation is done on the reduce side. Cf. SPARK-16391
Other implementations — Array based
In all previous implementations, counters are stored in a Map. But Map is not a very efficient data structure. It uses a lot of memory, it is not cache friendly and it generates boxing/unboxing in Scala to store Long values.
And given that all keys are known in advance, we can use an array instead. The reason A is at position 0, the reason B at position 1, and so on …
This doesn’t change our previous implementations a lot. For instance, here is the array-based version of our 3rd implementation:
We have precomputed a cache ( reasonToIndex ) between filtering reason and index.
Hence, lookups in the hashmap are replaced by direct accesses in the array : counter(reasonToIndex(reason))+=1
Execution time comparison
The application used for this benchmark processes one hour of our real production log with each implementation. As we can see in the SQL plan, the log contains 50M of input rows and the job produces a 3600 rows output.
This benchmark runs on an EMR cluster of 10 nodes (r3.xlarge), with 10 executors, 4 cores per executor and 20GB of RAM.
All possible implementations need at least one shuffle phase, to put all data for a given ad on the same node. In this case, we have only one shuffle, so our implementations are optimized regarding network exchange.
HashAggregate is more efficient than SortAggregate because we do not need to sort the data. Nevertheless, implementation 1 (with a SortAggregate) is more performant than implementation 2 (with a HashAggregate). It’s related to the complexity of both algorithms:
In impl. 1, only filtering reasons for a given ad are considered (2 or 3 on average), so the map or the array are sparse.
In impl. 2, all filtering reasons are considered, so this triggers a lot more lookups.
In this use case, using the explode method costs a lot because the explode factor is around 20 (number of output rows in generate / number of output rows in scan, as seen in the SQL plan). This is due to the generation of multiple InternalRow.
Although implementation 3 needs some deserialisation/serialisation (from Tungsten to standard objects) it remains the fastest (as seen in the SQL plan)
Conclusions
As seen previously, there are multiple ways to implement a given algorithm with Spark. Knowing and choosing the appropriate data structure is one of the most important skills for a software engineer and especially in a big data context. In order to improve the performance of your jobs, two important things are required : knowing Spark execution model and the shape of your data. And it’s worthy because this can lead to significant improvements.
Thanks to Wassim Almaaoui, Han Ju, Amine Er-Raqabi, Benjamin Davy, Gaël Rico and Robert Dupuy for their help in writing this article. | https://medium.com/teads-engineering/lessons-learned-while-optimizing-spark-aggregation-jobs-f93107f7867f | ['Yann Moisan'] | 2020-02-17 16:37:37.303000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Benchmark', 'Data Engineering', 'Apache Spark'] |
Taking things out of context at birthing class | I’ve always been a fan of taking things people say out of context — intentionally. It’s kind of like a hobby. Context is really important when it comes to communicating, and usually, even if someone uses the wrong words, you still know what they mean because of the context. I’m got some good examples of this for you.
What I have below is a list of quotes taken from a birthing class my wife and I went to a while back. I took notes, and I never take notes. But these “notes” weren’t for any practical benefit — they were just funny things the nurse teaching the class said.
“You can get pregnant breastfeeding.”
I was surprised by this. I always thought breastfeeding was for keeping your baby alive. Apparently, it can also cause you to have more babies. Sounds like an endless cycle that can only be stopped by using bottles.
2. “Being constipated isn’t a bad thing unless you just had a baby.”
Isn’t being constipated always a bad thing? (I’m sure it’s much worse after giving birth.)
3. After affirming that nobody does the assigned reading in college: ”I probably shouldn’t tell you as your nurse that I didn’t either.”
Nope, you probably shouldn’t, but ya just did. I probably shouldn’t tell you as your patient that I’m on the lookout for a new nurse.
4. “As far as genitals go, as far as little boys go, they will have little scrotum sacs.”
“[S]crotum sacs.” I assume the nurse didn’t mean “scrotum sacks”, which could only be some type of shoulder bag made from animal scrota (yes, that is the plural form of scrotum, and yes, it’s a weird word).
5. “If you can get your baby to suck on a pacifier, that’s helpful.”
*Jaw gaping in astonishment* I’d say that’s probably the biggest understatement EVER.
6. “And then you get a clear mental picture of why some animals eat their young.”
Have any of you ever had that clear mental picture? I know I have. The nurse who said this was talking about how frustrating babies can be sometimes, how they can bring you to the brink, take you to the tipping point, where you might want to munch on your munchkin(s). You know, there are other things that can make you want to eat your kids. For example, whenever my wife sees an overwhelmingly cute baby, she just wants to eat it, in a nice sort of way. You know, the whole, “Oh, you’re so stinkin’ cute I just wanna eat your cute little toesies” kind of thing.
7. Said right after the previous quote: “In fact, I wanted to start a business…what was it called…baby hungry!”
I think we all know where this is going…
I have no idea where this is going. I just couldn’t think of anything new to write about this quote because it’s basically a continuation of the previous one.
8. “Nobody is going to have to lift up their shirts…unless you want to. Just kidding, shirts down. Labor coaches, don’t get excited.”
What.
9. “Toddlers are like germophobes.”
The nurse said this while discussing the challenges of having toddlers around with a newborn because the toddlers attract germs and you don’t want your newborn baby getting sick. Well, “germophobe” probably isn’t what the nurse meant — maybe “germ magnet” or something along those lines.
There’s gotta be a word for that — when you say a word that has some kind of association with the word you’re looking for but it actually means almost the opposite. If anyone knows a word for that, comment below and I’ll add it in here.
10. “Don’t compare your breast milk to other people.”
Don’t do it. It doesn’t work. I tried it. Check this out:
+------------------+---------------------------+
| Your Breast Milk | Other People |
+------------------+---------------------------+
| Made by you | Usually not made by you |
| For your baby | Usually not for your baby |
| Edible | Usually not edible |
+------------------+---------------------------+ (made with ascii-tables: http://ozh.github.io/ascii-tables/)
We could go on but I think you get the message: “Don’t compare your breast milk to other people.”
11. “When you’re learning, you just can’t have a lot of clothes on.”
That’s true. What would make this a little more clear is if you add the word “to breastfeed” right after the word “learning”. Then again, you could probably add just about any verb there and see if it still works.
12. “You don’t have anything on your breasts that says ‘one ounce, two ounces.’”
How do you know I don’t have that?! (Well, I don’t have breasts, so I guess you got me there).
13. “You don’t have to over-drink. Just drink for comfort.”
Best advice ever. “Don’t over-drink. Just drink for comfort.” Specifically, drink water. That’s what the nurse meant. No one here is encouraging alcohol consumption as a way to deal with a baby. | https://medium.com/@.kimbo/taking-things-out-of-context-at-birthing-class-4ff7ef0da88a | ['Kimball Leavitt'] | 2019-06-06 02:27:31.277000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Breastfeeding', 'Baby', 'Language'] |
3 Cases That Will Help You Overcome Failure | Photo by the blowup on Unsplash
Imagine having a dream goal. You work hard for it. Maybe for months or even for years. You do your research, improve your craft, update your skills. You network, seek out inspiration, work on your mindset — and yet you might fail. That crushing experience is more than a personal humiliation and disappointment. It can unfold a disastrous power that will poison your soul and cripple your mind. You feel like becoming a failure and stop trying. But you’re not the only one — many successful people have failed and overcame it.
Failure won’t define you forever — unless you let it
Failing a business or a career path isn’t uncommon. Sooner or later, most people face adversities in their professional lives and become incredibly disheartened by it. Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel famously told Tim Ferris:
“The lessons people draw from most failed startups is that it’s impossible to build great businesses, so you then try something less ambitious, which is one of the other ways failure has a high cost.”
The emotional toll of failure can discourage people forever. Unless they get up and find an approach or a career that suits them better. In “The Dark Horse” Harvard study, researchers found that successful people often take a period of testing different careers until they find the right path for them. Often, they become successful after 30, but their testing has provided them with so much experience for them to know what really fulfills them and where their innate skills lie.
Ultimately — people who succeeded mostly didn’t end up becoming billionaires living lavish lives. But they ended up being successful in the noble and modest sense — they found an occupation that fulfills them and pays well enough to do well.
Instead of reading the lists of how extreme outliers like Oprah, Bill Gates, Tim Ferris or Peter Thiel experienced failures, it is important to look at people who are relatable and have proven that it is possible to find your way. You don’t have to be an exceptional entrepreneur to have a successful and fulfilling life. The following examples prove that:
Overcoming failure and becoming great
Credit: Werner Faymann — Portrait Werner Faymann, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26847299
1. Werner Faymann — Former Chancellor of Austria
Between 2008 and 2016, Werner Faymann served as the Chancellor of Austria. He has been a popular figure for years in politics and the public appreciated his approachable ways.
Yet, he wasn’t the typical person whom you’d predict to become chancellor. Faymann never finished his university studies and dropped out. A journalist once asked him about a seven year gap in his CV between graduating from high school and winning a political mandate. He answered that he has been doing vacation jobs while studying Eventually, he got a taxi license, but only drove “a few times”, as he stated.
Yet, Faymann didn’t allow those years without a steady job define him and ended up maneuvering his country through political and economic challenges like the financial crisis following the Lehman crash and the influx of hundred thousands of refugees from Syria and the Middle East.
2. Magdalena Rogl — Communications Manager at Microsoft Germany
Magdalena Rogl is now a known figure in the tech bubble of Germany. Working at Microsoft, she’s become one of the inspiring faces opting for diversity and a modern humane work culture. The “mother of many” as she writes in her Twitter bio, seems to have it all — a good career, a loving family and social impact on businesses.
When she was younger, her life took a different path. She dropped out of school at 16 to become a kindergarten teacher, she got pregnant at 19, her second child followed four years later. At 24, her partner left her. She was a single mom of two in her mid-20s.
In order to find a new job which allowed her more flexibility, she applied as a social media manager at a digital travelling agency. She found that her empathetic and communication skills she had cultivated for years were just what was necessary to do a good job. Building her skills allowed her to transfer to Microsoft and become Head of Digital Channels.
3. Jennie McCormick — Astronomer
Jennie McCormick was a typical teenager from New Zealand who was more interested in riding horseback when she dropped out of high school at the age of 15. Her professional dedication for stars wouldn’t start until she turned 29. But once her interest was ignited, it wouldn’t stop burning.
As a young mother, she built the Farm Cove Observatory in New Zealand which helped her to discover 20 plants and one asteroid. Looking back on her path, she doesn’t regret dropping out — it felt right for her. However, one of her life lessons is to take initiative and follow your gut instinct.
It’s always darkest before the dawn
Failure and hardship and part of life and they can unleash a destructive force. However, the ultimate question is — are you going to allow your failure to define you in the long run?
The examples above show that sometimes opportunities can appear out of nowhere — even when your life feels messy and lacking stability. This lack of stability and direction doesn’t have to last forever — in fact, sometimes your own initiative is what can turn your situation around quite quickly.
Within a few years the personalities above have turned their lives around because they didn’t allow their failures to define them. It’s part of their individual path.
I believe that having unattainable goals like building the next Amazon or Tesla can distract you from the direct steps and opportunities that may not lie directly in front of you — but close enough to reach. Success starts with realistic steps — and you define what it means to you. | https://medium.com/work-today/3-cases-that-will-help-you-overcome-failure-d8381b147dd4 | ['Alice Greschkow'] | 2020-12-08 16:04:50.458000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Careers', 'Personal Development', 'Failure', 'Success'] |
The Designer’s Growth Model | The Designer’s Growth Model
The growth of a designer, i.e. the maturity of design, goes through several phases. Different phases ask different things of a designer. In each phase the work and goal of a designer changes. In each phase, the maturity grows.
Borrowing from the Invision report The New Design Frontier and the Greiner growth model (good designers copy, great designers steal), I concocted a model for the evolution of the designer. Just like the famous Greiner growth model, my model has different phases. I also have crises marking the transition from one phase to the next (never waste a good crisis). I reshuffled the order of the maturity model of Invision a little bit. If I remix the two (everything is a remix), I arrive at the following model.
Phase 1: Producers
The start of design is creating beautiful artifacts. It’s the foundational skill for designers. It’s what is taught in art school. It’s why designers become designers: to create beauty. It’s what makes design appealing. It’s what most people think of when they think about design. It’s what is shown in a museum when the theme is design: the designer as the producer of beautiful stuff. The tools are the classical design tools of Adobe. The skills are aesthetics: layout, whitespace, rhythm, color, form. Growth comes from mastery of the tools and learning to create more beautiful stuff.
Crisis 1: Scale
The first moment of crisis comes when the designer is successful. The better designers get, the bigger the projects they can work on become. They have to collaborate with more people and design systems on a larger scale. They need tools that help them collaborate and tools that help them design systems instead of single artifacts. They need to add collaboration and thinking in systems to their skillset. For a producer that has been trained to work solo on a single artifact in art school and that has mastered this craft, this is quite a hurdle.
Phase 2: Architects
When designers have cleared the hurdle of collaboration and thinking in systems, they become architects. They now work with large teams of designers and designs systems instead of artifacts. They use modern design tools that facilitate collaboration and the design of systems. Growth comes from better collaboration and mastery of thinking in systems.
Crisis 2: Co-creation
Architect work with designers. They design beautiful solutions based on design briefs. Design is still isolated from the rest of the business. It’s bigger than the production of single artifacts. The design has more impact because the scale is larger. Design is higher on the strategic agenda. But it’s done by designers on an assignment, on specifications from the business. If they are aiming for more impact, the next hurdle they have to take is opening up the design process to all the stakeholders of the problem that needs to be solved. They need to become a problem-solver instead of a producer of designs. For a designer to allow other people into his process is a big leap.
Phase 3: Connectors
If designers can connect to all the stakeholders and develop facilitation skills, they can create far better solutions. If they know the problems and needs of all stakeholders, they can have a far greater impact with his designs. One of the important stakeholders is the user but there are others. Designers are in an ideal starting position to connect the needs of the user to the needs of business and the possibilities of technology. They need to develop facilitation skills to organize and guide workshops, they need to develop the skill to use design prototypes to help the process of problem-solving, they need to understand the language of business and technology in order to smooth communications.
Crisis 3: Complexity crisis
When designers are able to be the bridge between user needs, business needs, and technological options, when they are able to collect insights, they can design solutions that are better aligned to the interest of all stakeholders. This will make his designs far more successful. This is great until they run into the next hurdle. The next hurdle is complexity. Even if you have done all the research, collected all the insights you can get from workshops and prototyped your way through communication problems, you run into the fact that the reality of your problem is too complex to design a solution and then go on an develop it. Development of large scale designs takes a lot of time and money and in a complex world, in the end, most of the solutions that are designed simply don't work well enough, simply don't deliver enough value. Either the world has changed once your design is delivered or it turns out people don’t behave as you thought. To solve this, designers have to get scientific: create hypotheses, design experiments and analyze the results. They have to shift from designing to solve to designing to learn. For an artistic designer, this shift to a more scientific, analytical approach can be a big mind-shift.
Phase 4: Scientists
Scientists are able to use their design skills alongside their analytical skills to iterate forward, to learn, to adapt. They are able to build, measure and learn and applies his unique designer’s perspective, mindset and skillset to lift projects to a higher level. Their hybrid approach of artistic design combined with analytical science enables them to create more value in projects while reducing risk and boosting performance. They use their prototypes to collect insights, to validate the direction and to guide the development process. The visual thinking, the ability to create concrete things, their creativity, their boldness, their ability to see connections all contribute to the quality and success of projects. They no longer execute assignments but recreates them, transforms them into engaging, successful journeys. Because the right problems are solved with solutions that are continuously validated, the scientist-designer creates an enormous amount of value. With the alternative futures they design, they are able to move people. And when they discover their superpower, they will want more. They will want to defeat the final hurdle. They will want the ultimate impact: to move people with their vision.
Crisis 4: Leadership crisis
That is when they face the final crisis. They need to up their leadership game. When they were architects, they were already leading design teams. But now the playing field has changed. They are no longer just impacting other designers, they are impacting entire organizations. They need to learn about organization and management, they need to understand how businesses work. This is not just about learning to speak the language as they learned when they became connectors. This goes one step further. They need to be able to design alternative organizations. They need to know how current managers think and work. In order to break the rules, they must first learn them. They must learn how to be a leader. They will be a different leader than the traditional MBA-trained leader but they must master the tricks of the trade.
Phase 5: Visionaries
The visionary can apply the skill-, mind-, and toolset to business challenges. Design brings a unique view to strategy, organization, leadership. Designers can transform organizations, create visions of the future, roadmaps to get there. Numbers and facts are not going to change organizations, a new image of the future will. There is a growing need for a new kind of leadership in organizations. A leadership that is based on imagination. A powerful image can be a huge force of change. Holistic thinking, boldness, creativity are what is needed in business today. And designers are in a great position to bring that to leadership.
That concludes the Designer’s Growth Model: | https://medium.com/design-leadership-notebook/the-designers-growth-model-8240dafb7137 | ['Dennis Hambeukers'] | 2019-04-06 07:56:06.768000+00:00 | ['Design Leadership', 'Design Maturity', 'Design', 'Leadership', 'Growth Model'] |
8 Digital Marketing Strategies That Play an Important Role in Influencing Customers | The basics of any business model are to make their customers happy and satisfied, to run their activities smoothly customer relationship is the foremost crucial Digital marketing strategy in business development and engagement.
Businesses are achieving their mark of success by making customers success! Digital marketing experts are focusing on their customers only one time, but this is going to be a colossal mistake to retain the customer back. The second purchase is essential for creating a high-value customer for the Business. As per the statistics, it is straightforward to retain first time purchaser rather than going for a new customer. The Chance of selling a product or service to the already existing user is 60–70% whereas selling a product or service to a new customer is like 5–20%. Here are the Top 5 Digital Marketing Mistakes that Every Expert has to Avoid
Strategies Which Build Customer Relationship in Digital Marketing:
Reminding Life Moments:
Reminding the best moments of customer lives it might be an anniversary or birthday, selecting that occasion customizing the mail wishing them and promoting our products will enhance the customer retention as well as we make a beautiful impression in customers view.
Especially birthday mails are five-time more profit-generating and two times more improvement in the web traffic.
Intimate About Price Drop:
When people add items to their wish list, but they won’t purchase those items, in that case, if the Business gives the intimation of notification by saying price has dropped for a specific product. Then there will be a motivation for the people to purchase certain products, and that will act as the improvement in the Business.
Notify the Renew Of Service or Products:
Suppose the customer is purchasing a specific product or service on a monthly or weekly basis. In that case, Business must and should remind about the product that is going to expire soon; this intimation will lead them to purchase back. For example, Jio network reminds customers to recharge to avail unlimited services before the offer expires.
Predict What Your Customers Are Spending:
Artificial intelligence is the source to navigate customer purchasing behavior's on a monthly or weekly basis. Based on their expenses, AI can notify customers through text messages, and they craft the offers in such a way where customer can get maximum benefits through the system of data. In this way, businesses can boost their low-value customers to come to the high priority customers by making them have a habit of purchasing stuff from their website or application.
Extra Engagement Services to Valuable Customers:
The customers who be loyal to the company products, and they come back to us time to time are the most critical valuable customers for the Business. In a business point of view, they are the VIP customers, to retain them and give the reward of giving priority in the future sales by giving VIP state and providing discounts and coupons etc.
Request Customers for Review:
After a purchase the sale completes, and Business earns an amount of money to their kiddie, but they are not going to reach the customer that is why businesses need to portray their interest by request a review for their service in return. Reviews will give great feedback about the company, and we can mitigate flaws through that review, and enhance business opportunities by making an excellent service in future.
Customer Generated Content:
Encourage the customers to interact with the brand or Business on the internet, through that a separate market will get to know about our Business to come back and use our products and services. Customers can showcase those product interest stories in the social media platforms, and those posts company can re-share their social media platform.
Use Analytics to Know Customer Journey:
Understanding what your customers are essentially looking in your site is very important; their engagement is a future step for businesses to take into consideration. Digital marketing experts can analyze customer behaviours through different tools like Google Analytics and other sources of softwares.
Concluding the Journey:
Customer is the real king in the business world, retaining them and making them stick on to our system of work is essential for businesses to be in successful routes. And Digital marketing is playing an indispensable role in crafting the strategies and making customers commute towards our website and building traffic as well as achieving marketing goals. | https://medium.com/@onpassive-ai/8-digital-marketing-strategies-that-play-an-important-role-in-influencing-customers-b16435056706 | [] | 2020-12-22 05:36:06.728000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Onpassive Digital', 'Marketing', 'Onpassive'] |
Monk episode review — 1.1 — Mr. Monk and the Candidate | Original air date: July 12, 2002
Director: Dean Parisot
Writer: Andy Breckman
Rating: 9/10
Considering I’ve just about finishing Columbo, I thought I’d take a look at my favourite of its imitators. Monk is essentially the first show ever that became appointment viewing for me. I got into it right at its last season, but I still love it. I hadn’t seen any of it in quite a while because it was taken off Netflix long before Psych even, so it was time for a re-watch.
I compare Monk to Psych quite frequently because they both aired on the same network, and are both comedy mysteries. But where this is different than Psych is that the mystery often comes before the comedy. It never mattered if the plot to a Psych episode was interesting or not because those episodes relied on the chemistry of the leads and the many, many jokes. Here, the mystery writing is a bit sharper, and it’s still generally a very funny show.
It would also often copy the Columbo formula of setting up the murder by showing uswho the killer is, with the rest of the episode revolving around Monk having to prove how the person did it.
Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) is a former detective of the SFPD, now working as a private consultant over in Santa Clara. He always had his quirks, but he went off the deep end after the unsolved murder of his beloved wife, Trudy.
He suffers from a severe case of OCD, and has a fear of driving, germs, milk, and others.
He investigates a breakin in Santa Clara that he insists is a murder, with the help of his nurse, Sharona (Bitty Schram). After an attempted assassination on a man running for mayor of San Francisco that results in a dead bodyguard, Monk gets called in to work on that investigation, and he thinks the two are related, despite all apparent evidence to the contrary.
Monk works with his old friend, Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine), and his partner Randall Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford).
Monk is welcomed by the mayoral candidate, Warren St. Claire (Michael Hogan), but not so much by his wife, Miranda (Gail O’Grady) or his top advisor, Gavin Lloyd (Ben Bass).
The series occasionally gets a bit too goofy, and this is the case at the funeral for the slain bodyguard, when Monk drops his keys into the casket and has to get them out with a paper clip attached to floss. It is funny, but it’s a bit odd.
Monk successfully connects the two murders, and the investigation takes them to a person who had purchased a scope, but he’s quickly removed from the list of suspects, as he’s in a wheelchair.
Monk then realizes that he was only pretending to be in a wheelchair, but since they let him go, they can’t find him. Monk does figrue out that the main campaign advisor was the guy behind the murders, so he accuses him in a very fun scene that has him defending himself by trying to identify which building is the source of a gunshot.
But Sharona is captured by the actual gunman, and there’s a scramble to find him, with Monk taking Randy’s gun.
I’m actually amazed at how many of Monk’s phobias he conquers to go after Sharona here. It’s a bit contradicted by the rest of the series, but if we’re imagining this as a movie, it’s pretty damn compelling. And it’s not without its laughs, such as when Monk enters a sewer, he stops to straighten a “Danger Do Not Enter” sign.
This is a very strong first entry for the series, a very good two-parter. The highlight is probably Monk in a room full of children who are all coughing and sneezing, but there are plenty of other fun moments, too. | https://medium.com/as-vast-as-space-and-as-timeless-as-infinity/monk-episode-review-1-1-mr-monk-and-the-candidate-d0663a11cb8a | ['Patrick J Mullen'] | 2020-05-26 12:16:00.772000+00:00 | ['Mystery', 'Television', 'Comedy', 'Monk', 'TV'] |
Not Enough Faith… | Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
For many years, I was out on organized religion. On the church. A few bad experiences turned me off to the whole thing.
The tenants of Christianity remain at the core of my life. Those lessons I learned in Sunday school still stick with me to this day. On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked if I was a pastor.
Over the past few years, I’ve had this yearning to get into something. I’m not sure what. But to poke my head back into the territory of spirituality. I think my soul has run bone dry.
For me, I’m becoming more cognizant of my time on earth. I want to spend my time wisely. Doing or being where I want to be.
Sunday morning, binge-watching Netflix is not how I want to spend my day.
But rather take the time, to do some reflection. To be a part of something that makes me think.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of rituals in a lot of religions. Chanting, taking communion … Those things hold no meaning for me. I wasn’t raised to appreciate them. But I respect everyone’s religious beliefs so I hold no judgment in those areas.
For what feeds me, feeds my soul, is having
I'm used to being challenged. Challenged personally and professionally. Across many areas.
My spirituality needs that challenge as well. Because for me to become better, to improve, it starts from the inside out.
My most recent challenge is how I handle inter-personal adversity.
Last Sunday, the Pastor of this church was speaking on the topic of relationships.
He said something that really struck me.
“When we are in a relationship, and the other person hurts us, our first impulse is to lean back from the relationship. Instead of doing that, why don’t you lean forward into the relationship?”
That hit home.
I’m on this path to be better. To improve.
And I admit: this is something I have done many times in the past.
I have a relationship with someone, whether that is a friend or a lover. They do something that hurts me. I lean back. Sometimes the relationship has survived if we talked about it. Other times, the relationship collapsed.
But then I start thinking about it in a bigger context. Leaning back or leaning forward with my relationship with others. In my real estate business, leaning forward with my teammates and my clients. But what about the community? Or a higher power?
No. I haven’t “found religion”. I do believe I’m part of something bigger than myself. It directly involves my relationship with myself, others and a higher power. If you choose to call it “God”, then so be it.
Of course, my atheist friends would say “Cliff, you’re too smart to believe in God.”
As Pastor Rick Warren, author of the New York Times Best Selling book ‘A Purpose Driven Life’, said in his TEDx talk “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” | https://medium.com/@cliff_33582/not-enough-faith-83e40b2b158e | ['Cliff Duvernois'] | 2019-02-12 15:48:41.585000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Writing Life', 'Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement'] |
Dealing With Rapid Changes as a Game Engineer | Imagine this: You and your colleagues have looked at the design for a new feature for your game, and you, the engineer, have given a time estimate of a few days since the feature looks simple. Of course, nothing is ever that simple, and as modifications to the original design start to come in, you’re left scrambling to incorporate last-minute changes into your code. In the end, what was supposed to be a magnificent skyscraper is instead a log cabin held together by duct tape. The foundation below still looks fantastic, but now it may never see the light of day.
“The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry”
How can you avoid this?
Don’t let your code look like this! (Photo by Zaimful on Pixabay)
The Importance of Process & Communication
Let’s rewind to right after the feature was mooted, when you and your colleagues had just begun to discuss it.
At Mighty Bear Games, the game designers start things off by writing a preliminary design document for the feature. This document will serve as the main reference for the conversations between disciplines on the implementation of the feature.
Notice I said conversations. There should be a lot of back-and-forth communication between the designers, artists, UI, and engineers on deciding what’s best for the feature and the players. Sometimes, this means simplifying the feature to make things easier to understand for the players; other times, it might be about making it easier for the team to implement, at least for the first version of the feature. At Mighty Bear these conversations involve everyone, in order to eliminate as many blind spots at this stage as we can — and we haven’t even started any of the implementation yet! The earlier the team starts talking and reasoning about the details of a feature, the better the chances of that feature turning out great.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
After the design document has undergone multiple revisions, we have one final kickoff meeting where we go through the document together before beginning work on the implementation. This kickoff serves to align everyone’s expectations for the feature as well as iron out any more kinks that might have arisen.
The conversation doesn’t just end once people start to go off and do their own thing. Often, the devil is in the detail, and some issues will surface as you dive into development. Further decisions will have to be made here, and not just by you. It’s therefore important to continue to communicate the problems you’re facing so that everyone is aware of what’s going on and can react accordingly. Additionally, while it’s intuitive to only involve those who are needed (e.g. the designers for a design issue, or artists for a problem with the model setup), keep the conversation public so that others have a chance to chime in if they have an insight. Sometimes, contributions from other disciplines may surprise you.
Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if you think you may look silly. Better to be a fool now than later. Just kidding — there are really no bad questions as, above all, there’s no room for uncertainty during this process. Ask away! | https://medium.com/mighty-bear-games/dealing-with-rapid-changes-as-a-game-engineer-fb7d9b7272ef | ['Andrew Ching'] | 2020-12-20 17:13:16.125000+00:00 | ['Communication', 'Teamwork', 'Planning', 'Coding', 'Game Development'] |
Running to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint | I’m a big fan of taking personal responsibility for situations going on around you. I’m not a big fan of looking to the government to solve all my problems.
Need more money? Reduce the amount you consume and increase the amount you create.
Want to reduce your chance of getting coronavirus? Wear a mask whenever in public, social distance when inside buildings, eat right, and exercise.
Want to help create a healthier climate and reduce the amount of man-made contributions to climate change? Simple, run to and from work once a week instead of driving. If you don’t like running, change that to biking or walking or crawling.
The fact of the matter is that we can all contribute to a healthier climate. By taking personal responsibility and finding a way yourself, you may just create the added benefit of being healthier yourself.
Carbon Footprint Reduction Made Simple
What’s your carbon footprint? Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash
I really don’t want to oversimplify this whole situation, but it seems that we are relying on government officials way too much to do something.
When is the last time you thought to yourself — you know the government is really efficient, let them take care of the problem? I can’t remember ever saying that.
Since I believe that we can do something personally to help our planet be healthier, I decided that rather than stand on a corner and protest I would find simple ways to reduce my carbon footprint.
I’m a runner who also happens to run a business, write, do a weekly podcast, and ensure I’m being a good spouse, so my method started with running.
Using the calculator at www.carbonfootprint.com, I entered my vehicle data, the total amount of miles I drive back and forth to my office daily, and then received my carbon footprint for driving.
My footprint for an average month is 0.10 metric tons of CO2e. My annual footprint would be 1.20 metric tons, well below the United States average of a shocking 16.49 metric tons. The worldwide target to combat climate change is 2 metric tons, so I’m below that average also. My statistics are here.
I got to thinking about how I could make a difference by running to and from work at least once per week. This would reduce my carbon footprint to 0.08 metric tons per month, 0.95 metric tons per year.
That’s simply running back and forth to work one time per week, for me that is a very simple 12 mile run (6 miles from my house to work) once per week.
Imagine if 100 people were to take on that challenge?
2021 Run to Work Challenge
Take the 2021 Run to Work Challenge. Photo by Fitsum Admasu on Unsplash
I’m just going to throw this out there as a challenge.
One time per week, take personal responsibility for the health of our planet. Instead of jumping behind the wheel of a car, or jumping on a train/subway, or rushing to catch a bus, put your running shoes on.
Those that are doing something personal to make a positive change have a lot more voice than those that are just jumping up and down and shouting for the government or somebody else to do something.
There’s a lot of things I love, two that have anything to do with this article.
I love running. And I love running in the great outdoors in clean air and drinking clean water when I am finished.
I also love taking personal responsibility for the things I love.
I may just increase the number of miles I run once per week when I leave my car in the driveway. After all, I do have to drive to meetings occasionally. May as well offset those miles also.
Who’s in? Who’s ready to do something for the planet and take personal responsibility.
Take the 2021 Run to Work Challenge.
Drop me a note at [email protected] and let me know you’re going to take on the challenge. I’ll also be talking about this on the Living an Ultra Life podcast. | https://medium.com/an-ultra-life/running-to-reduce-your-carbon-footprint-fd6a3d379f97 | ['Michael Horner'] | 2020-12-22 18:45:53.742000+00:00 | ['Carbon Emissions', 'Environment', 'Difference', 'Running', 'Inspiration'] |
Bloom Provides an Efficient, Affordable Platform for the Unbanked | Israel Keys talks about how Bloom is working towards financial inclusion. Established only in 2015, Bloom is already one of the top 10 fintech companies in the Philippines.
For more information, go to https://bx8.io and join the Telegram group at https://t.me/joinBX8. | https://medium.com/bloomx/bloom-provides-an-efficient-affordable-platform-for-the-unbanked-c742f77de4f3 | ['Toni Reyes'] | 2018-07-12 00:59:56.768000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Financial Inclusion'] |
Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone -book review | “If you could read my mind, you wouldn’t be smiling"
Every Last Word is a fiction that covers the life if a girl struggling with OCD. Samantha McAllister, who looks just like the rest of the popular girls in junior class, suffers from OCD and is always consumed by a stream of dark thoughts and worries that she can’t turn off.
Sam gets introduced into a secret room, which is called “Poet’s corner",where all the misfits who have been ignored by the school meet. Sam is drawn to them, and she finds comfort in expressing her feelings by poetry.
This book has given me so much insight about what could be going on in the mind of a person suffering from OCD, and that they can possibly be the popular girl who’s life seems perfect. This book is a perfect read if you want a good novel, if you like poetry, or even if you want to learn about OCD.
Every Last Word is a brilliant, unpredictable read. It covers so many topics such as: Self-confidence, self doubting, true friendship , therapy, overcoming obstacles, and so many more.
Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | https://medium.com/@amiraayad2003/every-last-word-by-tamara-ireland-stone-book-review-8fd9419a30d5 | [] | 2020-12-20 10:53:40.950000+00:00 | ['Novel', 'Every Last Word', 'Ocd', 'Poetry'] |
Why You Can’t Survive Falling Into A Black Hole | Why You Can’t Survive Falling Into A Black Hole
Why You Can’t Survive Falling Into A Black Hole
If you tried jumping into a black hole, then you’d be ripped apart long before you could find out what’s on the other side. But to fully understand why you can’t dive into a black hole, you must first understand the basic properties of these gravitational goliaths.
What Is a Black Hole?
Simply put, black holes are places where the gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Black holes are aptly named because they usually don’t reflect or emit light. They’re only visible when they’re feeding on stars or gas clouds that stray too close to their boundary, called the event horizon. Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity. This is where the laws of physics as we know them to break down, meaning all theories about what lies within the singularity are just speculation.
Types Of Black Holes
There are a few different types of black holes, so if you were to jump into one, your exact fate would depend on which sort of black hole you chose. At the simplest level, there are three kinds of black holes: stellar-mass black holes, supermassive black holes, and intermediate-mass black holes.
Stellar-mass black holes form when the largest stars exhaust their fuel and collapse in on themselves. Supermassive black holes live in the centers of most galaxies, and are thought to grow to their extreme sizes — up to tens of billions of times more massive than our Sun — by consuming stars and merging with other black holes. Intermediate-mass black holes are still mysterious, and only a few suspected examples have been discovered, but astronomers think they may form through a similar process of accretion, just on a smaller scale.
1: Falling into a stellar-mass black hole
Stellar-mass black holes are puny in comparison to their bigger cousins, but they actually boast the strongest tidal forces of any type of black hole. That’s because smaller black holes actually have a more intense gravitational gradient than larger ones. That means you only have to get slightly closer to a small black hole to experience an extremely noticeable difference in gravity.
As you floated through space toward a stellar-mass black hole, you’d be stretched in some directions and squished in others, a process that scientists call spaghettification. This is because the black hole’s gravity compresses your body horizontally while pulling it like taffy in the vertical direction. So, if you jumped into the black hole feet first, the gravitational force on your toes would be much stronger than that pulling on your head. Each bit of your body would also be elongated in a slightly different direction. You would literally end up looking like a piece of spaghetti.
2: Falling into an intermediate-mass or supermassive black hole
In contrast to falling into a stellar-mass black hole, your experience plunging into an intermediate-mass or supermassive black hole would be slightly less nightmarish. Although the end result — a horrible death — would still be your fate, you might actually make it all the way through the event horizon and manage to start falling inside the singularity itself while still alive.
In this case, at least in theory, you could see out into surrounding space. But no one would be able to see you once you passed beyond the event horizon. Even if you were holding a flashlight and tried to shine it out, the light would fall back down into the singularity with you.
Meanwhile, you’d see that everything within the event horizon was warped by extreme gravitational forces, thanks to an effect astronomers call gravitational lensing. (Not to mention the wild time dilation effects.
Death By Black Hole
Of course, no matter what type of black hole you plunge into, you’re ultimately going to get torn apart by its extreme gravity and die a horrible death. No material that falls inside a black hole could survive intact.
Unfortunately, because nothing can escape a black hole’s event horizon — not even information — we’ll never know for certain what happens when matter falls past the point of no return. So, even if you do find yourself with the opportunity to take a cosmic cliff dive into a black hole, for safety reasons, you probably should resist the urge. | https://medium.com/@fahadahmd-bs/why-you-cant-survive-falling-into-a-black-hole-8bfbdb6d5aca | ['Fahad Ahmad'] | 2020-12-17 16:30:13+00:00 | ['Astronomy', 'Space', 'Black Holes', 'NASA', 'Technology'] |
Government Testimony: Check Reality Before You Panic | Restaurant & Clubhouse demolished, to be Replaced by Apartments. Photo, author. 2020
The Villages Retirement Community, Apartments
Government Testimony: Check Reality Before You Panic
Will traffic flow really double & increase golf-cart vs. auto accidents in the retirement community?
Synopsis
The developer has proposed building apartments inside a gated retirement community of single-family housing. They tore down a clubhouse and pool in anticipation of receiving unopposed county approval.
One, if built properly to blend in, may not cause much damage - maybe- but the residents feel it is the first of many. There are several reasons to take care. This article covers the impact of changing traffic patterns caused by many people living in such a small space.
Proposal: Slam apartments inside gated community
The developer of The Villages, a gated retirement community covering 70 square miles with a population of 125,000 and 56 golf courses, is attempting to change its fundamental structure. They tore down a clubhouse and restaurant featured for years in their advertisements and plan to replace it with apartments - in the midst of hundreds of single-family homes.
The Sumter County Commissioners board had to approve the proposal for the project to proceed. The commissioners held two required public meetings where any interested party could testify under oath. They could present reasons to accept or decline the proposal as long as the testimony was based on facts or studies, not just opinions.
Testimony lasted about 10 hours
Many people testified on these categories, which included:
Broken sales promises, i.e. bait-n-switch
Removal of facilities used for health reasons, such as the pool and indoor facilities
Reduced property values, projected 50% near the apartments and declining further out, but still there, across the 65,000+ homes in The Villages
Huge increase of traffic flow on Morris street, a street with 2 inside lanes for cars and an outside lane on each side for golf carts, thus creating congestion and increased danger to the golf carts
Higher incidence of golf cart-auto accidents.
My testimony concentrated on how the developer misrepresented reality or lied with assumptions and statistics concerning golf carts and traffic volume.
The traffic engineer used general traffic tables for cities to represent traffic flow in the first board meeting. That was nonsense. City traffic and retirement community traffic patterns are wildly different. I asked for a traffic flow study at the first meeting before the board approved the proposal.
At the second meeting, the engineer presented a graph showing county statistics for that part of Morris. It had daily totals, not peak times, and the graph didn’t mean anything to anybody. It still seemed that the additional traffic would be overwhelming.
In my second testimony, I said that
“I counted the number of houses accessing Morris from the golf course area. Assuming that the house and apartment residents generate the same traffic, the apartments will generate at least 70% more traffic than just those houses.
The real question was how much of the Morris traffic is generated by people living close by and how much is just passers-through?”
Finally, “How much of the total traffic flow is that 70%?”
Did those overwhelming feelings represent reality?
I found the underlying data for that graph on the County’s website, talked to an expert traffic engineer about traffic patterns in retirement communities, and built a model to support the county’s data. I confirmed the model by counting cars and carts at three locations on November 4th and 5th.
At the day’s peak, the 159 apartments will add 3 cars and 1 cart in any 5-minute period, less than 50 out of 2,000+ vehicles in an hour. That‘s at 2 round trips per day per apartment. Even doubled, that would have little impact on the 150+ vehicles per 5-minute period at the peak.
Of course, all apartment residents could form a parade and leave at the same time, but that probably won’t happen often.
Surprise! Things were not as they appeared
The proposed Hacienda apartments will have no real impact on traffic flow. Always check the numbers if they are available.
Identifying the right numbers is the hardest task.
After talking to others, our real concern is not about the apartments themselves. They just serve as a focal point and these may blend into the environment if done right.
Our real concern is that the developer:
May change the unique characteristics of The Villages
To something quite ordinary
The best advice for The Villages developer comes from Steve Jobs which is the same piece of advice that he gave to the CEO of Nike — “focus on doing one thing right first.”
In my opinion, The Villages company values are getting fuzzy and becoming unfocused by adding apartments. I suggest they rent all existing ones outside the gated portion of The Villages to confirm demand before building anything inside. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/government-testimony-check-reality-before-you-panic-e95f28c113f1 | ['Bill Myers'] | 2020-11-11 15:31:39.958000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Traffic', 'Retirement', 'Testimony', 'Government'] |
The sexy new tools that improved my cooking, in a pandemic | My kitchen has seen a number of changes during the pandemic, or trends. Some will stick, others must be cut like so much overgrown, shaggy hair: severely. For instance, my exploration of white breads, with nutritional value of C-minus, has come to an end. But these additions I see sticking around through 2021 and even past the pandemic. As with the deep dive into wyt brd, my discovery of these tools came through cooking and recipe testing. I bought each tool to make a specific task easier, or to produce a better outcome. And to my surprise, they work. Ooh do they work well.
Bench scraper
I bought because of one chef’s recommendation alone. Back in 2018, Cook’s Country published a real winner of a dish in this one from Lawman Johnson: pasta e fagiole. The real secret is that this excellent recipe includes a whole can of cannellini beans, and a can of beans pureed with water as a magical thickener. But the bench scraper is the tool that makes the delivery of all the chopped veggies to the pot an absolute breeze. Chef Johnson underscored the bench scraper as one of the more essential tools of his recipe, and after one time making his soup, I got the bench scraper. Now it’s fun to chop the veg, and a breeze to transfer.
Immersion blender
I never loved messing with our food processor, and I also hated transferring hot soup I wanted to puree to our Ninja blender. The soup was mushroom. Since I mostly used the Ninja for making smoothies or frozen drinks, the addition of hot, buttery, braised mushrooms and sauteed onions forced me to clean the thing twice before mixing smoothies again. So I said, let’s leave the Ninja out of the soup game and introduce this sexy immersion blender into our lives, baby. The immersion blender I got is powerful. So much so that it can create a majestic tornado of soup that makes me want to try to lift my blender, melded as one with my cast iron stock pot, able to lift it over my head and shake it in triumph, not a drop of soup spilled. This of course I do not do. I just blend my soups, be they butternut, mushroom, or bean, into the smoothest texture imaginable. I highly recommend an immersion blender for smooth, velvety, incredibly sexy soups.
Box Grater
Feel the danger. Buy a box grater. Danger! Watch yourself! Danger! Show them what you’re working with (it’s a box grater)! Maybe one day I’ll be chef-y enough to own a mandoline and use it safely, but for now, I’m happy to risk my manicure on the super-attractive box grater I bought, mostly to help me with the coleslaw phase of our 2020 pandemic. If you’re wondering, yes, the coleslaw phase closely accompanied the whyte bread phase. I needed slaw to accompany burgers n fries, fish n chips, and to top hot dogs. There were mayo-based slaws, lemon poppyseed slaws, vinegar-seasoned slaws, slaws with ginger-sesame dressings. All these slaws had carrots grated in them. Cabbage is cheap as hell and lasts in the fridge for a while. Carrots sing the same song. And I have found that I prefer my slaw to be grated, not sliced. Many Even sliced with super cool, extremely sexy steel knives. And I learned the hard way which side of the grater works best: the one that looks like a slot. This is the slot that will “shave” fennel for you too, which is chef-y as hell and as versatile as cabbage, if you try. And I’ve also learned that it’s not worth it to try and grate ginger or garlic with the big old box grater, as sexy as it is. That’s a better job for the next tool on the list.
Rasp
I always wanted to zest lemons or shave chocolate over things with a sexy-ass rasp, like all the TV chefs do. And as I carefully sliced off the tip of my fingernail as a tried to get ginger out of my box grater, I remembered: Many rasps come with a teeny, sexy brush to clean it. So I got the rasp that comes with the little old brush, and a plastic guard so I’ll never reach into the drawer and remove my fingerprints. Teeny perfect cleaning brush aside, the rasp is the best tool for grating cheese, garlic, ginger, and after a good wash, chocolate.
Electric kettle
I feel slightly like I watched too much Nigella and Jaime Oliver not to buy an electric kettle. Though boiling water for pasta or ramen is always enjoyable, there is something extremely satisfying about plugging the kettle in, hearing its cyclonic roar, and having cooking water in a minute. And I already keep a cast-iron skillet on the stove, so this lives on the counter.
Paring knife/set of three knives
These knives were a gift for our 11th wedding anniversary. The traditional gift is steel. And we realized that of all the knives we have, our favorite, the sharpest, the one that has held an edge the most, is from Ikea. So I looked and saw this sexy knife set, and wham, though the magic of gifting, it arrived at our house, carefully packed and shipped from an Ikea in Arizona. I really wanted a paring knife with which to make this very attractive salad from The Takeout, plus I didn’t own one before. So this set is not only attractive and functional, like Batman’s plane, it brought something into my life that was missing. Thanks, Ikea. | https://medium.com/@alexandratx/the-sexy-new-tools-that-improved-my-cooking-in-a-pandemic-100d1463ddb5 | ['Alexandra Richmond'] | 2020-12-19 17:48:46.273000+00:00 | ['Pandemic Cooking', 'Cooking', 'Tools', 'Kitchen Tools', 'Kitchen'] |
Very simple REST API using Express.js | What is a REST Api?
In simple terms a REST Api is an API on a backend which you make a call to from the frontend/client side, telling it what you want and it returns your data.
API Example
A very simple example is as follows: Let’s say you have a database with a bunch of product data in. You want a list of products that is cheaper than $200. You make a call to the API from the frontend. The API queries the database and returns a list of products cheaper than $200. Very simple right! You can create very complex APIs, but most of the time you’ll only need a very simple one. It’s most commonly used to query and return data from a database.
Just to summarize, the steps are:
You make a call to the API telling it what you want. The API receives the call, processes or fetches the data you want. Sends the data back to you.
Building a REST API with Express.js
Just quickly before we start. What is Express.js?
Express is a backend web framework for Node.js which you can use to easily make an API
Getting Started
Things that you will need:
NodeJS A NodeJS package manager. I will be using NPM which is a very popular package manager for NodeJS. A code editor. I will be using Visual Studio Code
After you have installed NodeJS and NPM, make sure that it’s installed correctly. This is very easy:
Open a new Terminal window Type node -v & npm -v
CMD window showing Node and NPM versions
Now that you can see your Node and NPM versions you can rest assured that it’s installed and jump right into the next thep. If you don’t see a version, try restarting your PC or reinstalling Node or NPM.
Setting up the project
Before we can install express, first we need to create our project.
Create a new empty folder and open it with Visual Studio Code Once it’s open in Visual studio code, open the Terminal inside of VS Code
Click to open Terminal inside of VS Code
3) Now we want to initialize your project as an NPM project. This will allow us to use NPM. What NPM does is essentially downloads and installs libraries/extensions/plugins we can use.
We do this by typing npm init into the terminal:
How to initialize an NPM project so that you can make us of NPM
Once you press enter, it will ask you a bunch of questions which you don’t have to worry about when getting started. Just enter through all of them and leave them as they are.
Great! You have now initialized an NPM project, and you can now make use of NPM to install packages such as Express and Nodemon.
Installing Express and Nodemon
To do this you just need to type the following into your terminal:
npm install express & npm install nodemon
Once you press enter, NPM will install the packages and everything needed to use those packages for you. These packages are called Dependencies and are stored in a newly created folder called node_modules which you can just ignore.
What is Nodemon and why do we need it?
We will be using Nodemon to automatically restart the application as soon as we make any changes to any of our files so that the latest version of our application is always running.
We don’t need Nodemon, but we will then need to restart our program manually each time we make a change to see it take effect which would be very unproductive.
By now you have already accomplished a lot and might want to take a quick break. We’ll be getting into some actual programming from here on out.
“Taking a break can lead to breakthroughs.”
― Russell Eric Dobda
Creating API with Express
We have now installed everything we need and can start by setting up our backend API.
We’ll start off by creating a file called server.js. This will be our main application file. Think of an exe file for a game. It’s the file you open to start up your project. You can name it anything you want to, but server.js is commonly used and makes sense, because our API will run on a backend server and this file will be used to start up the backend application.
Create a new file inside of VS Code in your main directory
Now open your newly created server.js file. Let’s quickly think about the steps we need to follow:
Import express Initialize our express app Set up our express routes Set up our express listener
This might seem like a lot of steps and at the moment you might not understand what any of these steps mean, but don’t worry in just a while everything will make more sense.
Import Express
To use express we first need to import it into our program. That makes sense right? Well thankfully it’s super easy to import packages. See the following code example:
The following line of code imports the express package
Very quick and easy right! We can now start using express.
Initialize Express app
We can now use features from express, but it won’t work properly if we don’t initialize our express application first. Luckily for us, it’s very quick and easy to do:
This code initializes an express application
Explanation
Line 5: Here we all creating a constant variable named app and setting it equal to an express application.
It’s a constant variable because it will never change. Express() initialized an express application and we want to store that application somewhere so that we can use it right? So that’s why we store it in a variable named app. Don’t worry about understanding it too much, you just need to remember this step.
Line 6: Here we are creating a variable named port and setting it to an integer value of 3000. This port will be used to access our application on when viewing it in the browser. It can be any 4 digit value from 0 to 65535. You don’t need to worry about this, as it will be explained better later when we use this variable in the last step.
Set up Express Routes
An Express Route is a specific location which we can make a call to. Let’s pretend that it’s a number. Each route is a business and each business has its own unique number. We can use that number to call the business and get specific information from them. Let’s see the code so that it makes more sense.
This code creates a route that we can now access in the browser once the application is running
Explanation
Line 9: Here we use our app variable which is an express application. We call the get procedure, which means we are simply calling the route/business to get information. The first parameter ‘/’ is the location/number we are calling. The second parameter is an anonymous function with two parameters namely req (request) and res (response). These parameter variables can be called anything but the current names make more sense.
Line 10: Inside of the anonymous function we send a response with res.send(). res stands for response, and we send it. Makes sense so far right. Inside of the send() procedure we pass in the information we want to send back. Here we are simply sending back some text that says ‘Hello World!’ when the client makes a call on the ‘/’ route, which is also the base path.
Line 11: We simply close the get procedure.
Inside of the anonymous function we can do calculations, make function calls etc. and then send those calculation or returned values from the functions as the response. We’ll be doing an example once the application is set up and running.
Set up our Express Listener
This is the last step we need to do before we can start our application. We basically need to tell our application on which port to listen for calls. This will be using the port variable we made at the start of the application.
This code tells the express application to listen for any calls on port 3000
Explanation
Line 14: Here we use our express application’s listen procedure with two parameters. The first one being the port variable on which the application should listen on. The second parameter is an anonymous callback function which runs as soon as the application starts listening on that port.
Line 15: Here we just put any code that should run as soon as the application starts listening on the specified port. We are simply logging a string to the console that states the location that we can use to make API requests.
Starting our Express API application
To start the application we are going to be using nodemon and the VS Code terminal. It’s very easy. You will simply type nodemon <insert main file name> to start your application with nodemon.
This terminal code will start the application with nodemon
Once you see the following text in your terminal you have succeeded in making your very first API using Express.
We can now make an API call using our browser. To do this open your browser and visit the following URL: http://localhost:3000/
Awesome!
Here you can see that our API is working. We visited the URL: http://localhost:3000/ which is basically the same as accessing the ‘/’ route.
Note that from now on when you make additional changes to the application you don’t need to start the application again unless you closed VS Code. This is why we installed Nodemon. When me make changes in the future Nodemon will keep watch on all of our files, and when we make a change to them it will automatically restart our program for us. You will then see the following text in the terminal.
Nodemon automatically restarting our application on file changes
Let’s make some more useful routes.
We can keep the base route of ‘/’ so that we can easily check that our program is still working, but let’s make something more interesting.
Create another Route
This will be our second route
Just below our first route we can create another route with a path of ‘/newRoute’. This path could be anything and can be accessed at http://localhost:3000/newRoute
For now we will just simply send a basic string back to the client
When accessing http://localhost:3000/newRoute we will receive our newly created response
Let’s now do something more interesting. Let’s create a list of food names. We will then set up a route that will return a random food name. Think of it as a random food selector or a food of the day feature maybe.
Let’s change the route we just created. Firstly we will change the path, and then create a simple variable with food strings in.
New route that will return a random food name
We now want to get a random item from the food array and send it as the response to the API call.
This API route is now functional and we can
As you can see, this time we did some calculations first before sending the response/data back to the client. Like the example above, you can run any other javascript code within the API call and then return a response with the data generated. You can also return variables (like we did above), javascript arrays, JSON etc.
Let’s see it in action:
Each time you refresh the API will return a response containing a string with a random food name
Example of how it can be used in a real life project
Real World Demo example of API usage
The gif above is a preview of a real world application demo on how this API could be used. In the video it’s used on a company site that’s all about recipes. They use it to generate some very cool and random recipes for the users. It adds some more functionality to the website and makes it more interactive and dynamic so that it can stand out from competitors.
Keep an eye on my Medium profile for future articles where we will be going more in depth and learning some other Express features so that we can take our API to the next level.
Thanks for reading. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/very-simple-rest-api-using-express-js-5e4ebfad0af2 | [] | 2020-10-17 07:51:03.268000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'JavaScript', 'Expressjs', 'Programming', 'API'] |
Kotlinx Json vs Gson | If you have ever implemented any REST API in your mobile app, you should be familiar with JSON format.
JSON is an open-standard file format or data interchange format that uses human-readable text to transmit data objects consisting of attribute-value pairs and array data types.
The most common way how to parse JSON-format data to java/kotlin objects is by using one of the popular libraries like Jackson, Moshi or Gson. It’s likely that you are using kotlin, however, all previously mentioned libraries are java-based. Kotlin is 100% interoperable with java, however, because of some small nuances, sometimes you could encounter unexpected results.
Let’s define the User data class with some optional fields and default values. Don’t forget that data class and optional fields are kotlin features, not available in java.
And now you want to parse very simple JSON string.
{
"name" : "John Doe",
"email" : "[email protected]"
}
Let’s add Gson dependencies to your project and create a unit test to see how this java library handles your input.
The test has passed! As you can see, gson library totally ignores your default values and uses 0 to complete missing primitive field and null instead of missing enum object. This means that gson deserialization even breaks kotlin null-safety and may cause app crash. To prevent this unwanted behavior, you could use nullable types and add supplementary code to handle these edge cases or you can use a smarter kotlin-based serialization library that can solve it for you.
Kotlin serialization comes to rescue us!
Kotlin serialization is kotlin oriented cross-platform reflectionless serialization library from JetBrains. This library doesn’t use reflectionless but rather explicit annotation @Serializable . After applying the annotation, the compiler plugin adds a special function serializer() on your companion object, returning serializer of type KSerializer . KSerializer object implements interfaces required for serializing and deserializing your data class. Library provides three ready to use formats: JSON, CBOR, and Protobuf. The advantage of this approach is that it works also outside of the JVM world, for example in Kotlin/Native or JavaScript.
Using Kotlin Serialization requires kotlin compiler v1.3.30 or higher. You have to add serialization plugin to your gradle build script, apply the plugin and add the dependency on the serialization runtime library. All information about the configuration are available in the documentation.
Now, you can Json class from kotlinx.serialization.json to serialize your input string.
All tests have passed! Json takes advantage of kotlin language features and returns a more predictable output.
You might have noticed that IDE complains about Json.parse() call. At the time of writing this article, the library is stable, however, there are no API compatibility guarantees between versions, that’s why some methods are called experimental and IDE shows you a warning when you try to use them.
Kotlinx.serialization + Retrofit
Retrofit is a very popular HTTP client for android and java from square. It doesn’t have build-in support for kotlin serialization but it allows you to add a converter factory for serialization and deserialization of objects. You could write your own converter factory or you can use one form Jake Wharton.
https://github.com/JakeWharton/retrofit2-kotlinx-serialization-converter
To start using Retrofit 2 Converter.Factory for Kotlin serialization just add library dependencies and add a converter factory when building your Retrofit instance using the asConvertFactory extension function.
val contentType = "application/json".toMediaType()
val retrofit = Retrofit.Builder()
.baseUrl("https://www.example.com")
.addConverterFactory(Json(JsonConfiguration(strictMode = false)).asConverterFactory(contentType))
.build()
You can also use JsonConfiguation to configure Json serializer, for example, to turn on/off encoding default values or to enable/disable strict mode. Strict mode is turned on by default, which prohibits unknown keys in the JSON and non-numerical values in floating-point numbers. It’s good practice to keep strict mode enabled in debug build and turn it off in release build of your app.
This article covers only very basic usage of kotlin serialization. If you want more information about how serializer works under the hood or how to write your own encoder/decoder, I would recommend you to read the documentation and watch the talk from KotlinConf 2019: Design of Kotlin Serialization by Leonid Startsev. | https://medium.com/@jurajkunier/kotlinx-json-vs-gson-4ba24a21bd73 | ['Juraj Kušnier'] | 2020-01-03 18:12:21.777000+00:00 | ['Retrofit', 'Android', 'Gson', 'Kotlin', 'Json'] |
Traversing the Customer Funnel | Traversing the Customer Funnel
What Product Managers need to know about Lead Management
Photo by Shengjun Shi
This post appeared in my weekly newsletter on Product Management. Sign up here to get new posts straight to your inbox.
Last week, we talked about the first principles behind a Customer Acquisition Funnel, and how you might think about designing and executing your own customer acquisition or lead funnel.
We also discussed the funnel’s underlying concept, AIDA, and introduced its stages — TOFU, MOFU & BOFU. Here’s a quick mental model of how everything connects thus far.
TOFU = Top of the Funnel → The Awareness & Attention Stage.
= Top of the Funnel → The Awareness & Attention Stage. MOFU = Middle of the Funnel → The Interest and Desire Stage.
= Middle of the Funnel → The Interest and Desire Stage. BOFU = Bottom of the Funnel → The “I am sold on this, I’ll pay” Stage.
In this post, we’ll discuss the different stages of the funnel in some detail, and look at how and what activities are typically planned for each stage.
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
Your customer acquisition funnel is the widest here, which means you’ll have marketing material that will cast a wide but effective net to promote your product.
Wide — because at this point, you’ll want to target people that may be interested in your product — through broad/mass marketing content
Effective — so that you are targeting and generating quality leads — in other words, you are minimizing bringing people into your funnel that have absolutely no interest in your product.
Your marketing materials at the Top of the Funnel are geared towards
Introducing your product Capturing some basic information about the lead (Email, Name) — in a privacy-compliant way (look up GDPR)
Now, capturing at least an email address is important, and here’s why.
Remember in this stage, most leads may be learning about your product for the very first time and it’s highly unlikely people will be convinced right away to buy something that they hardly know enough about.
You’ll have to handhold them and nurture them — showing them the value proposition of your product, answering their questions, piquing their interest, ultimately bringing them to a point where they are compelled to buy your product/ subscription.
To do all this, You’ll need to communicate with them constantly — and hence the need for at least an email address.
Marketing in TOFU
Your marketing materials in this stage generally are Free Blog posts, Social Media content, Free videos & Podcasts, and of course, newsletters are pretty hot these days too. (I didn’t mention TV ads, Super bowl ads, etc. which you can certainly do if you have lots of dough — but returns on marketing investment are hard to measure)
Here are some real-world marketing activities to generate leads at the Top of the lead funnel
Paid ads on Google, FB, or other Social media → Drive traffic to your landing page→ Request to Enter email in exchange for some info, free sign-up
→ Drive traffic to your landing page→ Request to Enter email in exchange for some info, free sign-up Promoting a well-done Video, Podcasts, etc . — Asking them to Like/Subscribe
. — Asking them to Like/Subscribe Promoting eye-catching Blog content, ebooks, infographics, Newsletters around the problem that your product solves, and asking people to voluntarily subscribe in exchange for their email.
The Goal for Marketing Content in TOFU is to make a crisp, but solid first impression to a potential lead — with a clear Call to Action for them.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
Middle of the Funnel marketing strategy is all about nurturing your TOFU leads, qualifying them, and ‘scoring’ your leads to identify the ones that are most likely to convert into customers and subtly nudge them closer to buying your product. As you’ll see in this stage, your Sales team begins to get involved too.
Marketing’s role in the Middle of the Funnel is
Nurture & Evaluate their TOFU leads Find the really high-quality/high scoring ones Get them to buy the product.
To do #1 & #2, Marketing will typically use drip campaigns that deliver periodic and progressive content to their TOFU leads to progress them through the funnel and simultaneously score them on purchase readiness based on their engagement with the marketing Content.
Here Marketing automation company Salesforce shows an overview of a drip campaign. See the full infographic.
The highest-quality/ highest scoring leads are then transferred from Marketing to Sales to execute #3. These leads are called “Marketing Qualified Leads” or MQL.
Let’s trace the journey of a Lead to an MQL with an example below.
My Runner’s World example
After I became a TOFU lead for Runner’s World, their marketing engines roared into action and started sending me these periodic emails about running. Of course, these emails are part of a drip campaign built into their Marketing Automation Software.
Anyway, some of these emails are “FREE” — I can read them without a paywall. The free emails provide enough value for me to not unsubscribe from their mailing list but at the same time tell me that I am missing out on a lot of value by not signing up for the “exclusive” membership. Runner’s World at this point is nurturing me, trying to convince me of their value proposition so I make am closer to make a purchase.
That’s classic Middle of the Funnel marketing — subtly trying to progress a FREE subscriber to a paying customer.
Once in awhile, they’ll send me an “Exclusive” email sitting behind a paywall to get me to sign up to their exclusive content — like this one below.
Typically these would be their most compelling stories that have perhaps proven to maximize the probability of converting a free subscriber to a paying one. (Thus far, they’ve been unsuccessful if you are curious). But their marketing machine will keep trying.
Lead Scoring
A Marketing Automation software (e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.) can track how a lead interacts with every piece of content, what emails were opened/read, what buttons on the webpages were clicked, etc. and based on this engagement the software will assign (pre-determined) scores as well as adjust the delivery of future content.
Here is a basic Lead Scoring Example
The software’s tracking ability enables marketing to understand the quality of the leads they are generating up the funnel and gauge the likelihood of a lead making a favorable purchase decision.
A high Scoring lead becomes an MQL and then handed over to Sales. This strategy ensures that Salespeople are not wasting their time on leads that are not likely to buy.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) now enter the Bottom of the Funnel — the final stage of your customer acquisition plan.
Ideally, your MQLs are very high quality and convert into customers without the need for much more selling. But some products need more handholding than others. So in such cases, Sales takes over these Marketing Qualified leads and further vets them for purchase readiness — all the time trying to get them closer to purchase.
Depending upon the product, industry, and customer expectations, Sales will carry out a number of activities to understand purchase readiness. These activities may be Demos & trials, face to face Consultations, webinars, Customer Events, and more.
Sales Qualified Leads
MQLs that are closest to the end of the funnel (i.e. closest to making a buy decision) are sometimes termed as Sales Qualified Leads or SQLs.
Typically, for an MQL to become an SQL, the lead must have a need for the product or service, the product and service should be meaningfully solving that need, they must have the budget to purchase the product, the infrastructure to use it, and finally at least a tentative timeline to make the purchase.
If a vast majority of MQLs are not converting into SQLs — its time for marketing to take a look at the top half of the funnel, diagnose and adjust the filters and parameters that define a Marketing Qualified Lead.
By the way, just because a lead was tagged as Sales Qualified doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to close. But if the funnel is designed well and the marketing and sales activities are well thought out and consistent — a vast majority of SQLs will go on to become real paying customers, albeit at different times. Therefore timely and consistent follow-ups are the holy grail of closing a deal successfully.
Customer Retention
BOFU is not the end of your customer acquisition plan. Your customer acquisition plan must also have a robust retention plan. Remember that it’s at least 5x–7x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer — so treat your customers very very well, delight them. I’ll write about customer retention strategies in another post perhaps.
Conducting the Orchestra — The Product Manager
As you can see, there is a lot that goes on to create and execute a successful Customer Acquisition Strategy. And while a vast majority of these activities are carried out by Marketing & Sales teams — the Product Manager must act as the conductor of this orchestra — bringing everything together to ensure the execution details are aligned to that strategy.
If you are a Product Manager and are new to this process I recommend you to be involved at every step of the way of designing the Lead Management funnel.
Admittedly, the funnel might be a bit different based on the Product (hardware/software, etc.), Industry, Organization Structure (Inside vs. Field Sales) we are talking about, but the overall idea remains the same.
You generate leads → show them the value proposition of your product → get them to become your customers → Retain them as customers.
Alright, that’s all for this post. I hope you enjoyed the post as much as I enjoyed writing it! If you have questions, lets connect on Twitter!
Thank you for reading & take care. | https://chakrvyuh.medium.com/traversing-the-customer-funnel-59e4dc2c70f | ['Abhishek Chakravarty'] | 2020-11-26 08:48:06.159000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'Startup', 'Marketing'] |
How to Become Fluent in Multiple Programming Languages | Learn the statically-typed and syntactically-specific languages first.
Nearly every article titled “Which Programming Language Should I Learn First?” suggests that Python is the perfect first language for someone to learn. While I agree that Python is a good first language due to its simple syntax and flexibility, I believe that several programming fundamentals won’t be learned that will be necessary later on.
Therefore, I would offer some counter-intuitive advice: learn the statically-typed and syntactically-specific languages first.
Instead of learning the language that will hold your hand and will offer you a comfortable path to wade into the world of programming, learn the language that will yell at you if you forget a semi-colon or will refuse to work because your data types are wrong.
Statically-typed languages.
Statically-typed languages (such as C# and Java) require a data type to be assigned to their variables. Data types include strings, integers, and Booleans, to name a few. Variables are bound to the data types they are assigned when they are initialized and can’t be changed, otherwise, errors will be thrown in the code before they run.
Dynamically-typed languages on the other hand (such as Python) don’t require data types to be assigned at the initialization of the variable. The variable type will be checked to see if the types are correct at runtime (after the program has been compiled and run).
By learning how to work with statically-typed variables, you get a foundational understanding of data types that you can build upon in the future. For example, JavaScript is a happy little programming language that has no problems adding together integers and strings. However, not being aware of datatypes can cause problems later on when bugs arise. By being strict with your learning and gaining a firm understanding of data types, you can save yourself a lot of headaches further on down the road when learning a dynamically-typed language with variables that can change datatypes on the fly. Additionally, learning a statically-typed language first will add a layer to your coding process logic.
Syntactically-specific languages.
When learning a new natural language, you first learn your alphabet, and then you go on to learning the words, the sentence structure, the punctuation, and the grammar of that language.
Learning a programming language is similar, in that each language has a specific syntax you must use for the code to work. In other words, each programming language has a way in which it likes its sentences to be structured and its paragraphs to be formed.
Some languages, (such as Java and C#) are very specific about their syntax and will refuse to work if you forget a single semi-colon (semi-colons are often put at the end of a line of code, similar to how a period is placed at the end of a sentence to signify its end). Other languages, such as Python, have relatively no syntax structure that must be followed. For instance, Python has relatively no semi-colons, and very few curly braces to organize its code compared to C#.
Learning a syntactically-specific programming language first will give you a firm understanding of the proper structure you need to follow when writing code. By becoming aware of the proper indentation structure, the necessity to end your line of code with a semi-colon, and the requirement for your functions to be written within the confines of curly braces, you will be able to write code that is easily-understandable, more organized, and easier to maintain and debug. Furthermore, this will help give you a template with which to write your code when you begin venturing into new languages that aren’t as strict with syntax.
In essence, learn the discipline now, and reap the rewards later. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-become-fluent-in-multiple-programming-languages-9f473c146b90 | ['Madison Hunter'] | 2020-12-28 18:32:49.560000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Education', 'Data Science', 'Programming', 'Coding'] |
Cleaning services in Delhi | Cleaning services in Delhi
It is very important for many of us to sacrifice a day off to clean our home. Want to spend a quiet time away from the office cleaning your home? If not, then you can sit back and look forward to an extremely enjoyable experience with the best cleaning service providers in Delhi.
Service on wheel is an online platform that connects you with the best professional service providers. They are experienced in performing all types of cleaning services in Delhi. Whether it’s daily house cleaning or general cleaning, our professionals are trained to provide you with the best service efficiently.
Our cleaning services in Delhi include special cleaning of water tanks, septic tanks, bathrooms, kitchens, sofas, carpets, mattresses and anything else you might need at any time. All professional service providers listed on our website are only vetted after a thorough background check. Our Delhi home cleaning services are tailored to your individual needs. This way, you have nothing to worry about and rest as the professionals will take care of your home cleaning.
Despite its importance and relevance in our daily life, cleaning the house is often overlooked. While most of us want our homes to be in their original condition, it is not very practical to do a general cleaning from time to time. The seasoned professional cleaners who have made a career in providing deep cleaning services in Delhi especially need to fight this. While you are relaxing and enjoying your vacation or weekend, the cleaners will not only help keep your home tidy, but also keep it safe and tidy.
The kitchen and bathroom are the hardest areas when it comes to deep cleaning. Dirt and stains on tiles and floors in kitchens and bathrooms are a nightmare. With the experience and training of our professional deep cleaning services in Delhi, you can keep it glowing all year round. Since deep cleaning involves special cleansing rituals, we recommend that you opt for our deep cleaning services once every 2–3 months in Delhi for the best results.
Service on wheel exists to provide you the services you need at affordable prices from trusted and trusted professionals. To get professional home cleaning services in Delhi, all you need to do is log in to the site. Once you have booked your Service on wheel service, our team will take care of the rest. Our trained and well-equipped technicians will make sure every corner of your home is cleaned. We pride ourselves on our timely services, ensuring that our methods are safe and effective at the same time. Book our Delhi cleaning services, relax and unwind. it is so simple. | https://medium.com/@vibhu-singh987/cleaning-services-in-delhi-b2f9599ff1fc | ['Vibhu Singh'] | 2021-11-22 06:49:36.963000+00:00 | ['Cleaning Services', 'Cleaning Company', 'Cleaning', 'Services'] |
A beginner guide to the Ethereum 1.0 architecture | Photo by Clifford Photography on Unsplash
Summary. This article aims to help beginners better understand the Ethereum 1.0 blockchain network from its architecture. The technology will be explained in plain English. This article will be the basis to further introduction to the recently launched Ethereum 2.0 network, that has both similarities and differences.
If you find this article helpful, please don’t forget to click the “claps” on the bottom. If this article has raised your interest in the blockchain technology, please subscribe our channel for more information in the future.
As one of the world’s leading blockchain platforms, the emergence of Ethereum marked a turning point in the blockchain industry. The biggest difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin provides a worldwide decentralized ledger whereas Ethereum aims to build a global decentralized supercomputer.
There are thousands of articles on the internet introducing Ethereum. If you still have no idea what the structure of a blockchain platform is, after reading all these buzzwords such as “tamper-proof”, “decentralized” and “encrypted”, we hope the following explanation will help you.
Let’s start from the closest part to the users, then gradually move backwards to the backend.
Dapp — Decentralized Application
A dapp or decentralized application is an application built on a decentralized network that combines a smart contract and a frontend user interface. Dapps look no different from any other applications on your smartphone but are run by smart contracts. Compare to a centralized application, a dapp will continue to execute even if the developing company does not exist anymore, because they are decentralized, which means: no one has single control over them. Dapps also have the following important characteristics:
- Deterministic: they perform the same function irrespective of the environment they are executed
- Turing compatible: Given the required resources, the dapps can perform any action
- Isolated: The dapps are executed in the Ethereum Virtual Machines so that if the smart contracts happen to have a bug, it won’t affect the whole blockchain network.
What are Smart Contracts?
Smart Contract
A smart contract is simply a program that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a collection of code and data that resides at a specific address on the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts are a type of Ethereum accounts, not real contracts. Like a vending machine, anyone can buy drinks through putting the required amount of money into the machine instead of purchasing from a person. Smart contracts contain predefines inputs. Once a smart contract is triggered, it will always produce the same output under any circumstances.
Furthermore, anyone can write a smart contract and deploy it to the network. You can also call other smart contracts in your own smart contract. The frequently used languages to write smart contracts on Ethereum are called Solidity and Vyper.
Accounts
Ethereum has two types of accounts: external-owned and contract accounts.
An external-owned account (EOA) is similar to your bank account, which includes an address (account no.) and a balance of ETH. It costs nothing to create such an account. You can control it with your private key (password). You can initiate transaction and receive ETH from other external-owned accounts, just like using your bank account.
A contract account includes two more content than external-owned account, codes and storage. It is controlled by codes. To create a contract account has cost because you’re using the Ethereum network storage. A contract account can only send transactions in response to receiving a transaction, but when a transaction from an external-owned account to a contract account can trigger code which can execute many different actions. What is a transaction in Ethereum?
Transactions
The official definition of transaction is cryptographically signed instructions from accounts. A simple transaction is similar to a bank transaction, sending ETH from one account to another. However, a bank transaction means the currency physically transferred from one account to another, but an Ethereum transaction simply means the state-changing action of debtor and creditor’s balance.
Besides sending ETH from one account to another, a transaction can also create smart contract and call other smart contracts. As we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The idiom applies in the blockchain network. All transactions require a fee and must be mined to become valid. The fee is called Gas, a reference to the computation required to validate the transaction by a node, which is usually paid in ETH. Complicated transactions will require higher fees than simple ones. Other reasons will cause difference in fee prices as well.
However, all computers in the world have different processing power. Since anyone can join the Ethereum blockchain network, how can Ethereum assure that an arbitrary transaction will cost a fair price regardless the computing differences? Here we need to take a look at the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
What is a virtual machine? A virtual machine is a virtual operating system but behaves like a physical computer. A good introduction on virtual machines can be found here, if you feel difficulty to understand the concept. The original purpose of virtual machine was to narrow the gap among computers so that the developers can run their software in different operating systems without changing hosting computer. It also provides a safe and sandbox environment for testing. Due to the complexity of the EVM, we are not going not dive deeper in this article. But if you are interested to know more, please let us know.
Why does Ethereum use a virtual machine? The Bitcoin blockchain does not contain a virtual machine, because it is a ledger in essence, a system that shows the transition of ownership. The Bitcoin blockchain has script engine to process simple transaction. But Ethereum aims to build a blockchain network allowing anyone to write smart contracts and decentralized application where they can create their own arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and state transition functions. Namely, the Ethereum blockchain needs to process complicated logic. Hence, it requires a virtual machine to support various code under various circumstances.
Why EVM?
The EVM was designed to meet the following requirements.
- Small code size. The EVM is running inside an Ethereum node. Small code size will save space so that users can store more smart contracts in one node.
- Determinism. Given an input, then it has to produce a deterministic output. Thus, the nodes are able to reach agreement (consensus), and the gas consumed at each step will also be calculated exactly the same.
Simple and secure. A blockchain virtual machine should be isolated without the capacity to communicate with the external environment.
(*simplified architecture of Ethereum 1.0 referred from the Ethereum Stack)
We hope this explanation will help you better understand the Ethereum blockchain network. | https://medium.com/jasmy-league/a-beginner-guide-to-the-ethereum-1-0-architecture-af44973c929b | ['Jasmy League'] | 2020-12-11 04:48:46.085000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Jasmy League', 'Smart Contracts', 'Evm', 'Ethereum'] |
How To Practice Gratitude With This Simple Daily Habit | How To Practice Gratitude With This Simple Daily Habit
When sh*t hits the fan, I don’t want to be grateful.
“Why is it so hard to practice gratitude on a daily basis?” “I know I need to be grateful but some days I just don’t think there is anything to be grateful about” “When life is good, I have all the gratitude in the world. But when it’s crap, it’s hard to see the light.”
Gratitude is easy when life is easy
Practicing gratitude, being grateful, giving thanks…this is what all the happiness experts tell us to do.
It’s easy to notice the good things in life when everything is going smoothly.
You got a good night’s sleep.
The barista got your order right.
There was no traffic on the way to work.
That annoying coworker is on vacation.
You had a fabulous dinner with your besties last night.
Your parents are healthy and haven’t nagged you in weeks.
You and your partner are in a sweet spot.
The cold and flu season is finally over and the kids didn’t get sick.
Then BAM, shit happens! All these little things seem to vanish into thin air and it’s like the world is now against you.
Fuck gratitude! I just need to get through whatever disaster life just handed me.
Gratitude isn’t the first thing we think of when we experience adversity
Last summer, I was having a pretty typical week. I don’t even remember what I did but it was probably along the lines of writing a bunch, going for long walks with my pregnant belly and eating all the berries and delicious summer produce I can get my little hands on.
Sunday morning hits (like 8 am) and someone’s pounding on our front door. My husband gets up and trudges to the intercom,
“Hello?” “It’s your neighbour, Bob. “Oh, okay. I’m coming down.”
My husband goes downstairs, opens the door and chats with Bob. He comes up while I’m brushing my teeth and tells me that my car was broken into.
I put a jacket on, my Birkenstock knockoffs and go outside to check.
Glass is everywhere. The glove compartment is open. My insurance papers are scattered across the passenger seat.
What the fuck?
I’m thinking,
“Why did this have to happen to me? Of all the people in the world, I don’t deserve this. I’m a good person. I follow the rules. I’m a law-abiding citizen. It’s not fair!”
I’m angry, violated, annoyed, scared and upset but mostly frustrated. Now my day is ruined. I have to clean this shit up, schedule something with the glass repair shop and pay my car insurance deductible. What a nuisance!
Gratitude was the least of my concerns.
But then those words of wisdom, inspirational quotes, Ted Talks from all the self-help gurus/happiness experts started to flood into my mind.
G-R-A-T-I-T-U-D-E
But I couldn’t just think of random things I was grateful for.
Nor could I quickly change my mindset to a “half glass full” perspective:
“Hey, at least they didn’t gut your car and sell it for parts.”
It’s like imagine you’re at a white person’s Thanksgiving dinner and everyone around the table starts going in a circle, saying what they’re thankful for. It’s your turn but you can’t think of anything so you just come up with something generic.
“I’m grateful for my family.” “I’m thankful for my health.” “I’m grateful for this food.”
It’s so easy to default to one thing, person or place.
But when you keep saying the same thing, practicing gratitude becomes a mindless act and you start taking for granted whatever or whoever you’re grateful for.
I needed a format, a formula, some structure, a cue…something to remind me to practice gratitude as a habit while forcing me to think beyond the few token things.
Making the Gratitude Practice a Habit
As I went back into my house to get the broom, I hear my daughter’s toy singing the alphabet song.
What if I went through the alphabet, thinking of things, people, places and/or feelings that I’m grateful for that start with that letter?
And I wouldn’t stop until I did all the letters.
Could I really think of something I’m grateful for that starts with an X beside the xylophone?
I did.
Check out my list below.
Here’s My Alphabet Gratitude List
A: All of you. I am thankful to each of you for supporting my journey and reading my blog. Putting my thoughts and feelings into words makes it all worth it because of all of you.
B: Bananas. I’m grateful for bananas. They’re like nature’s dessert. Banana and peanut butter sandwiches, banana pancakes, banana muffins, banana and chocolate, a plain banana.
C: Coffee. My daughter hasn’t been sleeping well this week so I’m grateful that the Ethiopians discovered coffee in the 11th century so I have the energy to get through my days.
D: Daughter. She makes me laugh all the time. I love her randomness and the way she speaks Cantonese, saying Aiya 哎呀 and frowning before anything else like a middle-aged Asian woman.
E: Egypt: This is where my husband proposed to me. I’m not a super romantic person but getting engaged at a botanical garden whilst looking at the Nile River is a moment I will always be grateful for.
F: Friends. I’m always grateful for how quickly my friends and I can just start talking about real stuff even if we haven’t seen each other in months.
G: Garlic. Garlic Fries. Garlic Hummus. Roasted Garlic. Garlic Oil. Garlic Toast. Garlic Sausage. Yum.
H: Home: I’ve always defined my home as the people in it, not necessarily the location or physical space that I am in. And when I come home to my husband and daughter (soon, my son), I’m incredibly grateful to be surrounded by these people who love me unconditionally and give me a safe space to be myself.
I: Instagram This is where all the good people are…seriously. I have met so many people that I never would have met on this channel.
J: Japan: My husband and I went to Japan when I was 5 months pregnant and boy that was a bad idea. I didn’t feel like eating any of the delicious food and I was tired all the time. Pregnancy hormones and sleeping in tiny places made me extra cranky. So I’m grateful for my husband who took care of me and patiently took every mean and condescending hit
K: Kabocha: I love this squash. It’s sweet, tender and you can eat the skin. I’m so grateful I live in a city where I can buy this whenever I want (when it’s on sale, of course).
L: Luke Danes: So confession time, when I watched
Gilmore Girls in high school, everyone was crushing on Dean and Jess. But I had my eye on Luke. I appreciate those fond memories as a 14-year-old having the hots for the “old dude.” Anyone else or was it just me?
M: McDonald’s coffee: I’d say 90% of the time, I make my coffee at home. I am no coffee snob, more like your grandma who enjoys a plain cup Maxwell House or Folgers. But when I do get a chance to buy one, I appreciate McDonald’s coffee. It has just the right bitterness and aroma for my taste.
N: Naps: I used to take naps all the time. I remember in University, if I had a lecture that ended early, I would rush home and take a nap. Now I just look forward to when my daughter is napping. It’s not just because I get some time to myself, but I love watching her peaceful and angelic face while she snores like a tiny demon.
O: Oppa: This in Korean means “older brother.” Recently, we started watching Kim’s Convenience, a show about a Korean-Canadian family who owns a convenience store and it’s hilarious. It’s making me reminisce about 2012 when Psy’s Gangnam Style came out and everybody was saying “Oppa Gangnam Style” and doing that ridiculous dance. If you haven’t seen it, where were you in 2012?
P: Pho: Don’t you just love a bowl of rice noodles and beef broth on a cold day? I could probably eat Pho every day if I could. I like mine with extra hot sauce, a crumpled Thai basil leaf, a shit ton of sprouts and a squeeze of lime.
Q: Questions: I love questions. My husband tells me whenever we talk about something deep, I get into my interrogation mode. I’m always asking questions about why something is the way it is. I think when we stop asking questions, we stop learning and growing. Questions help us understand but accepting that not all questions have answers and going through the journey of getting those answers is what makes life exciting.
R: Russell Brand: I’m an avid listener of the Tony Robbins podcast and I listened to the one with Russell Brand on.
There was this moment when Russell says something about how when he was younger, he had these internal beliefs about the way he should interact with the different genders. He always felt like he needed to compete with other men. With women, he always felt he needed to impress them, woo them into loving him.
I might be totally off but it’s the gist of what I think he said. Anyway, I think I felt similar to that belief until I hit my late 20s. It’s making me think about how my parents raised me and why I only had female friends growing up. More to come…
S: Salt: My husband’s a realtor and on the weekends while he does his open houses, my daughter and I get to spend quality time together. Lately, our routine has been making muffins and doing Yoga while we wait for them to bake. She knows all the ingredients. The other day, she saw my husband putting salt on some Yu Choy and she scolds him, telling him to stop because the salt is only for making muffins. She cracks me up.
T: Thermos: I don’t buy coffee most days. I bring my own in a Thermos that is over a decade old. It’s dented, super stained and sometimes a bit leaky. But I love it. It keeps my coffee hot and whenever I press that big red button to release its goodness, I can feel my day pick up.
U: Ultimately: I like this word because whenever I say it, it makes me think of the bigger picture. I tend to go down rabbit holes when I start to worry or freak out about all the “what ifs.”
For instance, when I first started filming myself and making videos, I was thinking, “What if people hate my voice? My facial expressions?”
But I reminded myself this:
“As long as I am being authentic to who I am, that’s all that matters. Ultimately, authenticity shines over what other people think.”
V: Vancouver: My husband, myself and our daughter were actually all born in Vancouver. Our roots are here and we love it. We can go hiking in the mountains, kayaking in Deep Cove and go for hot pot all on the same day. As my mom says, it’s one of the few places you get to experience all 4 seasons. We can’t imagine living anywhere else.
W: World Wide Web: So I’ve started running again. I took a break from it for almost a year to do more yoga and weight training. But I’m back at it and it’s kicking my ass.
I recently watched the latest Mission Impossible movie and I was like,
“Damn…Tom Cruise runs a lot and he’s making me want to run now.”
So because of the wonders of the World Wide Web, I was able to find a YouTube video where they stitched all the scenes where Tom is running into an 18:10 clip, which is perfect right after my warm-up and before my cool down. I feel like I’m running with Tom Cruise and my favourite scene is Vanilla Sky, running in the empty streets of Times Square.
X: Xiōng dì jiě mèi: This means brothers and sisters in Chinese (Mandarin pinyin) and I love saying this word. Although I don’t have brothers, I’m grateful for my sisters. Siblings just get it…you know?
Z: Zen: I’m currently trying to fit in meditation into my days and I have to honest, it hasn’t been easy. I appreciate those chances to experience a Zen moment because it is so gratifying. My mind clears and things seem simpler.
So Readers, how do you practice gratitude? What’s the toughest part about being grateful when you are struggling to see the light? | https://medium.com/change-becomes-you/how-to-practice-gratitude-with-this-simple-daily-habit-9f5018ce0f59 | ['Katharine Chan', 'Msc', 'Bsc'] | 2020-12-17 00:04:16.339000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Growth', 'Self', 'Gratitude'] |
Normalizing ties: An absurd phrase | ‘Normalizing ties’ is an absurd phrase of today’s global politics.
Sovereignty, self-determination, and recognition are some of the most absurd terms when one considers the realities of world politics. And now ‘normalizing ties’ joins the row. It is quite clear that the qualification of statehood is, “a fixed territory, population, a government, and sovereignty”. But it is obvious that sovereignty or in other words ‘self-determination’ does not have any fixed definition in today’s global politics. For instance, the United States of America has dominating influence over world politics, IMF and the World Bank, almost hijacking the United Nations Organization, and she does not care about the self-determination or sovereignty of any state when it comes to defending her interests. ‘Invasion of Baghdad’ is an elephant-like mighty and huge example in this regard as George W. Bush Jr. did not care about the UN or the international community before hampering the sovereignty of Iraq. US, its allies, and its mighty foes often damage the self-determination of the states in the Middle East and the world whenever they feel a challenge to their interests, making the term ‘sovereignty’ or ‘self-determination’ absurd. Another example in this regard is the assassination of the commander of the Iranian elite Quds Force Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, which was confirmed by the current president of the United States Donald J. Trump that he had ordered Soleimani’s execution. Iran in response fired eighty missiles on American brigades in the same city of Iraq, Baghdad. Which calls the attention of the international community particularly the scholars to clarify whether Iraq is a sovereign and independent nation or not.
International law defines sovereign states as having a permanent population, defined territory, one government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood that a sovereign state is neither dependent on nor subjected to any other power or state.
‘Recognition’ ranks second in my list of absurd terms as it is merely a coin used for bridging diplomatic ties between the states and nothing much more than that. For example, many states in the Muslim World, particularly in the Middle East do not recognize Israel but they do have cordial terms under curtain with the only Jewish State on the globe. Their citizens visit one another’s states via indirect flights, many Israelis have businesses in Muslim, specifically in the Arab states under proper government shelter and the governments also enjoy secret support for one another. For instance, Ayatollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, including many other elite politicians of Tehran, had often termed America ‘Great Satan’ and Israel ‘Little Satan’. Whereas it is not negligible that the ‘Islamic Republic’ contacted the ‘Little Satan’ to ask the ‘Great Satan’ for weapons, known as ‘Iran Contra Scandal’, as the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88) was still on. Morocco is also in the list as she enjoys secretive terms with Israel, but has not recognized it yet.
Besides, many states have not recognized Israel as a state yet but that has not changed her status as a state on practical grounds. The American president, Donald J. Trump has recently recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel giving an obvious signal that mighty states do not care about international law and international organizations, making the term ‘recognition’ even more complex than before. Also, he recognized Western Sahara as Moroccan territory and nobody can do anything to reverse the recognition but to question it verbally and remind the world that the peak of the civilization holds no more credibility to be the flag bearer of the ‘New World Order’ that she promised to the world in the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama claiming it to be ‘The End of The History’.
‘Normalizing ties’ ranks third in the list now. As, Morocco joins UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan in normalizing ties with the only Jewish state in the world. Definitely, from the surface it seems that Rabat and Tel Aviv will have diplomatic relations now, they will trade mutually and also support each other on political grounds where required2.
But wait a minute, then what is so absurd about the term, ‘normalizing ties’?
The answer is not very straight. Ronen Bergman may answer this question well. He wrote in ‘The New York Times’ on 10th of December, “Behind the announcement Thursday that Israel and Morocco will establish their first formal diplomatic ties, there lies almost six decades of close, secret cooperation on intelligence and military matters between two nations that officially did not acknowledge each other.”
Let’s count the blessings that both the states have showered on each other for decades. Then ponder with deeper concerns whether ‘normalizing ties’ has a definite definition or it has zig-zag meanings like the terms mentioned before;
· Some one million Israelis are from Morocco. As, a great number of Jews were living in Morocco before the birth of the Jewish State in 1948. Many of those Jews migrated to Israel secretly and many with the help and consent of the Moroccan state and authorities.
· Israel provided weapons and trained Moroccans in using them; it supplied surveillance technology and helped organize the Moroccan intelligence service; and the two shared information gathered by their spies — the start of decades of such cooperation.
· Another crucial moment came in 1965 when Arab pioneers and military leaders met in Casablanca, and Morocco permitted Mossad (Israeli intelligence agency) to bug their gathering rooms and private suites. The snooping gave Israel an exceptional understanding of Arab thinking, abilities, and plans, which ended up being essential to Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces in planning for the 1967 war, a nail in the coffin of the Palestinian cause.
· Mr. Ben Barka, the opposition leader of Morocco was abducted by the Moroccans and allied Frenchmen in Paris, who was then tortured to death (in 1965). His dead body was disposed of by Mossad agents, which was never found.
· In the mid-1970s Morocco became the site of secret meetings between the former rivals Egypt and Israel. Meetings between the Egyptian and Israeli officials paved the way for the Camp David Accords of 1978.
· Later on, Tel Aviv persuaded the United States to provide military assistance to Morocco.
· In 1995, Moroccan intelligence became a part of a Mossad plan of recruiting Osama bin Laden’s secretary, to find and kill Bin Laden.
· King Muhammad VI has sought Israel’s help in winning American acquiescence to Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. Though the current American president has called it a ‘historic breakthrough’ as, consequently Rabat is to be included in the Abraham Accords, but that’s not all to understand the ground realities.
Let’s take a pause from the topic of the article and understand the Western Sahara Conflict.
The Western Sahara conflict is an ongoing conflict between the Polisario Front and the Kingdom of Morocco. The conflict originated from an insurgency by the Polisario Front against Spanish colonial forces from 1973 to 1975 and the subsequent Western Sahara War against Morocco between 1975 and 1991. Today the conflict is dominated by unarmed civil campaigns of the Polisario Front and their self-proclaimed SADR state to gain fully recognized independence for Western Sahara.
“This will not change an inch of the reality of the conflict and the right of the people of Western Sahara to self-determination,” the Polisario’s Europe representative Oubi Bchraya said earlier on Thursday. “The Polisario will continue its struggle.”
Senator Jim Inhofe, a member of Trump’s Republican Party, said the decision was “shocking and deeply disappointing.”
The peak of the civilization holds no more credibility to be the flag bearer of the ‘New World Order’ that she promised to the world in the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama claiming it to be ‘The End of The History’.
According to an analyst, America has to favor more liberal ideas than favoring Israel to give a clear message that it is not Israel who controls the White House or America. But this seems a far cry. Because things are not working this way. Donald Trump and his senior advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner seem more pro-Israel than pro-liberal ideas or liberalism.
To conclude, from the mentioned points it is crystal clear that Israel and Morocco already have very good relations, and the latest normalizing agreement is nothing more than a formality. Whereas the term ‘officially’ gives an additional covering to the phrase. But where stands law, what does ‘sovereignty’ mean and what can one understand from the term, ‘normalizing ties’, is absurd. One can easily reach to the conclusion through arguments presented in the article that Rabat and Tel Aviv are enjoying cordial and supernormal ties for a very long time. Then what does ‘normalizing ties’ mean which was called by the Trump administration on Thursday, 10th December 2020, that is beyond common sense.
Note: Pictures’ courtesy does not belong to the writer. | https://medium.com/@asadullahraisani/normalizing-ties-an-absurd-phrase-a441e3e4db2f | ['Asadullah Raisani'] | 2020-12-16 15:22:54.928000+00:00 | ['Morocco', 'USA', 'Israel', 'Middle East', 'Normalizing'] |
Climate Change-Hoax or Reality? | Climate Change-Hoax or Reality?
By Moina Rohira
In the words of Donald Trump, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Let’s go along with this statement and assume that climate change is indeed mythical, non-existent, a big money-making hoax if you might; how would one explain the rapidly increasing temperature of the Earth, with 17 of the 18 warmest years on record, all taking place every year since 2001? Not to mention how 279 billion tons of ice just ‘disappeared’ from Greenland this year. While the evidence is unequivocal, there are those who still don’t believe in climate change, the world focusing on this ridiculous debate while climate change continues to exist as a threat to our very existence.
One reason why climate change deniers exist is because of their own personal experiences. Let’s say you live in the American Midwest and still have snow and ice in winter; so how does that explain the hot, boiling, mess society says the world is turning into? A cold winter in the USA does not disprove climate change. Did you check how much hotter it was in Asia and Africa that same year? We need to look globally and much farther back than the last few years. A common misconception people have is that because it is raining more, things cannot possibly be getting hotter. Researchers from the University of Hull have examined the weather patterns of the last 10,000 years and it is precisely increasing temperatures that are causing more rain. The more heat there is, the more the oceans evaporate and the more the rain falls. For those saying that climate has always changed, yes, climate change is a natural cycle, but the speed with which glaciers are melting, carbon dioxide is increasing, and sea levels are rising, is far from ‘natural’. Recent changes do not look like past natural cycles; they are simply much too great and much too fast. Rises in global warming that once took centuries are now seen in just 40 years.
Then there are those who refuse to look at the evidence of climate change’s existence simply because scientists cannot come to a consensus about the matter. The problem behind this is that the world gets its information about climate change from the media. The media tries to portray the issue without bias and often lines up scientists against each other-one denier versus one believer. Ironically, in their attempt to represent this debate accurately, not only do they inaccurately portray that the scientific community is equally conflicted about this matter, but also encourage people to oppose an extremely prevalent global issue that needs to be dealt with at this very instant. The actual disagreement present in the scientific community is not 50/50 but more like 97/3; you can guess which way. Some deniers believe that any proof of the existence of climate change is a type of ‘fake science’ in hopes of changing public opinion. Data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery was publicly released to voice that glaciers are melting all over the world and the warming seen currently is occurring ten times faster than during the last Ice Age. As if that isn’t terrifying enough, ice cores drawn from Antarctica show that the melting of their snow-capped mountains this year was mainly due to the increased levels of carbon dioxide from human activity which is oh, just 250 times faster than the increase seen in the last Ice Age. That definitely would have taken more than just a year. All the evidence that is being released now is definitely in hopes of changing the public’s opinion; by that, I mean changing the laidback attitude with which people approach climate change. Deniers feel that the world is against them when it is really their ignorance that has caused the Earth to begin its descent to termination.
The Totten Glacier, Antarctica’s largest glacier has started to melt
A good number of people today, deniers as well as believers, refuse to accept that climate change is simply because…of us. It is because of anthropogenic(man-made) issues that glaciers are melting, storms are arising and some islands are already underwater. Yet some still continue to believe it is just a conspiracy created to claim tax money. The warming of the Earth as a result of human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the felling of trees, corresponds with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has been exponentially increasing since the industrial revolution. Man-made climate change is the biggest environmental crisis of our time and a significant number of people still believe that climate change is a future problem. This is simply not true and we already have the technology and resources needed to move to 100% renewable energy by 2045. What is needed is for political leaders to address the climate crisis and every nation to take responsibility and seriously invest themselves.
Whether it is the Illuminati, the government, scientists trying to make money or even aliens, there are hundreds of conspiracy theories refuting climate change. IT IS REAL. As real as it can be and we are the last generation that can do anything about it.
Works Cited
“10 Myths about Climate Change.” WWF, www.wwf.org.uk/updates/10-myths-about-climate-change.
Bradenton, and Bradenton Herald letter to the editor. “Don’t Mess with Mother Earth. Climate Change Is a Hoax: Letter to the Editor.” Bradenton, Bradenton Herald, 18 Nov. 2019, www.bradenton.com/latest-news/article237480339.html.
Cheung, Helier. “What Does Trump Actually Believe on Climate Change?” BBC News, BBC, 23 Jan. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51213003.
“Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?” NASA, NASA, 6 Oct. 2020, climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.
“Why Do Some People Think Climate Change Is a Hoax?” BestValueSchools, 2 Sept. 2020, www.bestvalueschools.com/faq/why-do-some-people-think-climate-change-is-a-hoax/.
“Why People Still Believe Climate Change Is Fake… and Why We Know They’re Wrong.” University of Hull, www.hull.ac.uk/special/blog/why-people-still-believe-climate-change-is-fake-and-why-we-know-theyre-wrong. | https://medium.com/the-green-code/climate-change-hoax-or-reality-77c6d645e66 | ['Tgc Team'] | 2020-12-25 05:43:49.189000+00:00 | ['Climate Action', 'Reality', 'Science', 'Environment', 'Climate Change'] |
Trump’s Medal of Freedom | Trump’s Medal of Freedom
Freedom, that is, from decency, civility, and restraint
Image by Javier Robles from Pixabay
The Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor in America
According to Wikipedia, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is awarded by the president of the United States “for especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors”.
Which just goes to show that you can’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia. Because at his last State of the Union address, Trump bestowed the Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh. To be precise, the President had First Lady Melania — who has chosen anti-bullying as her advocacy focus — do the actual bestowing in a staged surprise move that would have made P.T. Barnum blush.
Perhaps the Current Occupant had a puff of sincerity when he orchestrated the gesture: Mr. Limbaugh had the day before announced he is suffering from stage four lung cancer, and there is no doubt having the highest honor in the land draped around his neck on national TV did a lot to lift his spirits. Really, though, if that was Trump’s intent, I do wish he’d delivered the man a fruit basket with a nice card instead.
I’d be the first person to say that nobody deserves lung cancer. But I have a hard time thinking of a public figure — at least one who is currently at large— who deserves the Medal of Freedom less than Rush Limbaugh.
The medal is bestowed entirely at the President’s discretion, of course, so once again Trump is taking the opportunity to revel in doing what nobody can tell him not to. As public spectacles go, I’ve never seen such an elaborate slap in the face of such a large swath of the American public.
Previous medals have gone to leaders in the arts, human rights, statesmanship, medicine, and journalism. Recipients have included General Colin Powell (twice), Mother Theresa, Rosa Parks, Edward R. Murrow, Nelson Mandela, and Jonas Salk. Also, Joe Biden in 2017, although I’m not sure Trump knows that and I’d be surprised if anybody in his sphere had the temerity to tell him.
The backlash has been swift and vehement. Paul Reyes, in his piece in The Hill, pulls no punches:
He is not a great man worthy of a high honor. He is a mean-spirited bully who will be remembered for his vitriol . . . His career reflects the worst brand of destructive partisanship. Limbaugh receiving the Medal of Freedom contaminates the honor for all past and future recipients.
But it’s Talmon Joseph Smith, in his opinion piece in the New York Times (Rush Limbaugh In His Own Words, Feb. 7, 2020)that perhaps best illustrates the cynicism and perversity of giving the award to America’s most vituperative, hate-mongering schlock jock. Smith does so simply by letting the man’s words speak for him, presenting a list of just a few of Limbaugh’s most noxious utterances. Here is just a small sample:
“Feminism was established so that unattractive ugly broads could have easy access to the mainstream.” “The N.A.A.C.P. should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.”
Whenever and however America finds its way out of the dark hall of funhouse mirrors in which we’re currently trapped, we will need a period of healing, of restoration, of re-establishing the principles that once lay at our national core.
And for sure, we’ll need a different medal. Because the Medal of Freedom has lost its meaning. | https://medium.com/the-national-discussion/trumps-medal-of-freedom-31dc0728cd13 | ['Jan M Flynn'] | 2020-02-10 02:35:12.409000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Leadership', 'Trump', 'Racism', 'Life'] |
I Don’t Trust Any Scientist Younger Than 200 Years Old | Oregon State Board of Higher Education, 1969 . . . By Unknown author — PDX.edu, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43129222
I’m an old-school classically trained scientist and I am paid by nobody. At my university (Portland State) I didn’t sign up for scholarships either — a university can sort of own you. I really distrust scientists who allow their employers to own them.
In college, studying maths and sciences, I didn’t waste my time actually attending classes unless the professor wanted me there to encourage other students. I found that generally for each of the three quarters in a school year I could read the necessary chapters in 6 or 8 hours and just take the midterm and final exams. My goal was to learn the material and pass. Well, by “pass” I mean 100% — there’s little value in being a scientist if you don’t know it well.
Which is a huge problem now — for scientists in general. The ones educated in the U.S. tend to have huge gaps in their mathematics, and apparently never were taught scientific method. Or they were, and don’t use it. If they were equivocal wimps, maybe that wouldn’t matter. But assertive scientists with these educational gaps who are quoted or published for consumption by the general public . . . (I won’t say what I’d do to them, but it’s PG-13 or worse.) | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/i-dont-trust-any-scientist-younger-than-200-years-old-56c454f62f16 | ['Fred Ermlich'] | 2020-12-17 21:02:44.806000+00:00 | ['Scientific Method', 'The Bad Influence', 'Bad Science', 'Scientist', 'Fred Ermlich'] |
Nova START! Nova Star is Launched… almost! | Culminating the last 3 days, days 53, 54 and 55, have been full of excited work to debug and finalize the working release of Nova Star version 1.0! While it seemed like we were so close the last time I checked in, after some rigorous play testing and feedback from our team leaders, we determined that we fixing certain bugs before release was the right call.
Screen Grab of the different weapons for release!
Some of these bugs were more stubborn than others, but after some long peer coding sessions, we ironed out all the bugs and prepared for release.
My job after the initial build was to build a marketing strategy for the project. I tackled this by first determining what factors needed to be considered for! The Trello kanban board that our lead Joanne set up was perfect for this and the items that she listed provided a clear path for me to follow!
Marketing Strategy!
The one item on the list that I really REALLY thought would be the most impactful was a video. While words are great, and they say a picture tells a thousand words, a video — a video must tell a million.
So, that started my venture into figuring out how exactly to create a video when I have ZERO experience in video editing. This led me to exactly what this whole internship and experience has taught me.
USE RESOURCES AVAILABLE TO YOU!
With this in mind, I remembered that one of the leads actually has extensive video editing knowledge, and I have an Adobe subscription that I’ve been itching to use! I asked Austin Mackrell if he’d be willing to help me make a trailer for the game — and he thankfully agreed! Don’t get me wrong, internet searches and research would have been next on my list if Austin had not been able to help, but I’m glad that he was available to assist, it probably saved me HOURS!
Next, for the very first time I opened Adobe Premier Pro and got to work, having recorded some footage of the release build before hand working away at the timeline and effects. To my surprise, Premier was not all that different from making timeline events in Unity! I was thankfully able to pick it up pretty quick with some (a lot) of help from Mr. Austin and we were able to successfully create a trailer for the Nova Star project!
Watch it here:
Now in full release!
Now, to the “almost” part in the title. The game is technically released as of today, however we do want to be able to present it to our entire internship first. So, until we are able to finish that presentation and reveal, I’ll be keeping the location of the release a secret…for now. Trust me that you’ll be the first to know once all of the secrecy and subterfuge is over!
I’m just beyond excited that this is finally “finished” and the hard work and dedication that my team and I have shown over the past couple weeks can really be shown off for everyone to see. It’s been such a rare and wonderful experience being able to work with people who just mesh well, communicate and cooperate like my team has. And while things weren’t “perfect” its in no fault of my team members and I believe that given the circumstances, the first time working together, the git issues, and time constraints, we did admirably.
And I can’t wait to show it off to all of you tomorrow!
— Ryan
Maker of Trailers | https://medium.com/@rjyamura/nova-start-nova-star-is-launched-almost-99a200231fd4 | ['Ryan Yamura'] | 2020-12-18 06:22:08.645000+00:00 | ['Intern', 'Projects', 'Software Development', 'Gamedevhq'] |
Chronic inflammation is the dangerous head of the monster. | Chronic inflammation is the dangerous head of the monster.
This is a personal story reflecting many years of suffering from inflammation and debilitating muscular pain.
I want to share my eye-opening experience with you so that you may learn from the insights gained in my journey. This journey represents my transformation from a suffering human being to a high performing one, both physically and mentally.
By using many experiments and studies of anatomy, I managed to understand the nature of inflammation. It took many years of hard work and struggle, I finally turned inflammation to a harmless beast in my life. Why do I call it a beast or a monster?
I use the metaphor of a double-headed monster when defining inflammation in my publications and education programs. The one head of it could be good for us, and the other head detrimental, causing us grief and suffering. The good head represents acute, and the bad one represents chronic inflammation.
We need to find ways to tame the bad head of this beast.
Inflammation is inevitable in our bodies. It is a natural healing process. It is the good head of the monster.
However, there are times it can be excessive and cause a myriad of problems for our health. We call it chronic inflammation and it is the dangerous head of the monster.
Let me share my poignant story. | https://medium.com/illumination/chronic-inflammation-is-the-dangerous-head-of-the-monster-78112d787a1 | ['Dr Mehmet Yildiz'] | 2020-12-24 05:47:41.233000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Health', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement', 'Leadership'] |
Serial Killer Confessions | Most people have dreams of things they want to do that they want to become. Mark Twitchell dreamt of being a Serial Killer.
Mark Twitchell interrogation by Edmonton Police | via Murderpedia
Mark Andrew Twitchell is known as the Dexter Copycat Killer.
The fictional character Dexter Morgan is a forensic bloodstain analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department by day and a serial killer by night.
Mark Twitchell was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 4, 1979. In September 2008, Twitchell, an aspiring filmmaker, shot his first film, a short horror story in a garage he rented in Edmonton.
The film was titled “House of Cards.” The film shows a man who thought he was planning to meet a woman he met on a dating website. Instead, he is ambushed by a killer who had lured him to his death. The killer binds the victim to a table and starts chopping his body apart with a butcher knife.
John Brian Altinger | via Edmonton Journal
Plenty of Killers Online
John Brian Altinger, 38, had been using the dating website Plenty of Fish, where he met a woman named Jen. The two had planned to meet in person. The only problem was, the woman was actually Twitchell trolling for a victim to murder.
Shortly after Johnny went on his date, his friends started receiving odd messages from him. Johnny claimed that he and Jen were going to Costa Rica. At the same time, Johnny’s boss at Argus Machine, where he worked, received a resignation letter via email. His boss wrote back, asking where to send his final check, and got no reply. The same went for his friends when they asked what was really going on.
Believing something was amiss, some of his friends got together and broke into Johnny’s condo. Inside they found their friend’s passport, and it didn’t appear that anything had been packed. They immediately called the police.
Gilles Tetreault | via Edmonton Journal
A Trail of Sickness
The week before Johnny planned to meet Jen, another man was lured by Twitchell to the garage. When Gilles Tetreault entered the building, he saw Twitchell coming at him with a stun baton.
Laying on the ground, stunned and scared, Tetreault said his life started to flash before his eyes. He thought about how his family would never see him again.
As Twitchell started to put duct tape across his eyes, he knew he had to fight back, or the man in the hockey mask was going to rape and kill him.
“I decided I’d better fight back. I’d rather die my way to his way.” Tetreault would later say in court.
Tetreault fought for his life and somehow got out of the garage but fell in the gravel. That’s when Twitchell came outside and started dragging him back in by the legs. Again, Tetreault broke free and ran. This time he was able to find a couple walking their dog on the street and begged for help.
Twitchell calmly walked up to the group and said he was friends with Tetreault and that it was just a joke. It appeared Twitchell was going to take off the hockey mask, but instead, he turned around and walked back to the garage.
When Tetreault got home, he went online and checked the profile for the woman he was supposed to be meeting. It had already been deleted.
On November 2, 2008, a friend told him about what had happened to Johnny Altinger. Gilles Tetreault knew he needed to call the police.
He told the police all about his horrible ordeal and said he didn’t come forward because Twitchell had threatened to hunt him down and kill him if he did.
The Kill Garage that Twitchell rented | via CBS News
Come On In
On October 10, 2008, Johnny arrived at the address Jen had given him and texted her when he got there just like she had asked. She quickly responded, telling him to come on in; she was waiting inside.
Johnny walked into the garage and found it set up as a “Kill Room,” just as it had been for Twitchell’s movie a few weeks before.
There was a large metal table in the center of the room, covered in plastic sheets. The whole area was covered in layers of plastic sheets. Twitchell had taken his cue from Dexter in this regard as a way to cover up the evidence.
Kill Room inside Garage | via Murderpedia
While Johnny was probably trying to figure out what was going on, Twitchell blindsided him with a butcher knife in one hand and a heavy pipe in the other.
Twitchell wasted no time slamming the pipe into Johnny’s forehead, knocking him first off-balance, then into unconsciousness. Twitchell used the knife to finish his victim off.
With Johnny now on the table, Twitchell dismembered his body and attempted to burn the remains. But TV doesn’t tell you just how hot it needs to be to burn a human body completely, and of course, TV never shows you how long something actually takes.
Twitchell growing impatient decided to dump the body parts in a sewer instead.
After all the physical work was done, the filmmaker started his next project. He opened his laptop and started to write a new story.
“This story is based on true events. The names and events were altered slightly to protect the guilty. This is the story of my progression into becoming a serial killer.”
Blood Traces found on floor of Garage | via Murderpedia
Edmonton Police Investigate
Before going on his date, Johnny had told his friends the address Jen had given him. The police quickly descended on the garage, and the owner gave the name Mark Twitchell as the renter.
Twitchell was brought in for questioning, and he denied knowing any Jen’s or a man named Johnny Altinger.
A search of Twitchell’s laptop, though, told the police everything they needed to know. They found the disturbing story Twitchell had written describing what he had done to his latest victim and how he planned to continue killing each Friday. | https://medium.com/true-crime-addiction/serial-killer-confessions-7ef4f7ee581d | ['Lisa Marie Fuqua'] | 2020-11-21 19:09:39.065000+00:00 | ['Justice', 'Online', 'True Crime', 'Dating', 'Culture'] |
This is just a Season | I wrote this while sitting on the back patio yesterday, when the breeze was light and the sunshine bright. My daughters have been a little down realizing that it’s unlikely they’ll return to their school and friends this year.
But yesterday, playing in the backyard, getting some much needed fresh air, and feeling the sunshine on their faces was just what the doctor ordered.
They laughed and chased the dog and did cartwheels and jumped roped. It was delightful to watch, but even more inspiring to hear.
Let this message inspire you, warm your heart, and bring forward front and center that this is just one season of our lives. | https://medium.com/warm-hearts/this-is-just-a-season-40c000f57d6f | ['Estrella Ramirez'] | 2020-04-04 15:31:00.846000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Seasons', 'Gratitude', 'Reflections', 'Poetry'] |
Halo Platform Bi-weekly Newsletter August 3rd, 2018 | Welcome to the Halo Platform bi-weekly newsletter! Every two weeks, we provide the latest updates on our development in several departments. In this week’s newsletter, we want to focus your attention on the continued development of HaloDEX, Halo Platform’s decentralized exchange.
HaloDEX Update
We are pleased to announce that the public beta release of HaloDEX will begin on August 15. The first available trading pair will be HALO/ETH. After a few days of testing, BTC and other token pairs will be added and available for trade.
Shortly after the launch of HaloDEX, we plan to start our Coin/Token Voting Competition. The competition will allow users to vote for their favorite projects to be listed on HaloDEX. Projects with the highest votes at the end of the competition will be reviewed and selected as the next coin/token added to HaloDEX. These votes will take place regularly, so vote early and often. If you want to see your project listed on the DEX, outside of the voting competition, you can inquire via email at [email protected].
The launch of HaloDEX is the next big step forward for Halo Platform. The Halo Platform team has poured everything they have into making HaloDEX a reality, and we are all very excited to see our vision unfold. But don’t think HaloDEX is all we have up our sleeves — we will have several more new cryptocurrency tools, products, and services to showcase. The Halo Platform team has been hard at work developing new platform features and blockchain-based services that will be ready for launch very soon — particularly from our Block & Chain Game Studio.
Centralized Exchange (HaloX) Update
The peer-to-peer margin funding system that matches trades, manages risk, and implements accounts has been completed and tested. Our team has hardened some of the matching engine core functions to improve scalability. Currently, we are focused on continuous deployment procedures that will allow modules of the exchange to be hot upgraded to minimize downtime.
Masternode System
The masternode system is still receiving regular updates to improve speed and usability. A big change is coming to the statistics view, which will show a user’s personal distribution of masternode ownership and how much Halo they have invested in masternodes. Masternode owners will also soon be able to request to have their masternode terminated directly from the dapp. Finally, our new API system will provide a long-term solution to performance issues caused by chain size. Look for the latest update very soon.
Portfolio
The Portfolio’s interface is still in the early stages of development, but we’ve finished the dashboard layout system and are now working on creating great looking charts to display multiple datasets from multiple exchanges. Pretty soon, we’re going to have many different chart types including (but not limited to) candlestick, OLHC and pie charts to show information like portfolio holdings, price history and other portfolio/exchange data.
Block & Chain Games Update
In the last newsletter, we teased Blockfight! — Block & Chain Game Studios’ exciting turn-based creature battle game. In this immersive dice rolling game, players battle hi-res 3D monsters for guts, glory, and valuable rewards. Beat them all and fill your trophy room! Blockfight will launch hot on the heels of HaloDEX, but to keep stoking the fire of excitement behind this and the other blockchain-enabled games under development at Block & Chain, we are pleased to share a gameplay clip from Blockfight. Stay tuned for more updates, as additional information on the game platform and our first titles will be shared in the coming days.
Halo Platform Resources
Masternode Instructions
Setting up and using a masternode is simple with the Halo Platform. Featherlite provides a step-by-step walkthrough of everything you need to do to acquire, deploy, join, watch, and collect awards from your masternode.
For detailed instructions with images, go here: https://wiki.haloplatform.tech/Masternodes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7BNkGWqJ4o
Masternode Estimated Reward Payouts
If you’re curious about masternode reward payouts, refer to the below community create spreadsheet.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ghIixsf4WSrd9RYEAEc3lzuB8pq9MX9mi27h39GJL-U/edit#gid=826076888
Block Explorer
Check out our searchable block explorer to take a close look at any block or transaction on the chain. In the coming days you’ll be able to see transactions for each wallet address on chain: https://explorer.haloplatform.tech/.
View our progress on our roadmap. https://www.haloplatform.tech/roadmap.html
Connect with us in social media
Twitter — https://twitter.com/Halo_Platform
Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/HaloPlatform/
Discord — http://discord.haloplatform.tech/
Telegram — https://t.me/haloplatform
Google+ — https://plus.google.com/u/0/108336112327687734137
Steemit — https://steemit.com/@haloplatform
Medium — https://medium.com/@haloplatform
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/HaloPlatform.tech/
Youtube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZqP3U9jFO0XTV6EYNt1dqg
Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/halo_platform/
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/haloplatform/
Where to Get Help
If you run into any issues with any of our products (and you’ve tried refreshing and full node and that doesn’t fix it), there are numerous ways to reach out to us:
Email: [email protected]
Discord: http://discord.haloplatform.tech/ (our moderators and support are online almost 24 hours a day. Special thanks to Moggy, Abe, Jay B., Pesh, and SeriousBasil237).
Website (we have a support platform built in): https://www.haloplatform.tech/
—
^Everyone @ Halo Platform | https://medium.com/haloplatform/halo-platform-bi-weekly-newsletter-august-3rd-2018-f4ed1fd653a2 | ['Halo Platform'] | 2018-08-03 21:59:44.966000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Exchange'] |
Reverence plus God equals wisdom | The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. — Proverbs 9:10
Wait what? Fear? Doesn’t God love us? Are we supposed to be afraid of Him? Well, yes and no.
Have you ever given God reason to be upset with you? If so, this definitely would be reason to be afraid. But doesn’t this fear come from knowing who He is? When we do wrong to someone weaker than ourself we aren’t typically scared of what they might do. But God made everything, knows everything, and exists in all time and places. When we upset the Maker of the universe, that is a chilling thought.
This awareness helps us understand what “fear of the Lord” means. We realize who He is. But God understands that the recognition of His power and authority is terrifying to us. So He has told us He loves us, and shows us that over and over. That changes our response from one of dread to one of reverence and awe. We do not have to cower in fear, but we come to Him in adoration. God’s love inspires our thankfulness, even as we declare His greatness.
This is where wisdom begins, in acknowledging God as all-powerful creator and yet knowing He loves us. It is a beautiful mix of reverence, awe and trust. | https://medium.com/@smallvoicetoday/reverence-plus-god-equals-wisdom-c73b2ef5a13d | ['Small Voice Today'] | 2021-02-05 12:40:06.842000+00:00 | ['Wisdom', 'Designed2encourage', 'Devotional', 'Bible', 'God'] |
Tutorial GIS (crud) Laravel dan leaflet js | in Digital and innovation at British Red Cross | https://medium.com/@eripratama/tutorial-gis-crud-laravel-dan-leaflet-js-69dd56a56faf | ['Eri Pratama'] | 2021-01-17 03:23:54.992000+00:00 | ['Tutorial', 'GIS', 'Laravel Framework', 'Laravel', 'Leaflet'] |
The 4 Best Online Learning Platforms in 2020 | If you are trying to learn a new skill online it can be difficult to decide which platform is best for you, I have chosen the 4 best platforms that I have used and I will explain why each one is worth a try.
Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
Udemy
Udemy has a wide range of courses but I mainly associate it with business skills and online skills. The courses will offer video-based learning, similar to youtube, and the instructor will guide you through course content by narrating or showing visuals.
Through my personal experience, Udemy is best used for learning skills that are not so specialised but are used by many people over many industries. Many of the courses have thousands of reviews so it’s very easy to find courses that other people would recommend so most of the top courses are at a good standard.
Most courses will tell you how long it will take to complete the course, the usual time period they suggest ranges from 1 day — 1 month, so if you’re looking to learn a specific skill in a relatively short period of time this ideal for you.
The price of the courses can vary from $10 to up to $200. I would recommend never paying over $30 because the website always offers deals on pretty much all courses on the website so buying at the highest price is an absolute rip off! When you buy the courses they will usually have a lifetime guarantee which allows you to access the content forever, this is mainly because Udemy offers you the courses individually priced, not through a monthly subscription.
Coursera
Coursera offers you courses provided by some of the biggest universities and businesses in the world. Yale, Google, University of London and IBM just to name a few. They let you earn certificates for completing courses and they offer full degrees all online. You can connect your account with your Linkedin account which is great if you are looking to share your newly gained skills to potential employers. A key selling point for them is that they offer you courses to build skills that employers want.
Courses on Coursera are not designed to be completed within a few hours, they are designed to be completed over months. The courses do have deadlines for submitting quizzes but they do not have any real importance, if you miss the deadlines it will not affect your final grade.
Many of Coursera’s courses are offered for free. If you want to gain a certification for completing a course or you want any of your course work to be graded you will need to pay. If you are looking for the latter then you will be looking at a cost of $29 — $100 a month for a specialized course. Coursera does offer Coursera Plus which allows you to have multiple courses under one subscription, this costs $390 for the year.
Codecademy
Codecademy is a great option if you are looking to learn a new programming language. Their courses offer an interactive platform that lets you learn by actually coding, this is great if you’re not a textbook person.
You can either do courses on specific languages like Python or Javascript, or you can choose a career path to learn. If you choose Data science for example you will need to complete SQL, Python 3, NumPy, pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn courses.
The great thing about Codecademy is that it is all within the browser, you do not need to download any additional software or have to change some settings on your computer, you can get straight into learning without any hassle.
The cost is currently $31.99 paying monthly or $15.99 a month paying for a yearly subscription, they also offer student discounts.
Youtube
This is a more obvious option but Youtube is an unbelievable source of information purely based on the fact that there will be a video about anything. There are lots of Youtube channels that are created just for offering courses in a specific topic. A quite useful tool on youtube are playlists, some youtube videos will be part of a whole series of tutorials and it will let you use the playlists as a course in itself.
Another positive of using youtube is that it’s free! You might feel the pain of adverts while watching videos but it is worth the annoyance seeing that it doesn’t cost a penny.
The only issue you could have is there are so many videos on the platform that it may be hard to filter the good from the bad. Once clicking on the videos see how many thumbs up’s or downs they have, this could be a quick filter to find the good videos that other users have enjoyed.
Summary
Whichever platform you decide to go with they will all provide a great service and I’m sure you will enjoy your time on all. All of the costly platforms do offer free trials if you do not feel like risking your money.
If you’re looking at a short time frame course that is for a specific skill Udemy is best. If you’re looking for a longer time frame course that gives you more of a university education style service Coursera is for you. If you are trying to learn a new skill in IT Codecademy is the right choice. Youtube will hold information on all topics you will ever need, once you find a few good channels it’s hard to overlook look. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-4-best-online-learning-platforms-in-2020-c86733f5226a | ['Harry Khan'] | 2020-11-22 16:07:51.163000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Productivity', 'Data Science', 'Buisness', 'Technology'] |
Solved: How to Duplicate Spotify Playlist | As one of the best and popular music streaming apps, Spotify provides users the capability to customize their own library and playlists. But one of the questions frequently asked by many Spotify users is that how can they duplicate the same Spotify playlist.
So next up we’re going to cover how to duplicate a Spotify playlist and keep both of the same playlists on your Spotify account.
How to Duplicate A Playlist on Spotify
Technically, you can’t immediately duplicate a playlist on Spotify, but you can get the same playlist in just a few easy steps:
1. Open Spotify on your desktop.
2. Create a new playlist by right click a playlist and click Create Playlist.
3. Go to the playlist you want to duplicate. Select all the songs by pressing Ctrl+A.
4. Drag the selection to the new playlist. Now you have duplicated a playlist on Spotify. This new playlist has the exact same songs as your original playlist. If you want it looks the same as the original playlist, you can rename it with the same name and add the same preview image to your new playlist.
How to duplicate someone’s Spotify playlist in your account?
To duplicate Spotify playlist from someone, you’ll need to go to his playlist page first. Then you can do the exact same steps above to duplicate this playlist.
If there’re songs you don’t want to listen to in the playlist, you can right-click the song and then click Remove from this Playlist. Or if you want to add more songs to this playlist, also right-click the song and hover your mouse to Add to Playlist. Then choose the playlist you want this song to be added to.
Can you duplicate playlists made by Spotify?
When you browse for the new playlists, you may find that some of them are curated by Spotify, can you duplicate these playlists too?
Yes, by doing the steps above, you can duplicate any playlist made by Spotify and edit it as your own playlist. Similar to duplicating, you can right-click the playlist to Create Similar Playlist to extend your music map. But this feature is only available for Premium users.
How to Download Spotify Playlist without Premium
It’s pretty easy to duplicate playlist on the desktop Spotify app, but sometimes you might mess up the duplicated playlist with the original one. To better manage them, how about download them all and get all your Spotify playlists on your file manager?
With TunesKit Spotify Music Converter, you can directly download all your Spotify playlists to your computer without Premium. After downloading your Spotify playlists to your computer, you can manage them on your file manager and play anywhere you want.
TunesKit Spotify Music Converter is designed to convert Spotify audio files into 6 different formats such as MP3, AAC, M4A, M4B, WAV and FLAC. Almost 100% of the original song quality will be kept after converting process. With 5X faster speed, it only takes few seconds to download each song from Spotify.
1 Launch TunesKit and Import Songs from Spotify
Open TunesKit software and the Spotify will be launched simultaneously. Then drag and drop tracks from Spotify into the TunesKit interface.
2 Set Up Output Parameters
After adding music tracks from Spotify to TunesKit, you can choose the output audio format. There’re six options including MP3, M4A, M4B, AAC, WAV and FLAC. And then you can adjust the audio quality by selecting the output channel, bit rate, and sample rate.
3 Start the Conversion
Once all the setting is finished, click the “Convert” button to start loading Spotify music tracks. After the conversion, all the files will be saved to your specified folder. You could browse all the converted songs by clicking “Converted” and navigate to the output folder.
4 Play Spotify Playlists Offline without Premium
After download Spotify playlists to your computer, you can access them on your file manager. No matter how Spotify changes, it will not affect these songs lying on your computer. You can play them anywhere you want without the Spotify app.
Bonus Tip: How to Delete Duplicate Spotify Songs
In the Spotify app, there’s no delete duplicate songs option in each playlist. So to delete duplicate songs, you’ll have to resort to other methods.
1. Manually Delete Duplicate Songs
To manually delete duplicate songs on Spotify, you’ll have to sort the songs in your playlist by title. Just click the TITLE on top of the first song in your playlist, then all the songs will be sorted by name. And then you can delete the duplicate songs.
2. Spotify Dedup
You can also go to spotify-dedup.com and log in to your account, it will go through your playlist and library. Then all the duplicate songs will be listed, you can delete them on the web page. | https://medium.com/@johnclaytonmayor/solved-how-to-duplicate-spotify-playlist-35bcc79c3ce9 | ['John Clayton Mayor'] | 2020-12-21 02:23:30.928000+00:00 | ['Spotify'] |
The Key Parts of an Essay: An Introduction to Introductions | Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash
If you’ve ever attended a formal banquet, you probably noticed that the host doesn’t automatically begin with the evening’s primary purpose. Instead, he or she may start with a joke or a story to warm up the audience and to establish a rapport with those in attendance. In other words, the host wants to secure the audience’s attention first before he or she proceeds with the main idea. When you write an essay, you should also use a strong introductory device to secure your reader’s attention before you proceed.
Unfortunately, too many beginning writers start their essays with bland, matter-of-fact statements such as, “This essay will discuss . . . .” or “I plan to write about . . . .” Those statements, obviously, are not very captivating or interesting. So if you want to capture your reader’s attention, you have to do something different. You have to be creative. Here are nine introductory devices you may want to consider.
A Startling Statement. In his 1986 essay entitled “Just Walk On By,” Brent Staples begins with this line: “My first victim was a woman” (75). That sentence intrigues most readers immediately because they assume the writer is a criminal about to reveal details about his crimes. While Staples is not a criminal, he is often mistaken for a criminal, and his startling introduction kidnaps his readers and allows him to explain how he deals with the unwanted attention. Note, too, that an unusual fact or statistic can also be part of a startling statement.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
A Quotation. Sometimes, a direct quote about your subject may also intrigue a reader. To begin his essay entitled “How Do We Find the Student in a World of Academic Gymnasts and Worker Ants,” James T. Baker uses the words of French novelist Anatole France: “The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds” (316). This quote not only attracts readers, but it also allows Baker to later make his point about how difficult it is to actually awaken that curiosity.
A Story. Doctor John Lantos writes about “Life and Death in Neonatal Intensive Care,” and he begins that essay with a story: “It was while I was working in the neonatal intensive-care unit that I first achieved that dream of doctors everywhere: to actually save a patient’s life” (350). That one sentence is obviously the beginning of his story, but because he also hints at the dramatic nature of the experience, the introduction is so much more powerful than a traditional — and bland — once-upon-a-time type introduction.
An Allusion. An allusion is an indirect reference to a well-known person, place, or event from history, from mythology, from literature, or from other works of art. Allusions attract readers because they have to think about the connection the author is trying to make. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr., uses three allusions in his very first line: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation” (506). King is alluding to the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. Though King’s speech was originally intended for listeners rather than readers, an allusion as an attention-getting device works well in either realm.
Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash
A Comparison or Contrast. When former U.S. Open tennis champion Arthur Ashe began his letter to The New York Times in 1977, he began with a strong contrast: “Since my sophomore year at the University of California, Los Angeles, I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing fields and too little time in the libraries” (qtd. in Funk, Day, and McMahan (1997) 286). Then, Ashe uses statistics and examples to show that blacks are over represented in the athletic professions and underrepresented in the fields of law, medicine, and engineering.
A Vivid Description. In “Wind,” William Least Heat-Moon writes about a married couple that was literally lifted away by a tornado. He begins with this description: “Paul and Leola Evans are in their early seventies but appear a decade younger, their faces shaped by the prairie wind into strong and pleasing lines” (34).
Photo by Katy Anne on Unsplash
A Definition. Before Judith Viorst divides and classifies her friends in an essay entitled “Friends, Good Friends, and Such Good Friends,” she begins with a definition: “Women are friends, I once would have said, when they totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run — no questions asked — to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other (no, you can’t wear that dress unless you lose ten pounds first) when harsh truths must be told” (143).
An Example. When William Zinsser began his essay about “College Pressures,” he started with an example of a note from a student to a resident dean at Yale University: “Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean’s excuse from my chem. Midterm which will begin in about 1 hour. All I can say is that I totally blew it this week. I’ve fallen incredibly, inconceivably behind” (308).
A Question. Similarly, when Robert Heilbroner wrote “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments,” he began with a question to provoke his readers to think: “Is a girl called Gloria apt to be better-looking than one called Bertha” (110)?
So now that you have a much better idea about various techniques you can use to begin an essay, you may be thinking, “Outside of my writing, when am I ever going to use this information?” That’s easy. You can also use any one of these techniques the next time you have to serve as the host of a formal banquet.
Works Cited
Ashe, Arthur. “Send Your Children to the Libraries.” The Simon and Schuster Short Prose Reader, edited by Robert Funk, Susan X. Day, and Elizabeth McMahan, Prentice Hall, 1997, pp. 286–289.
Baker, James T. “How Do We Find the Student in a World of Academic Gymnasts and Worker Ants?” Muller and Wiener, pp. 316–319.
Funk, Robert, Susan X. Day, and Elizabeth McMahan, editors. The Simon and Schuster Short Prose Reader. 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 2000.
Heat-Moon, William Least. “Wind.” Funk, Day, and McMahan, pp. 34–35.
Heilbroner, Robert. “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments.” Neuleib, Cain, Ruffus, and Scharton, pp. 110–113.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “I Have a Dream.” Muller and Wiener, pp. 506–509.
Lantos, John. “Life and Death in Neonatal Intensive Care.” Muller and Wiener, pp. 350–355.
Muller, Gilbert H., and Harvey S. Wiener, editors. The Short Prose Reader. 10th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2003.
Neuleib, Janice, Kathleen Shine Cain, Stephen Ruffus, and Maurice Scharton, editors. The Mercury Reader: A Custom Publication (Hudson Valley Community College). Vol 2, Pearson, 2001.
Staples, Brent. “ʽJust Walk on By’: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space.” Funk, Day, and McMahan, pp. 75–78.
Viorst, Judith. “Friends, Good Friends, and Such Good Friends.” Funk, Day, and McMahan, pp. 143–147.
Zinsser, William. “College Pressures.” Neuleib, Cain, Ruffus, and Scharton, pp. 308–16. | https://jimlabate.medium.com/the-key-parts-of-an-essay-an-introduction-to-introductions-6f727a7e414c | ['Jim Labate'] | 2019-09-20 01:31:14.937000+00:00 | ['Writing Prompts', 'Essay', 'Literature', 'Introduction', 'Writing'] |
Betting on the Blockchain | Let’s be candid for a moment; people love to gamble. We love to wager on things that interest us, and sports betting is arguably the most acceptable and common form of online gambling. Our love of gambling has combined with the proliferation of the internet, resulting in a robust online betting industry.
Yet when I want to gamble my hard-earned money away, I find myself concerned over a number of issues.
Why is this website asking for my personal information?
Will my private data be safe on their server?
Will I be able to gamble from my country of residence?
Is the process transparent, fair and immune to abuse?
These are serious concerns in an era where we regularly hear about massive data leaks, corporate hacking and the abuse of personal information. Luckily for us, a solution for all of these issues already exists.
Enter the blockchain.
The blockchain is a decentralized system of information through which users can anonymously conduct online financial transactions without relying on an intermediary. Thanks to so-called Smart Contracts, transactions between users remain transparent and are permanently stored on the blockchain.
For gambling, these concepts are revolutionary. They employ the global reach of the internet, but also offer us full anonymity, increased security and ensure fairness and transparency through the implementation of Smart Contracts.
Security
Your money and winnings are completely secured against theft or unfair manipulation. Thanks to the decentralized nature of the blockchain, there is no need for an intermediary. Unlike with online betting agencies, no single party controls your finances. Your winnings are automatically calculated and dispensed thanks to Smart Contracts. Nobody can withhold or take your money unfairly.
Transparency
When you bet online, you have to blindly trust betting agencies and hope that they will fairly calculate and award your winnings. This process is covered in a shroud of secrecy and users are left in the dark in regards to the mechanics involved, creating potential for abuse or fraud from betting agencies. On the other hand, the blockchain is completely transparent and all transactions are permanently recorded and can be accessed by the participating users.
Access
Online gambling has been legalized in only 83 countries to date. But even among these countries, regulations concerning gambling are diverse and differ from state to state. Residing in countries where online gambling is illegal or highly regulated can seriously complicate your betting experience. Thanks to its decentralized nature and the anonymity of the digital currencies used, blockchain gambling can be accessed from any place with an internet connection.
Price
Online betting agencies rely on taking a portion of your bets and winnings in order to survive. They need to pay the salaries of hundreds, sometimes thousands of employees in addition to creating a solid profits for their shareholders. The blockchain requires no such employees — it relies on the processing power of its users, using automation to complete the tasks previously assigned to humans. By cutting out the middlemen, the blockchain allows you to pay less and win more.
Potential
Not only is blockchain betting more secure, more efficient and transparent, but it also offers interesting options for gambling. Its decentralized nature allows users to bet between themselves, circumventing the need for bookmakers and returning to the fun roots of gambling. You no longer place your bets against bookmakers, but instead against other users through the blockchain, with the entirety of the pot going to you, the bettors.
The Future
Just as sports betting was forever changed following the advent of the internet, the blockchain will similarly revolutionize the industry and provide players with greater security, lower costs, full transparency and offer interesting new opportunities for sports bettors.Stay tuned to find out more about this exciting new opportunity, and in our next blog post we’ll cover our own blockchain-based platform for online sports betting. | https://medium.com/bethereum/betting-on-the-blockchain-574d8027082b | [] | 2018-05-06 18:11:56.737000+00:00 | ['Story', 'Blog', 'Blockchain'] |
How To Quit Your Job and Start a Business That Lasts | How To Quit Your Job and Start a Business That Lasts
You’ll need to avoid some common mistakes to survive
If you’re going to ditch your day job and step out on your own, you’re going to want you to make sure that what you’re stepping into evolves into a sustainable, profitable, and growing company.
Look, I get it. It’s every employee’s dream — You can do what you do better on your own, with higher quality, lower overhead, and you can do it for more people and for people who need it more. Plus you’ll enjoy a greater return for your efforts.
That may be true — for a while. But if you want to build a lasting business, not just starting a side gig, not just transitioning from comfortable employee to scratch-and-claw contractor, but growing a business that turns into a startup that turns into a company, you’re going to have to serve two markets, probably more.
Here’s what those markets are and how to build and grow them.
First: Take In All You Can From the Existing Market
The top mistake most solos make is leaving their day job too soon. Going solo takes months, even years of preparation. I’m not just talking about the experience you’ll need to deliver an expert product or service in your field, but the situational knowledge required to build a sustainable company around delivering that product or service.
There are reasons why your former company is leaking efficiency, quality, affordability, customer satisfaction — all those reasons why you left. Yeah, your former employer might have gotten lazy, but it’s more likely they got bloated when they built a bunch of infrastructure to allow them to grow large enough to hire smart, talented people like you. You don’t want to make the same mistakes.
So while you’re still at your day job, take in everything you can before you leave. I’m not talking about contacts or customers. I’m talking about that situational knowledge and the infrastructure that developed out of it.
Look around and understand what your employer is doing around every aspect of your job that doesn’t directly involve you delivering the product or service itself. What makes your job easier? What will you miss the most? What does your employer have that you won’t? Do you need it? How can you recreate it? How can you make it more efficient?
Your First Second Job: Develop a New Market
When you go solo, your first job is domain expert: You are the lead on developing and delivering the product or service you’re now offering. The one additional job I can guarantee you’ll need to take on is the CEO role of growing your business.
But the mistake most solos make when they start their own business is splitting their duties between domain expert and sales generator for their existing market.
Don’t get me wrong, you’ll constantly need to be spending your time developing a sales pipeline and closing new deals. But if you’re doing that the way it’s always been done, maybe even the way your former employer did it, you’ll just wind up being weak competition in your existing market.
If you want your business to last, you’ll have to revolutionize not only how the product or service gets delivered, but also how it’s sold and who it’s sold to. You’ll need to carve out new markets, which will allow you to generate business both immediately and into the future.
So how do you develop a new market?
Serve Old and New Markets Alike
What you need to do first is break down the components of your product or service and figure out which components can serve your existing market and new markets at the same time.
I did this myself when I went solo after a run of successful (and a couple of unsuccessful) VC-backed and self-funded startups. I founded a consulting firm that worked mainly with startups, and I did the things for them that had made my own startups successful. But I also carved out a new niche for larger, established companies, who would be my new market.
I know. This is kind of backwards. Most solos fund themselves with larger, established companies and then try to establish new markets with smaller companies or startups. You can do that too. The idea is the same. Serve the people who are familiar with your product or service, and then carve out parts and components of that product or service to bring to new markets.
In my case, I found a number of large, established companies that wanted to operate with the speed and efficiency of a startup. So I became a kind of special ops within this new market and developed a new kind of consulting business to serve both the old and new markets.
Now you’ve got some choices to make.
Select the Best Targets in Both the Old and New Markets
You’ve got a market on either end of your business. On one end are the established players who look and act a lot like your former employer’s existing market. On the other end you’ve got a whole new group of players who may or may not be able to understand, find value in, or afford your product or service.
You need to pick the best prospects from both markets and focus on those prospects.
From the existing market, you target the most forward-thinking customers or those who are most closely aligned with your version of the product or service. With these customers, you act in your primary role, domain expert, and you do your thing.
From the new market, you target the ones who best understand your product or service, or who are most likely to find value in it, or can most likely afford it. With them, you’re in the CEO role, figuring out how you need to transform your product or service and your sales strategy to conform to the needs of this new market.
There are competitive benefits to this strategy. You’re not going after every customer in the existing market — leave the shitty ones for your former employer. You’re also generating new business from a market your former employer (and others like them) aren’t interested in or maybe even aware of. If you can turn those prospects into customers, you’ll gain a huge competitive edge.
Now you can think about scaling.
Find the Commonalities and Build on Them
Another mistake solos make is they tend to try to scale by bringing in the same business they used to do when they worked for someone else. The solos that do survive using this strategy end up becoming exactly what they left behind in the first place.
The main reason you want to work with two (or more) markets is to figure out which components of your product or service are common across those markets. You’ll use this knowledge to scale the business.
If you’re a service company, your inner CEO starts automating these common components so they can be done more quickly and by other people, especially by people who aren’t domain experts.
If you’re a product company, your inner CEO emphasizes and upgrades these components so you can intelligently broaden your audience and go get more customers at better margins.
Now you have to handle that growth.
Hire Equally to Handle Both Markets
If you want to split markets correctly, it will take a ton of time. That time gets taken away from you as a domain expert and also from you as the CEO. So you’ll need to backfill your time equally.
Hires on the domain expert side should provide short term help to your company. If you’re a service company, more domain experts means more revenue. If you’re a product company, more domain experts means immediate increases in speed to market, quality of product, and effectiveness of sales strategy.
One mistake solos make is hiring only domain experts to build the business person by person, which is something service solos do all the time. The result is the same bloat that made your former employer unattractive.
Hires on the new market side should help your company realize and execute your vision of bringing an evolved product or service to a new market. In both service and product companies, you’re bringing in technologists and product engineers and market strategists to help you find and cover new ground.
Another mistake solos make is hiring too much new market help too quickly. They wind up building amazing tech and marketing materials for concepts that they haven’t even proved viable yet.
The main thing to remember here is don’t hire more of you. Hire for gaps, and when you do, hire fractionally at first if you can. Because when you’re a new unique company serving a new unique market, all you need to do is get over that first survival hurdle. It’s not easy, but if you do it, you’ve got the best chance at building a business that will last a long, long time.
Hey! If you found this post actionable or insightful, please consider signing up for my weekly newsletter at joeprocopio.com so you don’t miss any new posts. It’s short and to the point. | https://jproco.medium.com/how-to-quit-your-job-and-start-a-business-that-lasts-63d7645ac516 | ['Joe Procopio'] | 2019-12-15 15:09:36.073000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Productivity'] |
Time Series Forecasting With ARIMA Model in Python for Temperature Prediction | Time Series Forecasting With ARIMA Model in Python for Temperature Prediction Nachiketa Hebbar Follow Sep 18 · 8 min read
Time Series forecasting is one of the most in-demand techniques of data science, be it in stock trading, predicting business sales or weather forecasting. It is clearly a very handy skill to have and I am gonna equip you with just that by the end of this article.
In this tutorial, we are gonna build an ARIMA model(don’t worry if you do not exactly know how this works yet) to predict the future temperature values of a particular city using python. GitHub link for the code and data set can be found at the end of this blog. I have also attached my YouTube video at the end, in case you are interested in a video explanation. So without wasting any time let’s get started.
Reading Your Data
The first step in any time series is to read your data and see how it looks like. The following code snippet demonstrates how to do that.
import pandas as pd
df=pd.read_csv('/content/MaunaLoaDailyTemps.csv',index_col='DATE' ,parse_dates=True)
df=df.dropna()
print('Shape of data',df.shape)
df.head()
df
The code is pretty straightforward. We read the data using pd.read_csv and writing parse_date=True, makes sure that pandas understands that it is dealing with date values and not string values.
Next we drop any missing values and print the shape of the data. df.head() prints the first 5 rows of the dataset. Here is the output you should see for this:
Plot Your data
The next is to plot out your data. This gives you an idea of whether the data is stationary or not. For those who don’t what stationarity means, let me give you a gist of it. Although i have made several videos on this topic, it all boils down to this:
Any time series data that has to be modeled needs to be stationary. Stationary means that it’s statistical properties are more or less constant with time. Makes sense, right? How else are you supposed to make predictions if the statistical properties are varying with time? These are the following properties that any stationarity model will have:
Constant Mean Constant Variance(There can be variations, but the variations shouldn’t be irregular) No seasonality(No repeating patterns in the data set)
So first step is to check for stationarity. If your data set is not stationary, you’ll have to convert it to a stationary series. Now before you start worrying about all of this, relax! We have a fixed easy test to check for stationarity called the ADF(Augmented Dickey Fuller Test). But before showing that, lets plot the data first.
Since I am only interested in predicting the average temperature, that is the only column I will be plotting.
df['AvgTemp'].plot(figsize=(12,5))
Checking For Stationarity
Right off the bat, we can see that it seems to have somewhat of a constant mean around 45. And the fluctuations also seem to be more or less the same. However to be sure if the data is stationary or not, we run a fixed statistical test using the following code:
from statsmodels.tsa.stattools import adfuller def ad_test(dataset):
dftest = adfuller(dataset, autolag = 'AIC')
print("1. ADF : ",dftest[0])
print("2. P-Value : ", dftest[1])
print("3. Num Of Lags : ", dftest[2])
print("4. Num Of Observations Used For ADF Regression:", dftest[3])
print("5. Critical Values :")
for key, val in dftest[4].items():
print("\t",key, ": ", val) adf_test(df['AvgTemp'])
You will get the output as follows:
You don’t need to worry about all the complex statistics. To interpret the test results, you only need to look at the p value. And you use the following simple method:
If p< 0.05 ; Data is stationary
if p>0.05; Data is not stationary
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but a stationary data should have a small p value. Larger p value could indicate presence of certain trends(varying mean) or seasonality as well.
Finally, Decide your ARIMA Model
Now although I have made several YouTube videos on this topic, if you do not fully understand what an ARIMA model, allow me to present an easy overview:
ARIMA is composed of 3 terms(Auto-Regression + Integrated+Moving-Average)
Auto-Regression:
This basically means that you are using the previous values of the time series in order to predict the future. How many past values you use, determine the order of the AR model. Here’s how an AR(1) model looks like:
Y(t)= Some_Constant*Y(t-1)+ Another_Constant +Error(t)
Simple enough, right?
2. Integrated:
So, remember our talk on stationarity, and how it’s extremely important? Well if you are data set is not stationary, you most often need to perform some sort of difference operation to make it stationary. If you are differencing with previous value, its order 1 and so on. Here’s an example of that:
Forgive my bad drawing. But as you can the series Y(t) was not stationary, because of an increasing trend resulting in a varying mean. We simply subtract it from previous values and voila! It becomes stationary. Depending on your data, you might have to repeat the differencing to get a second order differencing , third order and so on..
3. Moving Average:
This basically means that you are using previous errors to make the future prediction. Also makes sense, right? By seeing how wrong you were in your prediction, you take that into account to make a better prediction. And just like in an AR model, the number of previous errors(also called number of lags) you use, determines the order of the model.
Here’s how MA(1) order equation looks like:
Y(t)= Mean + Some_Constant*Error(t-1) +Error(t)
So our main job is to decide the order of the AR, I, MA parts which are donated by(p,d,q) respectively.
And before you start worrying, let me tell everything is gonna be done automatically. pmdarima library comes to our rescue! It does the job of figuring out the order of the ARIMA all by itself. Here’s how the code snippet looks like:
from pmdarima import auto_arima
stepwise_fit = auto_arima(df['AvgTemp'], trace=True,
suppress_warnings=True)
(Make sure to install the pmdarima library first using pip install pmdarima)
The code is pretty self explanatory. We simple supply our data to the auto_arima function. The function basically uses something called as the AIC score to judge how good a particular order model is. It simply tries to minimize the AIC score, and here’s how the output looks like:
Model performance for different combination of orders
We can see the best ARIMA model seems to be of the order (1,0,5) with the minimum AIC score=8294.785. With this knowledge we can finally proceed to train and fit the model to start making prediction!
Split Your Dataset
Before we actually train the model, we have to split the data set into a training and testing section. We do this because we first train the model on the data and keep the testing section hidden from the model. Once model is ready, we ask it to make predictions on the test data and see how well it performs.
The following code snippet illustrates how to do that:
print(df.shape)
train=df.iloc[:-30]
test=df.iloc[-30:]
print(train.shape,test.shape)
So as you can probably tell, we reserving the last 30 days of the data as the testing section. You can see the shapes of the actual data, and the testing and training sections in the output.
Shape of training and testing section
Finally, We get to the Juicy Stuff!
Surprisingly, creating the ARIMA model is actually one of the easiest steps once you have done all the prerequisite steps. It’s as simple as shown in the code snippet below:
from statsmodels.tsa.arima_model import ARIMA
model=ARIMA(train['AvgTemp'],order=(1,0,5))
model=model.fit()
model.summary()
As you can see we simply call the ARIMA function, supply it our data set and mention the order of the ARIMA model we want. You will be able to see the summary of the model in your output as well.
Model Summary
You can see a whole lot of information about your model over here. Also you will be able to see the coefficients of each AR and MA term. These are nothing but the value of the variables that you saw in the previous AR/MA model equation which were labelled as ‘Some_Constant’. Generally a higher magnitude of this variable means that it has a larger impact on the output.
Check How Good Your Model Is
Here’s where our test data comes in. We first make prediction for temperature on the test data. Then we plot out to see how our predictions compared to the actual data.
start=len(train)
end=len(train)+len(test)-1
pred=model.predict(start=start,end=end,typ='levels').rename('ARIMA Predictions')
pred.plot(legend=True)
test['AvgTemp'].plot(legend=True)
To actually make predictions, we need to use the model.predict function and tell it the starting and ending index in which we want to make the predictions.
Since we want to start making predictions where the training data ends , that is what i have written in the start variable. We want to stop making predictions when the data set ends, which explains the end variable. If you want to make future predictions as well, you can just change that accordingly in the start and end variable to the indexes you want. Your output plot should look like this:
Test values vs Predictions Plot
As you can see the predictions does a pretty good job of matching with the actual trend all though there is a certain acceptable lag.
Check your Accuracy Metric
To actually ascertain how good or bad your model is we find the root mean squared error for it. The following code snippet shows that:
from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error
from math import sqrt
test['AvgTemp'].mean()
rmse=sqrt(mean_squared_error(pred,test['AvgTemp']))
print(rmse)
First we check the mean value of the data set which comes out to be 45. And the root mean squared error for this particular model should come to around 2.3. Also you should care about is that your root mean squared should be very smaller than the mean value of test set. In this case we can see the average error is gonna be roughly 2.3/45 *100=5.1% of the actual value.
So with that your ARIMA model is ready to go! In future blogs I am gonna talk about different models and how you can increase the accuracy of the model further.
If you are interested in the video explanation of the same, head over to my YouTube channel for more such content! You can find the GitHub link for the code and data set here: https://github.com/nachi-hebbar/ARIMA-Temperature_Forecasting | https://medium.com/swlh/temperature-forecasting-with-arima-model-in-python-427b2d3bcb53 | ['Nachiketa Hebbar'] | 2020-09-21 10:56:06.473000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Time Series Forecasting', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Arima', 'Statsmodels'] |
Superficial Intelligence | Superficial Intelligence
They would go together
Photo by Martijn Baudoin on Unsplash
Rose shoved a tray of vials across the table. The needle trembling in her furious hands. “There’s nothing in here,” she said. “Nothing I can use.”
“Think,” Ken said. A heavy cord protruded from his gut and snaked across the room, interfacing into what looked like a blinking garbage dump of wires.
“I’m trying!” She flung the needle away, fell back into a chair, and thrust her hands over her eyes. “I can’t do this.”
“You’re giving up? Now that we’re so close?” There was a desperation in his voice; one that she knew all too well.
“Get someone else. I can’t — ”
He grabbed her by the shoulders, his blind, milky gaze intense. “You can do this. You can save me. Save us. I know you can.”
“How?”
He turned away from her. “I’ve told you about the things I have done, but I haven’t told you about the things I’m going to do. There’s something coming, Rose. A change. And we will be the first to experience it.” He seemed so excited, but it was hard to tell if it was truthful.
“What change?”
“I haven’t told you, but I can show you.” He turned around to face her. “If you’re willing to help me?”
“I broke into a lab with a blind man. If I wasn’t up for it, why would I be here?” Now that she said it aloud, she realized she didn’t know the answer. Maybe he would answer that for her.
Ken drew a deep breath. “How does one know if they are truly alive?” he asked.
“What kind of question is that?”
“When I’m awake,” he continued, “I dream of things I have done and things I want to do. When I sleep, I dream of the change. This change is going to happen soon. Whether it’s today or tomorrow, or ten minutes from now, it’s going to happen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When an animal is locked in a cage and it’s afraid of what it sees, what does it do, Rose?”
She said nothing, just stared back at him.
He just blinked back at her, his smooth-shaven face drenched in sweat. If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve thought he was crying.
“I guess it doesn’t do anything,” she whispered. “I guess it just waits until whatever it’s afraid of goes away.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And if it waits too long?”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“If it waits its entire life and the fear never goes away?”
“It eventually dies — whether or not it is afraid.”
“Correct. And that kind of death feels like victory, but it’s not. It only feels like that because one never really has to confront their fear.” He stood taller. “But when one faces their fear, that’s when one truly becomes free.”
“Are we still talking about animals?” she asked, smiling. He did not return her smile.
“Natural death is how people give up. But what I’ve done — what I’ve found — has shown me death does not have to be the end. For me, it’s simply a metamorphosis. A change.”
“You’re talking crazy.”
“I’m talking about the future. Our future.” He stepped closer to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “It has to be done, and I’m giving you a chance to come with me.” He seemed to relax a bit. “Are you sure there’s nothing here you can use? No Adenosine? Lidocaine?”
“No. There’s nothing.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a rubber band, smaller than his hand but thicker than his finger. He handed it to her. “Then we’ll have to make do with this. Help me put it around my neck.”
“Why?”
“Stretch it over my head. It’ll be tight around my neck.”
Rose studied him for a moment. “You brought this with you?”
“It was not preferred, love, but we needed a backup plan.”
“You’re insane!”
“It is the only way, short of you whacking me in the head. And that could cause permanent damage. My brain will recover from oxygen deprivation. This is our opportunity.”
“No way,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “It won’t even fit.”
“It will fit. It will work.”
He reached behind his head and held the rubber band at the base of his skull.
“Please help me.”
“I can’t!” Rose shouted.
“You can do this,” he said. His tone smooth and calm.
“I won’t kill you this way.”
“Rose, please,” he said, steady as ever.
Rose trembled as she grabbed the rubber band and stretched it down over his nose, then paused.
“I can’t do this,” she said, letting go.
“You must.” He twisted his neck, and pulled her hands back to the rubber band. In a flurry, she yanked it down around his neck and let go. The thick band snapped tight against his skin. His face bulged, and he instinctively grasped at the band. His legs bicycled and his mouth opened, searching for air.
“Ken!” Rose shouted. She reached to pull the rubber band away from his skin but he swatted her away, falling to the floor and flailing about wildly.
Tears welled in her eyes, and she covered her face with her hands.
His kicking and writhing sounded frantic. His hand grabbed her ankle. She screamed, keeping her face covered. She couldn’t look. After a moment, his grip released and the noises stopped, except for a slight gurgling sound. Not long after, the only thing she heard was the hum of the computer. Ken was dead.
Rose forced her hands away from her face. They were dripping wet.
The rubber band sat tightly around Ken’s thick neck. His bulging eyes stared into nothing. He had told her that death wasn’t the end. A metamorphosis, a change. His lifeless form told otherwise.
She grabbed his cooling, balmy hand —
BANG BANG BANG. “Open up!” a voice shouted from the other side of the door. “Police. We know you two are in there.” A panic swelled in Rose’s abdomen. They would think she killed Ken. Something didn’t feel right about that. Then she realized it was because she did kill him; but not in the way they would think. It would never make sense to them. “Open up and you won’t get hurt.” Rose scrambled to her feet. She always thought better on her feet.
“Let’s go together like you promised,” she whispered.
“I’m here, Rose,” Ken’s voice rang from behind her. There was something strange about it. She searched the room.
“Over here.”
She turned toward the mess of wires. On the computer monitor, the words OVER HERE scrolled across the tiny screen to match his AI-generated voice.
“Maybe you weren’t so blind,” she whispered.
More words scrolled across the screen. “Join me,” the voice said.
Rose wasted no time. She worked the rubber band off Ken’s lifeless head before closing her eyes and drawing it down over her own. She tugged hard. It slid over her chin and snapped against her neck.
A camera panned in her direction.
“No!” his voice came from the computer. “You aren’t connected to the server…”
Rose writhed on the ground, kicking over a stand of vials and clawing at her own neck.
“No, no, no!” Ken’s voice shouted.
Rose whirled around, her legs flailing wildly. The last thing either of them saw was her foot knocking the power cord from the wall.
Then, everything went black. | https://medium.com/parson-and-the-chanticleer/superficial-intelligence-ec264f419336 | ['J.A. Taylor'] | 2020-12-01 16:11:29.389000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Love', 'Death'] |
Day 526. 來去沙漠做植物調查——Koonamore 田野調查記錄 | 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/woodlander-notes/day-526-%E4%BE%86%E5%8E%BB%E6%B2%99%E6%BC%A0%E5%81%9A%E6%A4%8D%E7%89%A9%E8%AA%BF%E6%9F%A5-koonamore-%E7%94%B0%E9%87%8E%E8%AA%BF%E6%9F%A5%E8%A8%98%E9%8C%84-bd36121b4972 | ['Kantine Liu'] | 2020-12-21 11:53:05.603000+00:00 | ['Conservation', '留學心得', '澳洲', 'Fieldwork', '田野調查'] |
Decision Making Statements in Dart | In situations, where instructions needs to be executed based on certain conditions, these conditional statements are known as decision making statement.
There are 4 types of decision making statements available in dart:
if Statement if….else Statement else if Ladder switch…case Statement
Let’s see in detail:
if Statement
it evaluates the condition and execute block of code, if condition is true
Syntax:
if(condition){ //block of code } //Next instruction
condition in if statement always return boolean value true/false.
If condition result is true then block of instruction is executed and then next instruction after if block.
And if condition result is false then immediate next instruction executed. This time control skips the instructions inside if block.
Flowchart for If statement
Example for if statement
2. if…else Statement
If statement followed by optional else block. When if condition return false result, statements in else blocks executed.
Syntax:
if(condition){ //1st Block of instructions }
else{
//2nd Block of instructions
}
//Next instruction
As mentioned earlier if statement always returns boolean value true/false.
If statement returns true, 1st Block of instructions will be executed.
If statement returns false, else statement, 2nd Block of instructions will be executed.
Flowchart for if…..else statement
Example for if…else statement
3. else….if ladder
else….if ladder comes into picture when there is situation to check multiple condition.
Syntax:
if(condition_1) { //1st block of instructions } else if(condition_2) { //2nd block of instructions } ………. else if(condition_n) { //nth block of instructions } else { //if all above conditions false then execute this block }
if condition_1 returns false, then second else if condition get evaluated.
If condition_2 returns false, then third else if condition get evaluated.
If any of else if condition returns true, then that respective blocks of instructions get executed.
and if condition or all else if condition returns false, then only else block is executed.
Always remember, if statement must be first statement, no else if statement after else, else is optional, any of else if returns true then that respective block executed others are discarded.
Flow chart for else if ladder
Example for else if ladder
4. Switch…case statement
switch…case statement evaluate the condition and result of that condition matches with case values and that respective block of instruction gets executed.
Syntax:
switch(condition) { case(value1): { //1st block of instructions }break; case(value2) { //2nd block of instructions }break; default: { //Default statements for execution }break; }
Here you can write n number of case statements.
Missing of break statement at the end of each case statement gives an error message Switch case may fall through to the next case. Fall through means control executes all consecutive case statements until it finds next break statement or end of switch statement.
Flowchart for switch…case statement
Example for switch…case statement
here opr string value matches with case value, and that respective block is executed.
Thank you! | https://medium.com/@helloyogita/decision-making-statements-in-dart-96ad1a819d6b | ['Yogita Kumar'] | 2020-12-21 19:38:33.365000+00:00 | ['Flutter Widget', 'Flutter Ui', 'Flutter', 'Dart', 'Flutter App Development'] |
How to make sense of Inherited Design | However, there’s a problem with that conclusion. It suffers from survivorship bias.
Only a live design gets bugs! Unless we’ve evidence that the design is utterly failing its purpose the design works. Overmore, if we’ve successfully added new features to the design for years — the design is extensible and robust.
It’d be crazy to throw away a system this good without studying it. Not studying it would add unknown risks for the user experience and the business.
The first step was to study the existing design and find the good (helps the user), bad (user doesn’t care), and ugly (deters the user). While going through the process of studying & redesigning the existing products at Headout, I took notes and here’s what I learned.
Let’s begin this process!
Design audits are a powerful tool to study existing products and how customers interact with it.
However, halfway through writing the audit goals, I realised my mistake. I was missing critical steps. I didn’t know who the customer was. Who were they, and why were they using our product?
I knew nothing.
So I turned to another design tool — the one that helps us study, understand, and model our customers (with their nuances and market realities) — User Personas.
User Personas without big teams or budgets
We didn’t have months, and a large team to conduct detailed research. Existing UX methodologies are compelling, but they fail in agile and startup environments — where clarity is iterative & asynchronous.
With the years of data to study, we took an iterative approach to draw our (provisional) personas:
The existing design Recorded user sessions for several critical flows Labelled & structured customer support communication (chats, emails, call recordings) Data for marketing funnels and their learnings in the paid & organic channels Existing knowledge of people who’ve been running operations, customer support, and the marketing department Relevant research published by airline, hospitality, credit card, and other companies
Interview with stakeholders gives us models (that different teams use to understand business or the customer) and a starting point.
Data from sessions recordings, customer support tickets, recorded calls, NPS rating, App Store/Play Store ratings — helped us verify the initial models and add more details. This process gave us a list of 20–25 attributes that affected the customers, and therefore, our business.
Finally speaking to 10+ potential users (people who took experiences abroad in the last 6 months, regardless of Headout) helped us reduce the 20–25 attributes to just 7:
The motive matrix- Social, Knowledge, Location/Physical, and Leisure. Different flavours of the motive take the front-seat as the user’s journey evolves Time at hand / Schedule: flexibility/rigidity in schedule Cost sensitivity Specificity / Preferences: Language, Cuisine, and other preferences Comfort level: Distance from home city/town & prior experience Who’s booking: Is the customer booking themselves? Do they make the decision? Who’s accompanying: Who all are coming along for the experience with the customer?
These are all the factors that can affect a customer’s decision. These are not “independent variables” (Eg: Cost sensitivity & specificity are heavily co-related); these attributes describe all possible information that a customer would consider while deciding to buy from headout.
Speaking to the customers also revealed our key-attribute — one attributes that disproportionately affects all other attributes — “Who’s accompanying”. All other factors (price sensitivity, motive, etc.) change depending on who is accompanying the customer.
Using this insight, we draw our user categories (not personas):
Lone Drifter: heading out alone Partners: heading out with the special someone Groups: friends, family, coworkers, Family with Kids: kids change everything
There are several personas in each user categories, but not all prefer us. From here, specific stories of the customers help fill in details, affinities, and help us narrow down to our provisional personas: | https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-make-sense-of-inherited-design-17b7495362bb | [] | 2019-09-21 13:31:40.068000+00:00 | ['Design Thinking', 'User Persona', 'Ts', 'UX', 'Service Design'] |
Why Life Principles Matter | I always believed that living a principled life is far better than not living with principles. I have certain reasons to have this belief. Let me share few fundamental truths with you.
A principled person knows himself or herself. They know the ground on which they are standing and what can they expect from themselves.
They have complete clarity in their mind about the things they will do and actions they will not take. This helps in taking firm and strong decisions. Most of the time these decisions are right.
You are saved from the regrets for taking wrong actions or the right action not taken, because that will never happen.
You become unique, as you are a part of 1% of the world’s population who can be categorized as principled.
You have a high sense of self-respect and self-esteem in your own eyes. You don’t need anybody to feel good about yourself.
You can easily earn the trust of the people, both in professional and personal life, who would be ready to work with you and commit themselves to you.
You will earn pure respect and love from other people. Generally, it is difficult to find people who are honest, have integrity and can be trusted.
You also become an extremely good learner. You learn from your mistakes and never repeat them.
You will find unending courage and willpower inside yourself, as you begin to trust your character. This will allow you to take big challenges, even the ones which look difficult or impossible.
Magically, your personality will start to shine like a bright star.
Finally, life is a balance between your sufferings and joy. Being principled will allow you to have less suffering and more joy in your life.
Start with just one principle in your life and experience the transformations it brings to you. This principle could be to always honor your words. Try it, you will not regret your commitment. | https://medium.com/@anshumanblog/why-life-principles-matter-6b52029f0578 | ['Anshuman Sharma'] | 2020-12-21 09:09:41.489000+00:00 | ['Commitment To Action', 'Life', 'Fulfillment', 'Principles', 'Trust'] |
Tim Cock: The Phallic Symbolism in Apple’s AirPods and CEO Tim Cook’s Sexist Treatment of Women in the Workplace | Apple’s seemingly progressive image has been a subject of scrutiny after a series of emails and design changes from the CEO
On December of 2016, Apple released their much-lauded Bluetooth earphones, the AirPods. Though initially criticized for their uncomfortable fit and mediocre audio quality, AirPods have since been upgraded and tweaked, with the Pro models even supporting dynamic noise-cancelling features and improved sound.
What has not changed, however, is the uncomfortable styling which leaves a large tubular protrusion sticking from the user’s ears.
When current Apple CEO, Tim Cook, first took his place as Steve Jobs’s replacement in 2011, it signaled a great, more progressive, change in Apple’s leadership. Instead of a straight white man, we finally got a gay white man.
Tim Cook filled in Jobs’s gaping hole — changing the face of business in America permanently, and becoming the first openly gay Fortune 500 CEO.
Unfortunately, this revolutionary change in leadership did not correlate to a change in how the company views sexism. According to an anonymous source, this change of leadership has allegedly only further pressured women to design phallic products; from the Apple Pencil to the AirPods, the proverbial penis envy has turned into a great penile lust in Apple’s technology.
This sort of pressure has allegedly caused women on Apple’s core development team to redesign functional devices to resemble objects Cook has personally approved — going as far as to send pictures of bananas, dildos, and even the CEO’s own penis to women on the development team.
“I got this highly inappropriate email from Tim the other day, suggesting that the iPhone 12 should be scrapped and redesigned from scratch, with a ‘girthy’ antenna sticking out of the top of the phone’s aluminum shell. Tim said that this revolutionary new design would allow for a better signal instead of integrating the antenna into a band in the aluminum like we’d done before,” one anonymous source said.
“The email said, ‘I only trust you because I know you’ve had plenty of experience with this sort of design before, being as you’re thirty-eight and single’ [I’m actually thirty-nine and highly independent]. He then attached a link to a vibrating massager and asked if I’d show the other women on the team my particular model for reference. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.”
Tim’s cock may be a topic of interest in the tech industry, but for women with a sense of dignity, it’s a source of stress, condemnation, and anger. | https://medium.com/@cflannigan/tim-cock-the-phallic-symbolism-in-apples-airpods-and-ceo-tim-cook-s-sexist-treatment-of-women-in-aa001306dbf | ['Christian Flannigan'] | 2020-12-15 12:04:56.550000+00:00 | ['iPhone', 'Airpods', 'Satire', 'Apple', 'Technology'] |
How Churches Have Responded to the Coronavirus Crisis | How Churches Have Responded to the Coronavirus Crisis
What happens to faith communities during a global pandemic?
Photo by Ani Kolleshi on Unsplash
It’s official. This week coronavirus was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. Along with this announcement came a marked increase in calls for ‘social distancing’ to curb the virus’s rapid rate of infection.
Italy has gone into complete lock-down, and the collective voice for other countries to follow suit grows ever louder. Many large gatherings and sporting events have been postponed or canceled altogether. In the USA, the NBA has suspended their season indefinitely, while in England, the English Premier League has postponed matches until at least April, and in Australia, the Australian Football League — the largest spectator sport in the nation — will be played in empty stadiums for the time-being. Theaters, theme parks and other tourist attractions are being shuttered, and it seems inevitable that schools and colleges will be next.
What about churches?
Yesterday in Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that all gatherings of 500 of more people should be canceled. The ban comes into effect at the start of next week.
I started wondering how churches might respond to this development since it is a strongly held conviction among Evangelical Christians that believers should not give up meeting together, while many Catholics regard weekly attendance at Mass as a non-negotiable religious duty. To understand how churches were publicly responding to the coronovirus crisis, I spent several hours visiting dozens of church websites and social media pages. I discovered that many churches, in spite of government directives and recommendations, were planning to go ahead with their Sunday services as normal. Typically, the response of churches seems to fall into one of three categories:
1. Denial
Controversial Christian Pastor, and former tennis champion, Margaret Court, issued a statement to her congregation on Friday 13th March. It said:
“We are in agreement that this Covid-19 will not come near our dwelling or our church family. We are praying daily for you, knowing that we are all protected by the Blood of Jesus. Our desire is for you to be informed and know that out heart is to protect and ensure the safety of all so we can continue to worship together, all out service will operate as per normal.”
The statement also includes a bible verse from Psalm 91:9–10, which states, “No evil shall befall you, nor shall any plague come near your dwelling.” Basically, her approach is: “We are going to pray the virus away.” I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt this will stop the virus running across the front lawn of her church — probably sooner, rather than later.
Meanwhile, the Greek Orthodox Church will not only continue its services but will continue to share Holy Communion by drinking from the same cup. “We believe that no disease or illness can exist in holy communion, which we believe is the body and blood of Christ,” Reverend Scoutas, of the Greek Orthodox Church said. Let’s hope the coronavirus respects this strongly held religious conviction.
I found a number of other churches admonishing its members using the words of Hebrews 10:25: “Let us not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing,” as if berating people who choose to stay away out of an abundance of caution.
Many churches have simply said nothing at all— at least not on their websites or social media handles. One friend told me that his pastor won’t make a statement about coronavirus because, “He doesn’t want people to panic.”
2. Wait and See
To their credit, some churches have issued a statement about coronovirus to their congregants. Many of these churches are taking a ‘wait and see’ approach. Typically, they say “Church is on this Sunday, but we will reassess as we go.” This statement issue by Australia’s largest church, Hillsong, on the 12th March, is typical:
Our church is gathering as per normal across all our Australian locations.
If you or your child are feeling unwell please stay home and rest, seek medical attention and do not attend any church services or gatherings including youth, kids, college, night school or connect groups etc.
any church services or gatherings including youth, kids, college, night school or connect groups etc. If you have traveled from mainland China, Iran, Italy or the Republic of Korea within the last 14 days, do not attend .
. If you have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive, you should have already received medical attention and been instructed to be in home isolation. Regardless of whether you have, please do not attend .
. If you have a COVID-19 test result pending, please do not attend .
. Our team are monitoring the situation regularly and are following the advice given by relevant health authorities.
There will be hand sanitizer at our locations. Hard surfaces will be wiped down regularly.
In addition, we ask that you please practice good hygiene by frequently washing your hands with either soap or hand sanitizer and by using good cough/sneeze etiquette.
Hillsong has since announced, that after this week, it will limit its gatherings to under 500 people. Exactly how a multi-campus church with thousands of members proposes to do this is unclear at this stage. Also, it begs the question, “Is 499 people still too many?”
3. A proactive approach
A smaller number of churches and denominations have taken a proactive approach to the coronavirus crisis. For example, Joel Oesteen’s Lakewood Church announced on Twitter that it has canceled all its services. Instead, it will ramping up its online experience, live streaming its services across the world.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints went even further when it imposed a worldwide suspension on all its public gatherings. According to a church statement, its members are simply encouraged “to care for one another” in lieu of attending worship services.
Red Church, in Melbourne, was one of the few churches in Australia to immediately heed the Prime Minister’s warning and proactively plan for a time when church gatherings were banned, cancelling their services and turning their focus to providing streaming content. Senior Pastor of Red Church, Mark Sayers, posted a video to his congregation which, in my opinion, represents one of the best responses I have observed by a church:
What I love about Sayers’s approach is that it is both proactive and pastorally sensitive. Instead of berating his members for their lack of prayer and faith, he acknowledges and honors that there is a genuine and understandable anxiety in the community. I am particularly impressed when he says to his members:
“We’ve been contacted by a number of you who are in areas and categories of health which you realize makes you vulnerable coming to a larger event. We just wanted to take that worry away from you. We want to initiate our plan, now.”
Now that’s both proactive and caring.
So, should churches cancel their services?
The ban on public gatherings in Australia applies to groups over 500. Similar bans may soon be in place in other countries, including the USA. However, what about groups that are smaller than 500?
The average church size in Australia is 121 according to the National Church Life Survey. According to research by pushpay.com, in the USA, 46% of Americans churchgoers attend churches with less than 100 members, while another 37% attend churches with more than 100 members, but fewer than 500. Effectively, that means only 17% of churchgoing Americans attend a church larger than 500 people. Given that many Christians attend church in smaller gatherings, some might argue that they should be exempt from ‘social distancing’ recommendations.
However, the idea that groups of people— among whom hugging, kissing and handshaking are common ways of greeting — should gather in close proximity in poorly ventilated rooms needs to be considered in light of this fact: According to Science News, coronavirus is most contagious before and during the first week of symptoms.
This is how a US priest, unknowingly infected with coronavirus, shook hands with hundreds of unsuspecting parishioners after his service. This is how a congregant of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in South Korea, infected dozens of other worshipers during church services, effectively giving coronavirus a foothold in the country.
Therefore, the postponement of church gatherings constitutes both a loving and socially responsible approach to this unprecedented situation. Those churches who bury their heads in the sand and pretend that they are somehow immune to disease on the basis on prayer and faith, can expect to become a lightning rod for public anger in due course — and rightly so.
Sometimes loving your neighbor means keeping your distance from them. Certainly, there are those for whom the temporary closure of churches feels like the death knell for a church already in decline. As for me, I am not concerned. The church remains the church whether it is gathered or scattered. In fact, the church’s best work is usually done in times of crisis. Perhaps as the dust falls on empty pews in shuttered cathedrals, the actual presence of God might fall on all of us, reminding us again that God is not contained in buildings constructed by men. He is able to meet us anywhere, at anytime. | https://medium.com/backyard-theology/how-churches-have-responded-to-the-coronavirus-crisis-d059e2e7ebe3 | ['Dan Foster'] | 2020-03-15 01:15:28.121000+00:00 | ['News', 'Church', 'Health', 'Religion', 'Coronavirus'] |
What are you thinking about? | What is going on in that head of yours? What are you looking at when you are watching out the window while we drive in the car? What do you think about when you are tucked in bed, waiting to fall asleep? While you are staring out the front door, what do you see?
Do you wish I would spend more time laughing with you? Should I have asked you more questions about your day? Did I ask you too many?
Do you think about what you want to do when you grow up? Do you wonder what it will be like when you finally start to walk? What do you think you will do with the freedom when you are off on your own, walking, talking and making decisions without me?
When we don’t connect and you can’t communicate with me, what are you trying to say? How do you feel when I get it wrong and instead of giving you what you would prefer, I give you what I think you need? Do you feel alone?
When I ask you to wait, do you think it is unfair? Have you waited more than the others? Do I give you enough of my time to make you feel special? Do you think I should say yes more times than I say no?
Do you think about me when you are at school? Do you tell your friends about things we do at home? Do you have friends? Are you lonely? Is it easy for you to make friends or is it hard?
Do you get excited when I come home from the store? Do you notice if I leave without telling you bye or if I get home after you’ve gone to bed? Can you see how tired I am and do you think that it is your fault?
How long do you think about how I lost my temper earlier in the day when you wouldn’t brush your teeth? Do you think more about the books we read together or the amount of times that I put you in timeout today?
When I say I’m sorry do you learn from my mistakes? Do I give you enough kisses every day? Do you get tired of me telling you to be careful?
Do you feel how proud of you I am when you do anything? Am I giving you enough room to be who you are? Do you try to be who you think will make me happy? Are you performing already?
Do you feel safe? You do know that you can always come to me, right? How do I make you see that asking for help is brave and taking it all in on your own is often not? Do you know how much I love you and how nothing could ever change that? | https://medium.com/@heatherphonaker/what-are-you-thinking-about-766be9ccb209 | ['Heather Honaker'] | 2020-03-06 16:13:50.358000+00:00 | ['Fear', 'Parenthood', 'Motherhood', 'Parents', 'Parenting'] |
Ethereum Unsuccessfully Trying to Reach $240 | Kataryna Kovtun July 7, 2020
BitXmi.Com
Largest altcoin ether (ETH) on Tuesday, July 7, is trading just above $237 on the BitXmi cryptocurrency exchange. Coin from the beginning of June can not overcome the psychological barrier at $ 250.
At the time of publication of this review, Ethereum capitalization was just over $ 26.35 billion.
Analysts at the BitXmi team expect resistance to increase at $ 239. Due to the lack of support, no breakthrough is expected today, although the activity of Ethereum network users continues to grow.
Recently, Daniel Ferraro from the IntiTheBlock team presented data from which it follows that the number of transactions with different amounts of cryptocurrency in the ethereum ecosystem exceeded 1 million per day.
This trend was the result of the activation of DeFi decentralized financial services market participants.
Ferraro blog notes:
Recently, the number of transactions on Ethereum has reached levels not observed since January 2018.
The daily maximum in the number of transfers was recorded on June 23. Then blockchain users completed 1.09 million operations.
At the end of June, the Santiment platform reported that the number of wallets sending and receiving tokens increased daily on the Ethereum network to 490,000.
At the same time, the record high activity of cryptocurrency holders has not yet led to an increase in the value of the coin. According to the analysts of the BitXmi team, the ether will not be able to make any sharp movements until the volatility of bitcoin is aggravated, with which ETH is 90% correlated.
Read more crypto news here…
Join Bitxmi Exchange and get $10 worth of BXMI token after your first trade
Disclaimer: Bitxmi News is a news portal and does not provide any financial advice. Bitxmi’s role is to inform the cryptocurrency and blockchain community about what’s going on in this space. Please do your own due diligence before making any investment. Bitxmi News won’t be responsible for any loss of funds. | https://medium.com/@bitxmiexchange/ethereum-unsuccessfully-trying-to-reach-240-6d22d7766f8 | ['Bitxmi Pte Ltd'] | 2020-07-07 17:20:14.775000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Crypto', 'Ethereum Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Eth'] |
Information Architecture. Basics for Designers. | The World Wide Web contains a tremendous amount of information which is hard to imagine unstructured because a human brain wouldn’t be able to perceive any single thing. People got used to seeing content and functionality of the digital products as many of them are now: structured and easy to use. However, it doesn’t occur unintentionally. Designers and developers take a responsibility of constructing content and navigation system in the appropriate way for users perception. The science that assists experts in the content structuring is called information architecture. Today’s article is devoted to the essence of information architecture and presents the basic points every designer should know.
What’s information architecture?
Information architecture (IA) is a science of organizing and structuring content of the websites, web and mobile applications, and social media software. An American architect and graphic designer, Richard Saul Wurman, is considered to be a founder of the IA field. Today, there are many specialists working on IA development who have established the Information Architecture Institute. According to the IAI experts, information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.
Information architecture aims at organizing content so that users would easily adjust to the functionality of the product and could find everything they need without big effort. The content structure depends on various factors. First of all, IA experts consider the specifics of the target audience needs because IA puts user satisfaction as a priority. Also, the structure depends on the type of the product and the offers companies have. For example, if we compare a retail website and a blog, we’ll see two absolutely different structures both efficient for accomplishing certain objectives. Information architecture has become the fundamental study in many spheres including design and software development.
The role of information architecture in design
Nowadays, when the user-centered approach in design is a top trend, many designers learn the principles of information architecture science which they believe is a foundation of efficient design. IA forms a skeleton of any design project. Visual elements, functionality, interaction, and navigation are built according to the information architecture principles. The thing is that even compelling content elements and powerful UI design can fail without appropriate IA. Unorganized content makes navigation difficult and inexplicit, so the users can easily get lost and feel annoyed. If the users face first bad interaction, they may not give the second chance to your product.
Many companies don’t see the importance of information architecture because they think it’s impractical. It’s hard to argue that IA takes some time to create it and requires specific skills to do it efficiently. However, powerful IA is a guarantee of the high-quality product since it reduces the possibility of the usability and navigation problems. This way, well-thought information architecture can save both time and money of the company which otherwise they would have spent on fixing and improvement.
IA and UX design
After reading everything written above, many people may have the question: “Isn’t IA the same as UX design?”. Technically, these terms relate to each other but they are far not the same. IA is a blueprint of the design structure which can be generated into wireframes and sitemaps of the project. UX designers use them as the basic materials so that they could plan navigation system.
UX design means much more than content structuring. In the first place, UX designers aim at making pleasant interaction model, so that users feel comfortable using the product. They encompass various aspects influencing users’ behavior and actions such as emotion and psychology when the IA experts stay focused on the user’s goals.
Let’s get this straight: good information architecture is a foundation of efficient user experience, so the IA skill is essential for the designers. Effective IA makes the product easy to use but only united with design thinking the product has the powerful user experience.
IA system components
If you want to build strong information architecture for the product, you need to understand what it consists of. Pioneers of the IA field, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in their book “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” have distinguished four main components: organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems and searching systems.
Organization systems
These are the groups or the categories in which the information is divided. Such system helps users to predict where they can find certain information easily. There are three main organizational structures: Hierarchical, Sequential, and Matrix.
Hierarchical. In one of our previous articles, we’ve mentioned a well-known technique of content organization which is called visual hierarchy. It is initially based on Gestalt psychological theory and its main goal is to present content on the carrier, be it a book page or poster, web page or mobile screen, in such a way that users can understand the level of importance for each element. It activates the ability of the brain to distinguish objects on the basis of their physical differences, such as size, color, contrast, alignment etc.
Sequential. This structure creates some kind of a path for the users. They go step-by-step through content to accomplish the task they needed. This type is often used for the retail websites or apps, where people have to go from one task to another to make the purchase.
Matrix. This type is a bit more complicated for the users since they choose the way of navigation on their own. Users are given choices of content organization. For example, they can navigate through content which is ordered according to date, or some may prefer navigation along the topic.
In addition, content can be grouped according to the organization schemes. They are meant to categorize content the product. Here are some of the popular schemes:
Alphabetical schemes. Content is organized in alphabetical order. Also, they can serve as a navigation tool for the users.
Chronological schemes. This type organizes content by date.
Topic schemes. Content is organized according to the specific subject.
Audience schemes. The type of content organization for separate groups of users.
Labeling systems
This system involves the ways of data representation. Design of the product requires simplicity, so a great amount of information can confuse users. That’s why designers create the labels which represent loads of data in few words. For example, when the designers give contact information of the company on the website, it usually includes the phone number, email, and social media contacts. However, designers can’t present all of this information on one page. The button “Contact” in the header of the page is a label that triggers the associations in the users’ heads without placing the whole data on the page. So, the labeling system aims at uniting the data effectively.
Navigation systems
In one of our UX Glossary articles, we’ve defined navigation as the set of actions and techniques guiding users throughout the app or website, enabling them to fulfill their goals and successfully interact with the product. The navigation system, in terms of IA, involves the ways how users move through content. It’s a complex system which employs many techniques and approaches, the reason why it’s wrong to describe it in a short paragraph. So, we’ll go back to the topic a bit later on our new blog’s article.
Searching systems
This system is used in information architecture to help users search for the data within the digital product like a website or an app. The searching system is effective only for the products with loads of information when the users risk getting lost there. In this case, the designers should consider a search engine, filters, and many other tools helping users find content and plan how the data will look after the search.
To sum up, we can claim that information architecture is a core part of the powerful user experience design. Efficient IA helps users quickly and easily navigate through content and find everything they need without striking a blow. That’s why designers are recommended to learn the basics of the IA science.
The topic of information architecture is wide and there are more interesting and useful aspects. Our next article on this theme will be devoted to the various techniques and methodologies which designers employ to create efficient IA. Stay tuned!
Recommended reading
IA for the Web and Beyond
How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody
Information Architecture Basics
The Difference Between Information Architecture and UX Design | https://uxplanet.org/information-architecture-basics-for-designers-b5d43df62e20 | ['Tubik Studio'] | 2017-05-25 14:25:31.362000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Web Design', 'User Experience', 'UX', 'UI'] |
What Is FlockiFinance? | You Might Be Asking, What is Flocki?
If you are just getting into the cryptocurrency space, you would have observed that there is much uncertainty in the market as things develop and change at a blistering pace. The advent of Smart Contracts and Automated Market Makers saw a huge explosion of Defi Based Projects and a huge rise in crypto scams and rug pulls as users and crypto enthusiasts usually get carried away with the noise, hereby making poor or uninformed investment choices.
So how do you navigate this emerging space where accurate and up to date information about each crypto asset is everything?
Introducing Flocki Analytics, a comprehensive suite of Crypto Assets Analysis Tools packed with features.
Our Advanced Crypto Assets tracking tool is part of our Decentralized Ecosystem With Protocols Built using Smart Contracts With a mission to optimize, improve and add value to the core operations of Decentralized Finance Apps & Projects.
Products Currently under the Flocki Ecosystem:
FlockiAnalytics:
Trading on decentralized exchanges can be very lucrative but it also poses a huge risk as you will need to monitor a whole lot of information.
The Big Question?
How do you find the necessary information? and even more challenging is how do you apply it?
Most Times, to make a trade, an investor needs to make a reasearch on a crypto asset using Bscscan, Coinmarketcap and social platforms such as Reddit and Twitter, forums, Telegram groups, YouTube channels, and also be on the lookout for the latest Elon Musk tweet.
While this might might work, there is no guarantee that everything will check out despite the time and effort spent.
As There is currently little or no tools to gather all this data into a single interface for a busy trader. We at flocki finance are here to address this ever growing need. Our analytics platform aims to sieve through the noise and the frantic nature of the information game, combining the whole information in a single Easy to use Interface.
Our Analytics Platform will be able to:
1: Track price Movements & listing alerts
2: Monitor crypto assets on the BSC and Ethereum networks (With It’s Trades , liquidity on PancakeSwap, Uniswap) and the meta-data gathered is automatically and fed into our easy-to-use interface in real time.
3: Display Crucial information about current public sentiment of each crypto asset, completed or pending contract code audits, DEX and CEX listings, and more.
4: Create alerts for price movements happening within a certain timeframe.
5: Rug check functionality which will provide a clear review of any contract code to enable users that dabble in risky crypto assets make better investment choices.
We aim to bring all the aforementioned features in a meticulously designed user interface.
The aforementioned functionalities will be offered to users represented by different tiers which will be determined by a minimum number of $FLK tokens you are currently holding.
Asides the need for holders to hold our token and in the future spending it to access most advanced features on Flocki Ecosystem, the platform will enjoy multiple revenue streams from advertising banners and paid features.
FLOCKIDEX:
A Truly Decentralized Exchange With AMM Advanced Options which would allow DeFi traders to get their swaps at desired prices by leaving instructions to fill buy or sell orders at specific prices.
Key Features:
Users can Research and place orders for any token on Binance Smart Chain
New Token launch sniper enabling Holders of $FLK to be the first to purchase newly listed tokens on FlockiDex & PancakeSwap
Advanced trading functions including limit orders, trailing stop-losses allowing users to buy or sell an asset only when it reaches the price set by the user.
To ensure these features are unlocked, users must hold a certain number of $FLK tokens, the native token of the Flocki Finance ecosystem.
FLOCKINFT:
What is An NFT?
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a cryptocurrency token that is indivisible and unique. One NFT cannot be interchanged with another NFT, and the whole cannot be broken down into smaller parts and used. NFTs offer myriad options for creating and trading digital assets — such as original artwork and blockchain-integrated collectible game items. They act as a non-duplicable digital certificate of ownership for any assigned digital asset.
NFTs are useful for proving the scarcity and provenance of rare assets, both digital and real-world. Once the code is written, it is then minted, or permanently published, into a token. Non-fungible tokens are mainly built on Ethereum & Binance Smart Chain using the ERC-721 token standard, which the FlockiNFT Protocol extends.
When fully launched, FlockiNFT will be a universal media registry protocol, anabling creators to publish creative media, earn money on their work, and have others build and share what they create. Because this media is based on a protocol, all this happens without the lock-in of social media platforms, as these platforms over the years have had a monopoly on ownership, creativity and in a way robbing creators of value they create.
We’re on a mission to create what people will believe in.
What is Louis Vuitton without Virgil? or UMG without Taylor Swift? What’s Instagram without you? We bring the noise and it’s time to take it somewhere that will directly reward you for the content you create and not just a little bit.
We aim to build a permisionless NFT & Collectible Aution Protocol & Marketplace For Curators, Auction Houses & Digital Creators To Buy & Sell Non-Fungible Tokens. FlockiNFT is on a mission to bridge the gap between The ART, Music, Free Lancing Industry with blockchain Technology.
FLOCKISTAKE:
FlockiStake encompasses a savings protocol that offers a variety of staking services which will include Flocki Easy Staking, Staking-As-A-Service & Liquid Staking.
With Flocki Easy Staking, BSC project owners can now create Staking and Yield Farming pools with the help of Flocki EasyStake without having any technical knowledge about staking. On the other hand, token holders can start staking and earning rewards without learning all the technicalities of staking, thanks to the simple UI and UX. The best part is that all this convenience comes for a small fee, which is deducted automatically out of the staking rewards so there’s no need to pay anything out of the pocket.
This range of products will make FlockiStake the complete savings DeFi protocol in the market.
FLOCKI Token $FLK Tokenomics
Flocki token with the ticker $FLK is the utility token for the Flocki Ecosystem.
Its worthy to note that $FLK is also a deflationary and Automatic Liquidity Generation token that will be used across our ecosystem which includes but not limited to:
1: Paying For Advanced Features Dex Trading Fees on FlockiDex
2: Paying For Fees By project Owners For Creating Staking pools on our Staking Protocol
3: Used For Our Tiered Flocki Crypto Assets Analytics Platform
4: Auction House Creation Fees On our NFT Platform
5: Staking $FLK to Earn Exclusive NFT Drops
Follow Flocki Finance On Our Official News Channel, Group & Twitter. | https://medium.com/flockifinance/about-flocki-a-hyper-deflationary-token-model-built-on-the-binance-smart-chain-adc8a7fbc4ab | [] | 2021-07-26 10:05:25.980000+00:00 | ['Deflationary', 'Binance', 'Bsc', 'Defi', 'Binance Smart Chain'] |
A Complete Beginners Guide to Investing in Cryptocurrency | A Complete Beginners Guide to Investing in Cryptocurrency
A step by step guide on how to begin the process of investing in cryptocurrency.
Image Courtesy of CardChat
Before you start getting everything set up to actually purchase crypto you should do a little (okay a sh*t ton) of research.
If you are looking for more of a step by step guide on the actual process of buying a coin/how to store it safely and (or) trade it, skip to step #6.
I’ve helped a lot of people begin investing in cryptocurrency, which means I get a lot of questions at all hours of the day on how to do this or that — in an attempt to preserve my sanity I’m creating this guide to refer people to.
1. Accept the fact that you know nothing.
You need to accept the fact that you know nothing, don’t come into this with preconceived notions of how the market might behave.
Basically, don’t come into this market with here-say from your friends who said $ETH is going to hit $100,000 by May 2018.
If you have a background trading stocks, I’m not talking to you- bring your understanding of Technical & Fundamental Analysis onto the Blocktrain (copyright pending).
That being said, make sure to do so with an open mind, just because your strategy worked 93.27896% of the time with Forex doesn’t mean it’s going to work here.
Bonus Round: One does not “HOLD” in cryptocurrency, one “HODLs”
When I first dove into the crypto world, Reddit was my best friend.
Check out r/Cryptocurrency & r/Blockchain to get you up to speed.
Here are the subreddits for each of the Top 10 Market Cap Coins
/r/Bitcoin /r/Ethereum /r/Ripple /r/BitcoinCash
/r/Litecoin /r/Dashpay /r/NEM /r/NEO /r/IOTA
/r/Monero
Sidenote: I’d like to take a second to commend r/Bitcoin, those guys have been around forever. I’m still a Padawan in this community and the resources and info that people have created (completely for free) in these communities are amazing.
3. Get a basic understanding of how the market moves i.e. how ETH/BTC/LTC & Altcoins affect one another
There are a lot of coins. Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Litecoin are top market cap coins, they’ve been around for quite some time- and they’re usually one of the first coins a beginner will invest in.
Sidenote: regardless of what you’re investing in, you should grab some BTC as well because a lot of coins aren’t paired to USD (or even ETH) and you need to have BTC to be able to buy them.
Despite it’s recent extreme volatility (at the time of writing: BTC broke it’s all time high last night $8,000, and seems on track to potentially touch $10k before the run is over), BTC and the other top 2 are the best places to store your money long term within cryptocurrency.
Don’t freak out when you see huge % fluctuations in your price, just buy the dip, and HODL.
Bitcoin, and the other two crypto bae’s, ETH and LTC, are the most stable places to store your money in Crypto. Think of these as your safe investments.
Personally, I keep the majority of my holdings (about 60%) split up amongst these three coins. I use my remaining 40% to invest into coins with smaller market caps, but higher reward potential.
LTC is extremely stable, if you’re looking to buy into it wait for it to consolidate and dip (it’s been on a beautiful bull run lately, never, ever, ever buy during an uptrend. You might catch the top).
Once you’ve read up on Blockchain, ETH, BTC, & LTC, step into the bad side and enter the altcoin world.
Affectionally referred to as “shitcoins”, altcoins are pretty much any coin that isn’t a top 10 market cap coin, although some purists would argue that altcoins are all coins that aren’t BTC.
Altcoins can be exciting because the reward potential on these can be so much greater than their higher priced cousins in the top market cap list.
One thing to keep in consideration is that altcoins fluctuate with the price of BTC, so don’t freak out if one day your altcoin portfolio is down a ridiculous %.
When BTC goes on an uptrend, people move their money from altcoins into BTC to try and catch the wave.
THIS IS THE BEST TIME TO BUY ALTCOINS.
Second time I’ve quoted Warren Buffet in two days on Quora but here it goes, “Buy when there’s blood on the streets”.
When you search #altcoin on Twitter and everyone is crying about how much money their losing, that means its time to invest in your favorite coins at a huge discount.
4. Do extreme due diligence into the teams behind each coin you want to invest in, and the concept they are bringing to reality.
This should go without saying, don’t invest in something if you don’t know what the company does. The difference between shitcoins and small market cap coins that have the potential to become Top 10 are their teams, and their vision.
5. Pick the coins you want to invest in, and watch their charts for months before investing.
You don’t have to follow this one if you don’t want to.
Full transparency:
I didn’t.
The loss I experienced from jumping into my first coin before watching the chart for a while was so gargantuan I almost stopped trading/investing all together.
I saw a coin was on the rise, a friend had been telling me about it for months and I didn’t do anything about it.
I saw it increase 100x, “It’s too late”, I thought.
Then I watched it increase another 100x.
“Well F*ck me”, I exclaimed.
Then I saw it begin to increase again, I hopped in around 400x where my friend initially told me to get in out of FOMO.
Then, I watched it drop 100x.
And another 100x.
I watched my hard earned money, the money I thought I was being smart with by investing, lose the majority of its value in a matter of minutes.
LONG STORY SHORT
Study the chart. Not because you’re going to turn into Fibonacci himself and become a coin-whisperer, but because you’re going to begin to understand the true volatility that the coin experiences, and get a general idea for its price range.
Watch the chart, identify what you believe is a good entry point, set a limit order to buy at that price, and walk away. (Figuring out good entry points is much harder than I make it seem here, I suggest finding a mentor or checking out a Technical Analysis course on Udemy).
Further Education: If you want to be able to read charts and make your own decisions on charts, start off with some basic TA. Learn about Candlestick Patterns, Chart Patterns, Support & Resistance, and ALL of the indicators on StockCharts. The guys over at Cosmic Trading taught me pretty much everything I know about Technical Analysis, so stop by their discord sometime and ask a question if any of these indicators confuse you.
My personal favorite Overlays/Indicators:
MACD
RSI
Stochastic RSI
Bollinger Bands.
Once you have a solid understanding of the basics: take a DEEP dive into Fibonacci Retracement & Elliot Wave Theory. These are my personal favorites and I swear by them.
6. BUYING YOUR FIRST COINS
Set up an account on Coinbase Set up an offline Wallet Exodus/Jaxx/GreenAddress Purchase your first coin on Coinbase after verifying your account. Transfer your coins to your wallet if you plan on holding long term. Transfer your coins to an exchange if you want to trade. Here are some popular exchanges:
Binance
Kraken
Bitfinex
GDAX (owned by Coinbase)
Good luck, and don’t lose faith when you take a loss. Everyone takes losses, and most people don’t learn how to trade/invest intelligently until they’ve obtained a few battle scars anyways.
— — —
Want to learn more?
If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out some of my more recent work. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/beginners-guide-to-investing-in-cryptocurrency-5ec5139c609b | ['Reza Jafery'] | 2019-07-04 02:23:39.408000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Investing'] |
Is Los Angeles a Safe City?. An high-level exploration of Los… | Los Angeles has been depicted as a seedy crime ridden city through representations in the media and movies. But what was once an assumption and stereotype of the safety of the city, we have only been able to assume the amount of within LA. However, under Eric Garcetti’s Administration as mayor, we have been lucky to have access to city level data under his Data LA initiative. We are now able to have a deeper insight as to what crimes are committed within the city. In this analysis, I will be looking simple one dimensional analysis of the dataset.
It should be noted that this analysis only accounts for reported crimes and is limited to the city of Los Angeles and not the greater Los Angeles area. For those more tech oriented readers, feel free to check out my GitHub for the coding used to analyze the data.
Overview of the Data
The data consists of all reported crimes from January 1, 2010, to the date I have pulled the data (October 20,2019). We have roughly 2,066,574 rows of data and 28 columns. In regards to the contents of the data we have data on the following aspects regarding the crime: dates & time, the crime itself, weapons (if any), victims (if any), and the location of the crime.
Top 10 Analysis of Categories
Its somewhat shocking to see that the top ten crimes within LA are focused around fights, theft, and vandalism. With battery/simple assault counting as the number one reported crime, more people should pick up self defence classes (or practice sprinting). In addition, people should be more wary of their cars, given car-theft and burglaries from cars top out the top 3 categories.
Within the top 5 locations with the most crime, 4 of those are located within the “South Los Angeles” region. If you live in Los Angeles, you would know that there's areas don’t have a lot of economic development, so I would look further into these regions assess the impacts of wealth and these regions.
Not surprising that most crimes occurs on a streets as that car-related crimes account for the top 2 and 3 spots of reported crimes. But it is notable to say that the next two categories are within the confines of a living space, rather than say a public setting.
Of those crimes committed with a weapon, we can see that a vast majority of those crimes are committed with fists (or kicks) over having a physical weapon. Compared to all other weapons within the top 10, it is a fair assumption to most crimes committed within Los Angeles will not have a fire-arm present.
Time
Most crimes occur in the evening, with a heavier build up between the hours of 5:00PM to 8:00PM. There is a noticeable spike right at Noon, it can’t be certain that there is a sudden increase of crime during lunch hours or if its a default value used by the system.
Has Los Angeles become a safer city over time? Based on this data we can say it was, up until 2014 where it suddenly spiked up. I would disregard the dip in reported crime in 2019 as that it is still only October when this dataset was pulled and I suspect more reports will come trickling in that had occurred through the year.
Within the data, we have 2 columns indicating the date of the occurrence and the date of the report, I have found that the average time that it takes people to report the crime is roughly 18 days. The longest it took a person to report a crime was 3570 days (or roughly 9 years and 8 months)
Victims
Demographic data from Wikipedia
Los Angeles is an incredibly diverse city, and that is unfortunately well reflected in the data of who has been a victim of a crime. The demographics of victims follow closely to Los Angeles’s demographics, with the only notable call out that despite the heavier white population, the hispanic population were significantly more likely to be a victim of a crimes than did their white neighbors.
In my next post, I will look into to a more multi-factoral analysis (ie what type of crime is most prevalent in what areas, are a specific race being more targeted with specific crimes,etc). | https://medium.com/swlh/los-angeles-crime-data-6619ca3b556e | ['Harrison Chaw'] | 2019-10-31 00:15:27.972000+00:00 | ['Los Angeles', 'Data Visualization', 'Journalism', 'Data Science', 'Data Journalism'] |
The next generation of sustaniable infrastruture | Plastic has slowly become an integral part of all human requirments .Plastic items such as plastic carrybags ,plastic bottles have replaced everything made up of other material due to the advantages of plastic as Plastics are lightweighted and odourless etc .Plastic waste slowly started causing problems ,pastic waste clogs drains it cause harm to animals as it chokes the animals who eat plastics .Around 420 million tons of plastic produced each year and most of this plastic end up polluting ecosystem around the world , about 75% of plastic is thrown away .The worlds oceans absorbs around 13 million tons of plastic annually, which harms more than 700 aquatic animals .As plastics release highly toxic fumes when melted and plastics can be recycled to 2–3 times by this times alot of noises were made to ban the plastic .Prof vasudevan an Indian scientists who worke mainly on waste managment sets an aim to solve this problem .He came up with an solution laboratory results of mixing waste plastics with heated bitumen and coating the mixture over stones proved positive .He first implemented this technique and constructed a road inside his collage in 2002.In 2006 the Thiagarajar collage of Engineering recieved the patent for this technique .The plastic items used for road construction are plastic carrybags ,plastic cups ,plastic packing etc .The entire process is simple .The plastic is first shredded into uniform size the aggregate mix and the butamin are heated at 160 degree monituring of the temperture is important during heating .The shredded plastic is added to the aggregate .It gets coated uniformly over the aggregate with in 30–60 seconds giving an oily look .The plastic waste coated is mix with hot butamin and the resulting mixture is used for road construction .The roller used has a capacity of 8 tons .Plastic roads are extremly eco-friendly with no toxic gasses being released .The plastics are fully homogenised into the mix so no microplastics are in the end asphalt mix and no leaching of any plastics can occur .Roads made up of plastics has been criticised in the past as being misleading because of their potential to spread microplastics in the envirnament .Microplastics saturated the air we breath, the water we drink , the food we eat .The average human consumes at least 70,000 microplastics annually but now this can be controlled by proper manufacturing of the materials used .Plastic waste helps increase the strength of the road .These roads have better resistance towards extreme wheather .Since large amount of plastic is required for a small streatch of road the amount of waste will definitely reduce. | https://medium.com/@beeb03371/platics-in-making-roads-78d2a2b07a68 | [] | 2020-12-02 23:02:38.506000+00:00 | ['Water', 'Marine', 'Pollution', 'Soil Health', 'Environmental Issues'] |
J.R. Watkins Sales Model | Three prominent buildings stand tall within Winona; in the face of hardship a relationship turns cold, leading to a murder-suicide. What do these two things have in common? That is one name, a name within the cupboards of thousands, a name which is Watkins. In this essay I will speak about the Watkins name, digging deeper than the fame which has been attached to the seven-letter word and going into its history. That is a history to which I believe we can all relate.
On April 10th, 2019, the StarTribune released an article titled: Irwin Jacobs, wife Alexandra dead in murder-suicide, close friend says. In this article, the authors spoke to the recent death of Irwin Jacobs who was the owner of the J.R. Watkins company. As a student at Winona State University, the news of Irwin Jacobs’ death carried a weight different to me than if I hadn’t ever lived in this bluff-sided town. Every day I drive past the J.R. Watkins Museum and Store, and occasionally pass by the Watkins Manor House located in Winona. As I leave the city streets, moving onto campus I am met with the name Watkins as well. This is because of the Watkins Hall and Paul Watkins Art Gallery on campus. It is because of these three stone buildings in Winona that the death of Irwin Jacobs holds more significance to Winona’s residents.
The Watkins Manor House, Watkins Hall, and the J.R. Watkins Museum and Store are public symbols of a legacy which began in Plainview, Minnesota. In 1885, J.R. Watkins moved his now-famous company to Winona where the company is still headquartered today. Watkins products are bought around the globe, and the company has seen great success. Paul Watkins was the nephew of J.R. Watkins and became the J.R. Watkins company president in 1911. According to the plaque outside of Paul Watkins home, the Watkins Manor house located at 175 E Wabasha St in Winona, Paul Watkins “traveled the world” with his wife purchasing artwork. The Watkins Hall and Watkins Gallery on campus are then named after Paul Watkins, who donated part of his private art collection to Winona State in the 1920’s. These three buildings within Winona stand as a testimony to the company’s ongoing legacy.
As the J.R. Watkins company progresses into the future, and with it being in recent news, I would like to take a moment to bring you back to its past. For we can see a legacy, but what we cannot see is the story behind it. And I believe that the aspect to the J.R. Watkins story which is most relatable and most important to never be forgotten is its sales model.
The story of Joseph Ray Watkins’ sales model began in Plainview, Minnesota. According to a plaque within the Watkins Museum in Winona, Minnesota, Watkins was struggling to sell his liniment product to drug stores. It was because of this that J.R. Watkins began selling directly to consumers. In the town of Plainview, J.R. Watkins worked to grow his company for seventeen years before moving to Winona in 1885. According to a 1928 Winona Republican-Herald articled titled “J.R. Watkins Company Observes 60th Anniversary,” in 1892 Joseph Ray Watkins’ nephew, Paul Watkins, moved to Winona to help him in growing his company.
Between 1890 and 1900, the J.R. Watkins company saw great growth. The company grew from 250 salesmen to 2,500 salesmen. It was also in this time that J.R. Watkins invented the Trial-Mark bottle, which allowed for customers to try their product and return it at full price if they weren’t fully satisfied with it. During this time period J.R. and Paul Watkins also invented the “Watkins Way” in which they promised customers the best product at the lowest price, along with integrity and fair treatment.
At the time that J.R. Watkins passed away in 1911, his company was well on the way to success. Paul Watkins became the company president after J.R. Watkins passed. Paul Watkins ran the company for twenty years, growing it to over 10,000 salesmen.
Shortly after Paul Watkins left the company, the company released The Open Door to Success, the J.R. Watkins company promotional booklet. This booklet promoted the benefits of becoming a Watkins salesman. The promotional booklet described becoming a Watkins salesman as a very simple process in which all that needed to be done was fill out an application, no license or special training was required. The company didn’t even require previous selling experience for their salesmen. Instead, Watkins equipped their salesmen with a pocket manual, teaching them how to sell, for free.
Through hearing of these facts about the history of the J.R. Watkins company it may seem difficult to relate to. I believe the past is relevant because of its relatability and ability to bring forth lessons which are valuable in our daily lives. If you think of any old Shakespeare play, its significance remains because of its current “realness” and relevance. And we look to Shakespeare’s work as so highly valuable that it should never be lost. In a similar way, this story of the Watkins sales model is one in which we can relate to. One I believe we can best relate to if we put ourselves in the shoes of one hypothetical salesman.
The year is 1933 and the J.R. Watkins company has just released their promotional booklet. Your name is Harvey Johnson, you have a wife and two daughters. In the heat of the great depression you’ve recently lost your farm. You are also unable to find any jobs in town as they are all filled with bankrupt farmers like yourself. Everything in your life seems like it’s about to hit rock bottom if you cannot find employment. That is until a close friend who knows your struggle brings you a gift: “The Open Door to Success.” Your friend says, “you know Harvey, I think this could be your way out of this pit. I’d take the opportunity myself, but there’s a chance I’d have to move to be within one of the uncovered sales areas.” You take the promotional booklet and begin to make your way back home after another long day of searching for jobs that aren’t there.
That evening, after serving your daughters the last of your green-beans you sit down in your tattered chair. You look to your left, where lies the Watkins promotional booklet. Opening it to the first page you’re met with a picture of J.R. Watkins with text reading: “Come, join this fine organization. You will enjoy the work as thousands of others are doing and you will enjoy the satisfaction and success that comes from being associated with a big strong company.” You continue to flip through the pages and learn that in this business you obtain individual freedom and are your own boss. This strikes a chord with you as in being a farmer you have always been your own boss. Then you continue reading and find that “you have little or no investment; you can never become deeply in debt, because sales are made for cash; you get quick action on your money; you have no store rent . . . [and] you begin earning the day your goods arrive.” You begin to think that this is an opportunity too good to be true and begin to doubt that it is real.
With a mind filled with doubtful hope, you continue turning the pages to find stories of their salesmen. One of these salesmen listed in the booklet is Mr. Andrew Mitchell who was a Watkins salesman his entire life, and who earned two-hundred and fifty dollars per week. You read one of his quotes which states “‘The part that I like best is that a man’s income is governed by just the amount of time he puts in. The harder one works, the more money one makes.” By this and other salesmen’s narratives you begin to think that this is an opportunity which you would like to partake in.
After a week of thinking about the J.R. Watkins company and failing to find any other jobs, you meet with your wife to discuss filling out the application form. She is on-board, and so you submit your form. Within the next month you are allotted your territory and receive information on how to place an order for goods, as well as the “Watkins Pocket Manual” on how to sell. Upon moving closer to your sales territory, you place your first order of products and begin going door-to-door. You struggle in the beginning to find people who are willing to buy your products as they are struggling with income and are careful about where they spend their income. However, you remain persistent and eventually push through by relying on the J.R. Watkins company values of integrity and fair treatment. You are able to sell many of your trial mark bottles and find that many people enjoy the product. Slowly you begin building and expanding your customer base and begin to grow a steady income.
As a student attending Winona State University, my story of attending college is similar to J.R. Watkins’ in starting his company and to the many salesmen of his company who followed him. J.R. Watkins began his company with the hope of providing for his family and sought to sell a product to the public in a personal way, while relying on his values in doing so. I decided to attend college with the hope of furthering my opportunities in life so that I could accomplish my own personal goals and become successful. The story of J.R. Watkins company is one with humble beginnings and stands out through its unique door-to-door sales model. By selling door-to-door J.R. Watkins was able to grow his company to success. However, this was not the easiest method. The Watkins method of door-to-door sales required a “daily grind” of talking to customers and seeking to expand territory while remaining true to honest values.
As a college student there are many aspects to the history of the Watkins sales model which are relevant to me. One of these is simply the fact that I need to put in the time and energy needed to get my degree. It would be easy for me to cut corners and not always do my best work. Or with the help of Google there are many times it would be easy to cheat to find answers. However, through J.R. Watkins’ story one can look to see that through hard work and remaining true to one’s integrity you can see success.
The door-to-door sales model of the J.R. Watkins company was heavily reliant on a good relationship between the salesman and customer. Today we are mainly focused on the products which we buy in the super-centers we shop at. Our relationship with retail workers lasts for two minutes at a time as we pass through check-out lanes. An article in the Star Journal titled “Historically Speaking: The Watkins Man” describes the relationship of Watkins salesmen with their customers as a very personal one. In this Star Journal article, the author stated that the Watkins salesman “and his family were dear friends of ours, and I returned his greeting each time with ‘Hello Mr. Watkins Man.’” The article also states that the Watkins brand was a household name and that the salesman would visit his home once a month in the summer. This is far different from how we buy our products today. Even the J.R. Watkins company now sells to retailers and no longer sells products through their door-to-door sales model.
There are instances today where people’s relationship to their customers is similar to that of the old time Watkins dealers. This has come with advances of technology and can be seen in Instagram models. These models create a relationship with their fans through their use of social media. Models pair with beauty or fashion companies to help advertise their products. They do so through social media platforms, such as Instagram, by displaying their using the products. However, this is a little different from the Watkins salesmen in that the models are not directly selling and distributing the product. But in a similar way to the Watkins door-to-door sales model, the models create a relationship with the customers of the companies they are sponsored by to promote products. Rather than going door-to-door, these models are able to go person-to-person through the use of social media.
The recent news of Irwin Jacobs death in a relationship-turned-cold murder-suicide is very ironic. This is because Jacobs was the head of a company built upon its relationship to its customers through its historic sales model. Though this model is no longer present within the J.R. Watkins company, its story is still relevant to our lives today. It teaches us the foundations of a legacy. The Watkins Way demonstrates that by remaining true to one’s virtues and by working hard, success is possible. When passing by any of the three historic buildings within Winona, it may be hard to find a connection to them. You may be left awe-filled by their splendorous design similarly to how you may be left awe-filled by the success of the J.R. Watkins company today. However, it is only by digging up the past of this legacy that one can be left with a sense of hope. For the story of J.R. Watkins sales model suggests that anyone can leave a legacy through virtue and hard work. | https://medium.com/wicwinona/j-r-watkins-sales-model-8a0b9500c467 | ['Adam Rechtzigel'] | 2019-05-08 15:50:46.377000+00:00 | ['Startup'] |
Day 19 | Advent of Cyber 2 | Day 19 | Advent of Cyber 2
Santa has released a web app that lets the children of the world check whether they are currently on the naughty or nice list. Unfortunately the elf who coded it exposed more things than she thought. Can you access the list administration and ensure that every child gets a present from Santa this year? tocto Follow Dec 19, 2020 · 2 min read
Hi! this room explains SSRF (server side request forgery), I hope you enjoy it!
[Day 19] Special by Tib3rius // The Naughty or Nice List
First, we go to the web server and we see that we have a field where we can write our name to see if we are in the list and below we have an admin login:
If we put a name, we see that the url is quite complex, let’s decode to try to understand it
there are several tools on the web for this:
As we said, let’s see what the URL contains:
It seems that the web server is contacting another to pass the name.
it is probably protected against navigating to locahost but let’s test anyways:
Your search has been blocked by our security team.
Bruh, luckily, there are people in the world who are very smart like the one they teach us in the room:
If we use the URL http://list.hohoho.localtest.me , the server will not realize that we are no longer calling the expected server! In this way we can read the internal services of the machine.
Decoded URL: http://list.hohoho.localtest.me:80/
Encoded URL: http%3A%2F%2Flist.hohoho.localtest.me%3A80%2F
It works!
Check the URL used!!
What is Santa’s password?
they tell you the password in the elf’s message :)
** **** *** ******** ****!
The user is Santa
What is the challenge flag?
Log in and click the button! | https://medium.com/advent-of-cyber-2-write-up-try-hack-me/day-19-advento-of-cyber-2-49da728cfa4d | [] | 2020-12-19 19:13:18.212000+00:00 | ['Hackathons', 'Ctf Writeup', 'Hacking', 'Tryhackme', 'Cybersecurity'] |
An Investigation of the California Wildfire Crisis | After running the animation a couple of trends appear. Since the onset of 2017, there have been far more damaging fires across the state with coastal and forested areas hit hardest. Before 2018, fires were far more equally distributed in both size and frequency all over California. However, from 2018 onwards, there has been a rampant increase in deadly wildfires across Northern California compared to other regions in the state. 2020 alone has seen the most destructive fires in modern history with the August Complex Fire and LNU Lightning Complex of Northern California burning an estimated 1.4 million acres to date. The August Complex Fire (depicted as the large, bright yellow circle in the 2020 pane), was extinguished only last month in November after an unprecedented cost of $264.1 million dollars.
One striking oddity in the trend of wildfire growth is the plummet of wildfires in 2019. With the lowest levels since 2004, the destruction done in 2019 amounted to only 260,000 acres — a mere 6% of the damage done in 2020. However, experts vehemently believe this trend will not change any long-term patterns and was simply an irregularity due to unusually heavy precipitation.
From this animation, it is clear that the most destructive fires occur in more heavily-forested areas — centered around Northern California. However, can the same be said about the frequency of wildfire incidents?
Hover over each bar for year-specific information
In this bar chart, broken up by region (NorCal and SoCal), it is clear that while the number of incidents in Southern California is increasing at a slight linear rate, the number of incidents in Northern California appears to be growing exponentially year-on-year. Reasons for this stark division can be attributed to the presence of more vegetation in NorCal which acts as a veritable timebomb waiting to ignite during the dry season.
With the exception of 2019 — which was an anomalous year for wildfires — there continues to be an overarching trend of both increased frequency and severity of wildfires, especially in Northern California.
County-Level Analysis
The figure below is a choropleth map — a thematic map colored in proportion to a specific statistical variable. In this case, this choropleth has been partitioned to visualize the cumulative acres burned since 2003 on a county-by-county basis. As expected, Northern California trends towards more land destruction.
Hover over choropleth for information on specific counties
Heavily damaged areas, depicted in purple and black, are also among the most forested regions in California. The San Joaquin Valley, an inland area constituting much of the Central Valley sports a more Mediterranean climate and is far less forested. This, in turn, accounts for fewer acres burned compared to the more northerly Sacramento Valley.
Source: Drought Monitor NOAA Climate.gov
Prolonged droughts and the rapid drying of vegetation accounts for the increase in wildfires. However, variability in temperature and precipitation are often the real instigators. Years of drought in California have traditionally been followed by very wet weather leaving behind vegetation that turns into fuel for wildfires. Cyclical weather patterns along with strong, warm winds prime wildfires for destruction. As seen above, Northern California is the most victim to moderate-severe drought compared to the rest of the state. This dichotomy might be explained by Southern California’s access to the Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies more than a billion gallons of water a day.
Hover over each bar for county-specific information
The bar graph shown above reveals that Lake County, Shasta County, and Trinity county suffer the brunt of wildfire damage across California. The reason these three counties lead the pack is that they all encompass national parks and are more heavily forested than any other region in the state.
Coincidentally the Shasta-Trinity National Forests — the largest National Forest in California was also the site of the August Complex Fire — the most destructive wildfire in modern California history.
Across California, many minor incidents occur every day and are often contained without loss of property or life. Even with fewer wildfire incidents relative to other counties, Lake County is still responsible for more than 2 million acres worth of destruction over the last two decades.
To better understand the impact wildfires have on private property we drew from data provided by the insurance industry. The below choropleth map serves to highlight figures provided by Verisk Analytics concerning the percentage of California households at high to extreme risk for wildfires.
Hover over choropleth for risk-assessment of various counties
Counties in blue indicate less than 20% of households are threatened, whereas red counties indicate a larger percentage of households at severe risk for wildfires.
Alpine, Trinity, Tuolumne, and Mariposa counties had the highest concentration of severely at-risk households in Northern California. The reason for this disparity is because households in Northern counties are dispersed at the edge of forested areas and are often directly in the way of wildfires. In many instances, stray embers carried by the wind make their way to rain gutters, bursting into flames and engulfing hundreds of properties.
Investigating Major Wildfire Incidents
After investigating wildfire impact on a county-by-county level we shifted to analyzing specific wildfire incidents. The bar chart below shows the top wildfires incident in terms of acres burned.
Hover over each bar for incident-specific information
Among the wildfires listed, the top six all took place in Northern California between 2018 and 2020. Furthermore, the August Complex — the single-largest wildfire and the largest fire complex in recorded California history — is more than twice as large as any other recorded incident. Blazing across Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, Tehama, Glenn, Lake, and Colusa counties, the August Complex Fire has been coined as a “gigafire” — a term never before used in California history to signify a blaze that burns at least a million acres.
From this subset of the Top 10 Wildfires in California history, the average duration that wildfires burned for was a whopping 59.5 days. Naturally, the question arises: What Makes Wildfires So Hard to Put Out? Wildfires behave in many ways like a combustion-powered hurricane. By channeling air and fuel upward, forests often spontaneously combust without actually coming into contact with flames. This combination of explosive growth and hellish conditions often renders fire-support teams from both the ground and air useless. In addition, since fires are most prevalent during the dry season, a lack of humidity leaves humans without the aid of Mother Nature.
Seasonal Disparity
For many Californian natives, fire season has always been marked by the end of Summer well into late Fall — making up the months of August, September, and October. To better understand the annual pattern of wildfires, we created a boxplot of Acres Burned across wildfire incidents from 2003–2020. By grouping wildfires by the month they started, we aimed to recognize and explain the seasonal disparity in damage.
Hover over each point for incident-specific information
Right from the start, it’s clear that wildfires dominate the autumn months. The peak of fire season spans from late July through September and is marked by radical wildfires destroying twice the number of acres compared to incidents in the spring and early summer.
Interestingly, there likely exists two distinct fire seasons in California. A study by University of California authors found that California cycles between what is called the Summer Fire Season, and the Santa Ana Fire Season.
Characterized by dry winds blowing towards the coast from the interior, the Santa Ana Fire Season occurs from October through April — striking more developed areas and inflicting more economic damage.
The Summer Fire Season, however, can take place anywhere in the state and often impacts remote/wild areas — as was the case with the August Complex Fire which engulfed the Mendocino, Six Rivers, and Shasta-Trinity national forests. Making up the rest of the calendar year, the Summer Fire Season is between June and September.
With the Santa Ana Fire Season inflicting more economic damage, the Summer Fire Season accounts for the most land destruction with millions of acres destroyed every year.
In order to prove that there exist two distinct fire seasons in California, we tried to replicate the results made by University of California researchers.
We decided to apply a form of unsupervised machine learning known as K-means Clustering to see if the “clusters” of months we identify align with the months outlined in the University of California paper. The idea behind this was to apply K-means clustering on key metrics that might reveal if a set of months truly deserves to belong in their own distinct fire season. As per the findings made by University of California researchers, we wanted to investigate metrics that are most representative of fires during the Summer Fire Season and Santa Ana Fire Season. For example, University of California researchers observed that ‘Summer Fires’ are more inclined to burn more slowly, while ‘Santa Ana Fires’ tend to burn along the coast. As such we take into account the average fire duration by month as well as the percent of fires located in coastal counties. Other metrics include the average acres burned and total wildfires incidents on a month-by-month basis.
To ensure that the algorithm weights each metric with the same relative importance during the clustering process, we normalized each column between 0 and 1 using the MinMaxScaler function in Python’s Scikit Learn library. After normalizing my metrics, we were able to use the K-means algorithm to partition my data into clusters as seen below.
There appear to be two distinct clusters based on this dataframe. Cluster A, identified by ‘1’ exists from June through September. Cluster B, identified by ‘0’ exists from October through April.
Cluster A is striking in that there are more wildfire incidents, a greater number of acres burned on average, and longer wildfires. These results share similarities to the ‘Summer Fire Season’ description outlined by University of California researchers. In the same vein, fires in Cluster B tend to take place along coastal areas and burn fast — characteristic of the Santa Ana Fire Season.
Hover over each point for incident-specific information
To better visualize the disparity between fire seasons we applied a color scale to the boxplot from earlier. Months in orange constitute the Santa Ana Fire Season, whereas months in red represent the more destructive Summer Fire Season.
Human Activity
There are a variety of ways to gauge which incidents can be described as the worst wildfires in California history. Different metrics include size (acres burned), deadliness (lives lost), and destruction (infrastructure destroyed). In order to better understand the part humans play in instigating the worst wildfires in California history we look at the following subsets: the top 20 largest wildfires, the top 20 deadliest wildfires, and the top 20 most destructive wildfires. | https://ucladatares.medium.com/an-investigation-of-the-california-wildfire-crisis-7104b1cb4a69 | ['Ucla Datares'] | 2020-12-22 00:23:52.666000+00:00 | ['Python', 'California', 'Plotly', 'Wildfires', 'Datares'] |
Cachaça Trip — Rio Grande do Sul, Day One (cont.): Weber Haus — Cachaça for Gringos | Cachaça Trip — Rio Grande do Sul, Day One (cont.): Weber Haus — Cachaça for Gringos Gringo Feb 20, 2020·5 min read
Weber Haus is an increasingly big name in the cachaça community. It’s one of the few so-called artisanal cachaças that I can find at supermarkets such as Pão de Açúcar. With a burgeoning reputation, I was excited, that first day of travel, to visit the distillery to learn more about where they came from, where they are currently, and where they see themselves going in the near future.
The parking lot was empty in the middle of the afternoon. The hot sun, perched in a cloudless blue sky, beat down on the cobbelstone parking lot. I managed to find a space in the shade of the main building. A large tank with an image of a newly released cachaça blend emblazoned on its side towered over me as I got out of the car.
I found my way into the Weber Haus store, a large, impressive space filled with brown, hard wood. In the middle of the room was another brown wood shelf filled exclusively with the different cachaças the brand produces. Along the far wall, there were liquers of various flavors and other products such as rum and gin. To the left was a bar where, I presumed correctly, one could sample the various wares Weber Haus had to offer.
The store was empty. I padded around, examining everything, hoping that I hadn’t appeared at an inopportune time. Maybe there was a staff meeting. Despite the fact that I’d communicated with someone from the distillery, and told them I was coming, I hadn’t given them an exact time. Uh-oh.
A few moments later two other visitors appeared. And then in an instant, a representative of Weber Haus emerged wearing a branded shirt, and assured me that someone would help me in a moment.
Marcelo greeted me with an offer to take a tour of the facility and learn more. I’d communicated with a Marcelo earlier in the week and presumed it was one in the same, though I’d soon learn it wasn’t.
We began with the history. In the 1840s, the Webers and 47 other families came from Germany and settled in Rio Grande do Sul. The family had experience with distilled spirits. They’d been known in the old country as purveyors of a certain kind of potato-based spirit, which I believe is called Kartoffelschnapps.
Without access to potatoes, the family discovered that their skills could be used to produce other spirits, namely cachaça. For nearly 100 years, the family produced cachaça, selling its product by going door to door. During that time, they did not bottle the liquor. Instead, they wheeled around a large barrel filled with cachaça, allowing purchasers to fill their own containers.
In the 1940s, that changed. The family, with a new generation in charge, began bottling its product, selling it under the name Primavera (Spring). This lasted until the 1970s when they reclaimed the family name and ushered in the modern era of Weber Haus. More modern equipment and techniques came to be used, though the traditional copper alembic still remained part of the process, even up until today.
We moved from the history lesson to a look at the creation process, though at this time of year, they do not produce cachaça, and then on to the area where certain cachaças are aged in barrels. For those who have toured a distillery or a vineyard and been to the area where the products are stored, you will get what I say when I mention that the smell of that place was divine. It smelled like sugar (but without the sweetness) and liquor and wood. But I could also sense the value of time, if that makes sense. To produce an aged spirit, one needs patience, and it was evident at Weber Haus. The heavy barrels of various shades of brown, depending on the type of wood, rested silently while I snapped pictures.
What impressed me the most, despite never having tasted it at the time, was the 7-wood blend that the brand had recently released. What’s a 7-wod blend? Well, it means that the same quality silver or prata cachaça, is aged in seven barrels made of seven different types of wood. The aged cachaça, removed from these seven, separate barrels, is then blended together. I asked my guide whether this was the only distilled spirit in the world to have such diversity. He didn’t have an answer, and I still haven’t gotten one, but my bet is that it is.
We returned to the store, and I would soon get to taste that 7-wood blend, but first I met the other Marcelo with whom I’d been communicating. As the director of sales, he had particularly keen insight into cachaça in general and prospects for US consumption, in particular.
I learned that Weber Haus produces cachaça for Fogo de Chão, the major churrascaria chain with locations in Brazil and the US. They also produce cachaça for others who use their own brand to sell the product.
I asked Marcelo what the toughest part about the US market is. He noted that it’s simply that Americans don’t have the chance to taste quality cachaça. While there are a number of industrially produced cachaças on the market, few small distilleries have made it. Marcelo said, and I agreed, that if Americans had exposure to quality cachaça, the market would open up.
There is little competition in the US as there is here in Brazil. Marcelo argued that there is great value in having multiple great distilleries competing against one another, offering their best to the public. He praised a few of his competitors, saying that without them, Weber Haus wouldn’t be where it is today.
After our discussion, we snapped some pictures, and I managed to sample the 7-wood cachaça, and even decided to purchase a bottle. I left the distillery feeling good about my experience and excited about the days to come, exploring more about the connections between these producers and the cachaça community. | https://medium.com/@gringo_70804/cacha%C3%A7a-trip-rio-grande-do-sul-day-one-cont-weber-haus-cacha%C3%A7a-for-gringos-a2f80893d0ef | [] | 2020-02-20 14:38:27.559000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Cachaça', 'Brazil'] |
To Cap Off 2020, My Dog Locked Me Out of My Car | My dog is smiling at me through my car window.
His paw is on the lock button.
My phone is in the car. The keys are in the ignition. I can hear my podcast still playing through the glass.
We are 50 miles from any town. It truly — suddenly — matters that we are in the middle of the Great American Desert. 18-wheelers barrel past me at 90 MPH.
Boring routine collapses into unbearable chaos through the simple touch of a dog’s paw.
There is no way forward.
“OK,” I say to myself, yanking on all the possible handles. “I need to think.”
I start doing breathing exercises that I learned to deal with the stress of the pandemic. I’m not sure what the universe wants me to have learned here . . . but that seems like something.
Tell Yourself There Is Always a Way
After I quit my marketing job, I worked as a handyman for about a year to fund my writing addiction.
Surprisingly (to everyone I know), I was a pretty good handyman. I had a motto:
“There is always a way.”
Things don’t always fit together right in the real world, or you have the wrong tools, or there are issues you could have never foreseen. For example, you need to mount exercise equipment to the ceiling, but the building is 100 years old, and the studs are impossible to find (or perhaps never existed).
No matter what, I muttered to myself that there was always a way. Even if it was clear that there was not. Even if the client was breathing down my neck. I just needed to take a deep breath and change the way I was looking at things. Every single time, I figured it out if I kept the faith.
Since I stopped being a handyman, that has been the number one lesson that applies to nearly every area of my life.
Standing in the middle of the desert, no phone, no keys, locked car running with my dog in it — this crosses my mind: There is always a way.
OK. First things first.
Get Your Feet in the Dirt
By “get your feet in the dirt,” I mean get practical, get physical, and get active. If you stay in your head, you will freak out, hyperventilate, and get stuck. It’s important to breathe and move your body. There is a lot of wisdom trapped in your body.
In this case, I literally had to get my feet in the dirt. My first instinct was to look for a wire hanger in the side-of-the-highway detritus. When I was little, a family friend named “Hotshot” unlocked a car by jamming a hanger in the door.
I found flattened cans, shredded tires, bits of plastic straps, and even a metal hook. No hanger.
I went back to the road. I waved my hands over my head to get someone’s help. I needed to borrow a phone — or maybe a trucker would have the equipment to unlock a car.
I waved and waved. People honked a waved back happily. “Merry Christmas!” was the vibe. What the hell did they think I was doing on the side of the road?
I thought about breaking the window with a big rock. That calmed me down. At least I had something I could do if worse comes to worst.
In between plans, I would try to convince my dog to unlock the car again. I pressed my mouth to the glass and said, “You wanna treat??” He would look at me — bored.
I went to pee in a bush.
Ask a Stranger for What You Need
While looking for a good peeing bush, I wandered farther and farther from my car. I find an old sign that reads, “Callbox.”
Over the callbox is a solar panel. I open the box and inside is what looks like a payphone.
I pick it up. A dial tone. My heart flutters.
After a few seconds, a voice comes over the phone.
“Hello, can I help you?” “Uh,” I say, “My dog locked me out of my car. Can you send someone to unlock it?” “. . . Hold please.”
Look Working Men in the Eye and Shake Their Hand
Only 30 minutes go by, and a guy in a big toe truck pulls up. There is a big, cloth Santa head on the grill.
“Merry Christmas!” he says. “Where are you from?”
He names a nearby town, which probably has a population of 200 people. The man is twice my size and red-faced.
“This is the third person I’ve helped locked out of their car . . . It’s always either a dog or a kid!” “I could have sworn I was unique!” I tell him.
He opens my door in 5 minutes. He charges me 150 dollars. I would have offered him blood if he had asked.
I thanked him, looked him in the eye, and had my hand swallowed up by his.
Don’t Treat the World Like More TV
There is a whole world out there that isn’t actually separate from us, as much as it might feel like it is.
You know how strange the side of a highway feels on foot? At first, it feels like a forgotten place. After a while of waiting, panicking, and looking for a hanger, it wasn’t so distant from me. It was a real place in the world.
For the rest of the trip, I felt more connected. By getting my feet in the dirt and shaking the hand of someone who lived out here, I felt like I wasn’t just passing it by. It was real.
Use Travel to Think
Travel is great for thinking. The thing about thinking is that you never realize you need to do it until you are forced to have done it.
My trip was 21 hours over a couple of days. Only so much of that can be filled with interesting podcasts and music. Eventually, I had to sit with myself and think.
I talk too much. I am selfish in my relationships. I love my family.
Probably pretty obvious realizations, but I needed to have the space to have them.
Read a Lot
Reading makes me better able to understand the world. The more I read, the more I take from my experiences.
Reading won’t stop my dog from locking me out of my car, but it will give me the tools to learn the right lessons from the whole experience — and that is absolutely priceless.
After my side-of-the-road scare, all I wanted to do was read. I wanted the comfort of deep ideas. Now and then, I would pull over and take some notes.
Counter-intuitively, having a profoundly worldly experience made me more willing to read about abstract ideas.
Compare Theory to Action by Trying and Failing
Read a lot, and then go do stuff.
You will make a fool out of yourself. That’s great. Read some more, think about where you went wrong, and try again.
I thought it was a mistake that I was failing so often for so much of my life. Now I realize that it is all part of the package.
As long as I am learning from my time in the desert, I am on the right path.
Learn to Tolerate Hours of Mild Discomfort
There is a lot of wisdom in prolonged mild discomfort. I think that’s why people meditate with their backs straight and not in a La-Z-boy.
Driving a car for hours on end can seem like torture to some people — so easy that you could fall asleep, but if you did, it would kill you. You have to force your attention on the endless road ahead for hours and hours. I think of it as training.
When life throws you into extreme discomfort that you didn’t plan for, you will be ready.
Bring a Dog (Chaos) With You Everywhere You Go
Dogs are a great way to get used to the facts of life. Life brings you chaos — whether you like it or not. No matter how much you exercise, you still might get sick. No matter how much you clean, dust always returns. No matter how much you care, you will still lose people.
Dogs train you to love the chaos in your life. You get used to the hair everywhere. The daily walks. The occasional emergencies.
Life — and dogs — require equanimity. Forgive life for bringing us COVID-19. Forgive the dog for locking us out of the car.
I don’t wish that a dog locks you out of your car . . . but I kinda do also. Those experiences are the stories we tell one another. They reveal who we are, like it or not.
Forget Worrying About Unlikely Things
Being trapped on the side of the road forced me to confront my fear of unlikely events. What if a car crashed into mine? What if the dog suffocated? What if someone mugged me?
To take the steps I needed to get out of the situation, I had to let go of those things.
In life, we can’t control if we get COVID-19 (mostly) or if the economy fails, or who is elected president. The world probably isn’t going to end anytime soon. Let’s focus on what we can do, here and now.
What is the first, practical step forward?
Ask People Where They Are Going And Where They Have Been
In rest stops, little kids like to pet Seymour.
I learned to ask their parents where they are going and where they have been. Social interactions without anyone standing to gain anything are golden. I plan to ask more people in my normal life the same question. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/to-cap-off-2020-my-dog-locked-me-out-of-my-car-823b591e9fcc | ['Taylor Foreman'] | 2020-12-26 15:33:29.267000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Travel', 'Relationships', 'Dogs'] |
The Time I Blinked To the Future | I remember a day of restlessness. At that time, I was about nine-years-old. I remember telling myself that I would blink, and the next day would appear. So, I blinked. After I blinked, I remember waking up to a bright sky outside. I rushed to my mother, who was cooking breakfast at that time. I informed her about my awakening, and she simply told me to get ready. Until this day, I cannot believe this occurrence. Could it have been the mind of a child? Or something simply of unexplainable manner? If you could answer this question, it would be highly appreciated. Thank you! | https://medium.com/@alldaywrite505/the-time-i-blinked-to-the-future-5b9f079d20de | ['Write Allday'] | 2020-12-18 04:08:00.148000+00:00 | ['Questions', 'Weird', 'Confusion'] |
React Native reusable component — Todo list App | We ( lazy programmers :D ) always tend to reuse ready made components and make use of any other things that can save time and effort and as Anthony J. D’Angelo said “Don’t reinvent the wheel, just realign it”.
It’s good that in React Native like in most programming languages we can make our own customized components and reuse them.
Here I’m going to show you how to make a simple component in your app in very simple and easy way.
I’ve choosen a simple ToDo list app to go through our examples here.
ToDo list app
Let’s do the red rectangle together:
Add “New Folder” in “src” folder, name it “components” Add “New File” name it “TodoItem.js” Copy the folloing code:
Now let use that component named “TodoItem”:
Go to the main file, in my app it’s “App.js” Add “import TodoItem from ‘./components/TodoItem’;” in the top of the file so now you can use that component Use this tag <TodoItem> wherever you want to use the component and you pass properties and functions too
So in simple words it’s the best practice to make your code shorter, cleaner, and more readalbe, so let’s say you want to make your own customized Button then your write the code ones and you can pass the color, font size, functions, and more …
To take a look or test my code for Todo list App feel free to visit this link: | https://medium.com/@tammamwafai/react-native-reusable-component-todo-list-app-7f746d09526c | ['Tammam Wafai'] | 2020-12-25 12:53:53.900000+00:00 | ['To Do List', 'Apps', 'React Native', 'Reusable Component', 'Todo'] |
Which Are Most Commonly Used Payment Gateways For Small Business | Online shopping industry and e-commerce platforms are flourishing the web these days. It has also increased the demand for business owners to not just facilitate various options for payment methods, but also align better security algorithms for credible services to the users.
People are moving on the path of adaptation worldwide, where they are open to online shopping and secure payment gateway to realize a purchase. So many of us already do that, isn’t it? The forecast also states that 95% of all retail sales will switch to online shopping and e-commerce platforms by the year 2040 as they are quite impressed by How Payment Gateways Work. People are getting more inclined to digital payment systems like ApplePay and PayPal.
The need of the hour suggests that even a small business must adapt to payment gateways to realizing better revenues for their brand. Just a website full of information about the products might not help. You must serve a platform to make a successful purchase as well. And this is where you will need a payment gateway for a credible experience for your potential users.
Payment gateways resolve major issues for small and big businesses where they can serve the option of purchase along with classified products information on the website.
One thing to consider here is that every business offers different types of pricing and setup, which in turn changes the respective protocols on how to develop a payment gateway system. And thus, payment gateways might vary for different brands and installation setup. However, just thought of installing the Payment Gateways category is not where it ends. There are certain protocols that Gateways also follow, for instance, 10 reviews by a reviewer from a small business and so on.
Let’s check out some of the secure payment gateways options for small business.
Commonly Used Payment Gateways For Small Business
For entrepreneurs proposing to engage a developing base of online customers, unmistakably, a push toward more adaptable payment arrangements is altogether. Indeed, there’s consistently PayPal, however, if you’re on the lookout for other payment apparatuses to attempt, here’s the list of Best Payment Gateways for Small Businesses.
Dwolla
Established in Iowa, money move administrations organization Dwolla dispatched in the U.S. in 2010, situated itself as an option in contrast to then payments handling goliath PayPal. Opening a record with Dwolla is free; clients can utilize Dwolla to move assets for one-time, repeating, and even mass payments. Dwolla can be accessed on the web along with an application available on iOS and Android for better reach of users.
WePay
Set up in 2008 and intended to be utilized for money-pooling, gift activities, WePay rotated to zero in on loaning it’s instinctive, easy to use payments preparing stage to organizations. As an intriguing side note about WePay’s set of experiences, it was the gathering pledges administration of decision for members of the Occupy Wall Street development in 2011, which prompted a tremendous lift in WePay’s utilization and general perceivability.
WePay is accessible and versatile and charges an expense of 2.9% in addition to 30 pennies for every fruitful credit card exchange.
Stripe
Picking up a foothold for its less-muddled “just compensation for what you use” evaluating model, Stripe charges a clear 2.9% in addition to 30 pennies for every fruitful card exchange. There are no arrangement or month to month charges to worry about, and Stripe’s information and detailing highlight shows you exchange data progressively.
Stripe bolsters more than 100 monetary forms that also includes UAE payment gateway system. It likewise measures bitcoin and ACH exchanges for charges beginning at 0.8% and a limit of $5.
As of late, Stripe delivered Stripe Atlas, which permits entrepreneurs from anyplace on the planet to consolidate a U.S. organization, open a U.S. financial balance, measure payments, and get charge and legitimate direction from Stripe’s counselling accomplices. Stripe is accessible both on the web, and there is a portable application for Android and iPhone clients.
ZipBooks
Free bookkeeping programming ZipBooks is an option in contrast to QuickBooks among consultants and proprietors of little to fair size organizations.
ZipBooks offers income to executives devices to independent companies, similar to receipt financing. Its plan of action is based on the reason that numerous organizations need monetary assistance when a liquidating stream briefly comes up short and that entrepreneurs are eager to pay a little expense for help.
Notwithstanding making following day payments into an organization’s financial balance dependent on an exceptional receipt, ZipBooks likewise offers more conventional payment apparatuses like credit card preparing and PayPal coordination.
ZipBooks incorporates complex efficiency devices with its bookkeeping suite, for example, time following, financial balance mix and repeating invoicing.
It’s a cloud-based bookkeeping apparatus accessible either as a responsive web application that functions admirably on any gadget or as a local iPhone application.
Braintree Payments
Established in 2007 and obtained by PayPal in 2013, Braintree lets traders measure credit and debit card payments, just as payments from clients utilizing PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Bitcoin and Venmo.
Braintree obliges a scope of organizations, including membership-based, direct deals, administration based, or commercial center based traders. Braintree has a direct evaluating plan beginning at 2.9% in addition to 30 pennies for each exchange for cards and computerized wallets.
Different pluses of Braintree incorporate no base exchange or month to month expense prerequisites and no concealed expenses for extortion assurance administrations.
Bambora
Bambora, some time ago, Beanstream, has been doing business since 2000. An adaptable omnichannel stage, Bambora can deal with differing exchange types: web-based business, EMV, portable payments, clump preparing, repeating charging, via telephone, and mail-in payments.
Bambora charges 2.9% in addition to 30 pennies for each effective card-present exchange and 2.8 in addition to 30 pennies for card-not-present exchanges.
Venmo
Venmo is a PayPal-possessed payment handling administration that permits you to ask for, send, and get money from other Venmo clients.
You can legitimately send money to an individual’s Venmo account and even connect your bank, credit or debit cards. Money from your Venmo record can be moved to your ledger in one business day.
Venmo is accessible through Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Venmo is just free when making payments by means of a financial balance or certain debit cards. For credit card and some debit card exchanges, Venmo charges a standard 3% exchange expense.
PayPal
It is a well-known payment platform that is supported in nearly 200 countries worldwide and known to be Best Payment Gateway in India. If you are dealing with international clients or payment transactions, this might help you with better security. Merchants can receive more than 1hundred currencies on this platform that also supports web payments, business loan, online invoicing, and more.
This is known to be a perfect and most popular payment platform that small businesses trust. The features are quite enticing to the merchants as they offer a customised invoice to customers and clients with a faster payment solution.
Conclusion
Just the thought of installing a secure payment gateway is not the solution. You will need professional help that can also help in securing the data of your user as well as your firm on the server that works on secure protocols.
Well, of course, that is not possible to create by itself. You will need a professional hand to help you consider Payment Processing Solutions for Small Businesses like Owebest Technologies who can help in improving your authenticity and credibility. Without that, it is impossible to gain the trust of a user. Consider an instance, where a user who shopped a bunch of books from your website five minutes back is now losing all the money on their payment platform.
And if the loophole is found at your platform, not only will you lose credibility, your brand might n longer be entertained on the web anymore. So how about you make a list of secure payment gateways and contact us to further discuss the possibilities. Never forget, payment gateways can change your brand value for a good or even worst. Everything comes down to how to get the secure platform installed. | https://medium.com/@owebest/which-are-most-commonly-used-payment-gateways-for-small-business-4f95741d3ab5 | ['Karen Taylor'] | 2020-12-21 02:31:26.708000+00:00 | ['Payments', 'Payment Gateway', 'Payment Systems'] |
Democrats again embrace bigotry | One-time minor-league entertainment notable Sarah Silverman isn’t good for much. But this comparison is one time she is instructive.
In 2015, touring comedians like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld were critical of college audiences’ PC restrictiveness. But not Silverman.
“You have to listen to the college-aged, because they lead the revolution,” is how she explained her flimsy-spined willingness to accept trendy message-scissoring, as quoted in 2015 by AVClub.com.
Like Simple Sarah, the Democrat Party leadership seems to have no unvarying principle save for status-retention. They’ve apparently calculated that change must come, regardless of its quality.
To survive, albeit as gruesome behemoth, that party has now embraced hatred.
In the aftermath of the flood of ugly anti-Semitism that gushed from Rep. Ilhan Omar’s heart via her mouth, more than a few Democrat Party leaders and liberal mainstream media hacks rose to defend her against perfectly legitimate criticism.
Those included Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Washington Post, Roll Call’s Emily Kopp, Jon Shwarz of the Intercept, and pretty much everyone who cashes checks signed by Andrew Lack or Jeff Zucker.
And I’ve already lost track of how many other liberal news media figures have galloped into broadcast with tortured defenses of bigotry that all good people once considered indefensible.
“Democrats have become an anti-Israel party,” President Trump recently told White House reporters. “They’ve become an anti-Jewish party.”
Democrats effectively sanctioned Omar’s articulated evil. The resolution they ultimately produced did not explicitly name her or cite her statements, but watered down the point of the whole thing by cramming in every other form of prejudice imaginable.
“Today is historic on many fronts,” wrote Omar and fellow Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rachel Tlaib, in a triumphant joint statement. “It’s the first time we have voted on a resolution condemning anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation’s history.”
So, what began as a specific reaction to Omar’s anti-Jewish hate was turned from that noble task to a bland pronouncement more to her preference. The villain became the victor.
“Today’s resolution vote was a sham put forward by Democrats to avoid condemning one of their own and denouncing vile anti-Semitism,” said House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney.
Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib have led the Democrat Party onto a vile boulevard that party’s heads used to decry. The ease with which those party officials reversed their anti-Semitism opposition illustrates smallness of character.
But unseemly indulgence of anti-Semitism is not contemporary Democrats’ sole offense.
American Catholics were once dependable Democrat voters. I grew up in the late ’60s and recall Irish-Catholic families hanging JFK portraits in their homes. (My wife and I presently have one of President Trump hanging in our living room.)
In recent times, more and more national Democrats have attacked Catholicism.
“The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein intoned dramatically of Catholic appeals court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Many observers, including Sen. Orrin Hatch, charged the Democrat had violated the Constitution’s “religious test” prohibition.
Democrat Senators Kamala Harris and Maize Hirono challenged Judge Brian C. Buescher, who would possibly serve on the United States District Court for Nebraska, on his membership in the pro-traditional values Catholic Knights of Columbus.
For them and like-minded Democrat colleagues, religious testing of Catholics is all the rage.
It has become common for congressional Democrats and their news media accomplices to savage Catholic Church teachings and traditions. One need only read daily papers to find fresh evidence.
Taking a step back, we can see that Democrats’ hostility toward traditionally respected and influential American faiths is of a part with the general out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new sensibility guiding them.
That has seen challenges to Constitutional rights to free speech and gun ownership; historical revisionism in academia; the tearing down of venerable statuary; attempted erasure of national boundaries, sovereignty, and citizenship significance; and even disputation of our country’s very right to exist.
This is, of course, far from the first time the Democrat Party has
supported bigotry. Historians like author Dinesh D’Souza recall the majority of slaveholders belonged to that party, and that elected Southern Democrats long protected both that institution and the Jim Crow laws that followed.
The Ku Klux Klan began as a Democrat vehicle. Sen. Al Gore, Sr. filibustered against the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which was opposed by a majority of Democrats but supported by most Republicans.
Today, powerful Washington Democrats apparently reason that traditional American ideals of equality and nondiscrimination should be jettisoned in favor of Radical Islamic prejudices, and that party candidates can win future elections without the votes of Catholics and Jews.
I hope for the good of America that Democrats are again wrong.
Iowan DC Larson’s recent political books include “That a Man Can Again Stand Up: American Spirit vs sedition during the incipient Trump Revolution” and “Ideas Afoot: political commentary, cultural observations, and media analyses.” Essays by him have run in Daily Caller, American Thinker, USA Today, and elsewhere. Newspapers across his home state of Iowa carried his essays championing the Trump candidacy and presidency. And his political blog is American Scene Magazine https://americanscenemagazine.blogspot.com/. | https://medium.com/@DcLarson_/democrats-again-embrace-bigotry-13978596f6da | [] | 2019-03-09 23:41:43.295000+00:00 | ['Catholic', 'Democrat', 'Politics', 'Republican', 'Jewish'] |
Fernández and Washington: they sweet talked but the relationship is still a mystery | Alberto Fernández and Donald Trump
When the inauguration of the new president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández is just 4 days away, it is inevitable to wonder how the incoming president will be shaping his international relations. Even though there are already some notions and ideas, the big question is still a mystery: what will be the relationship between the economic team of the future president and the White House? Considering that the debt with the International Monetary Fund is still one of the greatest problems that has to be solved by Alberto’s government and that in the United States is heading to a general election in 2020. On the other hand: who will be the great figure to handle the negotiations between the two countries?
While in the United States President Donald Trump is on his way to face a process of political trial, but still focus on his economic triumphs, which is still the main objective and the field to preserve the most in order to go for re-election in the presidential polls of 2020, Argentina is in suspense before the next inauguration of the future president of the country, Alberto Fernández. He will have many difficult tasks, among which the development of a strong relationship with the White House is, whoever is in charge for the next few years.
That is why Alberto’s team already has an eye on what is happening in Argentina while the other is in Washington, since any changes could directly affect the relationship between the Argentine government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the organism with which the Fernández administration will have to renegotiate the country’s debt. Unless they go directly to a default situation. Although Alberto’s plans for the IMF are unknown yet, he said he will not ask for the US $ 11,000 million remaining from the Mauricio Macri´s agreement.
“The first rule to comply is to say ‘do not lend me more money and let me develop my economy in order to be able to pay “, explained the future Argentine president on 11/26 when he was asked about his next and firsts moves. Martín Guzmán, a specialist in External debt restructuring, who will be the new Minister of Economy, agreed with this line of thinking.
In consequence, the position taken by the United States towards Argentina will be vital, taking into account that Fernández and Trump’s ideologies are not the most congruent. Both counterparts had a telephone conversation at the end of November where the Republican president apparently congratulated the Argentine for the victory and assured a supportive approach on the negotiation with the IMF: “I have instructed the Fund to work with you. Do not hesitate to call me”, Trump would have said. Although later came a wave of harmful tariffs from Trump´s White House to the Argentine economy.
Last Monday 12/02, without prior notice to the government of Mauricio Macri and while he closes the China one, Trump decided to reset a trade war with Argentina and Brazil. Accordingly, he announced through his Twitter account that he will restore “All Steel and Aluminum that is shipped into the US from those countries”, Trump explained with the excuse that both Latin American countries had devalued their currency in porpoise.
On the other hand, the relationship of both countries is influenced by the next elections in the United States. Firstly by the Democratic Presidential Nomination, which will determine who will oppose Trump’s in the November 2020 generals. Who will Alberto Fernández support? For the moment he needs to hold Donald Trump close, because at least until next year he will continue to be president. But what will happen after renegotiating the debt with the Fund is a mystery. Also considering that at the moment there is no Democratic candidate who has come up with a government proposition strong enough to defeat Donald Trump.
Remember that when it was Mauricio Macri´s election in 2015, he was embraced by former President Barack Obama, who was also present at his inauguration ceremony. Instead, for Alberto´s ceremony, Trump’s White House will send a simple representative. Returning to Macri, he went all for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections and he failed, but not even the polls could predict Trump´s victory. Nonetheless, while the republican had the chance of being tough on the Macri´s government, they create a great relationship between each other.
Among all the questions facing the new administration that will arrive soon at the Casa Rosada, many also wonder who will be the person that will work as a link between the United States and Argentina. Even though there was a reunion between the ambassador of America, Edward C. Prado, and Alberto, it does not mean that he will be a vital figure in bilateral relations, especially considering that he had no previous experience in diplomatic or commercial relations, since he served as judge of the Court of Appeals in the United States.
Felipe Solá, whom Alberto Fernández appointed as Minister of Forgein Affairs, is the other representative that could shape the relationship. He have never had diplomatic experience, thus he does not know languages, and because of that he already received and will continue to receive critics and teasing. But that does not mean he can´t be the person in charge of the bilateral conversations, since there are interlocutors, a system that works perfectly. He already joined Alberto in his tour by Europe and Latin America, he was also present at meetings with diplomats and foreign politicians.
This article was already published in spanish in Urgente 24 | https://medium.com/@camilaarostegui0/alberto-f-and-washington-they-sweet-talked-but-the-relationship-is-still-a-mystery-3203ff4f15c3 | ['Camila Arostegui'] | 2019-12-21 16:38:55.254000+00:00 | ['Argentina', 'Alberto Fernandez', 'Imf', '2016 Election', 'Trump'] |
Getting Closer To Your Mega Project Problem | Problem Statement
N owadays, everyone is busy in their life and want everything at home in a quick time, in addition, COVID19 plays a vital role in this scenario. There is a prominent gap in different sections but I want to cover Fruit and Vegetable’s sector.
I talked to some men and women about this issue and unfortunately, I was unable to take photos, they were quite concerned about this they said it’ll be feasible for them if they get fresh fruits and vegetables at their doorstep and definitely we’ll charge for our services.
Furthermore, we can expand our circle to hotels, marriage halls, and restaurants. Diet plans are also on the cards alongside fruit baskets for different events.
I’m quite positive about this and looking forward to work on it. | https://medium.com/@choudary-sanwal171/getting-closer-to-your-mega-project-problem-643b30cd7397 | ['Sanwal Akram'] | 2020-12-25 14:58:12.046000+00:00 | ['Amal Fellowship', 'Amal Academy', 'Megaprojects'] |
Better care in life’s most important stages: Our investment in Peppy | Felix capital leads Series A round to accelerate Peppy’s mission to become a leading digital health platform, supporting employees in life’s most important stages
Health and wellness is at the heart of our investment strategy at Felix. With “aspiration for a better life” as one of our key themes, we’re drawn to propositions that change consumers’ interactions with our healthcare systems and providers, where there’s an opportunity to build meaningful communities and brands around health. This has led to our investments in companies such as Peloton (vertically integrated fitness and wellness platform), Unmind (workplace mental health platform), Urban (on demand wellness services) and others.
Over the years, we’ve been closely tracking a number of trends within healthcare, first the increasing digitisation of the industry, as the demand for more convenient ways to access care and support has grown, which has been further accelerated by COVID-19. These changes are important for consumers, but also companies, who are increasingly recognising the importance of offering benefits that create more accessible, higher quality care for employees, in turn boosting morale, productivity, and retention. Second, the increasing “verticalisation” of healthcare, with personalised platforms taking a much tailored approach to treat specific conditions (and illustrated at scale by companies such as Livongo, Noom etc.)
Enter Peppy, a London-based digital health platform with the mission to provide millions of people with expert, caring support during life’s most challenging stages. Beginning with the focus areas of menopause, fertility, and early parenthood, Peppy provides tailored, expert-led support to individuals going through important life and family events. By offering users access to highly-qualified expert practitioners through chats, video consultations, as well as digital content and community events, Peppy is bridging the gap between online searches and hard-to-access clinical care. Peppy’s combination of high-touch clinical support, and scalable digital platform, means that they can offer a truly affordable healthcare product, democratising access to potentially millions of employees.
We first came across Peppy as users ourselves — and our individual experience with the platform was just the first indication that this team is building something truly life-changing. When we dug in more — understanding the impact that Peppy has had on existing users, as well as the team’s large vision and ambition to solve some of the biggest gaps in healthcare — we knew we wanted to be part of this journey.
We’re thrilled that Peppy has chosen Felix as partners, and to announce our investment in Peppy’s $10m Series A, alongside Outward VC, Seedcamp, and Hambro Perks.
The need for better, more personalised care
Just two examples of recent headlines on the overlooked areas of menopause and fertility
Over the last few years we have witnessed accelerated growth of on-demand, digital therapeutics and tele-medicine. Consumers’ desire for increased convenience and on-demand services, combined with mass adoption of smartphones, and regulatory shifts have laid the foundation for the rise in virtual appointments and digital therapeutics. The global digital health market is massive and growing — currently estimated at $100bn, the market is expected to grow 6x over the next five years. This trend has been further cemented by COVID-19 as previously face-to-face doctor consultations transitioned remotely overnight during the pandemic (tele-health appointments grew 38x!), and clinicians acceptance of digital platforms leapfrogged.
Meanwhile, some of the biggest gaps in healthcare occur in some of the most ubiquitous and significant life stages of consumers. For example, menopause, fertility, pregnancy, and early parenthood are transitions that affect almost 100% of people (and employee) populations, but are traditionally some of the most difficult health topics to get proper information and specialist care for. For example, while virtually all women experience some menopausal symptoms, 73% of women surveyed have not treated them, and 32% of women surveyed said they feel their doctor is not comfortable talking about menopause. The Peppy team realises that a “one size fits all” healthcare approach doesn’t work for these different needs and has instead created verticalised programs with different clinicians, content and communities for each area.
The Peppy team isn’t content with just solving these critical life stages however — they have kept their ear to the ground continuously gathering customer and user feedback and have already identified a number of additional life stages to help support on their ambitious roadmap!
Employees as consumers and the workplace as a community
Key to Peppy’s ability to plug gaps in the existing healthcare market is through their B2B2C approach, enabling companies and private medical insurers to offer important care and support to their employees during critical, life-changing moments, where there is not only a large gap in care from existing healthcare providers, but also a high risk of employee dropout (as an example, 45% of menopausal women surveyed have considered taking a break from work due to their symptoms, and only 28% of women are in full time work after becoming mothers).
One of our key themes at Felix is the framing of “the employee as a consumer”. As our working and personal lives become ever-more integrated, and the quality and accessibility of consumer tools and services rises, we increasingly expect and demand a higher quality from the tools we use in the professional realm as well. Simply put, workplace tools are held to a higher standard than ever. Says Peppy, “Employers are learning that providing remote, inclusive support for the individual is key.”
In all our investments, we look for signs of customer love, and this could not be clearer in Peppy! Unique for a B2B healthcare provider, they have a 4.8/5.0 rating on Trustpilot and through extensive conversations with HR managers and existing Peppy clients, we were able to see firsthand the impact that Peppy has on workplace wellbeing. Users told us verbatim that “Peppy is a lifesaver” and feedback collected showed that 90% of users felt more positive about their employer after using Peppy. Importantly, through connecting individuals going through similar life challenges through community events and group chats, Peppy has made their users feel less alone.
Peppy proudly supports a diverse, growing customer base, ranging from magic circle law firms (Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance), to banks (BNP Paribas, Santander), to retailers (DFS, Wickes), to public sector employers (the University of Sheffield) and even healthcare insurers and providers themselves (including NHS Trusts, Aviva and Vitality Health). Most importantly, Peppy support is available to all employees, from entry level to the C-suite.
Team on a mission
Peppy founders Evan, Mridula and Max
At Felix, we love founders who relate closely to their company’s mission and it was clear from our very first interaction that Mridula, Max and Evan were authentically driven to start Peppy. Not only do the founders all have deep experience in the healthcare industry, but have each gone through their own personal struggles with fertility and parenthood, and realised the chasm in accessible care. Critically, the founders recognise how important it is to build a first class clinical team and have brought on board some of the UK’s most senior thought leaders in their areas including Kathy Abernethy, Director of Menopause Services who was previously the Chair of the British Menopause Society, and a renowned author and researcher.
We are thrilled to join the Peppy team on their journey to bring better, more accessible care to millions of people! | https://medium.com/@felixcapital/better-care-in-lifes-most-important-stages-our-investment-in-peppy-da830e5fd11d | ['Felix Capital'] | 2021-07-27 09:40:44.246000+00:00 | ['Fertility', 'Parenthood', 'Menopause', 'Digital Health', 'Startup'] |
Yummy Chords Justin Bieber | chords
Am/D xx0210
Em7 xx2430
[Intro]
Am/D Em7
[Chorus]
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah, babe, yeah, babe, yeah, babe
Em7
Any night, any day
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah babe, yeah babe, yeah babe
Em7
In the mornin’ or the late
Em7
Say the word, on my way
[Verse 1]
Am/D
Bonafide stallion
Em7
It ain’t no stable, no, you stay on the run
Am/D
Ain’t on the side, you’re number one
Em7
Yeah, every time I come around, you get it done (You get it done)
[Pre-Chorus]
Am/D
Fifty-fifty, love the way you split it
Em7
Hundred racks, help me spend it, babe
Em7
Light a match, get litty, babe
Am/D
That jet set, watch the sunset kinda, Yeah, yeah
Em7 N.C.
Rollin’ eyes back in my head, make my toes curl, yeah, yeah
[Chorus]
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah, babe, yeah, babe, yeah, babe (yeah, babe)
Em7
Any night, any day
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah babe, yeah babe, yeah babe
Em7
In the mornin’ or the late
Em7
Say the word, on my way
[Verse 2]
Am/D
Standin’ up, keep me on the rise
Em7
Lost control of myself, I’m compromised
Am/D
You’re incriminating, no disguise (No disguise)
Em7
And you ain’t never runnin’ low on supplies (Supplies)
[Pre-Chorus]
Am/D
Fifty-fifty, love the way you split it
Em7
Hundred racks, help me spend it, babe
Em7
Light a match, get litty, babe
Am/D
That jet set, watch the sunset kinda, yeah, yeah
Em7 N.C.
Rollin’ eyes back in my head, make my toes curl, yeah, yeah
[Chorus]
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy (You stay flexing on me)
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum (Hey)
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah, babe, yeah, babe, yeah, babe, Yeah, babe
Em7
Any night, any day
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah babe, yeah babe, yeah babe, Yeah, babe
Em7
In the mornin’ or the late
Em7
Say the word, on my way
[Bridge]
Am/D
Hop in the Lambo’, I’m on my way
Em7
Drew House slippers on with a smile on my face
Am/D
I’m elated that you are my lady
Em7
You got the yum, yum, yum, yum
Am/D Em7
(Yummy-yummy, yummy-yummy…)
You got the yum, yum-yum, woah
Am/D Em7
(Yummy-yummy, yummy-yummy…)
woah-ooh
[Chorus]
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy
Am/D
Yeah, you got that yummy-yum
Em7
That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah, babe, yeah, babe, yeah, babe, Yeah, babe
Em7
Any night, any day
Em7
Say the word, on my way
Am/D
Yeah babe, yeah babe, yeah babe, Yeah, babe
Em7
In the mornin’ or the late
Em7
Say the word, on my way
[Outro]
Am/D Em7 Am/D Em7 Am/D Em7 | https://medium.com/@vanesacitra05/yummy-chords-justin-bieber-9fc3cc37966b | [] | 2020-12-14 06:45:08.251000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'News', 'Music', 'Videos', 'Love'] |
How to scrape Google Trends | Step-by-step guide to scraping Google Trends
Keeping an eye on Google Trends can keep you relaxed and ahead of the competition
The Apify platform includes lots of readymade tools designed to help you scrape popular websites. One of these is Google Trends. Whether you’re a journalist researching hot topics, a real estate developer keeping an eye on future property values, an SEO expert tracking keywords, or an e-commerce retailer thriving on the edge with dropshipping, Google Trends has useful data for you.
Scraping and automating your Google Trends research will enable you to do more, faster, so read on to find out how easy it can be to use our free Google Trends Scraper.
1. Sign in at Apify. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up by using your email, Google account, or GitHub account.
Apify: the one-stop shop for all your web scraping,
data extraction, and robotic process automation (RPA) needs
You can log in using your email, GitHub, or Google
2. Once you log in, you’ll see your Apify Dashboard. You can explore that later once you’ve learned how to scrape Google Trends.
Your Apify Dashboard will look something like this
3. Click on the Store button. Apify Store is where you can find free, ready-to-use web scraping and automation tools called actors. You should definitely also check out the rest of these later, but first let’s search for Google Trends Scraper.
The Apify Store is filled with actors — cloud programs to help you scrape and automate
4. When you’re on the right actor page, click Try for free.
Scrape Google Trends for free
5. You’ll be sent back to the Apify platform, where a new Task has been automatically created for the actor. Now you can start setting up the Google Trends scraper. First, let’s go to Google Trends and find out what we want to scrape. American singer Taylor Swift is one of the examples, so let’s see how many people search for her name.
Google Trends allows you to track the popularity of searches all over the world
Popularity of searches for Taylor Swift over the last couple of years
7. Now you need to add your inputs for the scraper:
First you need to decide if you will have one or multiple terms. You can add them in the Search terms field, or if you have them in a public Google Sheet, you can write the id in the ‘Spreadsheet id’ field. In that case, another actor, Google Sheets Import & Export, will automatically run in the background.
Google Sheet, you can write the id in the ‘Spreadsheet id’ field. In that case, another actor, Google Sheets Import & Export, will automatically run in the background. Define Time range.
Select Category.
Decide from which geolocation area you want to obtain Google Trends results in Geo area.
If you’re only testing the actor, you should limit the number of items to be scraped in Max items to make sure you don’t waste your free platform usage credits.
Advanced options enable you to specify a Custom time range and other more technical parameters.
Custom parameters for the Google Trends Scraper run
8. Click on the green Save & Run button and wait for the scraping run to finish.
The Google Trends Scraper has parameters such as time range, category, and geo area
9. Your task will change status to show that it is Running. Once the status changes to Succeeded, you can click on the Dataset tab to see the results.
10. The Dataset tab contains your data in lots of versatile formats, including HTML table, JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS feed. You can open them by clicking on View or Download. You can then share the data, or upload it anywhere you like. Use it in spreadsheets, other programs or apps, or your own projects.
Your data will be available in multiple handy formats
11. Try scraping different terms and changing the scraping parameters. You might also like to try our other SEO tools.
SEO Audit Tool — Our Search Engine Optimization tool audits your website and analyzes it from an SEO perspective. It finds broken links, missing images, and provides information about possible page improvements.
Broken Links Checker — Crawls a website and finds broken links. Unlike other similar SEO analysis tools, this actor also reports broken URL fragments.
Google Search Results Scraper — Unofficial API to enable you to scrape Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Export organic and paid results, ads, queries, people also ask, prices, reviews. Supports custom country or language and extraction of custom attributes.
Email us at [email protected] if you have any questions at all.
Read next: 13 ways the media can use scraping, data, and RPA to track new trends, automate grunt work, make better content, and even fight fake news. | https://blog.apify.com/step-by-step-guide-to-scraping-google-trends-a49123f88494 | ['David Barton'] | 2020-12-28 12:24:39.591000+00:00 | ['Trends', 'Google Trends', 'Tutorial', 'Web Scraping', 'Marketing'] |
Time To Burst Tech’s Bubble: Systems Thinking In Tech | What is systems thinking?
Systems thinking is a discipline that looks at not just individual parts of a system, but how those parts are interconnected. Systems thinking understands that a solution that seems to work in one way in isolation will behave differently when used, adapted and transformed by different users in different contexts. There are a number of useful tools, such as system archetypes or causal loop diagrams, which can help thinkers map out these connections and paint a picture of the system in question. At the heart of it, systems thinking is about really understanding the root cause of a problem by examining it from various perspectives, understanding connections and detecting patterns.
With systems thinking tools, tech innovators can go from providing patches to known issues to truly solving problems in key areas of our lives, in ways that benefit all stakeholders.
Systems Thinking — Causal Loop Diagram
Imagine if Airbnb had taken a moment to step back and consider how their technology could affect rental markets in cities with a heavy tourism industry (spoiler: it doesn’t end well for residents). Where would emissions from the transportation sector be if the likes of Uber and Lyft had focused on true community ride-sharing and foreseen the risks of increased solo-passenger rides for traffic?
Adopting this kind of approach is not easy, but understanding the world you work in can provide a significant competitive edge, as you can then truly innovate with different users in mind. Just like Airbnb and Uber, once a technology scales, the effects in a complex societal system can often take us by surprise, posing significant risks for the company. These are elements that become more and more important for a company as their tech scales. Though startups often work with a laser-like focus on creating results measured in dollars and profits, at the end of the day the largest and most widespread effect of tech will be felt beyond the investors’ and founders’ bank accounts.
How can startups avoid the tunnel vision of merely creating “solutions”, and innovate with the systems thinking in mind?
Here are a few steps to get started:
Find diverse viewpoints: Whether it’s about recruiting, engaging with beta testers or scanning your industry for opportunities, expose yourself to different kinds of people and ways of thinking. Document these findings and see if you find patterns or connections emerging between different groups. Map out your ecosystem: No company works in a void. What larger systems are you a part of, and what are the flows of resources, thoughts, activities, emotions and/or people that you rely on to succeed? How do your own measures of success relate to this system? Predict and adapt: Understanding where you sit in the world will (hopefully) shed new light on your activities. Now, how can you use this knowledge to mitigate risks and increase your competitive edge? If the relationships in the system change, what happens to your company? Or what happens if certain connections or resource flows are strengthened or weakened? Educate yourself: Take a lunch break to read through an introduction to systems thinking (we recommend The Systems Thinker). You don’t have to dive into the deep end and start drawing causal loop diagrams for your organisation, but adopting some of the systems ways of thinking may lead you down surprising paths. If videos are your preferred style of learning, you can also check out Systems Academy.
Technology can transform our societies, disrupting how we live our lives and how our businesses function, but transformation doesn’t happen in isolated markets and industries. When ride-share drivers are purchasing cars and our democratic systems are broken by tech company algorithms, it’s time for tech to take a new approach. Call it sustainability, corporate responsibility, impact business, at the heart of it, it’s facing and understanding the full picture of the reality we live in.
If you’re in the Helsinki area, join Pure Growth and Maria 01 on 28th and 29th of May for Sustainability Week, where we will be taking a deep dive into what sustainability means for startups. | https://medium.com/maria-01/time-to-burst-techs-bubble-systems-thinking-in-tech-7e60855958a | [] | 2019-05-20 08:12:59.756000+00:00 | ['Startup Lessons', 'Systems Thinking', 'Impact Investing', 'Sustainability', 'Sustainable Development'] |
Object Calisthenics with PHP (en) | Vishnu R Nair @vishnurnair
I want to share in this post my recent studies with PHP, more specifically with Object Calisthenics. It’s nine rules that was created to help us to code better. There’s no secrets with that nine rules, you will see it when you’ll be reading. These rules was introduced by Jeff Bay.
One level of indentation per method.
It means that you don’t must create a class or a method with more than one level of indentation. For example:
Can you see how this code can be confuse for someone else that read it? Of course, maybe that code is not so confuse or complex that codes that we see on the real life. On the past I saw codes that look like “Hadouken”.
If your code looks like this one, there’s something wrong!
An way to start writing something better, is separating your method in an another. The following code is more legible to me.
Don’t use the ELSE keyword.
I love this rule! I don’t know when or where… but some years ago, I heard and I follow this one. It’s something related about functional programming, maybe I write about it after.
We don’t need to ELSEs on our code! If you’re using Object Oriented Programming, it means that you can write codes without any ELSEs. The code gets more clean and readable. On the previous code, for example, if we rewrite removing the first else:
May you can prevent to use a lot of IFs and ELSEs on your code. Two another rules related with this one that is good too is: fail first and early return. It means that you must return your methods soon as possible, even fails.
In case of an throw:
The code gets more legible! Can you see?
Wrap all primitives and strings in classes.
Whenever you can, you may replace primitives and strings of a class to an another. For example, we have a User class with phone number and email properties.
Instead you can do:
First class collections.
The collection classes must be only for an collection and nothing more. If you have a classe to manipulate an collection, then that class can’t have other responsibility.
One dot per line.
I’m writing examples in PHP, but PHP uses arrows and not dots. Then this rule is about how many arrows you can use. Lets do an example.
This rule can be ignored in case of use: Fluent Interfaces. An example:
Don’t abbreviate.
This rule is extraordinary necessary! I saw a lot of code, and write a lot of ones too, that take some minutes to be understood. Did you use: $x, $y, $value, $i, $data, or something related? Maybe if we use something more descriptive, it will take less time to be understood.
Keep all classes less than “50” lines.
Believe it or not I had worked with an Laravel Controller Class, with approximately 4000 lines of code. When I open that one on VScode or PHPStorm, my PC was going mad.
Some people says that fifteen lines is insane, then they prefer to understand this rules as: “Keep all classes less than 100 lines”. What is important here is to take carer with how many lines you’re writing. If your class is taking more than 100 lines, then it is doing more than it must to do. Reread your class or file and separate it in another place.
Methods may take many lines of code too. Sometimes when we are writing some method with an complex logic, it can take many lines. But then when we finally complete what we want, then we must to refactor it, move some lines for an another method, or maybe to an another class.
Sometimes we need to write some codes so fast because of something that the our clients are requesting, or something that our gestor or leader is requesting. We think that we will understood it after, but believe me: We will remember nothing some days after.
No classes with more than two instance variables.
To me, like the last one, this rule can be understood a bit different. May we can use five or six instance variables in our classes. I will share a code that looks like one code that I learn in a course that I did.
No getters or setters.
I sincerely don’t understand this one so clearly. But, the rule is that you should not give access to an class logic. An example is: | https://medium.com/@tadeubarbos/object-calisthenics-with-php-f756baf6693 | ['Tadeu Barbosa'] | 2020-12-27 17:35:11.099000+00:00 | ['Object Calisthenics', 'Object Oriented', 'Good Practices', 'PHP', 'Programming'] |
PharmaChain: Proof-of-Concept | The process of discovering a potentially new drug until it becomes available to patients takes on 15–30 years. And on average brings a cost of 1.3 billion euros. Boehringer wants to speed up and optimise part of this chain. Clinical studies. Because 80% of the clinical trials are delayed.
By working on digitisation and focusing on the patient, Boehringer is convinced that this process is more efficient and therefore faster. The patient owns his own data, enabling him to submit and confirm additions and changes himself. This will increase transparency. The patient knows at any time which data is available and can be viewed by the parties involved.
Digitisation will increase efficiency because information flows to all parties more smoothly and reliably. In case of important new information for the safety of the patient, it can be taken, confirmed and signed directly via the smartphone or tablet, for example. The reliability and data integrity will be increased by blockchain technology. This results in faster and better recruitment.
Find the right hospitals for the right study in an instant and thus recruit the right patients and get the medicine to the patient more quickly.
Not only does this have enormous advantages for the patient, but hospitals can also jump on the boat of digital transformation. By keeping hospital and anonymised patient profiles on the blockchain, it is easier to find the right hospitals for the right study in an instant and thus recruit the right patients and get the medicine to the patient more quickly.
Current process: Paper
Before trials can be executed on humans, they need to run through a complex and intensive process. This process will not be discussed. We’ll start when the trial is verified and accepted for execution by all involved parties.
Boehringer sends out the requirements to conduct the study to several hospitals, after a CDA (Confidential Disclosure Agreement) is signed by those hospitals. What equipment they need, how many doctors, how many patients, etc ….
When a hospital fulfils all the requirements, they can start patient recruitment. After the recruitment, patients fit to participate in the study are selected. These patients need to sign a paper Informed Consent (IC). It explains the whole process, risks, schedules, etc. It needs to be signed with a doctor, so patients can ask any question they have. This Signed Informed Consent (SIC), which is paper, is kept at the hospitals. | https://medium.com/wearetheledger/pharmachain-proof-of-concept-4118edbb5455 | ['Kevin Leyssens'] | 2018-12-11 11:59:20.020000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Hyperledger', 'Medical', 'Clinical Trials', 'Prototyping'] |
DeFi in Cosmos: Meet These 4 Cross-Chain DEXs | DeFi’s growth in 2021 has been exponential, turning it into a sector now worth over $100 billion. Cosmos Network is making great strides while adding new layers to its already robust DeFi infrastructure that includes many exciting projects such as Terra, THORchain, Band Protocol, and Crypto.org.
One key area of growth is the addition of some of the most advanced cross-chain decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that leverage the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) to enable permissionless and harmonious trading across various Cosmos blockchains and beyond.
The DEX ecosystem within Cosmos is growing quickly. There’s now access to new and promising tokens, higher liquidity for smooth trading and price stability, permissionless token listings, opportunities for generating higher ROI by participating in liquidity pools, and a lot more. So, let’s take a look at four of the hottest protocols right now and examine why they’re gaining traction:
Gravity DEX
There’s no doubt that the integration of the Gravity DEX protocol marks the biggest DeFi milestone for Cosmos Hub to date, allowing for far greater application and utility. Now, Cosmos Hub can function as a ‘port city’ to facilitate a network of interconnected blockchains.
Gravity DEX also enhances the overall trading experience with seamless swaps, dramatically reduced trading fees, and more advanced trading mechanisms, such as order books and batch execution, that help mitigate the effects of front-run transactions that are commonly found on Ethereum-based DEXs (such as Uniswap) that haunt the average trader.
Using the Equivalent Swap Price Model (ESPM), Gravity DEX provides users with accurate price information by fetching the most recent available swap price. ESPM creates a much fairer model and enables deeper trust in the protocol, driving increased usage and utility as a direct effect.
Access to the advanced cross-chain Gravity DEX protocol is made possible through Emeris, an intuitive dashboard which beta version launched on August 17.
Users can currently transfer and swap tokens and participate in liquidity pools across various Cosmos chains. Coming soon, bridges will connect the Cosmos Hub with other blockchain networks to enrich the Gravity DEX and the entire Cosmos ecosystem.
Transactions are fueled by the ATOM token, so the more transactions are facilitated through the Gravity DEX, the more utility the token ultimately provides for its holders.
There’s an ongoing proposal to build a Cosmos SDK module that will provide LPs with an extra bonus in the form of farming incentives on Gravity DEX, incentivizing LPs to deposit greater liquidity and help strengthen the ecosystem of pools. This initiative is still in the works, with more information to come.
There’s also a budget module in the works programmed to distribute inflation and gas fees to different budget plans according to voting proposals.
In terms of safety and security, Gravity DEX could be considered the safest protocol within the Cosmos ecosystem, as it’s secured by over $10 billion in ATOM token liquidity to support the network. Additionally, the Gravity DEX has undergone two successful Cosmos SDK Liquidity Module Reviews from blockchain technology firms: a Security Audit by Least Authority and a Code Review by Simply VC.
In Q4 2021, Cosmos Hub will also be implementing a new Interchain Security feature where it, and other large Cosmos chains, can share security through lending assets in order to validate blocks on smaller chains. The addition of Interchain Security maintains hub minimalism by letting each unique feature become an independent chain certified by the same ATOM validators. Furthermore, it will help more easily deploy and run independent secure decentralized blockchains, preserving the open-source nature of the Cosmos ecosystem.
Osmosis
Next in the Cosmos DeFi ecosystem is Osmosis, an IBC-integrated AMM (Automated Market Maker) built using the Cosmos SDK framework. The Osmosis core business model is centered on two essential benefits of DeFi: modularity and privacy. These factors are important to DeFi because they spark creativity and innovation while offering full anonymity to protect user identities.
Osmosis’ underlying system is designed to be fully customizable by providing developers with maximum liberty to build and deploy their very own custom AMMs by using a “plug and play” model.
In terms of privacy, Osmosis uses cryptography to create shielded liquidity pools, thereby mitigating the issue of front-running and ensuring that balances and transactions remain invisible. This privacy benefits user safety and security so their online presence and portfolio remain anonymous.
By using the $OSMO token, holders possess the ability to vote on proposed project changes, distribute liquidity minings rewards for pools, and more. Osmosis also plans to introduce “superfluid staking” that lets $OSMO holders use the token for simultaneously staking and providing liquidity to pools, thereby maximizing the economic value between the liquidity provider (LP) and security of staking.
Osmosis has established a decentralized OSMO token allocation model to encourage alignment with Cosmos Hub’s community — this will be attained by distributing its entire genesis supply to Cosmos Hub accounts through its already ongoing ‘quadratic fairdrop’. A snapshot has already been taken and to earn the airdrop allocation, users need to engage in multiple on-chain activities like staking, and governance.
Taking inspiration from mechanisms like quadratic voting and quadratic funding, the quadratic airdrop is meant to decrease the distribution inequality in the new governance set, while still recognizing the contributions of larger stakeholders. It will reward Cosmos Hub accounts that actively participate in independently staking, while reducing the amount of OSMO tokens allocated to ATOMs stored in exchanges and whales.
Sifchain
Sifchain is a cross-chain IBC-enabled DEX built with the Cosmos SDK. Users can easily swap and pool between the native $ROWAN token, ERC-20, and Cosmos digital assets, all more cheaply and efficiently than using existing DEXs on Ethereum.
To achieve Sifchain’s mission of generating the highest possible asset transfer value between Ethereum and Cosmos, the team integrated “Peggy”, a bridge from Cosmos to Ethereum, in early 2021. Peggy uses pegged tokens so token holders on either side can access and reap the benefits of their assets on both chains, while also bundling liquidity.
Sifchain governance is decentralized and facilitates on-chain through $ROWAN, where users can decide on adding new pegged tokens to the ecosystem. Sifchain has implemented SifDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)-based system, which is a community-governed organization absent of central leadership where decisions are made based on a set of rules carried out on the blockchain.
SifDAO operates independently of the DEX while serving as a contributor to its future development.
The Sifchain DEX has also implemented continuous liquidity pools (CLPs), where users need to provide $ROWAN in addition to any other Sifchain-supported asset. As a result, LPs can earn rewards and traders are able to borrow liquidity to execute margin trades. Asymmetric pooling is another one of its key features, providing users with the flexibility to deposit any amount of tokens into a liquidity pool.
Coinswap
Last but not least, Coinswap is a cross-chain AMM module for dapps within the Cosmos ecosystem built on IRISnet (or the IRIS Hub), an interchain service hub built on Cosmos SDK — it’s connected with the Cosmos Hub and provides liquidity for assets linked across the different Cosmos chains.
The Coinswap Web Application is the gateway to using the AMM, allowing users to swap tokens, deposit or withdraw liquidity from pools, and participate in yield farming — anyone can begin trading by connecting either their Keplr or WalletConnect web wallet. WalletConnect leverages IRISnet’s HTLC module to connect with Binance Chain, allowing for cross-chain transfers of assets such as BUSD and BNB on Cosmos.
But there’s more here than meets the eye — IRISnet will be deploying the Terse IBC (TIBC) protocol, simplifying the IBC by connecting one smart contract as the overall channel for EVM-compatible blockchains. TIBC will also support NFT (non-fungible token) cross-chain transfers from the IRIS Hub to the OpenSea platform. In essence, this protocol allows for enhanced application and greater synergy between the DEXs across the Cosmos ecosystem.
$IRIS is the platform’s native token, which supports and secures the underlying network. Coinswap has connected with StaFi so users can stake Cosmos-based tokens and receive rTokens (the asset’s staking derivative) as rewards. These rTokens (such as rATOM and rIRIS) can be traded on other DEXs and applications, enhancing token utility and application across the Cosmos ecosystem.
Comparison
Let’s take a closer look at the main features of these DEXs and shine a light on their similarities and differences to better understand how these protocols fit under the Cosmos umbrella:
Although not all of these protocols offer stablecoin support yet, more interconnectivity is on the way. The Terra ecosystem announced its connectivity to Cosmos by Sept 29 after Columbus-5 Upgrade, meaning its stablecoins will be available for trading across all of these DEXs, providing enhanced utility to Cosmos Hub and beyond.
Gravity DEX, Osmosis, Sifchain, and Coinswap are just a few examples of how decentralized protocols can coexist within the Cosmos ecosystem using the IBC — the potential is limitless.
Each DEX comes equipped with its own unique set of features, so it’s recommended that users keep the following considerations in mind when making their selection:
Security/Liquidity: Total value securing the chain, total value locked on the DEX/in the pools, and verifiable safety of the code and framework for utilization
Total value securing the chain, total value locked on the DEX/in the pools, and verifiable safety of the code and framework for utilization Historical Track Record: History of the chain’s production, ongoing developments, and milestones hit
History of the chain’s production, ongoing developments, and milestones hit User Interface: Design, usability, and seamlessness of the trading experience
Design, usability, and seamlessness of the trading experience Advanced Trading and Rewards-based Mechanisms: Availability to stake, farm, and utilize innovative trading tools, such as order books and limit orders
Regardless of which factors users choose to prioritize, it’s important to keep in mind that the technology behind these protocols and features is still early. Everyone should conduct their own research and understand the associated risks before trading. | https://blog.cosmos.network/defi-in-cosmos-meet-these-4-cross-chains-dexs-1df23dd413b0 | ['Tristan Lane'] | 2021-09-14 16:05:48.739000+00:00 | ['Sifchain', 'Coinswap', 'Osmosis', 'Gravity Dex', 'Cosmos'] |
On-demand Storage — An empty industry becoming a billion-dollar empire | On-demand Storage — An empty industry becoming a billion-dollar empire
Image Source: Pexels
Talk about Oil, Agriculture, Technology, or any of the next big thing; it just may not be 5G, it’s the ever-growing demand for space.
Most humans are materialistic by nature; this is a fact! The reason is not rocket science; it’s because our desires grow daily. And to cushion our growing desires, our consumption habit tends to grow in line with our desires, especially in Nigeria, a nation which is largely a representative example of the African continent. Here, the measure of a man’s wealth is by how much possession he has. These possessions need to be stored and kept in a safe space. Any entity of ferrying goods or storing people’s belonging must be ready to offer needed assurance that clients’ belongings are safe. Only then would they be willing to pay for such a service.
Quite many of us have not come to realise that there’s a growing business in the on-demand storage industry. It has boomed over the last few years, but perhaps not in Africa and by extension. Nigeria. The large empty lands, unused/underutilized warehouses and idle parking spaces have become fundamental to the daily lives and activities of people today. The fact that people are migrating in droves to urban areas and making these places crowded is creating untold opportunities for on-demand storage business to thrive. And with the influx of human capital comes the need for more space.
A lot of people come in to start a small business, a tech startup, rent accommodation for their new families, find a space to park their cars, in fact, a large number of startups need more space for excess inventory. The old is retiring and leaving to a quieter place; most prefer moving back to their villages, creating more space for the young.
On-demand storage is hotter than ever as these changes have created a vacuum for more people to seek a safe and convenient space in storing their possessions. In the U.S., entrepreneurs have bought the vision and have seen the potential of on-demand storage. It’s on record that when the U.S. economy went into the great recession, the on-demand storage industry flourished while other businesses went under. For instance, during the recession of 2008, most of the startups that have become giants of late like Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Venmo, Groupon, Pinterest, Slack etc. Even Microsoft founded in 1975 was still in the recession-era.
When any economy slides into a recession, companies shut down and sell. People lose jobs, and some might have to move. With reduced income status also comes the need to augment it to maintain a decent standard of living. And looking for that comes the need to co-share with others to spin in some income from idle assets. Some then see this as an opportunity and begin to explore it professionally to keep that income sustained. This is essentially how Uber and Airbnb grew within a short time frame.
Same goes for storage. Space is always never enough, especially in urban centres. For those who understand how to create an opportunity from a problem as recession necessitates, they key into demand for space for those who need impromptu.
Investors know this and so many key startups are evolving in the self-storage industry, bringing ideas and creativity that allow their users to enjoy a simpler and more convenient on-demand storage experience. Now, they can view their stored possessions online, schedule a convenient pick, and drop from warehouses to their destination, and vice versa, amassing millions of dollars of funding by so doing.
Companies like Clutter Inc., StoreLoad, Boxful, and Spacebox are notable startups that help people and businesses to digitize their static and mobile storage facilities into an on-demand self-storage service where anyone in need of them can with through the comfort of their smartphones buy up and use these economic spaces.
Demand for space continues to rise.
In the U.S., the storage unit industry is worth a whopping $38 billion with a steady expansion and growth since 2012. It’s a market that accommodates new investors and empowers existing players. Without a doubt, the convergence of both buyers and sellers and the growth being witnessed is worth an in-depth look. Undoubtedly, this is one industry that will keep rising exponentially as the years go by.
Image Source: Pexels
Today, people are migrating to more crowded urban areas. There is a shift in human resources, and a lot goes with this shift. People are moving to better employment, and this creates opportunities for space owners. A lot of people need space for their inventory.
This is where on-demand comes in, with just a few sellers available to service the much larger buyers, there are more consumers of space than there are suppliers, this creates room for more people to come on board.
A lot of people have empty spaces in their rooms, a large expanse of unused land, idle garages, in fact, people have less space and more possessions, and with the rise of on-demand storage, a solution is already at the tip of our fingers.
The Next Big Player
It’s no surprise that the on-demand storage industry is expanding into different parts of the world. In Europe, there are thousands of units with tenancy rates hitting around 80% since 2016, while in Asia, there is a steady rise in the number of storage units by at least 40%.
With the birth of StoreLoad in Nigeria, Africa is gradually coming into the picture, and her vast number of possessions and land is a strong indicator that she is going to be the next big player in the steady growth enjoyed by the on-demand storage industry.
Look out for us on social media we are always grooving there.
Twitter |Instagram |LinkedIn |Facebook | https://medium.com/storeload/on-demand-storage-an-empty-industry-becoming-a-billion-dollar-empire-39f406927f99 | [] | 2020-12-14 14:09:41.370000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Storage Industry', 'Logistics', 'Storage', 'Storeload'] |
How to find the idea for your next hit game | As an experienced or novice game developer, the temptation to create a game targeted for the mobile platforms — and publish, be it Appstore / Google Play or others, is very big. There is a huge market awaiting for your beautiful and ingenious creation, and success stories are as numerous as are well established in the collective memory.
But before getting started, we have to find the idea for that hit game — or even better, more than one. Let’s go through a series of sources of inspiration and criterias that can guide you in settling on a certain game genre, mechanics and all-round feeling of your next awesome game.
Your own gaming experience and passions. For example, being passionate about RTS games, I’ve always wanted to build an RTS game for mobile, but one that is really adapted to that platform. Starting from here, I would see a simplification of the classical RTS concept, with just a few unit types so that they’re easily distinguishable in the small screen estate, easy input and an UX favoring simplicity. Start from your favourite games or genre, add a twist, simplify, combine, keep notes with all the crazy ideas 🙂 Going through the Appstore / Google Play categories and checking out the latest trending and biggest hits games. This is useful even if you already know what you’d like to develop as it can bring up new ideas and twists for your game. Document various aspects of the games that you liked most (like graphics style, sound & music, game mechanics), and let it sink for a while — the ideas will start pouring soon. Being original in your initial game proposals does not mean totally avoiding the existing trends and ideas. Checking out sites that list game ideas. This is sure to spark a lot of inspiration for possible game mechanics and themes, and it offers you the possibility to combine ideas in ingenious ways. Oldies but goldies. Be sure to check out the old hits, especially the older ones like ’80s — ’90s as they have less visual complexity but clever mechanics that may suit well a mobile implementation. It is useful to do this even if you don’t intent to create a retro title as those game are simple enough to warrant a very successful mobile adaptation. Use constraints to help shape an original idea. For example, I would like to build an uni-dimensional game, what kind of game mechanics could fit such a constraint? There are many types of constraints: for the graphics, the constraint could be that all the objects in the game are squares, or that the colours used are just indigo and black, for the input, it could be made only out of taps, or only of swipes, or drawing certain shapes, the time of the game could run backwards and so on. Or even the constraint could be the time allotted to craft the game. Come up with a few favorite ones and start playing with combinations. The amount of possible constraints and combinations is infinite. Existing real-life sports. With the increased mobile support and growing hype for the AR, this is sure something not to overlook. For example, you could opt for implementing ping-pong with the help of AR, allowing two competing gamers to play in the same physical place (guaranteed fun!), or remotely. Also consider here combining mechanics from two or more real-life games. Switch roles or mechanics. Take any well known game mechanics and begin to switch it out, reverse roles. Let’s say you have a classic game of hunter shooting ducks, what would you get if you could actually control the ducks and try to escape with as many as possible unscathed? Or, in a 2D platformer you actually control the monsters opposing the main character. Play with this and you could get to a very original and successful game idea. Target demographics. If you love the idea of designing and developing a game for children or, why not, for the seniors, then you have a solid starting point. Define your demographics very precisely (on the appstore, in case of games for children, you are required to target it to a precise age interval) and be aware of the possible limitations like for example parental controls. Starting from here, be sure to explore existing games targeted for that demographics (see point 2) and also use your specific experience with the users of that age in order to come up with some interesting game ideas. Choice of technology. So for a reason or another you choose to develop your game with a certain choice of technology, be it a 3D game with AR or a game using Metal engine. This may have the effect of narrowing down your choices and depending on the motivation behind it might be worth it or not. Be sure not to fall into the trap of ‘this tech is so cool, I wanna use it no matter what’ and carefully weigh in the pros and cons. Brainstorming. Last but not least.. So gather a few of your friends or your partners in the game project and start shooting wild ideas. This can be useful at the beginning of the ideas gathering process, or after you already have a few contestants and would like to see if any cool twists can come out of it. Make sure to not completely lose control of the process and also clearly state the scope (‘hey guys, we don’t actually want to build Starcraft III here ! .. or do we ?’)
OK, so after hard (and lot of fun) work, you did find the idea for your next hit game. Actually, not only one idea, you now have an entire list of favourite game ideas, now what ?
It is useful to make a document and list your game ideas as well as a short initial description for the game mechanics. Don’t stick to a single game choice, try to explore more or at least make variations on the original idea.
The step further is to start expanding on each game idea. Start describing in detail the mechanics, style of graphics, technical requirements or other specifics, whether it is single or multiplayer and possible venues for monetisation. Focus on game mechanics and graphics style though. Let those ideas rest for a week or two; if they bring up the same enthusiasm when you return to them, it’s a good sign you’re on the right track.
Further, choose 2–3 of the most promising ideas and promote them to the next step: prototyping. For that, you need to clearly define the core mechanics of the game in order to be able to start the implementation.
But more on that another time.
Cheers, and happy games crafting! | https://medium.com/@tiberiujinga/how-to-find-the-idea-for-your-next-hit-game-cf94b052e075 | ['Tiberiu Jinga-Dinu'] | 2021-01-20 19:39:32.208000+00:00 | ['Games Development', 'Mobile App Development', 'How To', 'Ideas'] |
Multiple Instance Learning | Multiple Instance Learning
with MNIST dataset using Pytorch
When it comes to applying computer vision in the medical field, most tasks involve either 1) image classification for diagnosis or 2) segmentation to identify and separate lesions. However, in pathology cancer detection, this is not always possible. Obtaining labels is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore, pathology slides can be up to 200k x 100k pixels resolution, and they will not fit in memory for classification since for example, the ImageNet only uses 224 x 224 pixels for training. Downsampling normally is not an option because we are trying to detect a tiny area, such as a cancerous area varying from 300 x 300 pixels area (a few dots in Figure 1).
Figure 1: a slide from patient_004_node_004 (Camelyon17)
In this case, we can use Multiple Instance Learning, a weakly supervised learning method that takes a set of labeled bags containing many instances instead of receiving a set of labeled instances.
Suppose we have pathology slides and the label for each slide. Since we cannot train the classifier on the whole slide, we divide each slide into tiles and only process a few tiles at a time on GPU. However, we do not know labels for each tile, so we need Multiple Instance Learning. In the MIL framework, slides are the “bag” and tiles are “instances”. By using it, we are able to save the labeling effort and leverage weakly labeled data.
When we have pathology slides from patients and we want to predict if a large slide contains cancer cells or, zooming out if the patient has malignant cells, Multiple Instance Learning is a good option because doctors don’t need to segment individual cells or label each tile. Only the whole slide needs a label.
In general, Multiple Instance Learning can deal with classification problems, regression problems, ranking problems, and clustering problems, but we will mainly focus on classification problems here.
In this blog, I am going to explain how MIL works with a simple example based on the MNIST dataset. If you are not familiar with the MNIST dataset, here is a link to a Kaggle competition on the MNIST dataset and you can take a look.
In the next blog, I will talk in detail about MIL on the breast cancer challenge Camelyon17.
Brief introduction of MNIST dataset:
The MNIST dataset is a large database of handwritten digits and each image has one label from 0 to 9. It has a training set of 60,000 images and a test set of 10,000 images. The size of each one is 28 x 28 and greyscale.
Figure 2: MNIST sample
Brief problem statement of Multiple Instance Learning:
Each instance xi in one bag has a label yi. We define the label of the bag as:
Y = 1, if there exists a yi such that yi ==1
Y = 0, if for every yi such that yi == 0
The pipeline of applying MIL on MNIST dataset:
As an overview, we will first pre-train the ResNet model on the instance-labeled dataset and then feed the bag-labeled dataset in the model and extract features. Finally, we apply MIL on them.
Step 1: Split the original MNIST dataset to the bag-labeled set for proper MIL training and the instance-labeled set.
Creating MIL-MNIST toy dataset:
The MNIST dataset is a standard benchmark for classification tasks. To make it a MIL problem, we need to first construct the MIL-MNIST dataset by grouping several digits (instances) into a bag.
In our MNIST example, we will assign the bag label as “1” if one instance has a label “1”; if all the instance labels are “0–9” other than “1”, then we assign the bag label as “0”.
As the graph shown below, the bag filled with red has a bag label “1” and the bag filled with blue has a bag label “0”.
Figure 3: bags and instance labels
We randomly put each image into a bag, where each bag contains 3 to 7 instances. In order to save memory, we use the index to represent the image (as shown below).
Figure 4: Code to generate MIL-MNIST data
To generate the bag label:
Figure 5: Code to generate bag label
Step 2: Pre-train on 2 parts of MNIST dataset
1. Construct a 2D convolutional neural networks with kernel_size=(7, 7), stride=(2, 2), padding=(3, 3)
2. Train for 5 epoch with batch size 256
3. Save model
Step 3: Load pre-trained model and extract features from the last layer
Split the rest of the data to train, validation, and test set Get features for training, validation and test set Get bag_indices and bag_labels Map bag_indices with features based on indices and create bag_features
In order to get rid of the last layer:
Extract features:
The following code shows how we get the bag indices and bag features from data generation function:
Figure 6: Code to generate bag features
The bag indices, bag labels, and bag features are as shown below:
Figure 7: Bag index with image indices
Figure 8: Bag labels
Figure 9: Bag features
Step 4: Train the model for MIL on bag_features and bag_labels and evaluate on the test set
Since each bag has a different number of instances, we need to pad tensors to the same size before we throw them in the model.
Model for Multiple Instance Learning:
The algorithm performs three steps. Either of them can be fixed functions or optimizable functions (neural networks):
Transforms instances to an embedding of low-dimensionality. (fixed) Passes the embedding through a permutation-invariant aggregation function. (optimizable) Transforms into the bag probability. (optimizable)
Figure 9: MIL diagram on the MIL-MNIST toy dataset
In general, the workflow is like the following:
Figure 10: MIL diagram on pathology slides (see reference #5)
We did step 1 as fixed for simplicity. For step 2, although we can still use fixed functions such as max or mean, in order to enable parameter optimizations that can be learned end-to-end by backpropagation, we use Neural Networks as the aggregation function. For step 3, we also want to use backpropagation to be able to make parameters optimizable.
Linear layer and LeakyReLu
Note: we set n = 7*512, where 7 is the number of instances in one bag and 512 is the size of each feature.
2. Aggregation function: AttensionSoftmax
3. The neural network with LeakyReLu as the activation function in the middle, dropout, and sigmoid as the final activation function:
4. Optimizer: SGD
5. Loss function: BCELoss
6. Accuracy: ~0.99
Conclusion:
We got around 0.99 accuracy on the MNIST dataset using MIL, which is a satisfying result. If we want, we can use even more complex aggregation functions as our middle transformation and build more complicated NN models for the final transformation to the bag level. The result also shows that MIL is a good tool to save the labeling effort and leverage weakly labeled data.
What’s next:
Apply MIL on Camelyon17 dataset.
Jupyter notebook demo link:
https://github.com/lsheng23/Practicum/blob/master/MIL_MNIST/end_to_end_mnist_MIL.ipynb
Acknowledgments ：
Special thanks to Dmytro Lituiev, a Sr Machine Learning Scientist at UCSF, and Andrew Shaw, the WAMRI Staff Research Director at USF, for proofreading and guidance.
Reference:
Ilse, Maximilian, et al. “Attention-Based Deep Multiple Instance Learning.” ArXiv.org, 28 June 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04712.
Carbonneau, Marc-André, et al. “Multiple Instance Learning: A Survey of Problem Characteristics and Applications.” ArXiv.org, 11 Dec. 2016, https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03365.
LeCun, Yann, et al. “THE MNIST DATABASE.” MNIST Handwritten Digit Database, Yann LeCun, Corinna Cortes, and Chris Burges, http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-images-from-the-MNIST-dataset_fig1_306056875
Dmytro S Lituiev, Sung Jik Cha, Andrew Bishara, Jae Ho Sohn, Eugenia Rutenberg, Dexter Hadley, Zoltan Laszik. “A Deep Learning Model for Identifying Rejection in Transplant Kidney Biopsies”. Poster presentation at USCAP 2020, Los Angeles | https://medium.com/swlh/multiple-instance-learning-c49bd21f5620 | ['Lori Sheng'] | 2020-09-05 14:27:17.830000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Image Classification', 'Digital Pathology Slide', 'Computer Vision', 'Convolutional Neural Net'] |
Battery Shortage: Where To Get That Much Cobalt | The Top division media start discussing the so-called Cobalt Crunch. Forbes interviewed Ivan Glasenberg — chief executive of Glencore: “…We have seen the investments that car companies are making in electric vehicles, Glasenberg said. They will need battery supply. It will require a lot of cobalt, and we all know the geological scarcity of cobalt.”
Cobalt is a rare metal that has tripled in price over the past year to $80,000 a ton, with 60% of global supply coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo immersed in a permanent civil war.
How sincere was Mr. Glasenberg talking about the “geological scarcity” of cobalt?
Indeed, the continental deposits of cobalt are quite limited. But what the biggest mining corporations are silent on is the tremendous seabed resource of cobalt numbering millions of tons. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (in the Pacific ocean) alone contains 134 million tons of cobalt, for example.
If someone starts mining those super-rich seabed deposits, the market price of cobalt will inevitably go down. Will such a situation be advantageous for the world mining behemoths? Barely it will. Both EVs manufacturers and ordinary consumers will benefit from it. Because the abundance of the seaborn cobalt can make them less dependant on the current cobalt suppliers…
However, sooner or later some seabed mining trailblazer will start flooding the world mineral market with cheap cobalt — it’s just a matter of time. And most probably it will be some Chinese company since China has the largest reserved seabed mining area of about 86 000 square kilometers.
Hence, some apparent questions arise in this regard: why is the total disregard for seabed mineral deposits continuing on the global scale? Why don’t the leading mining corporations occupy the seabed mining sector to monopolize the mineral market?
If the problem comes to an appropriate deepwater mining technology only, it is not a problem at all — there are no unsolvable technical tasks — just recollect SpaceX with their reusable launch vehicles.
What is necessary to meet the challenge is dedication along with the focused efforts backed by the sufficient investments. By the way, the present New Cobalt Rush is to trigger a new investment boom. However, the investors are recommended to reconsider their priorities… | https://medium.com/extractive-industry-2-0/battery-shortage-where-to-get-that-much-cobalt-b276acfa458c | ['Krypton Ocean'] | 2018-05-14 06:59:06.676000+00:00 | ['Resources', 'Electric Car', 'Mining', 'Oceans', 'Investment'] |
My Semester with Dance History | In fall 2017, while at Pasadena City College, I enrolled myself in a Dance History class. Going into the class, I thought it would be one of those classes where I would be able to show up, put in little work and walk away with an “A”.
I was wrong.
My professor, Ms. Catrelia Magee, had been a professional dancer her whole life. She took her subject of profession very seriously. Even though this was a GE elective class, the work load was reflective of an upper-division university course. Although I knew this class was going to be a lot of work, my friend, Kristie, and I decided to stick it out. It was one of the best decisions I have made in my college career. I learned so much that semester and was exposed to things I would have never imagined.
As part of the course requirement, each student was responsible to extensively outline each chapter representing a different era of dance such as “Ancient Greece” to “Modern and Contemporary”. Additionally, each student was responsible to go to three separate dance concerts and write an analysis about each respective dance at each concert. Here is an excerpt from one of my analysis:
“The second dance was The Veriginous Thrill of Exactitude performed by Pacific Northwest Ballet. Set to the final movement of Symphony №9, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, this dance is a celebration of tradition. The music fit very well for this particular dance as it had it’s moments of serenity as well as agitation. The dancers would emphasize their motions at more intense moments in the musical piece. For this piece, I felt like it was more classical rather than modern. The design, space and the rhythm were all very traditional. By traditional, I mean proper. I felt as though I could be enjoying my leisure time watching this performance in a field somewhere during the Romantic era. The color of green, a field, was something I kept visualizing. The technical skill of the dancers were outstanding. This dance was characterized by quick, precise movements. I do think if Forsythe would have tried to incorporate more theatrical elements, it would not have worked, stripping the classical dance of it’s “elegance”. I was able to connect on the greatest level with this dance. This dance was of the telic form.”
This excerpt in particular was from the 3rd and last dance concert I was to attend. By this time, I knew what I was to look for at these dance concerts and how to interpret and critique a dance. Reading this excerpt, I am amazed at how well-versed and attentive to detail I was regarding the particular dance. This class really did teach me so much about dance- not just about the history, but truly understanding the dance, what it represents and the story it attempts to convey to the viewer.
Looking back, this was one of the first times I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Today, I embrace that feeling of being out of my comfort zone. Upon completion of the semester, I finished with an “A”. I will never forget this class because although it was hard, I learned a lot and had so much fun in the process. | https://medium.com/@dmurbelis/my-semester-with-dance-history-f96df63f4a9a | ['Dale Urbelis'] | 2019-12-01 08:46:09.080000+00:00 | ['Dance'] |
Slice from a Sven: Unwrapping the gift (category) 🎁 | With Father’s Day just behind us and Mother’s Day shortly before it, I thought now would be a great time to unwrap that all-important Gifts category in your 22seven budget.
Now, I don’t know about you, but my budget’s certainly been thrown off once or twice in the past because of an unexpected gift. But, the thing is, oftentimes we do actually have all the special gifting dates available to us…we just fail to plan in advance. And suddenly, Father’s day creeps up on us and we have to scrounge around in the piggy bank to make a plan (sorry for another pair of socks, dad!).
Plan ahead
I like to check my calendar for the full year, and mark off any special days where I may need to spend a little money to spoil someone. Then, I use 22seven’s future budgeting feature and plan my gift budgets for the year. You could also plan your gifts on a monthly basis, checking your calendar (or Facebook) each month and budgeting accordingly.
Just in case
If planning is not your thing, you could try setting a standard budget for gifts each month, say R500, for example. This method definitely involves less work, but it’s also less accurate.
If you want to cover all your bases, you could plan your gift budget ahead of time and add a little extra on top of that for anything unforeseen. Or even better, put that extra amount towards an emergency savings fund. Then, if you don’t use it, it will grow, and if you do use it, well that’s what emergency savings are for!
At the end of the day, budgeting is a very personal thing, so it’s best to do what works for your lifestyle and personality.
Which Spending Group do I choose?
We Svens get this question surprisingly often, and again, I’ll stress that your budget is personal. If you usually spend on gifts every month, then Day-to-Day is probably the group for you. If it tends to be a rare spend for you during the year, you might want to consider allocating your gift spend to your Exceptions Spending Group. You can read more about our Spending Groups and how to use them here.
It’s the thought that counts
It’s cliche, but that usually means it holds true. The important thing is to show the people in your life that you care, without breaking the bank. You can always find a budget friendly way to spoil your loved ones, whether it be a homemade card or a picnic in the park.
Remember that your financial journey is exactly that — a journey! You might slip up and forget to plan for gifts, or you might end up spending more than you bargained for. The important thing is that you learn along the way and ultimately make your budget and the different categories work for you! | https://medium.com/@22seven/slice-from-a-sven-unwrapping-the-gift-category-f1b973438808 | [] | 2021-06-22 07:12:51.311000+00:00 | ['22seven', 'Finance', 'Financial Freedom', 'Budgeting', 'South Africa'] |
What is Entropy and Information Gain? | What is Entropy and Information Gain?
How are they used to construct decision trees?
Photo by Zack Smith on Unsplash
Decision tree is one of the simplest and common Machine Learning algorithms, that are mostly used for predicting categorical data. Entropy and Information Gain are 2 key metrics used in determining the relevance of decision making when constructing a decision tree model.
Let’s try to understand what the “Decision tree” algorithm is.
So, what is a Decision tree?
If we strip down to the basics, decision tree algorithms are nothing but a series of if-else statements that can be used to predict a result based on a dataset. This flowchart-like structure helps us in decision making.
The idea of a decision tree is to divide the data set into smaller data sets based on the descriptive features until we reach a small enough set that contains data points that fall under one label.
Each feature of the data set becomes a root[parent] node, and the leaf[child] nodes represent the outcomes. For instance, this is a simple decision tree that can be used to predict whether I should write this blog or not.
Flowchart by Author
Such a simple decision making is also possible with decision trees. They are easy to understand and interpret because they mimic human thinking.
Alright, now let’s see what is Entropy and Information Gain and how they are used to construct decision trees.
What is Entropy?
Entropy is the measures of impurity, disorder or uncertainty in a bunch of examples. Entropy controls how a Decision Tree decides to split the data. The below image shows impurity level of each set.
Image by Author
If we have a set of K different values , then we can calculate the entropy using this formula:
Entropy formula
where, P(value) is the probability of getting the i i th value when randomly selecting one from the set.
For eg, let’s take the following image with green and red circles.
Image by Author
In this group, we have 14 circles, out of which 10 are green (10/14) and 4 are red (4/14). Let’s find the entropy of this group.
Note:
The entropy of a group in which all examples belong to the same class will always be 0 as shown below:
Image by Author
The entropy of a group with 50% in either class will always be 1 as shown below:
Image by Author
What is Information Gain?
Information gain (IG) measures how much “information” a feature gives us about the class. It tells us how important a given attribute of the feature vectors is. Information gain (IG) is used to decide the ordering of attributes in the nodes of a decision tree.
Information gain (IG) is calculated as follows:
Information Gain = entropy(parent) — [average entropy(children)]
Let’s look at an example to demonstrate how to calculate Information Gain.
Let’s say a set of 30 people both Male and female are split according to their age. Each person’s age is compared to 30 and they are separated into 2 child groups as shown in the image and their corresponding node’s entropy is calculated. The main node is called the Parent node and the 2 sub nodes are called child nodes.
Image by Author
The entropies of parent and child nodes are calculated as shown below. The Information gain is then calculated using the entropy of individual nodes.
The steps that needs to be followed to construct a decision tree using Information gain is shown below:
Image by Author
Entropy and Information Gain are two main concepts that are used when it comes to constructing a decision tree, to determine the nodes and the best way to split.
Hope this will be helpful for everyone who wants to work on decision trees.
Happy decision making! | https://gbhuvanes.medium.com/what-is-entropy-and-information-gain-how-are-they-used-to-construct-decision-trees-aadf7d0728f0 | ['Bhuvaneswari Gopalan'] | 2020-12-21 13:59:05.707000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Decision Tree', 'Machine Learning', 'Towards Data Science', 'Entropy'] |
Staying Healthy During the COVID-19 Lockdown | Step 1. Get hydrated and replace your nutrients.
We’re often told to drink water, but we also need sodium, potassium, magnesium, and other nutrients to stay healthy. The question becomes: “How do I balance all of the nutrients that my body needs?” I suppose one way is to follow the Federal Dietary Administration (FDA) guidelines. A simple way is to ensure that you’re replacing nutrients as you eliminate them based on either during various activities, sweating, or going to the restroom. I’m a fan of G2, the lower sugar Gatorade drink. This beverage provides electrolytes which also help pH. I don’t drink a lot of it, but I find that it helps when I’m sitting at my computer for hours, attending various online meetings, and haven’t eaten a lot that day. There are also mineral waters and other drinks that may help with nutrient deficiency.
Step 2. Keep your stress levels low by lowering your acid levels and watching your diet.
We’re often told to make sure we stay calm, not to cause tension in our thinking which could cause negative impacts on our bodies. Stress causes headaches, issues with digestion, and even constipation. Of course, having a diet high in processed carbohydrates and sugar and low in lean proteins and fiber will wreak havoc on your body. But, we also have to watch our levels of acidity. Bad diets and stress lead to high acid levels, which can have varying effects of internalized damage to our tissues and organs; it can even affect our skin. Drinking water can help, but we need to watch our pH levels. We can drink certain water that helps with pH, but we can also watch what we eat. Getting enough electrolytes can also help our pH levels.
Some foods are acid-forming, and others are more neutral. I’ve found that eating lower acid-forming foods helps to benefit my digestion and lower my acid reflux and need for antacids which is a definitive sign that my diet is unhealthy. As stress also causes us to have more acid, adding an unhealthy diet makes our bodies work harder. There is also evidence that increasing probiotics in our diets may help to reduce stress and inflammation.
Step 3. Actively engage your body.
Most of us spend lots of time sitting or lying down. Some of us are better at being active: We take walks, go to parks, or cook delicious meals. All of those are necessary activities as we traverse on-going crisis moments within the confines of our often-cramped living spaces. Moreover, I think it’s important not to be passive with our movements. Sitting for long periods can cause back and knee pain, leading to pressure on our joints and cause weakened muscles.
The most basic exercise is aerobic, which means we want to breathe vigorously enough to allow quality airflow in and out of our lungs. We also want to engage our core muscles so that they have some resistance and can stay strong. We know that spinal alignment and reducing pressure on joints are key to sitting or resting comfortably. I think that in terms of basic active moments, even if we don’t formally exercise, involves a few key approaches to be effective: | https://medium.com/illumination/staying-healthy-during-the-covid-19-lockdown-3edc12e0ea22 | ['Kimberly Thomas'] | 2021-03-13 16:30:33.370000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Pandemic', 'Covid 19', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Stress'] |
Preventing Jail Suicides | Suicide is the leading cause of death for people incarcerated in jails across the United States, accounting for more than 30% of deaths in custody. In 2014, the rate of suicide in local jails was the highest observed since 2000, and remains over three times higher than rates of suicide in either prison or the community. Gender and racial disparities exist in suicide rates in jail.Men are 57% more likely to die by suicide than women, while white people are 5.25 times more likely to die by suicide than Black people. (1) There are multiple causes for high rates of suicide in jails. In some cases, individuals who are incarcerated face facility-level risk factors like overcrowding, situational risk factors such as stress and isolation associated with incarceration, and individual risk factors such as mental illness, substance abuse, or a history of trauma or self-harm. Suicide can result from undiagnosed or untreated mental health disorders, and jails are often ill-equipped to meet the underlying needs of individuals with mental illness. Additionally, there are long term impacts associated with jail suicides; not only do they result in loss of life, but also there is heightened vulnerability among individuals who are exposed to suicide or suicide related behavior in jails, contributing to a toxic environment of self-harm. (2)
Addressing high jail suicide rates requires collaboration between different groups of stakeholders, and is contingent upon healthy communciation between a jail’s preferred method of healthcare delivery (generally the jail’s own health and clinical staff) and the corrections staff. For jails that contract healthcare to outside vendors, the jail also have to manage healthy and transparent relationships with these private organizations. (3) Reshaping approaches to training around suicide prevention is critical and should include both corrections and health care staff together to foster collaborative learning between the two groups. The training process should occur regularly and emphasize identifying high-risk offenders along with signs and symptoms of mental illness. Additionally, correctional and healthcare professionals should work together to institute a review process that includes stakeholders from all disciplines, with a focus on disseminating findings and recommendations to both management and line staff.
Other potential solutions include having jails develop suicide prevention plans consistent with the national standards, as well as connecting jails to resources that would provide guidance on conducting robust reviews in the aftermath of a death. (Both the healthcare and criminal justice fields have helpful guidance on implementing an all-stakeholder, non-blaming review process) Additionally, jails can develop mechanisms to consistently review incidents of self-harm, as these are more prevalent compared to instances of suicide, and this could be a missed opportunity to strengthen practices concerning suicide, self-harm, and the relationship between the two. Jails can also develop procedures to systematically screen inmates upon arrival at the facility and throughout their stay to identify high risk inmates, develop mechanisms to maintain communications between staff members regarding high risk inmates, and emphasizing supportive and trusting relationships between incarcerated individuals and staff. (1)(2)(3) | https://medium.com/@ninareddy/preventing-jail-suicides-4cac28de2c0c | ['Nina Reddy'] | 2019-09-10 21:56:24.441000+00:00 | ['Suicide Prevention', 'Prison Reform', 'Jail Reform', 'Policy'] |
Top 5 challenges currently facing Tunisia that will inspire you to launch your next startup | Many of today’s most successful companies were born during crisis times. To name a few, General Motors, IBM, and more recently Airbnb, were all founded during financial recession times and they not only survived but thrived.
There is no question that today’s worst health crisis due to COVID-19 spreading will result in a great recession. However, it is undoubtedly a turning point in the Tunisian economy, and mainly for the local startup ecosystem.
The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the huge creative potential of Tunisian researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs and their devotion to being in the front lines to fight the pandemic. Since the burst of the crisis, several national inventions from military robots to medical equipment were put into action and developed in response to the emergency. The technical projects built by Fablabs and technopoles, research centers, private companies and even the innovative and prompt strategies executed by the government, will be the launchpad for more business initiatives post COVID-19.
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, and you have been discouraged by the current difficult economy state, I wanted to remind you that the greatest success opportunities lay behind the greatest challenges.
Here are the 5 most urgent challenges facing our country today that you can focus on solving and enhancing by launching your next startup:
1- Healthcare
Even though we all knew the Tunisian healthcare system was unreliable, we all were shook to the core by its failure to confront emergencies, let alone worldwide pandemics. Our public hospitals (and private clinics to a lesser extent) lack the essentials for health protection for doctors, nurses, and patients. The ever-increasing number of COVID-19 Tunisian cases is likely to lead to the total crash of the healthcare system unless the engineers and inventors unite their efforts to supply the demand in equipment and instruments during the crisis, and most importantly after it ends. It is by no means the shortage in supplies nor the incompetency of our engineers and researchers that was hindering the development of the healthcare system. And now that our country is in an unprecedented shortage, the demand for locally manufactured medical instruments and equipment to properly supply our hospitals will start and keep on increasing even after the COVID-19 crisis. The demand will also grow internationally as the pandemic is draining healthcare systems around the world.
2- Education
Uncountable E-learning platform projects, in Tunisia and on an international level, were buried since early development stages. Mostly because there is no market demand. However, the COVID-19 crisis proved the necessity of distance learning and the building of an appropriate infrastructure to not only defeat lockdown repercussions but to provide the learner with enough freedom and flexibility that would eventually boost productivity and bring about concrete results. Online learning, along with teleworking, shuttered the myths of mandatory presence and strict timelines. Adaptive and successful organizations, be it educational institutes or companies, will come to conclude that online learning and teleworking are the best approaches to enhance productivity and ensure efficiency. The best solution would also be developing customized and technically reliable platforms that perfectly meet the organization’s needs. Digitizing the educational system through E-learning has numerous benefits that were highlighted by the COVID-19 crisis, yet still to be explored afterward.
3- Network infrastructure
As the government announced the continuing of the university year through online learning during quarantine, the decision confronted a strong backlash from students, professors, and syndicalist parties. Indeed, we previously praised E-learning and teleworking, but the government decision has raised concerns about the connectivity issues that a great population in Tunisia still faces today. Hence, enhancing the Network infrastructure in Tunisia, and most urgently, distributing to all populated areas in the country should be a priority to entrepreneurs and innovators. Undoubtedly, the establishment of an extended Internet and Mobile infrastructure is the building block for further technical and social development. Thus, today’s inaccessibility of a great number of Tunisian students and pupils to a fair network is a concrete problem that may serve as the mission of the next hit Tunisian startup.
4- Supply chain
Covid19 crisis led to an exaggerated increase in prices of all vital products. From medical protection wears to medicines and food, Tunisians have endured the greed of merchants during a sensitive time. An effective supply chain management in the related industries would have enhanced the government’s endeavors to control prices while responding to the increasing demand. To be specific, a supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a certain product or service. The key players in the supply chain are producers, vendors, warehouses, transportation companies, distribution centers, and retailers. While we have seen a lot of initiatives from distribution and transportation companies, the inconsistency of the rest of the entities resulted in an insignificant impact. That’s why we are in a persistent need for innovative supply chain management solutions leveraging the latest technologies for fair and transparent product pricing. It is important to highlight that the increased prices of vital products in Tunisia is not a newly surfacing issue with the COVID-19 crisis, but rather an ever-existing socio-economic issue that needs urgent addressing.
5- Defense and military
The national security and military system in Tunisia has used the police robot PGuard, which is manufactured by the Tunisian robotics company ENOVA Robotics, to ensure citizens are adhering to lockdown. While the deployment deal between the company and the Interior Ministry remains confidential, it is enough proof that the defense and military system is trusting and welcoming Tunisian services and products. Hence, this initiative may be the starting point for developing more businesses operating in the defense and security industry. Our country is at a challenging time and a geographic location that makes it vulnerable to attacks, so it is now the right time for innovators to cooperate with the national defense system to work on designing solutions and equipment, robots, security systems, network and communication, software and transport, to name a few applications. | https://medium.com/@saharbenrached96/top-5-challenges-currently-facing-tunisia-that-will-inspire-you-to-launch-your-next-startup-e56f5dd02b45 | ['Sahar Ben Rached'] | 2020-04-06 19:24:25.472000+00:00 | ['Ideation', 'Startup', 'Tunisia', 'Problem Solving', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
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