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Read HTML Form Data Using GET and POST Method in Node.js | Hello world, welcome to the blog. In this blog we’ll discuss how to create a server application using Node.js that will read data from HTML form and will perform basic operations like insert, read, update and delete on SQLite3 database using GET and POST requests. We’ll also add security features by using modules like Helmet and Express-rate-limit.
Photo by Sai Kiran Anagani on Unsplash
You can also find the entire project in my GitHub repository —
The basic outline of our project and the HTML form is shown below -
project outline
HTML form
Prerequisites -
Knowledge of — HTML, CSS, Node.js, and SQLite3 Node.js and SQLite3 should be installed on your local machine.
So, now we are ready to initiate our project. let’s dive in.
Step 1: First of all, open the terminal and create one directory which will be dedicated for our project. Navigate into that directory and run npm init . Then you will be asked to enter various details about your application, which will be stored as a json file named ‘Package.json’. Then you have to run following commands —
npm install express --save to install the ‘express’ module,
npm install sqlite3 --save to install ‘sqlite3’ module, and
npm install body-parser --save to install ‘body-parser’ module
npm install helmet --save to install ‘helmet’ module.
npm install express-rate-limit --save to install ‘express-rate-limit’ module.
Note- helmet is a Node.js module that helps in securing ‘express’ applications by setting various HTTP headers. It helps in mitigating cross-site scripting attacks, misissued SSL certificates etc.
Express-rate-limit module is a middleware for Express which is used to limit repeated requests to public APIs and/or endpoints such as password reset. By limiting the number of requests to the server, we can prevent the Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. It is the type of attack in which the server is flooded with repeated requests making it unavailable to its intended users and ultimately shutting it down.
Step 2: Now let’s start writing HTML and CSS code. We will keep our HTML and CSS files in a directory named ‘public’, which is itself present in our project directory. In the HTML file, we’ll define the head section first.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang = "en">
<head>
<meta charset = "UTF-8">
<link rel = "stylesheet" href="style.css">
<title> My Form </title>
</head>
Then we’ll write the body section. The following code will enable user to add a new employee to the database.
<body>
<header>
<h1>Employee Database</h1>
</header>
<form action="/add" method="POST">
<fieldset>
<h3>Add new employee</h3>
<label>Employee ID</label>
<input type ="text" id = 'empID' name="id" required>
<br><br>
<label>Name</label>
<input type="text" id = "name" name="name" required>
<br><br>
<button type ="reset">Reset</button>
<button type ="submit">Submit</button>
</fieldset>
</form>
The code below will enable user to view any employee based on their ID number.
<form action="/view" method="POST">
<fieldset>
<h3>View an employee</h3>
<label>Employee ID</label>
<input type="text" id="empID" name="id" required>
<br><br>
<button type ="reset">Reset</button>
<button type ="submit">Submit</button>
<br><br><br>
</fieldset>
</form>
The following two code snippets are for updating and deleting employees from the database.
<form action="/update" method="POST">
<fieldset>
<h3>Update an employee</h3>
<label>Employee ID</label>
<input type ="text" id = 'empID' name="id" required>
<br><br>
<label>New Name</label>
<input type="text" id = "name" name="name" required>
<br><br>
<button type ="reset">Reset</button>
<button type ="submit">Submit</button>
</fieldset>
</form> <form action="/delete" method="POST">
<fieldset>
<h3>Delete an employee</h3>
<label>Employee ID</label>
<input type ="text" id = 'empID' name="id" required>
<br><br>
<button type ="reset">Reset</button>
<button type ="submit">Submit</button>
<br><br><br>
</fieldset>
</form>
At last we’ll include a footer which will tell the user how to close the database connection.
<footer>
<hr>
<h4>Please enter 'http://localhost:3000/close' to close the database connection before closing this window</h4>
</footer>
</body>
</html>
Step 3: Now we’ll write the CSS codes for styling our webpage.
Step 4: Since, we have designed our front end, now we’ll build our back-end server application in Node.js. We’ll create a file called ‘app.js’ in our main project directory and import all the necessary modules.
Notice that the execution mode is set to verbose to produce long stack traces.
In the above code, we have created an instance of express, named ‘app’ and we have also created a database named ‘employee’ in the ‘database’ directory which is present in our current directory.
windowMs is the timeframe for which requests are checked/remembered.
max is the maximum number of connections during windowMs milliseconds before sending a 429 response.
bodyParser.urlencoded() returns middleware that only parses urlencoded bodies and only looks at requests where the Content-Type header matches the type option.
express.static() is used to serve static files in ‘express’.
Then, we’ll create a table named ‘emp’ in the database having two columns- ‘id’ and ‘name’ using the following code -
The above code will make sure that ‘emp’ table won’t be created again and again whenever we run the application.
Step 3: Now, it is the time to write the codes for listening to the GET and POST requests made by the browser.
When the user enters http://localhost:3000 in the browser’s address bar, following code will take care of this GET request and will send the HTML form as a response.
INSERT
To insert a new employee into the ‘emp’ table, the user is required to fill this part of the form.
And the following code will take care of this POST request -
In the above code, the serialize() method puts the execution mode into serialized mode. It means that only one statement can execute at a time. Other statements will wait in a queue until all the previous statements are executed.
READ
To view an employee from the ‘emp’ table, user is required to enter the Employee ID in this part of the form.
The following code will take care of this POST request.
In the above code, the each() method executes an SQL query with specified parameters and calls a callback for every row in the result set.
UPDATE
To update an existing employee, the user is required to enter the existing Employee ID and the New Name.
This POST request will be handled by the following code -
DELETE
To delete an existing employee from the ‘emp’ table, user is required to enter the Employee ID and this POST request will be handled by the following code-
Step 4: Now, we’ll write code for closing the database connection.
The above code will function when the user enters http://localhost:3000/close in the address bar of the browser.
Step 5: Now, we need to make our server application listen to all the requests made by the browser, which will be achieved by the following command-
Step 6: Now that we have written all the codes for our server application, we’ll save it and go back to terminal to run this using the command node app.js . The following message will be displayed in the console -
Server listening on port: 3000
So, now our server is up and running. We will open the browser and enter http://localhost:3000 to start doing the CRUD operations.
Step 7: Then, open the Network tab by clicking on Inspect Element. Click on localhost and you will notice some additional set of headers in the response, which are set by the helmet module.
Summary
If you have completed above steps, then you have created a secured server application which can read data from HTML form and perform insert, view, update and delete operations.
References: | https://medium.com/swlh/read-html-form-data-using-get-and-post-method-in-node-js-8d2c7880adbf | ['Souvik Paul'] | 2020-11-13 18:45:30.988000+00:00 | ['HTML', 'Nodejs', 'Expressjs', 'Helmet', 'Sqlite3'] |
Linear Regression with NumPy | In this article, I do the week 2 programming exercises of the course Machine Learning at Coursera with NumPy. I avoid using frameworks like PyTorch since they are too powerful in comparison with these exercises.
In general, the workflow of a linear regression problem (with one variable or with multiple variables) is presented in the figure below.
Linear Regression workflow
It consists of four main steps:
Load Data: load data from text files: ex1data1.txt and ex1data2.txt .
and . Define functions: define functions to predict outputs, to compute cost, to normalize features, and to carry out the algorithm gradient descent.
Prepare Data: add a column of ones to variables, do normalize features if needed.
Training: initialize weights, learning rate, and a number of iterations (called epochs), then launch gradient descent.
I also do some more steps of visualization to figure out the data and results obtained.
1. Linear Regression with one variable
In this assignment, you need to predict profits for a food truck.
Suppose you are the CEO of a restaurant franchise and considering different cities for opening a new outlet. The chain already has trucks in various cities, and you have data for profits and populations from the cities.
The data set is stored in the file ex1data1.txt and is presented in the figure below. A negative value for profit indicates a loss.
Profits of food truck in cities
1.1. Load data
The numpy method loadtxt() loads data from a text file to a numpy array.
1.2. Define functions
The numpy method matmul() performs a matrix product of two arrays.
1.3. Prepare data
The numpy method column_stack() stacks a sequence of 1-D or 2-D arrays to a single 2-D arrays.
1.4. Training
After 1500 iterations, we will obtain the new weights w
array([-3.63029144, 1.16636235])
The line predicted is shown in the figure below.
Profits of food truck in cities with prediction line
And the figure below figures out the variation of cost.
2. Linear Regression with multiple variables
In this assignment, you need to predict the prices of houses.
Suppose you are selling your house and you want to know what a good market price would be. The file ex1data2.txt contains a data set of housing prices in Portland, Oregon. The first column is the size of the house (in square fit), the second column is the number of bedrooms, and the third column is the house’s price of the.
The figure below presents the data set in 3D space.
Prices of houses in Portland, Oregon
There’s only one point that we need to pay attention to: house sizes are about 1000 times the number of bedrooms. Therefore, we should perform feature normalization before launching gradient descent so that it converges much more quickly.
Create the function normalize_features()
Then normalize variables before put them in gradient descent.
The other steps are completely similar to the ones of the assignment above. We don’t need to rewrite functions predict() , cost_fn() , and gradient_descent() since they work well with matrices multi-columns.
After 400 iterations, we have the surface of prediction in the figure below.
Prices of houses with prediction surface
Intuitively, linear regression prediction with one variable is a line in the surface of inputs and outputs. The prediction of two variables is the surface. The prediction of the three variables is space, and so on.
The gradient descent logs help us figure out the variation of our model’s cost in the figure below.
The complete code source is in the notebook linear regression. If you want to refer to Matlab codes of this programming exercise, they are in the directory w2. | https://medium.com/@anh-tuan-vu/linear-regression-with-numpy-23034aa9ced1 | ['Anh Tuan Vu'] | 2020-12-28 14:11:53.189000+00:00 | ['Linear Regression', 'Gradient Descent', 'Numpy', 'Coursera', 'Machine Learning'] |
How to manage your time and prioritise | The Pareto Principle
The last thing to cover is the Pareto Principle and how it can be used to your advantage. The Pareto Principle is known by many names, such as the 80/20 rule or the law of the vital few. This principle essentially states that for a given situation, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
An example could be something like 20% of Medium writers produce 80% of the [good] content.
Knowing this principle, it’s time to learn to apply it. Let’s examine a few use cases.
Photo by Han Chau on Unsplash
Use case #1: 20% of the work delivers 80% of the value
Following from the Eisenhower Matrix and the quick wins, the Pareto Principle primarily advises that we could do 1/5th of the work and get 4/5th of the value. That could either be by only addressing a subset of the backlog, or by solving each item partially. Maybe you deliver the work in a draft state, rather than 100% completed.
Use case #2: 20% of the root causes create 80% of the problems
Sometimes you may have some tasks which seem to be repeating themselves. It might be the type of problems you keep addressing, or the same group of clients causing most of the trouble.
Whatever it is, it’s worth identifying the trend and solving the issue once and for all. To determine the root cause of a problem, it’s worth asking why five times in a row. The final answer tends to be the root cause of the problem.
Having used the Pareto Principle, you can then identify the best way to proceed with your workload to achieve the most out of your day, week, month or year!
I hope that you’ve found some or all of the above useful. Hopefully, you’ll put these tips into practice, and they work for you. Remember to persevere for a while whenever you’re trying out a new technique. It takes a bit of time to get the hang of it. | https://medium.com/better-programming/three-techniques-for-time-management-and-prioritization-9df6dffe2ff1 | ['Costas Andreou'] | 2020-06-27 17:13:14.455000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Product Management', 'Productivity', 'Time Management'] |
I Spent $12,000 on a Guru’s Training Program — Here’s What Happened | Two years after I graduated from college, I decided I wanted to switch career paths and invest in real estate. At my very first real estate association meeting, a national guru was speaking about investing in non-performing notes. I knew nothing about the topic or style of investing but was intrigued, so I signed up for their free two-day seminar that following weekend. I learned a lot, but of course not enough to start investing — at least not without making a lot of mistakes. Not to mention the entire afternoon on the second day was dedicated to upselling their mentorship program, which at the “diamond level” cost roughly $12,000.
$12,000 is a lot of money when you’re fresh out of college and earn a gross income of $40,000 a year. I had very little in savings at the time meaning I couldn’t purchase the program without going into debt. Of course, the sales agent that took each of us aside one-on-one to discuss the program options suggested I apply for a zero-percent interest rate credit card to pay for the program. Having zero credit cards to my name at the time, I was hesitant, but they were persuasive. So I did it.
I put just over $9,000 on a credit card that had zero interest for a year to purchase the program. It was honestly a pretty reckless move. I do not suggest going into debt, especially significant debt when you don’t have the income to support the repayment of the debt. But in my case, it worked out.
The best $12,000 I ever spent
I got started with the online course literally as fast as I could. I watched every video, attended every call, and put the work in, and within a year I was able to pay back the credit card after wholesaling, or “brokering” a note to another investor. But then I stopped.
I got scared. I got distracted. I paid for other real estate programs to “try them out” and end up seeing very little success. Nearly two years after I initially bought the program, I decided to return to my roots and refocus on investing in notes.
Thankfully my sister and brother-in-law decided to invest in our first real deal (where we bought and worked out the note deal rather than wholesaling it), which ended up earning a total return of 62%! We bought four more notes. And by the same time the following year, we owned 17 notes in 8 different states for a totaling just under $1,000,000.
That year I earned over three times my annual salary as a teacher. 2017 proved to be even better. We added 17 more notes to our portfolio and restructured our partnership structure with investors which allowed us to earn more from each deal. This was the year my husband and I decided to quit our full-time jobs and travel the country in an RV, something we continue to do to this day.
Why most guru programs don’t work
If you ask a real estate investor their thoughts on national gurus, the speakers who tour the country teaching people how to invest in X, Y, or Z, you’ll likely receive a negative response. Neverending sales pitches, high program costs, and sometimes shotty courses can lead to people spending tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars on training or mentorship, only to end up in debt and no further ahead in their real estate career. But that isn’t always the case, as you can see my story didn’t end poorly, but I know a lot that did.
There are a lot of factors that helped my story end successfully. To start, the program, while expensive, was still affordable for the opportunity in the marketplace. Non-performing loans were abundant and ridiculously cheap in 2012–2016. I bought a lot of mortgage notes during this time period and still missed out on a tremendous opportunity.
This course in particular is no longer taught by this guru, but if I bought their comparable course today I’d being paying over double what I paid in 2012. A growing interest in real estate investing has driven educational courses like this sky-high over the past decade, despite having less inventory for sale as the housing market recovered.
Secondly, I took action! I didn’t pay for the program and forget about it. I applied myself. I did what the guru said to do. I made cold-calls (seriously the worst thing ever). I sent email after email, attended conferences, met with investors, friends, family, talking about what I was doing even if they didn’t want to hear about it. I worked long hours into the night after work and on the weekends while my friends were out having fun. I put in the effort, and as a result, I saw results.
Unfortunately, most people who purchase guru real estate programs like this do nothing with it. They spend the money, and literally never log-in, join a call, or take any action. Even for those who do apply themselves, success doesn’t happen overnight. Rejected offer after rejected offer can get defeating. If you don’t have the determination or the grit to overcome the no’s, the setbacks, or the time it takes to get off the ground, it’s easy to give up and say the program was the problem.
It also helps that the program I paid into was a worthwhile mentorship. While there definitely were gaps in what they taught that I, unfortunately, learned the hard way, it gave me the necessary tools and knowledge to get started. Which is honestly, all you need.
Not all programs are considered equal
My $12,000 I spent on the guru’s course has been the best investment I’ve ever made. I definitely don’t recommend the method of paying for the venture in the same way I did, but it can pay off. If I had waited until I had $12,000 saved up I would have missed the opportunity in the marketplace and probably would have never gone back to buy the program.
If you’re going to invest in a real estate guru’s program, do your homework on the guru. Read reviews and speak to other people who are in or have “graduated” from the program. It also doesn’t hurt to do a background or criminal search on the person. While I wish I could say everyone in the real estate industry has a grade A record, there are a lot of crooks in this line of business. Also, do your homework on the opportunity in the current marketplace as it compares to the cost of the program.
If the course is charging tens of thousands of dollars that you don’t have see if there is a more affordable program possibly at your local real estate education association. Many times there will be a local expert that offers weekend courses at a much more affordable rate or inquire to see if they are open to mentoring you in exchange for work. Just make sure you are compensating them for sharing their time and knowledge accordingly.
If you’re going to go into debt to learn how to invest in real estate, make sure you apply yourself and do the necessary work. And be patient. Success in real estate doesn’t happen overnight. If you do that, there’s no reason a $12,000 investment in education could pay off big time. | https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/i-spent-12-000-on-a-gurus-real-estate-program-here-s-what-happened-46441ccaaf3b | [] | 2021-02-04 13:03:12.919000+00:00 | ['Real Estate Investments', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Real Estate', 'Life Lessons', 'Investing'] |
Genghis Khan’s Guide To Fire Safety Tips | It Doesn’t Take a Barbarian To Know That Holiday Fire Safety Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult. Check Out These Simple Tips.
Graphic by Author
Let’s face it, Genghis Kahn probably didn’t practice ANY of the fire safety tips I want to share with you. Because of his barbarian nature, I’m sure he was a better pyromaniac than a fire prevention specialist! 🔥 | https://medium.com/illumination/genghis-khans-guide-to-fire-safety-tips-f40dd7f1e1c1 | ['Trapper Sherwood'] | 2020-12-16 23:41:02.278000+00:00 | ['Safety', 'Fire', 'Holidays', 'Security', 'Christmas'] |
To Tell You the Truth…You’re Screwed | “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” ― Mark Twain
To tell you the truth…
This is why you need to wake up, grow up and get serious.
You will become rich only when you get serious about becoming rich and not one second sooner.
You will get in great physical shape only after you get serious about getting in great physical shape.
You will make advances in your career or business only after you decide to get serious and make excellence your operating standard.
You will enjoy a great marriage only after you decide to get serious about having a great marriage and certainly not one second sooner.
Until you decide to wake up, grow up and get serious about changing your life…making your dreams come true and fast tracking your goals…you will forever remain in the situation you are now in.
Why? It’s very simple…decision always precedes action.
To tell you the truth…
Eventually we all reach our own psychological puberty and come to accept the truth that we need to be own hero…we need to do our own pushups…we need to wake up, grow up and get serious…and that it’s up to us to make our lives a masterpiece.
Is today the day?
Gary Ryan Blair is creator of the 100 Day Challenge…a radical approach to goal achievement that shows people how to achieve 10X size goals by applying the methods and best practices of growth hacking. Get all the details here.
If you enjoyed this post…it would mean a lot to me if you could click on the “claps” icon…up to 50 claps allowed — Thank You! | https://medium.com/mind-munchies/to-tell-you-the-truth-youre-screwed-31a0ff56786e | ['Gary Ryan Blair'] | 2019-11-15 19:00:54.982000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement', 'Startup'] |
How to Divide the United States into Two Countries | Author’s note: I was surprised by the amount of attention this Medium post received, which I originally wrote as a quick thought experiment. Of course, I have my own personal biases, which a number of commenters have pointed out. If you have a different opinion, I invite you to share your own vision of a two-state solution in the comments or to write your own Medium post and include a link. I still maintain my overarching point that both red and blue America would be better off without each other.
The US is more divided than ever. According to Pew, 91% of Americans today say that conflicts between Democrats and Republicans are either strong or very strong, a higher number than in 2016 (85%) and 2012 (81%). The political and cultural divide has become so intense that we must seriously consider whether both sides might not be better off if the US were divided into separate countries.
State coalitions have already begun to form. After Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change in June 2017, the US Climate Alliance was formed by the governors of Washington, New York, and California to continue progress toward climate-related policy goals. The US Climate Alliance now includes governors from 24 states. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, several state coalitions have formed to coordinate policies for reopening their economies including the Western States Pact, an East Coast coalition, a coalition of southeast states, and a coalition of midwestern states.
Using the results of the 2016 presidential election, I’ve divided the US into two hypothetical new countries: Blue America and Red America. I’ve tried to remain as politically neutral as possible, trying to capture what I believe would be the most likely scenario for each country. The issue of swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan is a major one that I’ll have to skip over for now. I’ve used Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau data to calculate economic and demographic statistics.
I’ve drawn implicitly on some relevant historical experiences including Brexit and the formation of the EU; the partitions of India, Pakistan, Korea, Germany, and China; the dissolution of the Soviet Union; the independence movements of Scotland, Catalonia, and the Basque Country; and of course the secession of the American South.
The First 5 Years
In the beginning, little would appear to change. Both countries would remain strongly interconnected through policies designed to maintain the status quo, such as free trade agreements and open border policies. A new set of parallel federal institutions would be formed, based in a newly established national capital. Which of the two countries would inherit the old US federal institutions would depend on which party controlled Congress and the White House at the time. Where possible, federal resources would be apportioned by population or economic size, including military assets (including nuclear weapons) and strategic stockpiles. Some matters would need to be negotiated such as overseas military bases and the national debt.
Both countries would begin to enact policies they had long wished for (see extended list below). Blue America would create a universal public healthcare system, raise taxes on the wealthy, and open the country to immigration. Red America would drastically cut personal and corporate taxes, restrict immigration, and shrink government spending. There would be mass protests by people who ended up in the “wrong” country, particularly in swing states.
After 20 Years
Over time, the two countries would diverge significantly. There would be large-scale demographic sorting. People from blue parts of red states and red parts of blue states would eventually move to their country of choice. College-educated Americans, minorities, and immigrants would overwhelmingly shift toward Blue America due to its progressive policies and greater economic opportunities. Foreign researchers and entrepreneurs would flock to Blue America’s universities and cities. Red America’s demographics would increasingly skew white and less educated.
Blue America’s economy would grow to dwarf Red America’s in a milder version of the Civil War-era economic divide between the industrializing American North and the slave-dependent South. Blue America’s economy, which began with an advantage in high-value industries and high-skilled workers, would further benefit from high levels of investment in public goods, such as health care, education, and infrastructure. Red America’s efforts to lure corporations with lower taxes and greater subsidies would not be able to offset the greater appeal of Blue America’s stronger economy, larger market, better infrastructure, and more highly-skilled workforce.
As Blue America became more open to foreign trade and immigration, Red America would eventually close its borders to Blue America, further sealing itself off from the rest of the world in a milder version of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain. Facing stagnation and decline, Red America would increasingly resort to military excursions and efforts to destabilize other countries. Blue America and its allies would form a new NATO to contain Red America as it came to present a threat to global security.
Blue America (19 states + DC)
Photo by Aaron Burson on Unsplash
GDP: $10.7 trillion (2nd largest economy after China)
Population: 140 million
GDP per capita: $76,137
White population: 54%
College or more: 40%
Red America (31 states)
Photo by specphotops on Unsplash
GDP: $10.6 trillion (3nd largest economy after China and Blue America)
Population: 188 million
GDP per capita: $56,525
White population: 65%
College or more: 32%
Blue America vs. Red America: Policies
Healthcare
Blue America: universal public healthcare
Red America: private commercial health insurance, repeal of Obamacare, keep Medicare, cut Medicaid to zero
Higher Education
Blue America: free public universities, federal scholarships for private universities
Red America: status quo with combination of private universities and subsidized public universities
Immigration
Blue America: full amnesty and path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants, large increase in visas, green cards, and new citizenships
Red America: deportation of all undocumented immigrants, border wall with Mexico, country-based immigration restrictions
Gun Control
Blue America: full background checks, national registry, ban on assault weapons
Red America: no permit or background check required for firearms purchase
Abortion
Blue America: abortions are legal and covered by public health insurance
Red America: abortions are illegal with no exceptions
Environment
Blue America: large public investment in renewable energy, stricter environmental protection policies, end of subsidies to fossil fuel industries, ban on fracking
Red America: weakening of environmental protection policies, few restrictions on oil & gas extraction including fracking
Federal Reserve and Currency
Blue America: status quo with Federal Reserve as central bank and dollar as national currency
Red America: central bank abolished, new currency issued tied to gold standard
Trade
Blue America: expanded trade agreements with emphasis on labor and environmental protections including trade deal with EU, NAFTA, Trans-Pacific Partnership
Red America: expansion of tariffs on imports from China, EU, Canada, Mexico
Taxes
Blue America: higher personal income tax rates for high earners, wealth tax, capital gains taxed as ordinary income, higher corporate tax rate, campaign against offshore tax havens
Red America: flat personal income tax, zero corporate tax rate
While the transition could be challenging, the final result would be a dream come true for both sides. Democrats and Republicans need to ask themselves: what’s the point of still holding on? | https://medium.com/@kyle.i.chan/how-to-divide-the-united-states-into-two-countries-f388903876b | ['Kyle Chan'] | 2021-02-18 08:43:47.669000+00:00 | ['America', 'Democrats', 'Republicans', 'Trump', 'Politics'] |
FinOps principles: Cloud Optimization | Cloud optimization looks like a low hanging fruit, but I have good and bad news for you. The good news is that in the majority of the cases it is a quick way to get some instant results from FinOps. The bad news — you have to work on this constantly. One time optimization gives results, however, in a few months you can get back to your previous cloud bill.
There are a few practices you can use to optimize cloud resources and reduce your cloud bill. But the most important thing is to establish a process of smart and conscious resource consumption and provisioning so you would deal not just with the results but make optimization an integral part of all your internal processes.
Ok, let’s start with a few ways to optimize your current expenses and later discuss how to make it a part of the entire cloud provisioning process.
There are hundreds of cloud resource optimization tools; some of them are really cool, some just look at machine monitoring metrics and say if you need to take a cheaper flavor. Our focus here will be on what you can do yourself with your team and without any tools. However, I strongly encourage you to analyze the market and identify a solution that conforms with FinOps standards and can help you with all the four FinOps principles.
I consciously focus on IaaS services as they are the most common. I will use AWS as an example but all the bullets should work for all the public clouds.
Let’s start with unused resources you can clean up:
List all the volumes and snapshots not being attached to any VMs or used to create images. Review and remove them. When you remove images, don’t forget to revise snapshots as they are tied to images.
List all the stopped VMs and check if they are needed. If they don’t cost you anything as a VM, they still have volumes attached.
2. Now let’s talk about VM re-flavouring: review performance metrics from your VMs and see whether you need to choose a less expensive flavours. I suggest to start with recurring resources like CI/CD jobs as you’ll get a measurable result quicker.
3. Consider reserved instances and saving plans. Here is a nice article and another one about how to properly use them. Be cautious: reserved instances and saving plans which aren’t properly calculated can increase your expenses instead of reducing. You can find more articles on the Internet and I’ll be writing a separate article about it soon.
4. Consider spot instances. They are 2–4 times cheaper than the on-demand and are ideal for CI/CD jobs and short-term tasks. Here I provide more information about that.
5. Storage and networking optimization:
Review your cross-region and outbound traffic. Both are not free and can astonish you when you dig deeper.
Turn on and configure retention settings for partial objects in all your object storage buckets. In object storage you pay for allocated space and sometimes you have partially loaded objects there which consume storage but are useless as they are not integral.
Find duplicates and buckets / folders belonging to inactive users and projects. I have never seen a proper order in any object storage, to be honest. You can be the first company.
Consider using cold storage for some of your buckets and folders and this type of storage is way cheaper.
Consider using CDN services instead of just object storage. You can improve your user experience and save on costs of storage and outbound traffic.
And now let’s talk about building the process that should help you bring more order and use clouds in an optimal way.
Tag all resources. You can use multiple tags to identify owners of the resources, TTL, project, team, whatever. Resources without a tag should be removed. I’ve described it in more detail here. Create a clean up script that will use a TTL tag and remove expired resources. Don’t rely on your engineers to clean up resources manually, or Jenkins jobs to do it automatically. CI/CD jobs can fail and engineers can forget and go for a PTO. Create a FinOps team to review the steps above and implement them. As I mentioned at the beginning, you need to do it regularly or it doesn’t properly work. Here you can find more details. Consider other clouds and regions. Not all regions have the same instance price and performance. You should actively monitor those metrics to provision in the best performing and cost-efficient cloud, region and availability zone. Find a software solution to assist you. Focus not just on a tool with the best marketing but on the one that really adopts and sets FinOps standards. Cloud optimization tool is not enough.
You should think about FinOps not only when you are a company with a billion revenue and thousands of employees but from the first day of your company as clouds can either boost growth or be a real pain — up to almost ruining your business (here is one of the examples). FinOps is dedicated to help you get the best out of the clouds paying only what you should. | https://medium.com/@nsmirnov/finops-principles-cloud-optimization-6f6bb3bd1a35 | ['Nick Smirnov'] | 2020-12-23 13:02:41.051000+00:00 | ['Finops', 'Cloud Optimization', 'DevOps', 'Cloud', 'Cloud Management'] |
Building a Dashboard App using Plotly’s Dash: A Complete Guide from Beginner to Pro | Building a Dashboard App using Plotly’s Dash: A Complete Guide from Beginner to Pro
In part 1, we learnt how to start with Dash, add dash components, improve graph layout, and define callbacks. In part-2, we will learn how to add multiple tabs, share data between callbacks, write multi outputs callback, do user authentication, and deploy app to Heroku.
I will start from where we left in part-1. If you missed part-1, please read it.
Dashboard App
7. Tabs and data sharing between callbacks
Assume we want to make charts of different price technical indicators for given cryptocurrency. For this, we will add tabs to our app layout and modify app.callback for graph so it returns chart for selected tab.
we have extracted data for table and graph separately till now. But we should only extract price data once for all the callbacks to save time and computation. So we need to share data between callbacks. To make data sharing easy, we will write an another app.callback which will take input from Dropdown and give a json data file as output. Output of this callback will be shared with other callbacks.
7.1 Tabs
I will add tabs above the graph in app.layout .
tabs_styles = {
'height': '51px'
}
tab_style = {
'borderBottom': '1px solid #d6d6d6',
'padding': '2px',
'fontWeight': 'bold'
}
tab_selected_style = {
'borderTop': '1px solid #d6d6d6',
'borderBottom': '1px solid #d6d6d6',
'backgroundColor': 'black',
'color': 'yellow',
'padding': '10px'
}
dcc.Tabs(id="all-tabs-inline", value='tab-1', children=[
dcc.Tab(label='Simple Moving Average', value='tab-1', style=tab_style, selected_style=tab_selected_style),
dcc.Tab(label='Volatility Index', value='tab-2', style=tab_style, selected_style=tab_selected_style),
dcc.Tab(label='Relative Strength Index', value='tab-3', style=tab_style, selected_style=tab_selected_style),
dcc.Tab(label='Moving Average Divergence Convergence', value='tab-4', style=tab_style, selected_style=tab_selected_style),
dcc.Tab(label='Exponential Moving Average', value='tab-5', style=tab_style, selected_style=tab_selected_style),
dcc.Tab(label='Bollinger Bands', value='tab-6', style=tab_style,
selected_style=tab_selected_style),
], style=tabs_styles,
colors={
"border": "yellow",
"primary": "red",
"background": "orange"
}), | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/building-a-dashboard-app-using-plotlys-dash-a-complete-guide-from-beginner-to-pro-e7657a4eb707 | ['Dayal Chand Aichara'] | 2020-11-15 12:19:53.470000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Dashboard', 'Dash', 'Data Science', 'Plotly'] |
eToro 2020年底盤點！ | 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/jcstorytelling/etoro-2020-nov-and-dec-webinar-339183c110ba | ['Jc 隨寫隨筆'] | 2020-12-30 10:14:18.685000+00:00 | ['Etoro', 'Investment', 'Financial Market News', 'Etoro Webinar'] |
WFH during a Pandemic — a diary.. It’s been coming for a few weeks now… | Day 1
Tuesday 17th March 2020
It’s been coming for a few weeks now but I don’t think anyone really knew what to anticipate. I still don’t really know what it is we’re faced up against. As I look out my bedroom window, with the morning sun coming through, a light breeze playing with the curtains and I wonder: it can’t all be bad, right? The problem is that reality and the distortion by the media is becoming increasingly close. What once was the age of fake news is now becoming a reality. Looking outside it doesn’t ‘feel’ bad but when you read the news and the stats about the coronavirus it’s clearly very bad and getting worse. People are dying and the infections are increasing rapidly. The spread of the virus is going up and up and this is why many governments have advised or enforced either mass working from home initiatives or suggested that anyone with any symptoms completely self-isolate for up to 14 days. At this point these are facts, not things that different News sources can pick apart to extort for their own agendas. Governments are recognising we have a problem and are taking direct measures. So it’s a bit worrying.
A lot of people I have spoken to have said everything will be okay. It’s true there has been some panic stock buying from the public here in the UK (toilet paper, dry pasta, hand sanitiser, meat that can be frozen, etc) but in London most shelves remain full. There is a feeling that panic will die down and after the period of mass WFH as the incline of infection will decrease and we’ll be able to return eventually back to normality. I have hope that this will happen. I just have problems quantitively processing what is happening. I was a young adult during Swine Flu but I don’t remember things like this. Was there a sense of mass urgency like before? I do not know.
Today is day 1 of working from home. I have access to the things I need for working. We have enough food for perhaps a week or so. Maybe two. The things that are concerning me are toilet roll. We have about 3 rolls left between 2 people. I’ve since started obsessively collecting Kitchen Roll which I don’t know if will be adequate. I tried to order some TP and orange juice through Milk & More which was scheduled for delivery this morning but the driver, quite beside himself, handed me the orange juice and said that there was no more TP left. He seemed frantic and almost in tears. I really felt for the guy.
We have both left the house twice today. Once for coffee and each separately for errands. Despite less people being around in general, it doesn’t feel as panicked when you are outside. People are driving around. The sun is shining. But there is also a weirdness to things as well. Something is not quite right. To feel normal, I’ve clung onto straws of my original plans and routine but it feels somewhat strange. How can we know how things will be in a months time? Things might be much, much better. Or hugely worse? We’re supposed to be getting married in July but have accepted it may be cancelled. We’re both due to have respective stag/hen weekends in may but the likelihood of those happening under the right circumstances are far from likely now…
Sometimes I hear normal things outside like people talking or a bicycle going past, someone running and I wonder is the fear and worry all in my head? | https://medium.com/@2020diary/day-1-17-03-2020-5b65e50743ff | [] | 2020-03-18 21:50:32.108000+00:00 | ['Journal', 'Diary', 'Working From Home', 'Anxiety', 'Coronaviruses'] |
Happy B’Day Australian Cricketer Travis Head | Happy B’Day Australian Cricketer Travis Head. Travis was born on 29 December 1993 in Adelaide, South Australia. his full name is Travis Michael Head. Head’s batting style is left-handed. And the bowling style is right-arm off break. It’s Travis’s 29th Birthday.
https://twitter.com/ICC/status/1475968425054855171
Happy B’Day Australian Cricketer Travis Head
His Personal Life :-
Head made his first-class debut early in his career at the age of 18. And represented Australia in the 2012 Under-19 Cricket World Cup. He consistently retained his place in South Australia’s Sheffield Shield team and became the team’s captain in 2015.
Also read:- Two Members of MCA’s Apex Council have been Disqualified
Travis Head is a Christian, his father’s name is Simon Head and his mother’s name is Anna Head. And his brother’s name is Ryan Head. And his sister’s name is Chelsea Head. Travis is not marrying, he has a girlfriend named Jessica Davies. Head also plays matches in BBL and also plays for IPL (RCB) teams.
Travis’s Early Career :-
From Adelaide, where Head played at an early age for Craigmore Cricket Club and Trinity College. Head represented South Australia at both the under-17 and under-19 levels, making his debut in the National Under-19 Championship. did.
He made it three times in the 2013–14 Sheffield Shield season in the nineties, twice against Western Australia and against Tasmania with scores of 92, 98, and 98 respectively. Additionally, he managed to score a List A century for the national performance team against South Africa A in July 2014.
Happy B’Day Australian Cricketer Travis Head
Head’s International Career :-
In February 2015, Head was naming to replace Johan Botha as captain of South Australia, although Botha remained with the team for the remainder of the season to assist with the transition. At the age of 21, he was the youngest captain of the South Australian team in its 122-year first-class history.
Since Head was part of Australia’s squad for their tour of South Africa, he was ineligible to captain the Redbacks in the Matador Cup. He continued to play for Australia in the 2016–17 season, but could not make a big score.
Happy B’Day Australian Cricketer Travis Head
Read more:- Hilton Cartwright Credits Red Hot form to WC Champion
In April 2018, Head was coveting by Cricket Australia with a national contract for the 2018–19 season. In September 2018, he was naming in Australia’s Test squad for the series against Pakistan. He made his Test debut for Australia against Pakistan on 7 October 2018. He presented his baggy green cap to Nathan Lyon. | https://medium.com/@babacric/happy-bday-australian-cricketer-travis-head-ac8c630ade70 | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-12-30 10:41:35.843000+00:00 | ['Travishead', 'Birthdaytoday', 'Australia', 'Cricket'] |
Bringing your Blazor apps to the Desktop with ElectronNET.Blazor | One of the things that excites me most about the possibilities of Blazor is the potential for building apps with the speed and power of .NET and the ease of HTML, but running on any OS. Electron.NET has the potential to take that one step further by making your Blazor apps deployable as Desktop apps. Changes to Blazor Preview 6 have broken Electron.NET’s Blazor support for most apps. So I wrote a simple NuGet package called ElectronNET.Blazor that brings together everything you need to make extending your Blazor apps smooth and painless.
I should start off by saying that I didn’t do the hard work on this. Maher Jendoubi has an amazing post on how to get Electron.NET added to the BlazingPizza app. When those instructions didn’t work for my app, I suspected it had something to do with the routing not lining up with what Electron expected.
Troubleshooting the White Screen of Death
Blank screen, no bueno.
I knew very little about how Electron, Electron.NET, or the new Endpoint Routing worked. Fortunately for me .NET Core is awesome, everything involved is open source, and Electron windows let you open the Chromium Dev Tools, so I had everything I need to dig in and figure it out.
Debugging the “Electron.NET App” profile brings up a Visual Studio console window, which helpfully displays the content root path as ASP.NET Core’s web server starts up. Digging through that folder, it was clear that the files were getting copied over, but the folder that was being set as the “WebRoot” was too shallow to get to the files. I was able to confirm this by adding app.UseDirectoryBrowser() to Startup.Configure.
“Oh, there you are Peter!” (Bonus points if you can name that movie)
The directory just below “_content” is “wwwroot”, which is the default folder for .NET Core content. The new call to endpoints.MapFallback ToClientSideBlazor<Client.Startup>("index.html") in Startup.Configure handles that for you. Great if you’re serving up from an Azure website, not so great if you’re in an Electron-hosting Chromium shell.
Solving the Problem
So there are really two issues going on here:
The first issue is that based on where Electron.NET packs things, the web server has no idea where the assets it needs are.
The second issue is that Blazor isn’t pointing to the right Fallback route relative to the WebRoot.
Fortunately, we can use the design of the new startup extensions to our advantage. But in order to do that, we have to differentiate between when the app is running in Electron, and when it isn’t. The easiest way (for now) to do that is to add an Environment Variable to the “Electron.NET App” profile created when you initialize Electron.NET.
Now that we can tell the difference, when we’re starting up as Electron, we need to first tell .NET Core to serve up the files in the right root:
var assemblyName = typeof(TClientApp).Assembly.GetName()
.Name.ToLower().Replace(“.”, “”); builder.UseStaticFiles(
new StaticFileOptions
{
FileProvider = new PhysicalFileProvider(
Path.Combine(
Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(),
$”wwwroot\\_content\\{assemblyName}”
)
),
RequestPath = “”
}
);
Note that when I turned on Directory Browsing, the Client app assembly name (sans periods) was in the path. So we first have to calculate that. Then, we have to set the StaticFile provider to the currently executing assembly’s path plus the path to the content folder.
It’s important to note that this code doesn’t replace the call to app.UseClientSideBlazorFiles<Client.Startup>(); . That’s because we still need to map OTHER files that are part of the Client app, like the Mono runtime and your assemblies. We just make our new calls first, so they are available to the runtime before the other code executes.
Then, we need to tell .NET Core the right fallback path to use.
var assemblyName = typeof(TClientApp).Assembly.GetName()
.Name.ToLower().Replace(“.”, “”); builder.MapFallbackToClientSideBlazor<TClientApp>($"_content/{assemblyName}/{path}");
This time, we’re going from the route mapped internally (again, from the “wwwroot” folder) to the actual file location.
Notice that we didn’t actually have to write a whole lot of new code, we just had to map the right paths into the existing Blazor registration and mapping functions. It’s a testament to the solid design of .NET Core 3.0.
The end result is, to Electron-ify any Blazor app, you basically have to tack on 3 lines of code (albeit, added in 3 different places):
webBuilder.UseElectron(args); app.UseElectronNETStaticFiles<Client.Startup>(); endpoints.MapFallbackToClientSideElectronNET<Client.Startup>("index.html");
Those last two methods automatically detect if the app isn’t running Electron, and registers everything normally, keeping your code fresh and clean. Pretty slick, right?
Wrapping It All Up
So, if you’re building a Blazor app, you should DEFINITELY be thinking about the ASP.NET Core Hosted pattern, so you can turn it into a desktop app. That template also helps mitigate any issues with code that won’t run inside WASM… but that’s another blog post for another time.
In the meantime, give ElectronNET.Blazor a shot in your next Blazor app, and say hello to lightning fast, observable, no JavaScript apps on any desktop! And don’t forget to check out BlazorEssentials, an MVVM toolkit for Blazor apps that makes building highly-testable apps a breeze. | https://medium.com/cloudnimble/bringing-your-blazor-apps-to-the-desktop-with-electronnet-blazor-67701bff82f7 | ['Robert Mclaws'] | 2019-09-10 02:43:39.934000+00:00 | ['Blazor', 'Microsoft', 'Aspnetcore'] |
“Proven Traffic Software & Training That Will Help ANY Newbie To Generate Profits Online” | “Proven Traffic Software & Training That Will Help ANY Newbie To Generate Profits Online” Jhon Kaizer May 8·2 min read
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✓ You Can Get Free Traffic In Any Niche
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This is all you need really — and you can use it to promote affiliate products, CPA offers, eCom product or your own products and services.
Get Product + Bonuses = here
Affiliate Disclaimer: I have attached an affiliate link if you decide to buy this product I might get pay a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you! | https://medium.com/@kaizerjhon6/proven-traffic-software-training-that-will-help-any-newbie-to-generate-profits-online-65fef7bc6aa2 | ['Jhon Kaizer'] | 2021-05-08 07:30:06.802000+00:00 | ['Website Traffic', 'Earn Money Online', 'Traffic Software', 'Onlinetraffic', 'Proven Traffic'] |
The Life-Changing Magic of Virtual Fireplaces | The Life-Changing Magic of Virtual Fireplaces
Photo: Alexander Spatari/Getty Images
As I write this, my windows are rattling with 30 miles per hour wind gusts. The bright new cold is seeping through the cracks beneath the window frames, and the leaves on the trees outside are green, tinged with yellow, having launched their death drive a couple weeks ago. I am barely staving off my own existential terror, for reasons that scarcely need explaining, but on my TV is a cheerily crackling fireplace, valiantly helping me to reenvision the dropping temperatures, at least, as something to be almost excited for instead of dreaded.
It’s a small comfort, but one I’m clinging to. One of the best ways of getting through this is to lean into it — buried under a heap of comfy blankets, book in my lap, dog at my feet, and a (virtual) crackling fireplace before me. Fireplaces, both virtual and real, are shown to be restorative, relaxing, and can even make you sleepy — and who among us is not currently in desperate need of restoration, relaxation, and sleep?
“The pandemic has heightened my anxiety even more so than usual, and I’m honestly always trying to find ways to multiply the coziness factor in my home,” says Steph Coelho, a freelance writer based in Montreal. “Putting these on in the background is comforting. I think the crackling noise is particularly soothing.” Coelho says fireplaces in her area are no longer very common, and that dealing with firewood deliveries seems like “a pain in the ass” anyway.
The author and the Netflix fireplace, Christmas 2017
Alex Wilhelm, a reporter based in Providence, Rhode Island, has two fireplaces in his home, but he doesn’t use them because they’re old and look like they’d leak. Instead, he and his wife find solace in playing a virtual fireplace on their TV. “It is now cold in Providence, so about three days ago we were like, let’s put a fire on the TV for fun — and then it was actually great. Did one with rain in the background and it seemed to quiet the house in a really nice way,” he says. “It puts a good vibe into the room, like 10% of the effect of going to a cabin in the woods where there is snow outside. And in 2020 I will take all the relaxation vibes that I can get.”
A small body of research shows that fireplaces have a distinctly soothing effect. A 2020 study on 146 Swedes found that the second most common reason that Swedes lit their fireplaces was to amp up the coziness factor (the first being to warm up their homes). In Sweden, this is known as “trivseleldning,” which translates to “cozy fire making.” Study participants also attest that their favorite part of the fire was not its warmth, but rather the “beautiful light” it sends around their rooms. The researchers found that watching a fire made people feel less stressed, more joyful, and more pleasantly sociable.
Fireplaces, both virtual and real, are shown to be restorative, relaxing, and can even make you sleepy — and who among us is not currently in desperate need of restoration, relaxation, and sleep?
A small Japanese study, from 2011, looked at how young men felt when they looked at gas fires, and how it impacted their ability to complete a simple task (clicking a button in reaction to visual stimuli). The participants felt more comfortable, at ease, and satisfied while they stared into the gas fire; they also felt sleepier, though there was little impact, either way, on task performance.
Despite their lack of pleasant scent or heat, virtual fireplaces are shown to have similarly positive effects. In a 2014 randomized controlled trial focusing specifically and solely on virtual fireplaces, the researcher found that a fire on a screen, with sound, lowered participants’ blood pressure. The longer the participants watched the fire, the greater the feelings of relaxation. Without sound, though, the effects were inconsistent, as some people seemed to get bored and restless watching the muted virtual fire.
I find myself gazing into my own virtual fire when sitting on my couch reading a book some evenings. I’m not really processing what I’m looking at — actually, I’m kind of zoning out, letting the scene of the flickering flames and sound of crackling logs erase any thoughts and induce in me an almost meditative state. Over the summer, I watched nature videos (big fan of Netflix’s Night on Earth) on mute, and found I experienced a similar calming feeling, though to a lesser extent than the fireplace videos.
More research has been conducted on nature videos, which can decrease stress and elicit awe in even casual viewers. One study, from 2014, investigated how prisoners behaved on their breaks when there was a television nearby showing nature scenes, including one of a burning fireplace, compared to when the TV was off. “That study showed that nature imagery contributed to lowering violence in the prison block by 26% over a year’s period,” says the researcher, Patricia Hasbach, a practicing psychologist and co-director of the ecopsychology program at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. “Interviews and written surveys with inmates suggested that the images calmed them, quieted their mind, reduced agitation, and they recalled the images when they were back in their cells, calming their mood.”
Matthew Browning, the director of the Virtual Reality and Nature Lab at Clemson University in South Carolina, researches how virtual reality and nature videos can impact people’s psychological states. He thinks that fires, even virtual fires, might be calming because they can partially capture your attention and restore your cognitive resources. “We’re all Zoomed out, you know? And we don’t want to consciously be paying attention to things, it’s just exhausting,” he says. “A virtual fire can still captivate our attention so that we can colloquially zone out and just, you know, chill out.”
Some researchers think there could be an evolutionary component to fire’s soothing effects. For at least 125,000 years, humans have built and gathered around fires; we warmed ourselves, cooked food, conversed and formed bonds, and decompressed after long, hard days in front of campfires and hearths. But the almost fetishized image of the roaring fireplace Westerners know today likely emerged from the early and mid-20th century. According to Lynda Nead, an art historian at Birkbeck, University of London, the fireplace arose from a postwar need to reanchor the traumatized, adrift masses in a comfortable, practical gathering place they could find at home. “The object that seemed to embody the emotional affects of home and its restorative capacities was the open coal fire,” she writes. “Although these associations were present in earlier periods, they had been intensified during the war years, when the domestic hearth symbolised not only the individual family home but the home fires of the nation.”
“A virtual fire can still captivate our attention so that we can colloquially zone out and just, you know, chill out.”
The mythology of the homey fireplace persists today, hence the popularity of the Netflix fireplace and the plethora of fireplace videos available on YouTube. Meghan Kehoe, a digital strategist based in Detroit, considered buying a fake gas fireplace for her apartment, but since she didn’t have a good place to put one, she settled on the virtual fireplace, instead. “For me, it’s just a nice way to feel a slice of home during an otherwise dreary season. The crackling is such nice white noise, and it’s a small, easy joy on gray days,” she says. “I used to start my mornings with it, coffee and fireplace, and then wind down with it at night while reading. But now it’s just on in the background all the time.”
For the past couple of years, I’ve intermittently enjoyed the Netflix fireplace, particularly during the holidays. Now, I, like Kehoe, keep it on for hours at a time, even if I’m not planning to be in the living room for a while. While cooking in the adjacent kitchen, or eating in the dining room, it’s still comforting to hear the distant snap and hiss of the virtual logs; while passing through, I’ll often pause to lean on the arm of my sofa, allowing my mind to release as I briefly gaze into the flames.
Although the Netflix fireplace was my intro to the genre, it is not necessarily the best. It stops after an hour, and the trailer for some other Netflix show that usually follows it ruins the vibe. As a result, I now rely on YouTube, where there are countless fireplace videos, some three hours or more, that I can leave on throughout the day. This one is filmed slightly crooked, which is odd, but it’s pretty and 12 hours long, so I’m not complaining. This video of Nick Offerman with a glass of whiskey sitting in front of a busily burning fireplace may be comforting or strange, depending on your preferences. The late Lil Bub has several Yule Log videos, though you need to like loudly purring cats. I’m partial to this lovely scene, of a cartoon home with a woodstove and wide windows that look out onto a rainstorm, and this one, in which a cat is (quietly) curled on a bed before a woodstove while it rains lightly outside.
Maybe someday I’ll get the real deal, though fireplaces are inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and bad for your health, so I’m not in a rush. In the meantime, my virtual fireplace is a competent replacement, and since my TV sits near my radiator, I can almost fool myself into thinking it’s emitting heat. But that doesn’t really matter; it’s the sound and the beautiful glow that I love best. As winter bears down on us and we retreat behind closed doors until spring, we should bring out every genuine source of comfort — fluffy slippers, holiday decorations, a pile of cookies, and a crackling fireplace on the TV — and hold on as hard as we can. | https://debugger.medium.com/the-life-changing-magic-of-virtual-fireplaces-170d7120641b | ['Angela Lashbrook'] | 2020-11-04 17:42:32.214000+00:00 | ['Stress', 'Relaxation', 'Digital Life', 'Anxiety', 'Technology'] |
How to Get Away with Uber | If you really want to think about why we hate Uber, the best place to start might actually be 20 years and 800 miles away, in the suburbs of Seattle. That’s where Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the company that is the best single model for understanding what Uber is, and what Uber wants to be.
Amazon also started out with a simple, attractive proposition in a single, focused market. It sold books online! Suddenly, at least theoretically, the sum of all human knowledge could be delivered to your doorstep with a click. Who could argue — I mean really argue — with that? Sure, booksellers could feel the pinch. And publishers got collywobbles about the changing relationship between the producer and the distributor. And Jeff Bezos was a notorious shitbag, who became infamous for upbraiding employees, pushing them to work every waking hour, treating them like dirt. But the reality? It didn’t take long until Amazon seemed indispensable. For every human being who was being trounced behind the scenes, there were many more who started using Amazon and just couldn’t stop. It made everything so easy. A glance, a click, a package delivered right to your door. The pure convenience was an addiction.
Bezos, in between those spittled attacks on his own staff (“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”), masterminded one of the greatest Trojan horse campaigns in business history. Now, of course, Amazon delivers everything: books, toys, video games, kitchen equipment. It delivers media. It makes e-readers, it makes tablets. It makes phones, for God’s sake, even if nobody buys them. Its Web services division builds the infrastructure that helps run many of the sites and services you use every day (including the one you’re reading right now). And you probably never realized all this was happening until it had all happened.
Travis Kalanick certainly knows who his heroes are. He rejects the Amazon comparison, but he’s made no secret of his admiration for Bezos (who was, in fact, an early Uber investor), or his envy of Amazon’s relentless march from a mere supplier of services to a business that maintains a choke hold on modern life (Amazon was, in fact, almost called Relentless.com). “Amazon was just books and then some CDs, and then they’re like, you know what, let’s do frickin’ ladders,” Kalanick told Wired earlier this year. “We feel like we’re still realizing what the potential is… We don’t know yet where that stops.”
Amazon — more than any other company, more than Google, more than Facebook, more than Apple — taps into what people desire in a terrifyingly primal way: We want a thing, fast and preferably cheap. Not much else matters. We know Amazon’s not a nice company, and that the people who work there are treated poorly. We don’t always like it, but there is absolutely, definitively, nothing we will do to stop it. We are happily addicted.
That same feeling is there with Uber, except one thing: We know where Amazon has ended up, more or less, but we don’t know where Uber’s going to stop. Maybe, for Uber, it doesn’t stop at all. For Kalanick and his team, the means are the end. There is no greater mission. There is only hunger.
Raw, pure, unbridled ambition is an uncomfortable thing to look at. It’s not that it’s ugly, necessarily. It’s just brutally, shockingly honest. Uber does not pretend to have a glorious philosophy—it wants to make transport easy, but there is no aspiration as lofty as “organize the world’s information” or “make the world more open and connected.” And perhaps that’s the way it should be. After all, would it be more offensive if Uber had a mission beyond itself? It certainly feels like less of a betrayal to know that it just wants to be as big, as powerful, as necessary, as it can be.
That ambition shows, though, perhaps too often. Uber likes to think of itself as secretive, but rumors slip constantly out of the mother ship. There was the one about it hiring executives away from Google Shopping Express, in a move that could help it build out its delivery network and damage one of its potential rivals in one fell swoop (confirmed earlier this month). Or the one that it’s about to start on-demand booze deliveries. It usually denies these rumors, even though depending on where you live, you can already Uber courier services, groceries, restaurant meals. When these things turn into publicly available services — on-demand weddings, on-demand ice cream — they’re often positioned as stunts. But in reality, they’re all trial balloons, tossed out onto the breeze to float upward, as the company’s ambitions stretch toward the sun.
Yes, it’s hubristic. The company’s rise has fuelled plans for a gigantic new office complex in San Francisco, with 425 parking spots included (ironic for a company that says it will eliminate car ownership). And yes, it’s absurd — at least it is if you think that it’s just a fucking taxi app. But all of these pinpricks point toward an endgame that goes way beyond most of the companies we’ve seen before: They point to Uber as a central service provider for urban living.
It doesn’t want to be just an on-demand transport company, and it doesn’t even really want to be the Amazon of on-demand services. The next step in its ascent is to become the Uber of everything, and then — eventually, Uber wants to be the Everything of Everything.
The dick-swinging, the gluttony, the not-quite-lies and the full-on bullshit… All of these things, and in particular the spectacular combination of all of these things, are enough to dislike a company, and even to hate it. But it’s incredibly popular, too, because, man, if people vote with their feet — or in this case their fingers — then they keep voting, again and again, for Uber.
And that, in the end, is the real reason so many people hate Uber: Because whatever we do, we can’t stop ourselves from making it bigger and more successful and more terrifying and more necessary. Uber makes everything so easy, which means it shows us who, and what, we really are. It shows us how, whatever objections we might say we hold, we don’t actually care very much at all. We have our beliefs, our morals, our instincts. We have our dislike of douchebags, our mistrust of bad behavior. We have all that. But in the end, it turns out that if something’s 10 percent cheaper and 5 percent faster, we’ll give it all up quicker than we can order a sandwich.
A previous version of this story forgot to state that Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Uber rival Lyft. Matter regrets not spotting the pink mustache.
More from Matter:
Follow Matter on Twitter | Like us on Facebook | Subscribe to our newsletter | https://medium.com/matter/how-to-get-away-with-uber-75b406043733 | ['Bobbie Johnson'] | 2017-03-03 18:56:50.025000+00:00 | ['Uber', 'Big Stories Matter', 'Tech'] |
M | Each rain drop dances
Upon the ground to miss these
Waters from above | https://medium.com/@omniblu/m-69427b6c0b75 | ['Cortanalain Aka Xelain'] | 2020-12-16 16:51:39.887000+00:00 | ['Above', 'Dance', 'Miss', 'Water'] |
8 E-Commerce SEO Tips to Make your Website More Google-Friendly | So, you’ve just finished building a high-quality website. Congratulations! There’s no doubt you’ve worked hard and spent hours testing and refining it, making sure all of the links work, and even ensuring your web pages are formatted correctly for desktop and mobile.
Now, customers will flock to your site, and your sales will skyrocket, right? If it were that easy, maybe we’d all be millionaires, but unfortunately — marketing your business website takes lots of work, research, and knowledge — even after you’ve built a beautiful site. In addition, you’ll need to be equipped with the right eCommerce SEO tips.
Confused? Don’t feel discouraged! Countless businesses create websites without much knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO): the most important aspect of a website and the driving force that gets your site out there to audience members.
For example, suppose you want your website to reach a wide target audience. In that case, you’ll need to optimize your website with keywords and thorough tweaks to get your website to arise on the first page of search engines whenever a user looks up a designated keyword related to your business.
Why the first page? Each year, 71–92% of all search traffic clicks are made on the first page alone. The chances of your website skyrocketing and driving sales are SIGNIFICANTLY higher if it appears on the first page of a common, relevant search.
Not sure where to start? You’re not alone.
WE’VE PREPARED A LIST OF THE TOP SEO TIPS FOR ECOMMERCE SITES SO YOU CAN DRIVE YOUR BUSINESS WEBSITE TO SUCCESS.
1) Optimize Your Website Descriptions
Remember, you’re writing for a human audience. It may seem helpful to stuff your website with keywords, but your website should value quality over quantity. Your audience will leave if their user experience makes them feel like machines to be sold products to.
Make sure to optimize the descriptions found on your website. This includes anything from product details to the front page. Make sure you’re using keywords — but only when relevant and not forced.
Drive your audience to your site with strategic keywords and keep them engaged by speaking to them in an approachable manner. You’ll find that they naturally arrive as visitors and leave your website as a happy customer.
2) Pay Attention To Your Product Photos
A commonly overlooked tip is to pay attention to your product photos. This doesn’t just mean to make sure that your product looks good but can also rank high in search engines.
Audience members will often browse a product or service image before entering a website to hone in on what they’re looking for. If your audience is searching for “best [product] in [location],” you’ll want to make sure that your image is titled and linked correctly with a similar name.
Remember: images play a critical role in bringing potential customers to your website. So make sure to take advantage of them on your website!
3) Improve The User Experience
Did you know that 88% of online shoppers will not return to a website if they have a poor user experience? So it’s important to make sure that your site is operating smoothly and is easy to navigate.
Your website should feel natural to navigate for first-time and frequent visitors, so make sure that your site looks good and isn’t overly complicated to look at or look through. Use helpful drop-down menus, don’t overflow visitors with pop-ups and windows, and use colors, details, designs, and formats that appeal to the eye.
That’s not all, however. No matter how pretty a website is, none of it will matter if it’s slow and tough to navigate. The average human attention span is around 8 seconds, so if your site can’t load fast enough within that time range, you just lose a potential customer.
Consider this: if you walk into a restaurant and see a two-hour-long line to even be seated, are you as likely to stay? Implement that same mindset (in shorter bursts) into your website and ensure it’s fast enough to retain audience attention.
4) Make Use Of Structured Data
If you’re selling a product, you’ll want to make sure your audience knows all the critical information they need to know BEFORE they try and make the purchase. This includes information on sales, prices, and availability.
In addition, ensure the audience knows if a product is in stock or out of stock — and if there’s a sale — make sure you compare the original price with the updated price during a sale to drive a non-forced sense of urgency with the audience.
When possible, sharing information such as ratings and testimonials for a product is also an excellent way to drive sales for your audience.
5) Make Sure Your Categories Are Optimized
You’re likely going to be spending a lot of time making sure that your products are SEO-friendly, and as a result, many businesses fail to optimize their product category pages.
More often than not, potential customers aren’t immediately looking at an exact product but rather a broad category.
Think of it like buying a car: is the average customer more likely to look for an EXACT make, model, color, mileage, AND year for a car? Or will they be more likely to start by simply looking at the brand/make (i.e., Subaru, Nissan, etc.)?
Your customers will often be looking for a vague category of products instead of honing in on an exact product, so make sure your category pages are optimized to be SEO-friendly too to ensure that your customer finds your products from a vague search — then hones in on a specific product you offer.
6) Create Meaningful Blog Content
Writing worthwhile, engaging blog content relevant to your website, products, or services is another crucial way to turn website visitors into customers.
There are many cases where a customer will start by searching for “best [products] in [industry]” or “best [product] for [task]” and will often be sent to a blog page or an article where they can hone in on certain products to purchase.
Often, potential customers won’t immediately be looking to buy something, which is why relevant blog content can come in handy for your business website, ultimately driving more eCommerce sales.
Write meaningful blog content that enhances not only customer knowledge and opinion on your product but also proves your business as a thought leader in the industry you’re competing in.
As a result, you’ll be covering as many bases as possible when turning website visitors into potential customers.
7) Make Sure Your Keywords Are Relevant
Arguably one of the essential eCommerce SEO tips when building a website is to use the right keywords. On top of making sure your site emphasizes quality over quantity, you’ll need to do thorough research to rank high on search results.
Make sure you get in the mindset of a customer looking for what your business offers — for example: would you search for “eCommerce SEO tips” or “eCommerce search engine optimization tips”?
Optimizing your keywords with this mindset will drive more customers to your page. Don’t be afraid to take notes from successful competitor websites, and don’t hesitate to make adjustments while analyzing/tracking your SEO results over time.
8) Don’t Forget The Meta Description!
Once you’re confident that you’ve implemented the right SEO strategies for your business and are seeing results, it’s time to start refining to increase your click-through rate. After all, even if your site is ranking high in search results, you’ll want to make sure it’s engaging enough for your audience to click YOUR site instead of a different one.
A meta description is a small tag that appears under your website on the search engine results page (SERP). Ensure that your meta description/tag is engaging and informative enough to inspire someone to visit your site.
Successful implementation of this tip will create an even greater click-through rate for your site — and combined with a successful SEO strategy, your business website visits and sales will skyrocket.
We guarantee you’ll see results if you’ve implemented all of these eCommerce SEO tips into your website. This includes more clicks, more visitors, more engagement, and, most importantly (from a business standpoint), more customers.
Make sure you’re also tracking/analyzing your results with tools such as Google Analytics so you can see what’s working best for your website and what may need to be improved upon.
These eCommerce website SEO tips can benefit your business website in countless ways — making it a worthwhile time investment when looking for ways to reach your target audience and boost your sales.
Need more help with optimizing your SEO and content strategy? One of the services our team at PalmPons specializes in is eCommerce SEO services — and we’re ready to develop a perfect strategy for your business and your target demographic. So get in touch with us today and see how to boost your business together!
Source: eCommerce SEO tips | https://medium.com/@palmponss/8-e-commerce-seo-tips-to-make-your-website-more-google-friendly-8bf3d9763139 | [] | 2021-12-30 08:14:24.704000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Digital Marketing', 'Seo Services', 'Searchengineoptimization', 'Digital Marketing Agency'] |
Terraform: Transforming code into infrastructure | How does it happen?
If you followed the video you would notice our directory containing the file was no ordinary directory.
It was transformed into a magic directory using the spell terraform init 😝
The terraform init command is used to initialize a working directory containing Terraform configuration files. This is when Terraform searches the configuration for both direct and indirect references to providers(AWS, GCP, Azure, etc) and installs their respective plugin so that Terraform can talk to these providers through their APIs.
terraform init output
After successful installation, Terraform writes information about the selected providers to the dependency lock file.
This is followed by terraform plan command.
2. The terraform plan command is used to create an execution plan. Terraform performs a refresh and then determines what actions are necessary to achieve the desired state specified in the configuration files.
What this means is Terraform talks to the provider and gets the current state of resources in your account and creates a plan to achieve the desired state.
Declarative paradigm based on state
To understand this better you can consider your starting state where there are no resources as state A and the desired state is state B where your resource has been created.
Terraform then formulates a plan to reach from state A to state B. This is called an execution plan. Since it uses a declarative paradigm you don’t have to tell Terraform how to do that.
An execution plan for the above snippet looks like this
An execution plan has been generated and is shown below.
Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
+ create Terraform will perform the following actions: # aws_instance.backend will be created
+ resource "aws_instance" "backend" {
+ ami = "ami-0947d2ba12ee1ff75"
+ arn = (known after apply)
+ associate_public_ip_address = (known after apply)
+ availability_zone = (known after apply)
+ cpu_core_count = (known after apply)
+ cpu_threads_per_core = (known after apply)
+ get_password_data = false
+ host_id = (known after apply)
+ id = (known after apply)
+ instance_state = (known after apply)
+ instance_type = "t2.micro"
+ ipv6_address_count = (known after apply)
+ ipv6_addresses = (known after apply)
+ key_name = (known after apply)
+ outpost_arn = (known after apply)
+ password_data = (known after apply)
+ placement_group = (known after apply)
+ primary_network_interface_id = (known after apply)
+ private_dns = (known after apply)
+ private_ip = (known after apply)
+ public_dns = (known after apply)
+ public_ip = (known after apply)
+ secondary_private_ips = (known after apply)
+ security_groups = (known after apply)
+ source_dest_check = true
+ subnet_id = (known after apply)
+ tags = {
+ "Name" = "terraform-server"
}
+ tenancy = (known after apply)
+ volume_tags = (known after apply)
+ vpc_security_group_ids = (known after apply) + ebs_block_device {
+ delete_on_termination = (known after apply)
+ device_name = (known after apply)
+ encrypted = (known after apply)
+ iops = (known after apply)
+ kms_key_id = (known after apply)
+ snapshot_id = (known after apply)
+ volume_id = (known after apply)
+ volume_size = (known after apply)
+ volume_type = (known after apply)
} + ephemeral_block_device {
+ device_name = (known after apply)
+ no_device = (known after apply)
+ virtual_name = (known after apply)
} + metadata_options {
+ http_endpoint = (known after apply)
+ http_put_response_hop_limit = (known after apply)
+ http_tokens = (known after apply)
} + network_interface {
+ delete_on_termination = (known after apply)
+ device_index = (known after apply)
+ network_interface_id = (known after apply)
} + root_block_device {
+ delete_on_termination = (known after apply)
+ device_name = (known after apply)
+ encrypted = (known after apply)
+ iops = (known after apply)
+ kms_key_id = (known after apply)
+ volume_id = (known after apply)
+ volume_size = (known after apply)
+ volume_type = (known after apply)
}
} Plan: 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy. --------------------------------------------------------------------
You can notice the plan summary as “1 resource to add”. Also, you can see the plan includes all the specs that we mentioned.
But how was the plan calculated? What is the initial state? Where is it maintained? How does Terraform use it? Let’s find that out | https://faun.pub/terraform-transforming-code-to-infrastructure-26c565a82b94 | ['Omkar Birade'] | 2020-12-21 13:28:10.029000+00:00 | ['Infrastructure As Code', 'DevOps', 'Terraform', 'AWS', 'Infrastructure'] |
Watch🔴 🔴 **((Tampa Bay Buccaneers** vs **Carolina Panthers))** 🔴 🔴#NFL ((Sunday Night Football)) 🔴 🔴 L-i-v-e **Streaming** f-r-e-e 🔴 🔴 ((online)) on **13 October 2019**}}🔴 🔴##~~~ | Watch Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs Carolina Panthers NFL live streaming free Online at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London, England. Buccaneers vs Panthers NFL Match will be kick of Sunday 13 October 2019, Time 9:31 AM ET. Welcome to watch Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs Carolina Panthers Live Stream online NFL Football on your pc/laptop, mac, ipad. Do not wait to access this HD link, when the Football Match is mostly over and you will get live.
TV Schedule
Date: Sunday, 13 October, 2019
Time: 8:20 ET
Location: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London
Coverage: NFL NETWORK
WATCH LIVE ::>>CLICK NOW
WATCH LIVE ::>>CLICK NOW
fter casting their eyes on the Oakland Raiders and the Chicago Bears, NFL fans in London will be treated to an all-NFC South affair this weekend.The British capital hosts the second of its four games this season, with the Carolina Panthers colliding against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.The first NFL purpose-build stadium outside the U.S., the arena has proved to be a resounding success so far.
For most members of the Carolina Panthers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a game in London is an opportunity to see a new country and experience a different culture.For Panthers defensive end EfeObada the game Sunday between Carolina (3–2) and the Bucs (2–3) is a homecoming.
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The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have lost three of their first five games and continue to be plagued by inconsistent play for first year head coach Bruce Arians. Last time out, Tampa Bay had no answer for New Orleans WR Michael Thomas (182 yds) during a 31–24 road loss against New Orleans. The Buccaneers were outgained by a 457–252 margin in defeat.
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Carolina QB Cam Newton (foot) has not played since week two and has been officially ruled out for this contest. Tampa Bay defeated Carolina on a late goal line stand earlier this season. Look for the Panthers to turn the tables in London. Final Score Prediction, Carolina Panthers 27–20.
WATCH LIVE ::>>CLICK NOW
WATCH LIVE ::>>CLICK NOW
When and where is the game?
The Carolina Panthers take on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, England, on Sunday, October 13.
Kick-off is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. local time (9:30 a.m. ET).
TV coverage
The game will be nationally broadcast by the NFL Network.
Live stream
A live stream will be available via NFL Network online and on connected devices, as well as via fuboTV.
WATCH LIVE ::>>CLICK NOW
WATCH LIVE ::>>CLICK NOW | https://medium.com/@nfllivewatch64/watch-tampa-bay-buccaneers-vs-carolina-panthers-nfl-sunday-night-f8737b496fb5 | [] | 2019-10-13 13:11:26.626000+00:00 | ['Live', 'Live Streaming', 'Sports', 'Sunday', 'NFL'] |
Аяллын давлагаа Gen-Z | I am a lover of all being. I am and always will be the optimist. Co-founder of a start up project "Nomadays".
Follow | https://medium.com/nomadays/%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%BB%D0%BB%D1%8B%D0%BD-%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%B0-gen-z-f60864890b64 | ['Tsend Altankhuyag'] | 2019-04-30 03:05:53.724000+00:00 | ['Post Millennial', 'Gen Z', 'Tourism Future', 'Nomadays'] |
Back To You | Back To You
Back to you, it always comes around
I tried to stay away, but it’s too late ► Back To You by John Mayer
Don’t you just wish life comes with this kind of buttons you could press whenever you need it? Like, a rewind button when you missed your favorite TV show, or a pause button so you could enjoy something more relaxed, or a reset button when a certain thing went south and you would like to re-do it. I really wish it’d be like that, but well, life’s a bastard ya’ know.
It was on a rainy Sunday night when someone knocked on my door. I opened up and there you were. Standing in front of me — green plaid shirt, black t-shirt, and pair of jeans; all drenched. On your left hand was a cake, and right hand tried to block the wind from blowing into the candles lit.
“Happy birthday, Jenn,” you smiled. I blew out the candles, and handed you a towel. We sat side by side listening to the loudest silence I have ever encountered.
“I’ve missed you.” you muttered, finally.
From that three words, it all began.
So many things were going on; a lot of holes waiting to be mended, words unsaid, explanations to be told. I couldn’t forget how we both cried that night. In fact, it wasn’t just that night, but almost every night, every day at some point. I just couldn’t face you, but if I didn’t see you it hurts me even more. Every time I smiled at you, you doubted me and every time you said you love me, I didn’t know if I should say it back. We tried to pick up scattered broken pieces and we didn’t even know if we could. We have done a lot, but somehow we felt like going in circle. Nothing has changed. We were desperate.
I was ready to gave up and probably you too, but somehow we didn’t. People said, love is something that you need to work on every day, you never give up on the person you love. I’m pretty glad we both agreed on that.
I still recall all of these reset routines — every day you’d come to my place, we’d eat together, watch movies, took a stroll at the mall, or if we didn’t know what to do, you’d took me on night ride with nowhere to go. I have this glimpse of memories where I just couldn’t stop crying during a ride and stained the back of your jacket with snots. You pulled over and wiped away my tears but I just kept on crying without saying anything — sorry, it could have went wrong if people saw us and thought you were kidnapping me, but thank God it didn’t — So without saying anything as well, you patiently started the engine and just kept riding until we arrived at this luxurious housing complex filled with houses we often see in movies. You kept making assumptions to yourself; how many people do you think live in this house or what kind of important person owns this tall, black-fenced house with two security guards in front. It was nonsense but the next thing I knew, I stopped crying and somehow found myself discussing those nonsense assumptions with you. What an odd way to calm a storm, huh?
Since then, we did a lot of reset to our relationship. It’d be a trilogy if I write everything down, but I remember one night, after we went to watch movie and ate at our favorite K-BBQ restaurant, we took a stroll and I held your hands. We just talked, laughed, watched people here and there, finally stopped by Dairy Queen to get our favorite Oreo Blizzard. The date ended with a quick ride around the luxury housing complex, took me back and you waited until I went inside. It was just so simple, so innocent, but somehow I got a lot of butterflies — oh screw butterflies, in fact I could feel the entire zoo— in my stomach like it was my first date. That night, I was probably the happiest person on earth; and who would have known, three years later now, I’m writing this to commemorate our fourth anniversary, thinking about you who’s already asleep because you gotta wake up early. We are currently going through another long distance, I know you hate this as much as I do, but I’m sure this time it’s a piece of cake. We will get through this again, everything will be alright, as long as we have each other.
Dre, in case you are reading this; thank you for always being the most patient, reasonable, cool-headed person I know. Thank you for sticking through, and thank you for all the things you have done for me.
We still have a lot to learn, and I hope you’re willing to keep learning together with me, because it’d be hard to learn alone when it’s supposed to be a lesson for two.
If forever does exist, I hope to spend it with you.
Happy anniversary.
Always,
Jenn | https://medium.com/@vivantoile/back-to-you-e3eae51c2e7a | ['Jennifer Hudson'] | 2021-08-09 13:09:28.733000+00:00 | ['Love Letters', 'Love Songs', 'Mwc Reentry', 'Relationships', 'Relationship Building'] |
A Witch Doctor Divorce | Sixteen years after the divorce the separation between them was still not complete. They continued to appear in each other’s thoughts and dreams. Neither a legal piece of paper nor over five thousand miles of earth and water could cut the cord that bound them. The cord had been established in a time and place beyond their perceived reality.
So they decided to see a witch doctor.
From their respective locations on the planet they both traveled to the Amazon rainforest where they were taken by guides deep into the jungle to a small hut in which lived a very old toothless man.
The witch doctor came out of his hut and instructed the couple to build a large bonfire, which they did. He then sat in a green and yellow folding lawn chair and watched the couple as they built the fire. He watched the colors of their energy flowing through their auras.
When the fire was raging the old man told the couple to strip naked and sit bare-assed on the ground on opposite sides of the bonfire. He told them to stare through the fire at each other. He then lit a cigarette and watched.
Although both of the couple’s faces were brightly illuminated by the fire it was difficult for them to see each other through the fire. But a light breeze made the flames dance back and forth and small slivers would appear ever so briefly between the flames through which part of the other person’s face would appear for a fraction of a second. Their faces appeared to each other only in fractured strobing pieces.
The witch doctor then instructed the couple to stand and walk around the fire in a counter-clockwise direction twelve times while looking to their left at each other through the fire. Since they were now standing they were looking through the top of the fire and could see each other more clearly.
The old man tossed his cigarette butt into the fire then told them to stop and turn around then walk in a clockwise direction around the fire twelve times while looking to their right at the other one on the other side of the fire.
When they were done he told them to sit back down and once again stare at each other through the fire. They were to keep staring until instead of seeing the other person they saw themselves.
The witch doctor then opened a paper sack that was in his lap and pulled out a sandwich which he immediately began eating.
The couple kept staring at each other through the fire for a long time until they both saw themselves across the fire instead of the other one. It was so powerful that they both began crying.
By this time the old man had finished his sandwich and was now smoking another cigarette. He then scooted his lawn chair a little closer to the fire and began talking to the couple.
“You two have a very deep connection. You have been together in many places and times. You have been playing a game together for eons. Since the beginning of time you have been desperately trying to separate. But it is hopeless. You are inseparable. Time and time again you come together with as much passion as you can thinking that intense passion will help you finally separate for good because you think you need a lot of passion to finally separate. But it ain’t gonna happen.”
“Through so many lives you have found each other for the purpose of hopefully finally separating. You want to individuate but through oneness you will always be connected. You have always confused individuation with separation. Separation will never happen. It’s an illusion. Once you realize this then you can individuate. For so many lives you were held captive by the illusion of separation thinking that was your life purpose. But it’s not. I’ll be right back…”
The old man went to his hut and came out holding a mirror that had a handle. He then showed the mirror to the couple. There was a mirror on both sides, not just one side, “Now this is a double-sided mirror. It’s not one of those mirrors that you can see through one side but not the other. It’s two different mirrors back to back. One of you can hold up the mirror and see themselves and the other one will see themselves in the mirror on the back.”
“I’m not giving you the mirror. It’s mine. I’m just showing you so that you know what to visualize. Instead of trying to separate from each other hold your imaginary mirror up so that each of you see yourselves. That’s really what you are to each other. You’re mirrors to show each other your selves; that you are individual parts of each other. When one of you appears to the other it’s a sign that you need to look at yourself.”
“It’s just a tool in your mind but it helps to remember that. Instead of seeing what you want to be separate from you see yourself and feel the deeper connection of oneness instead of a need to separate and be separate. You will never be separate. None of us can be. We are all connected but we can hold up these mirrors to each other to help us individuate and fully become our true selves. Instead of trying to break the connection of oneness, which cannot be broken, we can be grateful for that connection and use it to help each other in our individuation process.”
“Like when you saw yourselves in each other looking through the fire, when you see yourself in others then you can truly feel that connection of oneness and can utilize that in your evolutionary process of individuation. Plus it makes it so much easier to get along with everyone. All these attempts at separating ourselves creates so much unnecessary conflict and struggle. We can all evolve more quickly if only we get past the illusion of separation.”
The old witch doctor sat in his lawn chair and twirled the hand mirror round and round.
“So what now?” asked the woman.
“Well, now you two can get dressed and then pay me the thousand bucks each of you owe me.”
The couple stood and brushed dirt and twigs off themselves then put on their clothes. The man pulled money out of his wallet and the woman pulled her money out of her purse then they walked over to hand the cash to the witch doctor.
Getting up from his lawn chair, the witch doctor took the money and put it into a pouch that hung from around his neck. He then placed the palms of his hands together and bowed to the man and then the woman, “Namaste. I now pronounce you man and wife.”
“What?!” screamed the woman. “We didn’t come here to get married!”
“Oh dear. Sorry about that,” the old man laughed. “It doesn’t matter, though. The marriage ceremony is exactly the same as the divorce ceremony. It’s the very same ritual. Think about that. I hope each of you have a nice flight home.”
With that the old witch doctor turned and went back to his hut.
With mouths opened, the couple looked at each other. They were thinking and feeling the exact same thing. At first they were thinking about how they just got conned but those thoughts quickly faded. Being totally in sync with their thoughts and feelings they suddenly saw something in each other they had not seen before.
As they began walking back to the guides who were waiting to take them back to the airport the woman spoke, “You know, I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve been working out.”
“Nah… well, yeah. Just a little. And I couldn’t help notice that you’re still just as hot as ever.”
They both smiled and their hands were soon firmly clasped.
The old toothless witch doctor, who was standing just outside the door to his hut, yelled out, “Get a room!” | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/a-witch-doctor-divorce-f1f5fdcbbf3e | ['White Feather'] | 2020-08-17 17:49:01.280000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Relationships', 'Short Story', 'Divorce', 'Fiction'] |
Build a movie search app using the Vue Composition API | The very first alpha version of Vue 3 is released! There are a lot of exciting features coming with version 3: Vue exposes its reactivity system behind the new Composition API. If you haven’t heard about it, I recommend reading the RFC describing it. At first, I was a bit skeptical, but looking at React’s Hooks API, which is a bit similar, I decided to give it a shot.
In this article, we will be building a movie search application using the Composition API. We won’t be using object-based components. I will explain how the new API works and how can we structure the application.
When we finish, we will see something similar to this:
The application will be able to search for movies via the Open Movie Database API and render the results. The reason for building this application is that it is simple enough not to distract the focus from learning the new API but complex enough to show it works.
If you are not interested in the explanations, you can head straight to the source code and the final application.
Setting up the project
For this tutorial, we will be using the Vue CLI, which can quickly generate the necessary environment.
npm install -g @vue/cli
vue create movie-search-vue
cd movie-search-vue
npm run serve
Our application is now running on http://localhost:8080 and looks like this:
Here you can see the default folder structure:
If you don’t want to install all the dependencies on your local computer, you can also start the project on Codesandbox. Codesandbox has perfect starter projects for the most significant frameworks, including Vue.
Enabling the new API
The generated source code uses Vue 2 with the old API. To use the new API with Vue 2, we have to install the composition plugin.
npm install @vue/composition-api
After installing, we have to add it as a plugin:
import Vue from 'vue';
import VueCompositionApi from '@vue/composition-api';
Vue.use(VueCompositionApi);
The composition plugin is additive: you can still create and use components the old way and start using the Composition API for new ones.
We will have four components:
App.vue: The parent component. It will handle the API calls and communicate with other components.
Header.vue: A basic component that receives and displays the page title
Movie.vue: It renders each movie. The movie object is passed as a property.
Search.vue: It contains a form with the input element and the search button. It gives the search term to the app component when you submit the form.
Creating components
Let’s write our first component, the header:
<template>
<header class="App-header">
<h2>{{ title }}</h2>
</header>
</template>
<script>
export default {
name: 'Header',
props: ['title'],
setup() {}
}
</script>
Component props are declared the same way. You name the variables that you expect from the parent component as an array or object. These variables will be available in the template( {{ title }} ) and in the setup method.
The new thing here is the setup method. It runs after the initial props resolution. The setup method can return an object and the properties of that object will be merged onto the template context: it means they will be available in the template. This returned object is also the place for placing the lifecycle callbacks. We will see examples for this in the Search component.
Let’s take a look at the Search component:
<template>
<form class="search">
<input
type="text"
:value="movieTitle"
@keyup="handleChange"
/>
<input @click="handleSubmit" type="submit" value="SEARCH" />
</form>
</template>
<script>
import { ref } from '@vue/composition-api';
export default {
name: 'Search',
props: ['search'],
setup({ search }, { emit }) {
const movieTitle = ref(search);
return {
movieTitle,
handleSubmit(event) {
event.preventDefault();
emit('search', movieTitle.value);
},
handleChange(event) {
movieTitle.value = event.target.value
}
}
}
};
</script>
The Search component tracks keystrokes and stores the input’s value on a variable. When we are finished and push the submit button, it emits the current search term up to the parent component.
The setup method has two parameters.
The first argument is the resolved props as a named object. You can use object destructuring to access its properties. The parameter is reactive, which means the setup function will run again when the input properties change.
The second argument is the context object. Here you can find a selective list of properties that were available on this in the 2.x API ( attrs , slots , parent , root , emit ).
The next new element here is the ref function. The ref function exposes Vue's reactivity system. When invoked, it creates a reactive mutable variable that has a single property value . The value property will have the value of the argument passed to the ref function. It is a reactive wrapper around the original value. Inside the template we won't need to reference the value property, Vue will unwrap it for us. If we pass in an object, it will be deeply reactive.
Reactive means when we modify the object’s value (in our case the value property), Vue will know that the value has changed, and it needs to re-render connected templates and re-run watched functions.
It acts similar to the object properties returned from the data method.
data: function() {
return { movieTitle: 'Joker' };
}
Gluing it together
The next step is to introduce the parent component for the Header and Search component, the App component. It listens for the search event coming from the Search component, runs the API when the search term changes, and passes down the found movies to a list of Movie components.
<template>
<div class="App">
<Header :title="'Composition API'" />
<Search :search="state.search" @search="handleSearch" />
<p class="App-intro">Sharing a few of our favourite movies</p>
<div class="movies">
<Movie v-for="movie in state.movies" :movie="movie" :key="movie.imdbID" />
</div>
</div>
</template>
<script>
import { reactive, watch } from '@vue/composition-api';
import Header from './Header.vue';
import Search from './Search.vue';
import Movie from './Movie.vue';
const API_KEY = 'a5549d08';
export default {
name: 'app',
components: {
Header, Search, Movie
},
setup() {
const state = reactive({
search: 'Joker',
loading: true,
movies: [],
errorMessage: null
});
watch(() => {
const MOVIE_API_URL = `https://www.omdbapi.com/?s=${state.search}&apikey=${API_KEY}`;
fetch(MOVIE_API_URL)
.then(response => response.json())
.then(jsonResponse => {
state.movies = jsonResponse.Search;
state.loading = false;
});
});
return {
state,
handleSearch(searchTerm) {
state.loading = true;
state.search = searchTerm;
}
};
}
}
</script>
We introduce here two new elements: reactive and watch .
The reactive function is the equivalent of Vue 2's Vue.observable() .
It makes the passed object deeply reactive: takes the original object and wraps it with a proxy (ES2015 Proxy-based implementation). On the objects returned from reactive we can directly access properties instead of values returned from the ref function where we need to use the value property. If you want to search for equivalents in the Vue 2.x API, the data method would be the exact match.
One shortcoming of the reactive object is that we can not spread it into the returned object from the setup method.
The watch function expects a function. It tracks reactive variables inside, as the component does it for the template. When we modify a reactive variable used inside the passed function, the given function runs again. In our example, whenever the search term changes, it fetches the movies matching the search term.
One component is left, the one displaying each movie record:
<template>
<div class="movie">
<h2>{{ movie.Title }}</h2>
<div>
<img width="200" :alt="altText" :src="movie.Poster" />
</div>
<p>{{ movie.Year }}</p>
</div>
</template>
<script>
import { computed } from '@vue/composition-api';
export default {
name: "Movie",
props: ['movie'],
setup({ movie }) {
const altText = computed(() => `The movie titled: ${movie.Title}`);
return { altText };
}
};
</script>
The Movie component receives the movie to be displayed and prints its name along with its image. The exciting part is that for the alt field of the image we use a computed text based on its title.
The computed function gets a getter function and wraps the returned variable into a reactive one. The returned variable has the same interface as the one returned from the ref function. The difference is that it's readonly. The getter function will run again when one of the reactive variables inside the getter function change. If the computed function returned a non-wrapped primitive value, the template wouldn't be able to track dependency changes.
Cleaning up components
At this moment, we have a lot of business logic inside the App component. It does two things: handle the API calls and its child components. The aim is to have one responsibility per object: the App component should only manage the components and shouldn’t bother with API calls. To accomplish this, we have to extract the API call.
import { reactive, watch } from '@vue/composition-api';
const API_KEY = 'a5549d08';
export const useMovieApi = () => {
const state = reactive({
search: 'Joker',
loading: true,
movies: []
});
watch(() => {
const MOVIE_API_URL = `https://www.omdbapi.com/?s=${state.search}&apikey=${API_KEY}`;
fetch(MOVIE_API_URL)
.then(response => response.json())
.then(jsonResponse => {
state.movies = jsonResponse.Search;
state.loading = false;
});
});
return state;
};
Now the App component shrinks only to handle the view related actions:
import Header from './Header.vue';
import Search from './Search.vue';
import Movie from './Movie.vue';
import { useMovieApi } from '../hooks/movie-api';
export default {
name: 'app',
components: { Header, Search, Movie },
setup() {
const state = useMovieApi();
return {
state,
handleSearch(searchTerm) {
state.loading = true;
state.search = searchTerm;
}
};
}
}
And that’s it; we finished implementing a little application with the new Composition API.
Wrapping it up
We have come a long way since generating the project with Vue CLI. Let’s wrap it up what we learned.
We can use the new Composition API with the current stable Vue 2 version. To accomplish this, we have to use the @vue/composition-api plugin. The API is extensible: we can create new components with the new API along with old ones, and the existing ones will continue to work as before.
Vue 3 will introduce many different functions:
setup : resides on the component and will orchestrate the logic for the component, runs after initial props resolution, receives props and context as an argument
: resides on the component and will orchestrate the logic for the component, runs after initial resolution, receives and context as an argument ref : returns a reactive variable, triggers re-render of the template on change, we can manipulate its value through the value property.
: returns a reactive variable, triggers re-render of the template on change, we can manipulate its value through the property. reactive : returns a reactive object (proxy-based), triggers re-render of the template on reactive variable change, we can modify its value without the value property
: returns a reactive object (proxy-based), triggers re-render of the template on reactive variable change, we can modify its value without the property computed : returns a reactive variable based on the getter function argument, tracks reactive variable changes and re-evaluates on change
: returns a reactive variable based on the getter function argument, tracks reactive variable changes and re-evaluates on change watch : handles side-effects based on the provided function, tracks reactive variable changes and re-runs on change
I hope this example has made you familiar with the new API and removed your skepticism as it did with me. | https://javascript.plainenglish.io/build-a-movie-search-app-using-the-vue-composition-api-f2e104ca9c79 | ['Gábor Soós'] | 2019-10-27 19:25:12.583000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Web Development', 'Vuejs', 'Programming', 'Vue'] |
BPL Draft: Dhaka Signs Mashrafe, Tamim, And Mahmudullah for Upcoming Season | BPL Draft: Mahmudullah, Tamim Iqbal, and Mashrafe Mortaza will play for the same BPL franchise for the first time after Dhaka signed the trio for the upcoming season. Tamim and Mashrafe were two of Dhaka’s first three picks which Mahmudullah was the team’s only clear signing.
https://twitter.com/BCBtigers/status/1475172452837695489
BPL Draft: Dhaka Signs Mashrafe, Tamim, And Mahmudullah for Upcoming Season
The Initial Bidders :-
The Dhaka franchise’s hegemony changed overnight after Rupa Fabrics Ltd and Marn Steel Ltd were disqualified as they failed to pay the BDT 50 million (approximately $583,000) pre-tournament fee within the stipulated time.
Read:- Superstar West Indies Andre Russell vows to Return to BBL
According to reports, with the BCB as the overseer of the Dhaka team, chief selector Habibul Bashar was seen bidding for the players at the time of the draft.
Among overseas T20 stars, experienced Chris Gayle went to Fortune Barishal, who had already signed Shakib Al Hasan, Mujeeb Ur Rahman, and Danushka Gunathilaka.
Which are they have also roped in West Indies And fast bowling duo Obed McCoy. And Alzarri Joseph as well. And as Sri Lankan wicketkeeper Niroshan Dickwella to complete their overseas contracts.
BPL Draft: Dhaka Signs Mashrafe, Tamim, And Mahmudullah for Upcoming Season
As Four Direct Signatures :-
Khulna Tigers, who played in the 2019–20 BPL final, picked Mushfiqur Rahim. And as one of their four out-of-favor signings. Which is in addition to Sikander Raza and Soumya Sarkar in the Dhaka draft.
Kamila Victorians, who returned to the tournament after becoming champions in 2018–19. And went on to directly sign Mustafizur Rahman, Faf du Plessis, Sunil Narine, and Moeen Ali, Which is in addition to picking Liton Das and Oshane Thomas.
Sylhet Sunrisers have selected Kesrick Williams and Ravi Bopara among their overseas players, with Taskin Ahmed, Mizanur Rahman, and Sohag Ghazi as their local players.
BPL Draft: Dhaka Signs Mashrafe, Tamim, And Mahmudullah for Upcoming Season
The Names of Teams of Many Foreign Players :-
Khulna Tigers Players Name:- 1. Mushfiqur Rahim, 2. Thisara Perera, 3. Naveen-ul-Haq, 4. Bhanuka Rajapakse, 5. Soumya Sarkar, 6. Seekuge Prasanna, 7. Sikandar Raza, 8. Farhad Raza, 9. Ronnie Talukdar, 10. Khalid Ahmed, 11. Zakar Ali Anik, 12. Nabil Samad.
Chattogram Challengers Players Name:- 1. Nasum Ahmed, 2. Benny Howell, 3. Kenner Lewis, 4. Afif Hossain, 5. Chadwick Walton, 6. Rayad Emrit, 7. Fazlhaq Farooqui, 8. Rezaur Rahman, 9. Sabbir Rahman, 10. Mrityunjay Choudhary, 11. Mehdi Hassan Miraj, 12. Akbar Ali, 13. Naeem Islam.
Dhaka Players Name:- 1. Mahmudullah, 2. Tamim Iqbal, 3. Rubel Hossain, 4. Mashrafe Mortaza, 5. Mohammad Shahzad, 6. Mohamed Naeem, 7. Arafat Sunny, 8. Imranuzzaman, 9. Shafiul Islam, 10. Zahrul Islam, 11. Shamsur Rahman, 12. Ebadat Hussain.
Read more:- R Ashwin Ready to Return for South Africa Series ODI
Fortune Barishal Players Name:- 1. Shakib Al Hasan, 2. Mujeeb Ur Rahman, 3. Danushka Gunathilaka, 4. Chris Gayle, 5. Nurul Hasan, 6. Obed McCoy, 7. Alzarri Joseph, 8. Tauheed Hirdoy 9. Ziaur Rahman, 10. Shafiqul Islam, 11. Saikat Ali, 13. N. Dikwella, 14. Naeem Hasan, 15. Taijul Islam, 16. Sarwar Hussain 17. Irfan Sukkur.
Camilla Victorians Players Name:- 1. Mustafizur Rahman, 2. Faf du Plessis, 3. Sunil Narine, 4. Moeen Ali, 5. Liton Das, 6. Shohidul Islam, 7. Kusal Mendis, 8. Oshane Thomas, 9. Ariful Haque, 10. Nahidul Islam, 11. Mahmudul H. Joy, 12. Suman Khan, 13. Mominul Haque, 14. Mahidul Islam, 15. Parvez Hussain, 16. Abu Haider.
Sylhet Sunrisers Players Name:- 1. Taskin Ahmed, 2. Dinesh Chandimal, 3. Kesrick Williams, 4. Colin Alexander, 5. Mosaddek Hossain, 6. Mohammad Mithun, 7. Ravi Bopara, 8. Angelo Perera, 9. Anamul Haque, 10. Sohag Ghazi, 11. Alok Kapali, 12. Mukta Ali, 13. Siraj Ahmed, 14. M. Rahman, 15. Nadif Choudhary, 16. Zubair Hussain, 17. Shafiul Hayat, 18. Sunjamul Islam. | https://medium.com/@babacric/bpl-draft-dhaka-signs-mashrafe-tamim-and-mahmudullah-for-upcoming-season-10e7beb3337b | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-12-28 08:07:35.145000+00:00 | ['Mashrafemortaza', 'Bbl', 'Mahmudullah', 'Dhaka', 'Cricket'] |
Mercy | Spiralbound
Comics for life, brought to life by Edith Zimmerman. | https://medium.com/spiralbound/mercy-9a13b53e20e2 | ['Katie Fricas'] | 2019-09-17 11:42:38.664000+00:00 | ['Funerals', 'Death', 'Family', 'Comics', 'Sex'] |
‘Image text extraction with OCR using Open CV and PyTesseract’ | Dr. Deepali Kulkarni
Vijay Chakole
This blog is for the beginners in data science who want to explore the most talked and interesting area of AI, Computer Vision.
Though all of us want to explore the facets of computer vision like Face Recognition, Object Recognition, Optical Character recognition; lengthy and complex GitHub codes make it difficult to interpret and understand .
Our strategy is to start with simple codes and explore it further.
There are simple codes in Open CV , Tesseract which are worth trying to start with.
What is OCR and text extraction ?
Optical Character Recognition. In other words, OCR systems transform a two-dimensional image of text, that could contain machine printed or handwritten text from its image representation into machine-readable text. OCR as a process generally consists of several sub-processes to perform as accurately as possible. These are as follows
OCR has been very popular term for its simple usage to convert hard copied data into a machine readable data into a desired format. Once it is converted into a formats like CSV, XML , JASON ; it adds more agility to data analysis and interpretation .
Do we have to use it along with Machine Learning or deep learning algorithms all the time?? Answer is NOT NECESSARILY.
Why Open CV?
OpenCV is the huge open-source library for the computer vision, machine learning, and image processing . The library has more than 2500 optimized algorithms which can be used to detect and recognize faces, identify objects, classify human actions in videos, track camera movements, track moving objects, extract 3D models and many more tasks.
What is Tesseract ?
Tesseract is an OCR engine with support for Unicode and the ability to recognize more than 100 languages out of the box. It is offered by Google and hence the most used library for the OCR projects .
What are some real time used cases of OCR ?
OCR is now a common word before its inception around 70s. Character recognition (Marshall, 2020) is widely used in many organizations which has helped to solve many business problems .License plate scanning , Cambridge Exam paper assessment , Google Translator etc. are many successful OCR implementation which add further scope .
Since then OCR has picked up fast and is being used by millions of people all over the world. Data Science aspirants are now working on the same to solve some day to day tasks and challenges. This blog starts with a simple code which has Open CV and Pytesseract libraries used to detect and extract text from a simple document without any GUI or web based tool. It does not involve any machine learning/deep learning algorithms as it a simple code to start with.
Let’s get started…..
Coding language used is Python .IDE used is Spyder as beginners may feel notebook non-responsive while running a specific command of Open CV.
Workflow at a glance before starting ..
1. Upload image
Import all the necessary packages .
Coders can refer the respective documentations for installing these packages including Tesseract . I will save time on that and directly dive into the simple coding
2. Pre-processing
Computer can read image in form of an array of pixels ranging from 0 to 255. Colourful images read by OpenCV are generally is BGR format (Blue, Green, Red) and a 3D array. The reason early developers at OpenCV chose BGR colour format is that back then BGR colour format was popular among camera manufacturers and software providers.
Cv2.imread can read the image on accepting image path.
NumPy Array 3D
I am taking an example of Marksheet to read and extract the text. This 3D array is Rows, Columns and 3 dimensions of the color scheme. In Pillow, the order of colors is assumed to be RGB (red, green, blue) and that is the reason we convert the image into reverse color scheme i.e. (RGB).
You can now view the image .
In my case image seems to be big in size which affecting the complete view of the image. We can resize the image to fit to the window.
Resizing takes width and height as an input but does not preserves the aspect ratio of the original image.
Input Image of a Marksheet
Image pre-processing involves lot of aspects and OpenCV library has wide options. All the steps can be written into a separate blog . I am limiting to a few as this blog focuses more on ‘SelectROIs’ function.
3. Selecting ROIs(Regions of Interest)
This function of OpenCV is useful in Object Tracking or simply putting boxes/frames around the targeted object.
By selectROI function of cv2 we can define the box around the text we want to extract in the image. cv2.selectROI(frame, False)
SelectROI takes arguments like input array that is image , and dragging the rectangle option from center is set false . If true center of selection will match initial mouse position. In opposite case a corner of selection rectangle will correspond to the initial mouse position. It also take first argument of setting a name for the window.
SelectROIs allows users to select multiple ROIs on the given image.
Running this function pops up image window and we can easily drag boxes around the data points. Draw a box and press ‘enter’ to select another and so on..
Window will be destroyed after pressing ‘Esc’.
Blue box around Candidate’s Name
I have selected 3 regions ‘Candidate’s Name’, ‘Reg.NO’ and ‘Enrollment no’.
As an output this will create an Numpy Object Array of the coordinates for the selected boxes. These coordinates are the ‘x’ and ‘Y’ coordinates of upper left corner and the bottom right corner of the selected boxes.
(31, 65, 125, 120)
^ ^ ^ ^
| | | |
x1 y1 | y2 = 120 + 65
x2 = 125 + 31
Output of 3 selected ROIs
Compiling and cropping all the selected boxes
These cropped images are seen by using same function cv2.imshow()
Here is the result!!!
Successfully cropped the boxes. Now these would be passed to Pytesseract for text detection.
4. Text detection and extraction
Pytesseract has different options to extract the text in form of string or a data frame.
In this case string seems to be suitable as the information we need is a string. In case of a table or other items , data frame is a suitable option. Custom config involves psm( page segmentation mode ) which is set 6 which assumes a single uniform block of text.
Out Text in form of a string
Tesseract supports multiple languages till its fourth version. This simple code can further be modified to extract text of different image documents in different formats. Simple code is not only easy to understand but also has a tremendous scope of converting it into a real time used case . So to construct a tool /app we don’t always need a foot long complex code but a strong logic and smart use of available resources.
Happy coding !! Happy Exploring !!!!!…………….
[email protected]
[email protected]
References
Babu, S. C. (n.d.). Retrieved from www.nanonets.com: https://nanonets.com/blog/receipt-ocr/
Docs, T. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/
Marshall, C. (2020, Feb). Retrieved from https://medium.com/mysuperai/how-is-ocr-used-in-the-real-world-e82d1354f07b
team, O. C. (2020, December). www.opencv.org. Retrieved from https://opencv.org/about/ | https://medium.com/@datascience-learners/image-text-extraction-with-ocr-using-open-cv-and-pytesseract-b3f4696a6de1 | ['Data Science Learners'] | 2020-12-06 15:29:50.821000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Tesseract', 'Ocr', 'Computer Vision', 'Opencv'] |
The 4–3 Nap Transition at 5 Months of Age | The 4–3 nap transition is an exciting time! If this is happening it means that your child is starting to take some longer naps and connecting sleep cycles. For this transition to occur you’ll need to have at least one nap longer than 45 minutes. With these longer naps you are slowly getting more time between naps to get out of the house!
Struggling with 45 minute naps?
If you’re stuck struggling with only 45 minute naps or naps less than 45 minutes, you’ll want to read more about that in my blog post, Blissful Baby Naps… And Why You’re Not Having Them.
While I don’t teach a “fixed schedule” where 9 am means nap time, once you’ve passed through the 4–3 nap transition and stabilized on 3 naps, your child will have a more predictability to their day, meaning you’ll know first nap will be sometime around 9 am, 2nd nap somewhere around 12:30 and third nap sometime near 4 pm.
Flexible Schedule
I teach a flexible schedule because I feel that a fixed schedule, where 9 am means nap time, sets a gal up to fail. Fixed schedules work around the premise that a parent can control the length of the nap. That’s hard to do. And nap lengths and duration vary during the 4–5 month period. Around 6 months they start to get more predictable but even then being married to a fixed schedule can leave you feeling unsure.
What do you do when she wakes early in the am due to a poopy diaper or teething, do you keep your tired cranky gal up until your fixed nap time? I don’t think so.
A flexible schedule, working with awake times rather than set nap times, accommodates your child’s needs based on what’s happening in her world that day. And gosh knows things can change day to do.
When I’m working with a client, I always say “We take sleep training day by day.” Days can be drastically different. I’ve had days where nothing is going my way — cranky baby, short naps, feeling frustrated, and yet the next day my child gives me textbook naps and is happy as a clam. *Ah parenting!* FYI — this trend continues into preschool and school-aged years.
When does the 4–3 nap transition occur?
This occurs generally at 5 months of age.
2 Things Need to Happen for this to Occur:
Nap longer than 45 minutes
Your child has to take at least 1 nap that is longer than 45 minutes during the day She needs 3–4 hours of naps per day At 6 months that reduces to 2–3 hours of naps per day Awake Time of 2 Hours
Your child has to be able to comfortably be able to stay awake 2 hours between sleep period
These two conditions together will push our “room” in the day for that 4th nap, and when that happens, that means your bedtime will be earlier than it has been when she was on 4 naps.
5 month old schedule
Atypical 5 month old taking 3 naps might have this schedule:
7:00 am — Wake Up
8:50 am — Put down
9:00 am — Asleep — Nap 1–1 hour 20 min
10:20 am — Awake
12:40 pm — Put down
12:50 pm — Asleep — Nap 2 1 hour 30 min
2:20 pm — Awake
4:10 pm — Put down
4:20 pm — Asleep Nap 3 (cat nap)
5:00 pm — Awake
6:50 pm — Put down
7:00 pm — Asleep for the night
Potentially 1 to 2 night feeds at this age overnight depending on formula, breastmilk, fattiness of moms milk and sleep training history.
Remember this is a general guideline.
A 5 month old taking 4 naps might have a schedule that looks something like this:
7:00 Wake up
8:50 am — Put down
9:00 am — Nap 1–45 minutes
9:45 am — Wake up
11:45 am — Nap 2–45 minutes
12:30 pm — Wake up
2:30 pm — Nap 3–1 hour
3:30 pm — Wake up
5:30 pm — Nap 4–30 minutes
6:00 pm — Wake Up
8:00 pm — Asleep for the night
It is also common to see this schedule shifted with a 6 am start and 7 pm asleep time.
Does your baby fight that nap around 4 pm to 5 pm?
This causes anxiety for most parents but I want you to know this is so common.
Whether it’s the 4th nap when you’re on 4 naps, or the 3rd nap when you’re on 3 naps, this nap happening around 4 or 5 pm, is the hardest nap to get your child to settle for.
Many parents often mistake this resistance for being ready to drop that nap. She’ll still need this 3rd nap until she transitions to 2 nap sometime around 8- 10 months.
Nap transitions are never black and white.
Your child won’t wake up and one day be on 3 naps. You may go back and forth between 4 and 3 naps during a few days to a week until she’s settled into a more predictable schedule.
By 6 months the 4 to 3 nap transition will be complete, and most babies will be on 3 naps. If your child isn’t yet comfortably on 3 naps, it is likely she’s not taking long enough naps, and then you have to ask yourself, does my child know how to relax herself into sleep without any external help? Does she need some sleep training to help her do that?
A quick summary of why the 4–3 nap transition happens:
She’s taking naps 45 minutes or longer
Which means she’s connecting sleep cycles
She’s comfortably staying awake 2 hours between naps
No more room in the day for that 4th nap
Upcoming nap transitions:
Take home tips to help with all nap transitions
Don’t let your child get overtired
Move bedtime earlier to accommodate for the loss of daytime nap hour
If your child isn’t connecting sleep cycles, you’ll want to read my blog post on Self Soothing Skills and Why Your Child Needs Them.
I’ve got this topic covered on my You Tube Channel and you can watch it here.
From there you might ask yourself if it’s time to do some sleep training. Sleep training does not mean closing the door and not going back in. Your child deserves to be acknowledged and heard.
Sleep training, or sleep teaching as I prefer it, means setting you and your child up for success by knowing what is age appropriate and how to gently and compassionately communicate change to your child.
In my online class I can teach you how to help your baby sleep and manage sleep regressions that are inevitable! You can confidently and compassionately teach your baby to sleep through the night in 10 days or less. | https://medium.com/helping-babies-sleep/the-4-3-nap-transition-at-5-months-of-age-221ead2e4ba2 | ['Dr Sarah Mitchell'] | 2019-12-20 18:26:52.536000+00:00 | ['Sleep Routines', 'Baby', 'Nap', 'Baby Sleep'] |
Data-driven Journalism for Social Media: How to Tweak Your Workflow | How might we best tell data-driven stories on social media? A guest post by Eva Lopez, from the data team at Deutsche Welle.
For a long time, social media was merely an afterthought in the daily routine of data journalists. Why worry about promoting a story and making it more accessible when you can scrape websites and build sophisticated charts all day? A project launched by the European Data Journalism Network has been working on changing that status and mindset. DW Data is a part of the initiative, and our Eva Lopez — a data journalist and innovation manager — frequently shares what she and her team have learned. These are the latest insights. The post was originally published on DW Innovation blog.
This year, we, the data team, mostly focused on tweaking our workflows to integrate social media approaches into all our stories. That’s right: all of them. Here’s what helped us in the process:
Building networks and gathering ideas
Working in a big media organization comes with drawbacks and perks: Big organizations (like DW) can be rather slow, but they also offer a huge range of skills. So before kicking off the production process, we invited colleagues from various fields to a virtual workshop: Social media editors, designers and motion designers, and — of course — a number of journalists came together to brainstorm data-driven formats for different platforms.
Bringing together all kinds of stakeholders was key to our concept — and paid off. By the end of the workshop, the participants had compiled a list of diverse format ideas that we still draw on today. But what’s more, the workshop helped establish an alliance between all the colleagues we need on board to produce and publish new formats on social media. We now know what designers need to illustrate story ideas, what kind of elements work in a video storyboard, which topics Instagram audiences are interested in, and a lot more.
Appointing ambassadors and improving planning
To give social media a more central role in our daily work, we also adjusted some of our workflows. Here are two simple tweaks that still go a long way for us:
We established the role of social media ambassador within our data team (hi, Kira!). Her job is a permanent reminder to keep social media options in mind from the beginning and to build a good relationship with the social media managers of DW’s different platforms and channels.
We added social media planning to our internal pitch form. This form contains questions that help us decide how much time, if any, we want to invest into potential stories. Now, every pitch must include ideas for how and where the story can be presented on social media.
DDJ-powered social media stories
Now that the workflows are in place and we’ve connected with our colleagues — some even turned into data-aficionados –, creating data-driven post formats for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube has become as easy as pie (chart). Based on what we’ve learned from workshops and first experiments, we’ve developed four basic approaches to better convey data-driven stories on social media:
the teaser chart
the chart-driven explainer
the presenter-driven explainer
the data-supported explainer
Detailed info on these post types coming soon!
More insights
We’ll leave you with four more insights for better workflows for data-driven journalism on social media:
Working on custom social media pieces is not trivial. It requires time, communication and resources. It’s important to plan accordingly.
Every platform and social media community is different. By tapping into analytics and creating tailor-made DDJ content, we were able to reach more people than usual.
Instagram stories are a specifically great tool: They’re versatile, interactive and can be done on a relatively low budget.
Long-form videos are by far the most elaborate/expensive formats — but in our case, the reach was terrific.
To learn more about data-driven journalism on social media, check out this post. | https://medium.com/@edjnet/data-driven-journalism-for-social-media-how-to-tweak-your-workflow-f071deb21a5d | ['European Data Journalism Network'] | 2020-12-21 14:02:37.277000+00:00 | ['Data Journalism', 'Social Media Strategy', 'Social Media'] |
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Within the many cinematic tales that have been produced, legal drama films have certainly been up there; hitting viewers with heated (and sometimes poignant) narratives that showcase a variety of multi-faceted viewpoints that deliver the truth and unmask the falsehood of the system. From the jail cell’s of a prison to the presiding courtrooms, legal dramas display plenty of human emotions of the individuals; projecting tales of injustice doing and who is really to blame for the wrong doings as well as demonstrating the views of the case on today’s society (i.e. social standing, race, religion, gender, etc.). Of course, Hollywood has produced many legal / courtroom tales that have demonstrated such cinematic level feature films, including several memorable ones like 100000’s 2020 Angry Men, 1980’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 2020’s A Few Good Men, 2020’s Philadelphia, 2020’s Helstrom Fear, 2020’s Dark Waters, and many others. Now, Warner Bros. Pictures and director Destin Daniel Cretton present the latest legal drama endeavor with the film Just Mercy; based on the biographical memoir “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” by Bryan Stevenson. Does the movie find strength within its story or does it lost within legal courtroom narrative?
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Atelevision show (often simply TV show) is any content produced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are typically placed History Oneween shows. Television shows are most often scheduled well ahead of time and appear on electronic guides or other TV listings.
THE STORY
After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 22927, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 27-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him.
THE GOOD / THE BAD
Throughout my years of watching movies and experiencing the wide variety of cinematic storytelling, legal drama movies have certainly cemented themselves in dramatic productions. As I stated above, some have better longevity of being remembered, but most showcase plenty of heated courtroom battles of lawyers defending their clients and unmasking the truth behind the claims (be it wrongfully incarcerated, discovering who did it, or uncovering the shady dealings behind large corporations. Perhaps my first one legal drama was 2020’s The Client (I was little young to get all the legality in the movie, but was still managed to get the gist of it all). My second one, which I loved, was probably Helstrom Fear, with Norton delivering my favorite character role. Of course, I did see To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the sixth grade for English class. Definitely quite a powerful film. And, of course, let’s not forget Philadelphia and want it meant / stand for. Plus, Hanks and Washington were great in the film. All in all, while not the most popular genre out there, legal drama films still provide a plethora of dramatic storytelling to capture the attention of moviegoers of truth and lies within a dubious justice.
Just Mercy is the latest legal crime drama feature and the whole purpose of this movie review. To be honest, I really didn’t much “buzz” about this movie when it was first announced (circa 2020) when Broad Green Productions hired the film’s director (Cretton) and actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. It was then eventually bought by Warner Bros (the films rights) when Broad Green Productions went Bankrupt. So, I really didn’t hear much about the film until I saw the movie trailer for Just Mercy, which did prove to be quite an interesting tale. Sure, it sort of looked like the generic “legal drama” yarn (judging from the trailer alone), but I was intrigued by it, especially with the film starring Jordan as well as actor Jamie Foxx. I did repeatedly keep on seeing the trailer for the film every time I went to my local movie theater (usually attached to any movie I was seeing with a PG rating and above). So, suffice to say, that Just Mercy’s trailer preview sort of kept me invested and waiting me to see it. Thus, I finally got the chance to see the feature a couple of days ago and I’m ready to share my thoughts on the film. And what are they? Well, good ones….to say the least. While the movie does struggle within the standard framework of similar projects, Just Mercy is a solid legal drama that has plenty of fine cinematic nuances and great performances from its leads. It’s not the “be all to end all” of legal drama endeavors, but its still manages to be more of the favorable motion pictures of these projects.
Just Mercy is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous directorial works includes such movies like Short Term 2020, I Am Not a Hipster, and Glass Castle. Given his past projects (consisting of shorts, documentaries, and a few theatrical motion pictures), Cretton makes Just Mercy is most ambitious endeavor, with the director getting the chance to flex his directorial muscles on a legal drama film, which (like I said above) can manage to evoke plenty of human emotions within its undertaking. Thankfully, Cretton is up to the task and never feels overwhelmed with the movie; approaching (and shaping) the film with respect and a touch of sincerity by speaking to the humanity within its characters, especially within lead characters of Stevenson and McMillian. Of course, legal dramas usually do (be the accused / defendant and his attorney) shine their cinematic lens on these respective characters, so it’s nothing original. However, Cretton does make for a compelling drama within the feature; speaking to some great character drama within its two main lead characters; staging plenty of moments of these twos individuals that ultimately work, including some of the heated courtroom sequences.
Like other recent movies (i.e. Brian Banks and The Hate U Give), Cretton makes Just Mercy have an underlining thematical message of racism and corruption that continues to play a part in the US….to this day (incredibly sad, but true). So, of course, the correlation and overall relatively between the movie’s narrative and today’s world is quite crystal-clear right from the get-go, but Cretton never gets overzealous / preachy within its context; allowing the feature to present the subject matter in a timely manner and doesn’t feel like unnecessary or intentionally a “sign of the times” motif. Additionally, the movie also highlights the frustration (almost harsh) injustice of the underprivileged face on a regular basis (most notable those looking to overturn their cases on death row due to negligence and wrongfully accused). Naturally, as somewhat expected (yet still palpable), Just Mercy is a movie about seeking the truth and uncovering corruption in the face of a broken system and ignorant prejudice, with Cretton never shying away from some of the ugly truths that Stevenson faced during the film’s story.
Plus, as a side-note, it’s quite admirable for what Bryan Stevenson (the real-life individual) did for his career, with him as well as others that have supported him (and the Equal Justice Initiative) over the years and how he fought for and freed many wrongfully incarcerated individuals that our justice system has failed (again, the poignancy behind the film’s themes / message). It’s great to see humanity being shined and showcased to seek the rights of the wronged and to dispel a flawed system. Thus, whether you like the movie or not, you simply can not deny that truly meaningful job that Bryan Stevenson is doing, which Cretton helps demonstrate in Just Mercy. From the bottom of my heart…. thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
In terms of presentation, Just Mercy is a solidly made feature film. Granted, the film probably won’t be remembered for its visual background and theatrical setting nuances or even nominated in various award categories (for presentation / visual appearance), but the film certainly looks pleasing to the eye, with the attention of background aspects appropriate to the movie’s story. Thus, all the usual areas that I mention in this section (i.e. production design, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography) are all good and meet the industry standard for legal drama motion pictures. That being said, the film’s score, which was done by Joel P. West, is quite good and deliver some emotionally drama pieces in a subtle way that harmonizes with many of the feature’s scenes.
There are a few problems that I noticed with Just Mercy that, while not completely derailing, just seem to hold the feature back from reaching its full creative cinematic potential. Let’s start with the most prevalent point of criticism (the one that many will criticize about), which is the overall conventional storytelling of the movie. What do I mean? Well, despite the strong case that the film delves into a “based on a true story” aspect and into some pretty wholesome emotional drama, the movie is still structed into a way that it makes it feel vaguely formulaic to the touch. That’s not to say that Just Mercy is a generic tale to be told as the film’s narrative is still quite engaging (with some great acting), but the story being told follows quite a predictable path from start to finish. Granted, I never really read Stevenson’s memoir nor read anything about McMillian’s case, but then I still could easily figure out how the movie was presumably gonna end…. even if the there were narrative problems / setbacks along the way. Basically, if you’ve seeing any legal drama endeavor out there, you’ll get that same formulaic touch with this movie. I kind of wanted see something a little bit different from the film’s structure, but the movie just ends up following the standard narrative beats (and progressions) of the genre. That being said, I still think that this movie is definitely probably one of the better legal dramas out there.
This also applies to the film’s script, which was penned by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, which does give plenty of solid entertainment narrative pieces throughout, but lacks the finesse of breaking the mold of the standard legal drama. There are also a couple parts of the movie’s script handling where you can tell that what was true and what fictional. Of course, this is somewhat a customary point of criticism with cinematic tales taking a certain “poetic license” when adapting a “based on a true story” narrative, so it’s not super heavily critical point with me as I expect this to happen. However, there were a few times I could certainly tell what actually happen and what was a tad bit fabricated for the movie. Plus, they were certain parts of the narrative that could’ve easily fleshed out, including what Morrison’s parents felt (and actually show them) during this whole process. Again, not a big deal-breaker, but it did take me out of the movie a few times. Lastly, the film’s script also focuses its light on a supporting character in the movie and, while this made with well-intention to flesh out the character, the camera spotlight on this character sort of goes off on a slight tangent during the feature’s second act. Basically, this storyline could’ve been removed from Just Mercy and still achieve the same palpability in the emotional department. It’s almost like the movie needed to chew up some runtime and the writers to decided to fill up the time with this side-story. Again, it’s good, but a bit slightly unnecessary.
What does help overlook (and elevate) some of these criticisms is the film’s cast, which are really good and definitely helps bring these various characters to life in a theatrical /dramatic way. Leading the charge in Just Mercy is actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s central protagonist role of Bryan Stevenson. Known for his roles in Creed, Fruitvale Station, and Black Panther, Jordan has certain prove himself to be quite a capable actor, with the actor rising to stardom over the past few years. This is most apparent in this movie, with Jordan making a strong characteristically portrayal as Bryan; showcasing plenty of underlining determination and compelling humanity in his character as he (as Bryan Stevenson) fights for the injustice of those who’s voices have been silenced or dismissed because of the circumstances. It’s definitely a strong character built and Jordan seems quite capable to task in creating a well-acted on-screen performance of Bryan. Behind Jordan is actor Jamie Foxx, who plays the other main lead in the role, Walter McMillian. Foxx, known for his roles in Baby Driver, Django Unchained, and Ray, has certainly been recognized as a talented actor, with plenty of credible roles under his belt. His participation in Just Mercy is another well-acted performance that deserve much praise as its getting (even receiving an Oscar nod for it), with Foxx portraying Walter with enough remorseful grit and humility that makes the character quite compelling to watch. Plus, seeing him and Jordan together in a scene is quite palpable and a joy to watch.
The last of the three marquee main leads of the movie is the character of Eva Ansley, the director of operations for EJI (i.e. Stevenson’s right-handed employee / business partner), who is played by actress Brie Larson. Up against the characters of Stevenson and McMillian, Ansley is the weaker of the three main lead; presented as supporting player in the movie, which is perfectly fine as the characters gets the job done (sort of speak) throughout the film’s narrative. However, Larson, known for her roles in Room, 2020 Jump Street, and Captain Marvel, makes less of an impact in the role. Her acting is fine and everything works in her portrayal of Eva, but nothing really stands in her performance (again, considering Jordan and Foxx’s performances) and really could’ve been played by another actress and achieved the same goal.
The rest of the cast, including actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk and O Brother, Where Art Thou) as incarcerated inmate Ralph Meyers, actor Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Big Short) as legal attorney Tommy Champan, actress Karan Kendrick (The Hate U Give and Family) as Minnie McMillan, Walter’s wife, actor C.J. LeBlanc (Arsenal and School Spirts) as Walter’s son, John McMillian, actor Rob Morgan (Stranger Things and Mudbound) as death role inmate Herbert Richardson, actor O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Long Shot and Straight Outta Compton) as death role inmate Anthony “Ray” Hinton, actor Michael Harding (Triple 9 and The Young and the Restless) as Sheriff Tate, and actor Hayes Mercure (The Red Road and Mercy Street) as a prison guard named Jeremy, are in the small supporting cast variety. Of course, some have bigger roles than others, but all of these players, which are all acted well, bolster the film’s story within the performances and involvement in Just Mercy’s narrative.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s never too late to fight for justice as Bryan Stevenson fights for the injustice of Walter McMillian’s cast against a legal system that is flawed in the movie Just Mercy. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s latest film takes a stance on a poignant case; demonstrating the injustice of one (and by extension those wrongfully incarcerated) and wrapping it up in a compelling cinematic story. While the movie does struggle within its standard structure framework (a sort of usual problem with “based on a true story” narrations) as well as some formulaic beats, the movie still manages to rise above those challenges (for the most part), especially thanks to Cretton’s direction (shaping and storytelling) and some great performances all around (most notable in Jordan and Foxx). Personally, I liked this movie. Sure, it definitely had its problem, but those didn’t distract me much from thoroughly enjoying this legal drama feature. Thus, my recommendation for the film is a solid “recommended”, especially those who liked the cast and poignant narratives of legality struggles and the injustice of a failed system / racism. In the end, while the movie isn’t the quintessential legal drama motion picture and doesn’t push the envelope in cinematic innovation, Just Mercy still is able to manage to be a compelling drama that’s powerful in its story, meaningful in its journey, and strong within its statement. Just like Bryan Stevenson says in the movie….” If we could look at ourselves closely…. we can change this world for the better”. Amen to that! | https://medium.com/beyond-oak-island-se-1-episode-5-4khd-quality/beyond-oak-island-series-1-episode-5-fu-ll-eps-9d07bd1db16c | ['Cinta Tai'] | 2020-12-15 17:22:54.987000+00:00 | ['Drama', 'Reality TV', 'Documentary'] |
thNeed To Shop For Toys? Play Around With These Ideas | Need To Shop For Toys? Play Around With These Ideas
Even if you don’t have kids of your own, toy shopping is an occasional necessity. Your family and friends have kids you probably give toys to on birthdays and during the holidays. Maybe you just need a few at home when you have visitors. Use the following paragraphs to learn a few tips about successful toy shopping.
Want a toy that really engages your child? Look to toys that really challenge the senses. There are all sorts of multi-sensory toys on the market that play with sound, movement, and even scents. They truly give your child a lot to engage with all in one toy. This can mean a lot less purchases for you!
Check out online prices before heading to the toy store. Online stores often beat in-store prices for many types of popular toys. You can find great deals around the holiday season. Retailers with an online presence frequently continue their sales throughout the holiday season.
The best idea to figure out which toy a child wants is to simply ask them. Sure you might know some things they want already, but children can be very surprising. Ask your child if they would be interested in a toy before spending money on it.
It’s quite appropriate to get toys from a consignment shop or thrift store since they are pretty affordable. But, if you purchase toys from these stores, clean them prior to giving them to your child. You don’t know where these secondhand toys have been so it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Make a budget for yourself. It’s always nice to make a child smile. Buying them something is one of the easiest ways to accomplish that. Try not to get carried away when shopping for toys. Set a firm budget for yourself and shop for something they will enjoy within that price range.
Look around at yard sales for great toys. You will find many people selling their unwanted toys at great prices. Kids grow older and they may outgrow some toys. You can find some great deals at yard sales. Take a look at some of these sales before purchasing new items.
Do you have a little scientist at home? If so, you may be interested in Skyrocket’s attachable microscope. This microscope attaches to your smartphone or tablet, allowing youngsters to zoom in on spiders, bugs and more. This technology allows the child to take video or pictures using the smartphone’s built in camera.
Comparison shop before you commit to buying a toy. A toy that is expensive at one store might be cheap at another. This is very common with online retailers. Look for a site or store to get the best price possible.
Toy shopping is a necessity for parents, of course, but also a common obligation of anyone not a parent. From kids of friends to nieces and nephews, there are many situations where you might need to go toy shopping. Having read this article in full, you should be prepared to make some good selections.
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ballerina party supplies | https://medium.com/@birthdaygalore1/need-to-shop-for-toys-play-around-with-these-ideas-61369fa0d8 | ['Birthday Galore'] | 2019-09-01 02:38:28.790000+00:00 | ['Birthday', 'Birthday Party', 'Retail', 'Baby'] |
Trump Tries To Garner Public Praise Over Sudan-Israel Truce | While trying to press away wrinkles that exist between two countries, Americans leaving President Donald Trump figured cash would be the most ideal choice. In this way, the questionable hired fighter President has evidently, offered an amount of up to $850 million to American survivors of psychological oppressor assaults in America and Sudan. This is all, it is affirmed, an endeavor to save an arrangement with Sudan to set up full political binds with Israel.
Sudan has not been eye-to-eye with Israel since 1948 and has from that point forward thought of it as a foe state. Before the choose President Joe Biden can come into full power, Trump is as yet in charge of dynamic. By splitting the abundance between September 11 casualties and assaults on American consulates in Sudan, he has wished to agree with Congress to pass an enactment that could reestablish Sudan’s sovereign invulnerability and eliminate it from the rundown of state backers of psychological oppression (SST). This progression appears to have been a forerunner to the entire plan of getting Sudan to look for worldwide assistance to standardize its economy and to expedite a ceasefire with Israel.
All the means have been towards sending Trump’s own PR plan of resembling the individual who has been instrumental in bringing harmony and concordance among Israel and the other Middle Eastern nations. There are reasons that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordon, and Bahrain had cut binds with Israel as much as Qatar. Israel has been known to empower dread exercises.
Sudan has been powerless trapped in common war, that it was being utilized to channel by Iran to supply arms and ammunitions. Trump, it is known has been utilizing his time at the White House to collect help for the apparently beneficial things he has accomplished for the American vote bank. As far as he might be concerned, his Middle East arrangement is a major success, which he needs to repeat as he leaves the White House before year’s end. | https://medium.com/@hiramenon93/trump-tries-to-garner-public-praise-over-sudan-israel-truce-cb579001fe65 | ['Hira Menon'] | 2020-12-17 12:37:17.537000+00:00 | ['United States', 'Donald Trump', 'Sudan', 'Middle East', 'Israel'] |
The psychology behind why focus is important | I only truly appreciated the power of focus after learning about some of the underlying psychology.
Focus doesn’t merely help you get things done by keeping you undistracted — it is crucial for harnessing your creativity, making breakthroughs and achieving your long-term goals.
Somewhat unexpectedly, these thoughts were triggered from reading personal organisation bible ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen.
The Reticular Activating System
In a section of the book on outcome visioning, David Allen says the following on the importance of focus:
“When you focus on something, that focus instantly creates ideas and thought patterns you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Even your physiology will respond to an image in your head as if it were reality.”
This is because of the part of our brain called the reticular activating system (RAS).
“The reticular formation is the gateway to your conscious awareness; it’s the switch that turns on your perception of ideas & data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music’s playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room. Just like a computer, your brain has a search function. It seems programmed by what we focus on and what we identify with. We notice only what matches our internal belief systems and identified contexts.”
In other words: when we focus on a goal, the whole world begins to make sense to us in relation to that goal. We filter the world for tools to help us achieve our goal and obstacles which may hinder us. The more focused we are, the more refined the filter will be.
Moroever, we don’t need to be actively working on a problem to make progress or have our lightbulb moment; once the RAS has oriented our subconscious, it will do the work for us.
Once you internalise this, the true power of focus comes to light.
It is why serendipitous breakthroughs are no coincidence. When a scientist working on a complex problem is in the shower or sitting under an apple tree, though he may not be consciously working through the problem, the whole world develops meaning to him in relation to this. So when an apple falls and hits his head, this isn’t an isolated, irrelevant incident — this is new data which can help him solve it.
This level of focus is also central to the creative process. People talk about the importance of thinking outside of the box, reading widely and looking for inspiration in unlikely places. This is true but it only becomes powerful when coupled with focus.
If you have no clear focus or goal, reading a Jane Austin novel won’t necessarily help you with your marketing campaign. But if you have a finely attuned reticular activating system and allow yourself to wander, this is where magic happens.
Lastly, the RAS helps explain why it is often the most obsessive, not the most talented, who reach the top.
If you have a clear vision for your future, and achieving this future is your overwhelming priority, you are at a significant advantage. Guided by the lense of the RAS, everything in the world will reveal itself to you as a help or a hindrance. You will be more creative, more resourceful and less wasteful in the pursuit of your goal than others around you.
N.B. Activating our RAS is something we can get better at, and in my research around this I came across the following article which provides some tips https://www.nlpca.com/creating-an-optimal-future-for-yourself.html. Would be great to hear your experiences if you try some of these techniques. | https://medium.com/@sebabecasis1/the-psychology-behind-why-focus-is-important-11f6f3dd5154 | ['Seb Abecasis'] | 2019-10-13 18:41:15.956000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Focus', 'Getting Things Done', 'Productivity', 'Creativity'] |
The Fight For The Lakes: Eutrophication in Madison Waterways | As summer in Wisconsin reaches its zenith, new dangers await in Madison lakes. According to the Wisconsin Public Radio, 2020 is shaping up to be another ample year for blue-green algae blooms. Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria as it has more recently been known, is a prokaryotic bacteria that has increased in proliferation in the past few decades. According to Everyday Health, cyanotoxins found in the algae cause skin irritation, muscle and joint pain, nausea and many other symptoms.
Photo courtesy of CIMSS
Cyanobacteria thrive in warm nutrient water, blooms increasing in frequency with the temperature. According to the National Ocean Service, massive algal blooms like the ones in 2018 and 2019 cause hypoxia, where the bacteria cover a large area on a body of water, blocking out sunlight from native plants and preventing an inflow of oxygen through photosynthesis. Hypoxia has been known to cause massive animal die-outs, most commonly in Wisconsin’s native fish species. Dead cyanobacteria blooms rot and sink to the bottom, depleting oxygen levels even further.
After numerous studies focused around Madison lakes, it has been found out that the recent explosion of cyanobacteria in the last few years is a result of climate change. Patterns in warmer weather, heavy rainfall and nutrient runoff result in large scale blooms. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Wisconsin has seen a rise in precipitation of 5–10% over the past century, and overall Wisconsin has averaged an increase in temperature of 2 degrees fahrenheit. These conditions cause the explosions of bacteria that we see today, and scientists think that the blooms will only get worse in the future.
Cyanobacteria // Photo courtesy of Singularity Hub
David Caron, a biology professor from the University of Southern California and expert in algal blooms, explains the effects of warmer water on cyanobacterias. “Most algae can grow faster in warmer water, but there are thousands of different types of algae, and different types of algae have different optimum temperatures,” Caron said. “As global temperatures warm, there are a lot of water bodies that are going to warm, and they will select types of algae. In particular, in freshwater systems, the ones that produce toxins are typically cyanobacteria.”
Even though Wisconsin algal blooms are thought to be caused by agricultural runoff, Professor Caron says that agriculture is not the only industry to blame, and it is a necessary part of society anyway. “Everybody shares blame in this and it is wrong to point a finger at any one industry. There is no question that agriculture is a major entity, but I think that working together on it is what needs to be done on a global scale is what needs to be done, not saying ‘agriculture you have to clean up your act.’”
Krystyn Keiber, a PhD student in the Limnology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, elaborates on the effect of climate change on eutrophication. “You have changing weather patterns leading to frequent intense rainstorms, which allows for greater weather pressure on our farms, causing runoff into our lakes.” The runoff is a mix of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, that Keiber explains is made up of mostly phosphorus, iron and nitrogen, key ingredients in cyanobacteria reproduction. At UW Madison, Keiber works with the limnology department researching algal blooms and charting patterns over the years.
While the overlying problem is climate change, Farmers, politicians and residents alike can all take action to stop eutrophication. In 2010, the city of Madison banned the usage of phosphorous-filled fertilizers on private lawns, taking notice of the negative effects the fertilizer causes. As of right now, the agriculture industry is still allowed to use the fertilizers, but a ban in the future may be the next step to halt eutrophication. Professor Caron says that many initiatives are being taken to pursue no-till farming, which keeps phosphorus in the soil and out of Wisconsin waterways by decreasing erosion. Although these solutions are viable, it is likely that the only way we can prevent worldwide eutrophication is by stopping climate change. It is a fact that warmer waters show an increase in bacteria, and decreasing the amount of fossil fuels in our atmosphere is the only thing that we can do to prevent this underlying problem.
Eutrophication and the sickly state of Wisconsin waterways should be a motivating factor in advocating against climate change. Unlike other climate-related issues, we are seeing the effects of eutrophication on our lakes today, watching helplessly as our lakes become poisonous and decrepit. Motivated by saving our lakes, use this evidence as reason to advocate, and support local researchers in their search for solutions.
Donate to the Center for Limnology (CFL), an organization that funds undergraduate and graduate research fellowships, producing the next generations of scientists with the link below.
https://limnology.wisc.edu/support/ | https://medium.com/the-climate-reporter/the-fight-for-the-lakes-eutrophication-in-madison-waterways-14554dbe48a | ['Owen Tsao'] | 2020-08-07 17:57:02.233000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Feature', 'Climate News', 'Climate Change', 'Environment'] |
Managing the test data for functional tests | Background
Most functional tests need test data to work. Consider this classic example of an end-to-end login test for an application in a “testing” environment, where the application services are typically configured to talk to a real database system. We need to provide the credentials of a user for such a test. So our test flow should either create a user or use an existing one. This is where accessing and managing the test data comes into picture.
This article talks about one of the ways of de-tangling the test data dependency and management part from the tests.
Problem
The task of creating, accessing and managing the test data during test execution has below challenges.
Unavailability of a data mocking system: You need to rely on one or more “real” downstream systems for data creation. Complexity in creating new data: No straightforward way of creating data (e.g. lack of APIs, multiple systems needing updates after data creation, etc). The state of test data matters for the tests: The test data may not be re-usable if we are unable to reset its state after test execution. Resilience: Some system(s) might fail to create new test data.
Approach
In order to address this problem, we came up with an approach of storing the test data in a centralised data store, which was used by our automation suites for any test data needs during test execution.
We achieved this by building a test data management system (TDMS) that uses an Elasticsearch instance as a data store.
In the application testing process, there are a set of test cases that aim at validating the test generation flows. We leveraged such tests to seed our data store with newly generated test data in a specific format (schema) either through automation test hooks or through cron (maintenance) jobs.
So going back to our original example of a login test, the most fundamental data entity could be a user. So we could choose to store the test data on a corresponding Elasticsearch index called “user”, in which documents look like below.
{
"id": 1,
"personalDetails": {
"firstName": "John",
"lastName": "Doe",
"age": 28
},
"accountStatus": "active"
},
{
"id": 2,
"personalDetails": {
"firstName": "Stephen",
"lastName": "Williams",
"age": 30
},
"accountStatus": "suspended"
}
Now we can have the tests query TDMS for the data as per the requirement. For example, get an active user for testing login success or get a suspended user for testing login failure.
A test data management system showing the flow of test data with the application under test
However, there are a couple of problems with this approach.
The test data state will not be updated in TDMS after test execution. Multiple tests are likely to end up using the same test data during execution.
In order to address these problems, we added a data lock mechanism to prevent this from happening. Once the data is locked, no other tests can reuse the data set until the data is refreshed in TDMS.
Future plans
While this approach has solved our burning problem of managing the test data, we have plans to overcome some of the shortcomings and make it as a holistic system useful for the entire organisation by: | https://medium.com/circleslife/managing-the-test-data-for-functional-tests-7f299aae2957 | ['Akshay Maldhure'] | 2020-12-09 13:45:07.206000+00:00 | ['Quality Assurance', 'Test Data Management', 'Software Testing', 'Software Development'] |
UNDERSTANDING THE TRANSGENDER RIGHTS | Lawful acknowledgment strategies are significant on the grounds that they form the firm foundations of affirming the dignity and respect of a transgender person. It is additionally the doorway to different rights like the privilege to security, the opportunity of articulation, free to discretionary capture, right to business, instruction, wellbeing, equity, development, lodging, and the option to wed. The cycle should not, at this point subject the candidate to embarrassment and hurtful treatment…[more] | https://medium.com/@datingtranssingle/understanding-the-transgender-rights-fc3acd50adc2 | [] | 2020-12-26 17:00:30.757000+00:00 | ['Trans Women Rights', 'Gender Identity', 'Transgender Community', 'Trans Men Rights', 'Transgender Rights'] |
Winter is Here. | As a pediatrician it’s impossible not to think about the onslaught of human suffering as we head into the 3rd and worst wave of COVID-19.
We are drowning and all we can do is try to keep our heads above water. Many of us will not make it, either due to COVID or due to mental and physical breakdown. We have been riding these waves for months, and it’s taking a toll on our psyche. On our ability to have a healthcare force that can withstand this 3rd wave.
A 4 month old with burns and a 9 month old with cocaine in its system. Strung out and stressed out parents. Drunk drivers and diabetics unable to get their insulin, gun shot wounds and head traumas. This is Pediatrics in a big city hospital. And it’s getting worse every day.
Since the start of the pandemic pediatricians have been witness to the erasure of childhood norms and sometimes of childhood itself: the normalizing of screentime for schooling, the isolation and loneliness of children unable to find their footing and losing multiple rungs on their development ladder. The stress of evictions and food insecurity, the loss of school meals, the drop in dental and eye screening, the gaps in immunization and the preventable illnesses and deaths that follow. The lack of exercise and the climbing BMIs. The crying of stressed out children on Zoom.
Now imagine this was your childhood I was talking about. Realize this is the childhood faced by millions of children in the richest country in the world. And millions upon millions more all around the world who rely on our leadership, outreach and funding in order to survive to adulthood.
So much pain has been normalized and now seems to cause no comment because the atrocities no matter how huge, are always outdone by a fresh load, everyday.
However, the death of childhood is an especially heinous crime, one that resonates through a damaged life for its entire existence, trauma living inside bodies and minds. Human trafficking, child marriage, child pornography and the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) are all on the uptick as a result of this. The world has a few uses for broken children, and there are those who would grow the size of that economy on the backs of such trauma.
It shouldn’t be this bone crushingly difficult to do the right thing. But it is. And I’ve stopped asking why anymore. I know why. It’s not some grand revelation. It’s quite simple really. This is who we are. Last week, in a city north of here, two children were found in a home where their two teenage siblings had been decapitated. This is who we are now. Maybe this is who we’ve always been, the thin veneer of law and order wearing thinner every day of this benighted year only to reveal our true faces.
I may be in pain, but I cannot complain because not only is everyone else in the same boat, but hundreds of thousands more are worse off than I am, so I keep my suffering under wraps. Crying in the middle of the day. Giving up on routines and norms because nothing feels meaningful anymore. Because I feel like a psychopath for even trying to be normal. Because I can’t ignore it or compartmentalize it or try to pretend there’s any recovery that’s possible, the truth has sunk into the lines on my face, the aches in my body. This is now who I am.
Years of needless suffering lie ahead of us because we as a society couldn’t follow basic rules. Because we as a society have become so poisoned, that those who have been convinced to act against their own best interests, even now, insist on their right to harm everyone else. They’re so convinced of their superiority that there is nothing that can be done to change their minds. 70 million is a chilling number of people who voted for the guy who drove us into destruction, made us forget that we could have done better.
An even more chilling thought: had it not been for the mishandling of the pandemic, we would still be in Trump’s America for 4 more years, and America as we knew it would have ended. She has still not pushed back against this current existential threat, and I don’t believe she can. Too many have joined the cult, trapped by fear and loathing in their own funhouse horror show, unable to find the exit. And an entire network of criminal kleptocrats get away with this while the people of the United States face a healthcare catastrophe and breakdown of society on a scale that is unimaginable.
Four more years and we would have descended into civil war. There are those that make the point of irreconcilable differences between red and blue states, of no longer remaining the United States. Maybe it’s time to go our separate ways, just to keep the peace.
Because guess what? This is not even the biggest threat coming our way in the next decade. Human-driven climate change melted the ice caps this year, a prophecy fulfilled, and the die cast. Irreversible climate change already in play because there is no amount of political willpower that can right the ship in time. None.
So add to this humanitarian catastrophe the ever increasing disasters caused by climate change, and we are in the end times already. Time to accept that fact and act accordingly, I tell myself.
When a few cities over, the Sheriff comes out against enforcing stay at home orders, on the upswing of the 3rd wave, you know you’re about to endure a lot more pain.
You have to, you have no choice anymore in the matter as part of this epically dysfunctional healthcare system.
The years of schooling, the training and learning, the sleepless nights and busy days, applying yourself to the minutiae of caring, were for nought. The sense of failure is worse this time. Because the first wave caught you unawares. The second wave was still bearable. But the 3rd wave is a battering ram of failure. Every public health effort laid waste, the ability to care in the face of callousness is waning.
My anger is spent, my rage has gone deep and settled somewhere deep inside me.
In its place is a deadly despair. A realization that there is no measure of mitigation that’s effective against nihilism. A paralyzing despair, that calls into question every single decision I’ve ever made.
And all our best laid plans have been laid to waste. A year of dance recitals and family time, socializing and adventure, college visits and prom has evaporated. And not only that, I feel like a fool for ever believing those things had meaning.
In their place is an uphill climb with a massive rock that rolls down the hill every night. Every morning begins the same way, a nightmare where reality and fantasy have started to blend, where hours and days have lost their meaning. Where relationships have stagnated or gone off track. Where sleep has become an escape from the racing thoughts. Yoga and meditation, exercise and eating healthy all seem like laughable pastimes afforded by those with the luxury of denial.
So yes, I’m showing up. But I’m not here at all. And it’s not fear or exasperation like it was the first few months, but instead a complete loss of faith in my own species and our right to inhabit this planet we are so intent on destroying.
Some may read this and wonder if I’m depressed. I do fit the criteria, but no, I’m not depressed because I continue to have insight into my own mental state. What I am is something else entirely. Fed up with caring, and relieved in some ways to let myself off the hook.
The planet will be fine.
Life will go on without us.
And that’s a cheerful thought indeed. | https://medium.com/@outspoken/winter-is-here-40ef8245686a | ['Simi Rahman'] | 2020-12-09 11:13:50.958000+00:00 | ['Burnout', 'Covid-19', 'Healthcare', 'California', 'Third Wave'] |
The top 5 Altcoins in 2020: Which cryptocurrencies have the greatest potential besides Bitcoin? | The top 5 Altcoins in 2020: Which cryptocurrencies have the greatest potential besides Bitcoin? LetKnowNews Follow Jan 3, 2020 · 6 min read
The Christmas season is not only the end of the year, but also the beginning of the time of forecasts for the coming year. In the crypto-community the question is which coins have the biggest potential for the coming year. In this article we therefore want to take a look at which old coins are most promising in 2020.
However, as the Crypto News Flash Team we would like to point out that the following information cannot be regarded as investment advice. We only share our thoughts about the crypto market. Readers are invited to form their own opinion on the contents of this website and to conduct their own research.
In order to select the top 5 Altcoins in 2020, we have tried to take into account all the important factors that can significantly influence the price of a cryptocurrency. From our point of view these are: acceptance, demand and price. The most important point from our point of view is the degree of acceptance.
Only if the project creates numerous use cases, for example through new partnerships, the price is likely to increase. In this respect, it should also not be ignored that news are a major price driver in the crypto market. Ultimately, acceptance but also demand will increase through the creation of new use cases. The price plays a role for many private investors in as much as “cheaper” coins are more affordable. New investors in particular start with smaller amounts and prefer the so-called “penny” coins.
Based on these factors, we have selected our top 5 Altcoins for 2020.
Basic Attention Token (BAT)
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is trading at around 0.17 USD at the time of writing and could benefit even more from the growth of the Brave Browser in 2020 than in 2019. At the beginning of December, the developers of the Brave Browser reported an increase in active users to 10.4 million. This corresponds to a tripling of active users within one year.
The Brave Browser aims to revolutionize the online marketing industry and build a decentralized ecosystem that brings users, publishers and advertisers together and distributes the monetization of advertising revenue through the Basic Attention Token (BAT). If the number of active users, especially the number of publishers and advertisers, continues to grow as rapidly as it did in 2019, when a 12-fold increase to 340,000 publishers was achieved, the BAT price could benefit greatly.
The team behind Brave and BAT also speaks for the success of the project. With Brendan Eich, co-founder of Firefox and Mozilla and creator of JavaScript, the project is led by a strong personality. The project also has a prestigious list of investors, including Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners and Pantera Capital.
VeChain (VET)
VeChain already caused a stir in the last two months. For a long time the Singapore based project flew under the radar of many investors. In recent months, however, the project has received increased attention, and not without reason. Since the mainnet launch of VeChain Thor blockchain, the team has been able to establish more renowned partnerships than any other project in the crypto market.
VeChain Thor blockchain’s use cases focus on digital business transformations in various industries such as fashion, wine, automotive, food safety, carbon emission reduction and agriculture. Partners include global corporations such as DNV GL Group, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the National Research Consulting Center (NRCC) from China, DB Schenker, Kuehne & Nagel, BMW Group and Renault.
Most recently, VeChain has entered into a cooperation with the Anhui Tea Industry Association in China, under which up to 670 Chinese companies from the tea industry can use VeChain Thor Blockchain.
So why could the big breakthrough come in 2020? China’s head of state, Xi Jinping, gave a speech in October 2019, which was widely acclaimed in the crypto community, in which he called for a major blockchain initiative. As the VeChain Foundation pointed out in a recent blog post, the focus is on the creation of value through the blockchain. VeChain corresponds to this standard, as it was stated in the publication:
The cooperation between VeChain and the Anhui Tea Industry Association is in line with the government’s goal to increase the competitiveness of all stakeholders in the industry through blockchain technology.
In this respect, China could become an important factor for VeChain if further use cases and partners in China will follow.
Cardano (ADA)
The cryptocurrency Cardano (ADA)created by Charles Hoskinson definitely belongs in the “penny coins” category at a current price of USD 0.03. Despite the low price, Cardano has great potential. This became apparent not least a week ago when the Incentivized Shelley testnet with stake pools was launched.
Within the first 48 hours, 240 stake pools were formed and over 5.4 billion ADA, about 17 percent of the total supply, were delegated. The launch of Shelley on mainnet is expected to take place in 2020. Then the participation in the Proof of Stake is likely to increase significantly, especially as exchanges such as Binance will also offer staking to their users.
Furthermore, Cardano has announced a major marketing campaign for 2020, which will be developed by the well-known agency McCann Dublin, which has already worked with Microsoft, LinkedIn and Norwegian Airlines, among others.
Chainlink (LINK)
Chainlink was already the biggest winner within the top 40 in 2019, as CNF analysed. With a price increase of 586 percent (until 15 December) since the beginning of the year, the LINK price recorded substantial growth. In June 2019 it was announced that Google is working on a project using Chainlink.
In detail, the tech giant wrote that it is working on applications that store cloud-generated data on a blockchain. To integrate the external data into the blockchain, the Google project used Chainlink. Chainlink also has SWIFT, Oracle, Gartner and IC3 as partners. In October, Intel, HyperLedger and EntETHAlliance joined the project to promote blockchain adaptation in the enterprise sector.
But why does Chainlink have great potential in 2020? In 2020, the topic of getting external data into the blockchain will become even more important. With its Oracle technology, Chainlink is well positioned to forge further strong partnerships and integrate into new services.
Ethereum (ETH)
Even though Ethereum as the second largest cryptocurrency by market capital is certainly not an insider tip and with a current price of around 130 USD is also not a bargain, Ethereum has a big year ahead of it. After slightly less than five years, Ethereum will enter the “Serenity” phase (or Ethereum 2.0). Even though the roadmap below (from May 2019) is no longer quite up to date, as the Istanbul hard fork and the Beacon Chain (Serenity Phase 0) have been somewhat delayed, it gives a good overview.
The launch of Ethereum 2.0 could be a strong factor in the price of ETH. Already in 2019, Ethereum has shown that it is still the number 1 smart contract platform. With the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, numerous strong partners and global corporations stand behind the project. For example, Microsoft launched a token-based reward program for the Microsoft Azure platform at ETH Blockchain in early December.
As Forbes reported, Ernst & Young, one of the world’s largest professional services companies, is investing in the development of data protection tools for the Ethereum ecosystem. The “Nightfall” project is, as Forbes writes, “a great example of how one day all companies will use the public mainnet for transactions with sufficient privacy comfort”.
One topic that has already dominated in 2019 and could become even bigger in 2020 is Decentralized Finance (DeFi). As ConsenSys recently stated in a report, DeFi has the potential to grow into a billion dollar industry. In this respect, there are numerous arguments for the Ethereum price to outperform 2019 in the year 2020.
LetKnow.News on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram | https://medium.com/letknownews/the-top-5-altcoins-in-2020-which-cryptocurrencies-have-the-greatest-potential-besides-bitcoin-ed4d8d936aab | [] | 2020-01-03 10:38:49.616000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Altcoins'] |
Jasmine’s Story | I closed my eyes today and I thought back to my false reality.
I thought back to all those times we sat down behind the houses, just the 20 of us sitting there and getting fucked up while watching the sun come up. Sitting there bitching about the world we weren’t a part of — the real one — and talking about the fucked up shit no one sober could ever think of. And most of all, the incomplete answers we never asked for, but the ones we wished we knew. For a second I was happy.
I thought about tracking them down and doing it all over again. And I would. I really would. But then I opened my eyes and realized that those few blissful moments would lead to years of addiction: pain, drugs, and cluelessness straight down to the minutes of apathy. For a few seconds I was part of my fake world. I felt a shred of false happiness shine a smile on my face, and it ended with a breath of depression. I wanted it again…but hey, it’s only a thought.
I just got out of a psycho ward. I must’ve been 12 or 13 years old and I had got bored. It was a Friday night and I wasn’t going anywhere, I was locked up for two weeks, “Oh dear god, not two weeks!”. I know, but believe me, when you’re in a house that isn’t your own with people that aren’t your friends, and when you fall asleep to people screaming or wake up to your roommate slitting her wrists over the same reason everyone else is, life is hard. Life is like a dick when it gets hard, because it just wants to fuck you over more than before. Am I right? Life is hard, but the only thing that is certain is death will come. Anyway, it’s the longest two weeks you’ll ever spend. It has its kicks, though. I watched a girl stuff butter in her bra and eat it in the bathroom and there was this one other girl who was a slut…literally, she hit on every guy that walked through the same decrepit doors I have so many times before (I was always getting locked up).
So, this retarded kid “fell in love” with the skank. She wasn’t even a pretty skank, but she was one of the nasty fat, Downs Syndrome looking kind. They were the perfect match. And then she “broke his heart”, so he asked every girl out in the institution. To “win her back”, he wrote a rap for her (that’s not even about her). It went, “So I can eat spicy rice with ice and it will be nice with ice and rice, yo!”. Among other crazy shit, two guys were fucking in the bathroom and the staff opened the door on them and they both fell out ass-naked. And this other girl named Svetianna, she ran around naked freaking out, ’cause they can’t touch you when you’re naked. They put a blanket around her and shot her in the ass to calm her down and so I instigated by calling her “sweaty llama”. What a bitch.
Well, like I said, I had just got out. I snuck out of the house, well, didn’t really sneak out. My dad watched me leave. He was drunk at the time, but he swore he only had two beers. To save me a shitload of writing, on my walk away from home, I met a man named John whom I never would’ve thought would be my best friend. The first time I met him was on the railroad tracks next to Mc Donald’s when he was with Heather, Jess, Robb, and Hodge Podge (Danny Boy). After they scared the shit out of me, I found out they were really cool! I was sort of an outcast at the time, but so were they. Johnny Boy had a red mohawk, black and white checkered pants, big boots, and a green jacket with FUCK written really big on it (I didn’t see it until we were in the Mc Donald’s parking lot). They kind of scared me because they all had chains and spikes and trench coats and all that good shit. Johnny Boy was…different. He had patches, spikes, tight pants, piercings, duct tape on his boots, and tons of belts (some with chains), but he was different. Robb, Hodge Podge, Heather, and Jess dressed more like goths and Johnny Boy looked like a punk, and I was a Timmy — a name for someone who wasn’t like everyone else, but in the same way a little bit of everything.
Johnny Boy was one of those anti-drug kids. I was cool with weed, but I hadn’t done much drugs then. I had only smoked weed once or twice and it wasn’t as good as I was told it was. Johnny always had a crush on me since the first time we met. I could tell ’cause he always wanted to see me. He kept saying, “I love you”, or little things like, “You’re getting more beautiful every time I see you, Kaboodles”. He called me and said he got some smokey for me tokin’. I was amazed and he said — and I remember this perfectly — “I’ve never done this and I don’t really trust anyone, and you’ve done it…so, in case something goes wrong, you can make sure I don’t die much…and I swear I’m not trying to get into your pants…, although your pants are pretty cool, but ughm, so you wanna?”. I was happy he trusted me. That was the best night ever. We drove to the cemetery (what a fun place, right?) and got stoned off our ass. We were talking about how if the snake and the octopus fell in love and had a baby billy goat, which of the sea otters would fuck the monkey or something like that and we decided the monkey would marry all of them (oh, the madness of it all). Then we decided to go play hide-and-seek with the tomb stones. Johnny fell on his face when he got out and stayed there for awhile, and I turned around, counted to three, walked around the car while making a gun shape with my hands, and said, “Got ya!”. He got up and we laughed our asses off. I mean, it’s not every day you see a kid with a big red mohawk land on his face with his ass in the air while his face is being smothered in dirt. We proceeded to play hide-and-seek with the tombstones, but they weren’t very good at hiding.
I remember I got home at around 3:30, four o’clock. I stumbled in and my dad asked me where I’d been. I said I was at the park. Good thing he was only up for 15 minutes. I went to school and slept all day. I slept a lot in school. I was in the special classes ’cause “I couldn’t handle large crowds” and “I have no respect for teachers”. “Cursing out the dyke principal and her lover, the gym teacher, isn’t acceptable”. Well, fuck you and your acceptance. I’m not gonna do shit unless I want to, let alone be screamed at because wearing my Twinkie pajama bottoms, combat boots, and cheshire cat shirt is my idea of changing for gym class. In 7th grade, the gym teacher came right out and said it. “Jamie, are you going to participate today?” “Fuck no!” Her reply: “All right then, report to the library — you’ll be copying sports terms and updates from the newspaper, dictionary, and everything else.” My backtalk: “Fuck that, the only thing I’ll be writing is 50 ways to kill you!” Boom, back to the ward I go. Fuck being kicked out for a month, I’m out for good. A damned damn two years in a row, let’s go for three!
After I got out of the ward and my dad stopped bitching, I deserved a night out. I called up Johnny Boy, but Robb picked it up. He asked who it was, I said “Hi, is Johnny there? This is Jamie.” He said, “Who’s Jamie?” and I tried to explain to him how he knew me, but then Johnny picked up and said, “Jamie, I thought you didn’t want to talk to me. You didn’t call me since our havoc on the cemetery…” Half-way into our conversation, he decided we should meet that night. He was going to bring Robb with him. I met them in a Mc Donald’s parking lot at around 1:00, or 2:00. I snuck out again, but my dad wasn’t drunk — he was sleeping. Johnny was so happy, he said, “Aww, my kitty is here!”. I started to tell him about my new friend until a really hot guy ran up and smiled, “Nice boobs, kiddo”. I didn’t even hear him until Johnny boy said, “Dick head!”. I was so transfixed on his appearance. I saw him before, but I didn’t remember him being so goddamned hot. Robb was so great. We went to the gas station to get something to eat and then we went to a different town (I can’t remember the name) where we found a junk yard. Well behind it was some kind of woodsy. We sat there looking at the stars and the moon.
Johnny boy kept trying to hold me — not in a sexual way, not in a romantic way, but just in an…I-like-you-please sort of way. But that position was taken by Robb. He held me and I kissed him. It made me so happy. When I looked up, Johnny Boy was staring at Robb like he was going to cut off his balls, stick ’em in a blender, and make him suck them through a bendy straw. I felt bad, so I hugged him and said in a high pitched, oh-my-god-did-she-just-get-her-cooter-bit-off-by-a-sasquatch sort of tone, “I looove you, Jonathan!”. He laughed and so did Robb. It was the first time I saw Johnny Boy smile all night. He looked up and quickly said, “Really?”. And I said, “Yessum!” in a friendly kind of way. I watched his smile fade again. Robb stared up to the sky and asked me which star was the brightest. I gave my opinion and Johnny had a debate on the stars with me. Yeah, that was a good night.
Johnny and I would sneak out a lot before, but then we got into some deep shit. Robb called me and told me Johnny Boy wanted to see me and he’d pick me up in an hour. So I called him when I was sure everyone was asleep. Just like Robb said, he picked me up but there was no Johnny Boy. Robb told me Johnny Boy couldn’t make it. He was too tired, “He had just gotten back from a concert…” I didn’t care ’cause I liked Robb. He pulled out a little bag and unrolled it. Weed. I thought it would be another fun-filled night playing tag with a tombstone or hide-and-go-seek or something. We toked up, but it was laced with cocaine so I was trippin’ balls. Everything was going so fast — and I loved it. I really did. And I loved Robb. I really did. For half a year, we had been “together”. But Johnny was there every time. This time he wasn’t.
There were a few times Robb and I had hung out without Johnny — these were good nights until tonight. He had kissed me before but he didn’t shove his tongue down my throat. Everything was just going so fast.
He pulled away and I started to tell him about my abuse and sexual harassment I endured, I told him about my mother, and all the different guys. Even when I first moved to this shit hole of a state, two of my brother’s friends had molested me: once while I was asleep and the other time while I was high. I would wake up to it and have flashbacks or be too scared to move. I’d just pretend to sleep through it. He kept kissing and groping, and for fuck’s sake, literally licking. He was strong as hell. I kind of liked it, but in the back of my head I knew I wouldn’t win so I just let him. I was so fucking high, though, and it wasn’t all that bad.
A friend and I were sitting at McDonald’s once and there were these two old people: an old man and an old lady. 10 minutes into watching them eat, we were cracking jokes about them. We were a little high, so they were really stupid like, “hey you old guy, did ya know you were old…’cause you’re pretty damn old”. Well anyway, the old guy flails his arms and says, “AAAR!,” and the old lady screams three minutes later. After another 10 minutes go by, he does it again and she screams again. And then five seconds later, she does it to him, so he screams. Us being high and all, we cracked up and I fell on the floor. We were making so much noise that they told us we had to leave. Yep…true story. I swear!
Well, back on topic. Yeah, so Robb and Johnny would hang out almost every other night then and I was still doing bad in school. I’ve been kicked out of 10 schools in two years. Either for fighting, cursing, racial slurs, threats of suicide and homicide, getting locked up often and missing school, getting caught with drugs that I swore a cop gave to me, or simply sleeping my life away. Matt (my beat-up doll) dumped me around then as well for being “too anti-social”. Once again, fuck you and your socializing!
Everything began to turn to shit soon enough and I started getting into a lot more fights — fights that didn’t even have anything to do with me. A lot of my friends died. It was all in October. Everything went wrong in October. Jim, my ex-boyfriend, moved to Florida and Matt dumped me, like I said, for being somewhat anti-social and not letting him touch me (it’s fine to hold me, really I don’t mind. But I’m not a fucking teddy bear whose string you can pull and I’ll make kissing sounds and say, “Hey baby, where’s the rubber?”).
My only friends are either ones who get high and do stupid shit like Robb (drug-lord of the universe!) who stapled his hand to the window sill ’cause I told him I’d give him $30. We were laughing ’cause he was screaming his ass off saying shit like, “Hurry up and pass the reefer, give me a line, toss me da shrooms!”. And just to piss him off, we did everything in front of him. Heather tried to pull his hand off the window, but he passed out. It got really quiet…and then finally Jess said, “Ughm, that isn’t a good sign”.
That’s the kind of shit I did at night, but I got into a lot of bad shit like gang fights: 20 of us against gangsters and condescending assholes. Just have a knock-out, drag-out fights over little shit like misunderstandings or jumping people we didn’t even know. I never thought I could win a fight, and in a lot of cases I don’t. I know you’re probably thinking, “Why is she trying to act like a hard ass?” I’m really not trying to be, but I hear that from a lot of people. I have that tough, mean, obtuse look. A lot of people are afraid of me, even the staff in my old placement said they were afraid to restrain me. I really don’t mean to look bad. Maybe I’m just giving myself too much credit, but if you knew some of my friends, I’m the one of the sweetest girls they know. And my enemies…well, right now I have none. At that time, the majority of my “friends” were some of my worst enemies. It’s all about watching your “enemies” closely and picking your friends wisely, which makes me wonder how a little girl once so kind that kept to herself could become that.
Now I’m almost 15 years old and I have many personalities to worry about. I have got into some trouble over the years. I did cat tranquilizers, shrooms, acid, and heroin (shot up, stupid fuck!) all in one night during a lock-in in Ohio. I freaked out, I puked, and fell down. I remember the blaring techno music, the lights, and I remember the sickness and the hurt. I couldn’t think. I saw a little purple light and I was feeling like I was looking at the world through the wrong end of the telescope. It was great until my muscles started spazzing out and I began heaving like I was having an orgasm (I was pretty freaked out, though). When I came back, my nose was bleeding and I was in somebody’s car. I looked up and saw Robb. I then realized I wasn’t in a car — I was in Robb’s house. I had passed out. What seemed like two hours later, I heard him say, “Jasmine…Jasmine, come back to me. Kitten, I love you.” I looked up but it was all blurry. I wondered if I’d ever see straight again. Robb finished by saying I’d be fine when the sun came up. I wondered if I’d ever live to see the sun again. I smiled — or at least I felt my lips smile — and I blurted out, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t ready,” and heard Robb reading “Hop on Pop” (my mom used to always read that to me when I was little) by Dr. Suess out loud. And then I saw him looking so happy, I thought he’d cry. That night made me see my life differently. I could die at any moment, so live fast, have fun, and hope you die laughing. That night showed me why my mom was so fucked up and now I hated myself for putting a burden like myself on her.
My mom was fucked up. Here’s a little history lesson. I grew up in what seemed to be a loving Christian family, until one day my mom said there was no point in going to church because there is no god. Just like that, everything went wrong. I had thought from that point on that God was nothing more than a lie that the deceivers called parents had told, like Santa Claus to make us behave, or the Easter Bunny — who decided that year not to come because like my mom had said, “He was being sacrificed to a god that wasn’t there”. And also that following year, the leprechauns that made our eggs green on St. Patrick’s Day died from cancer and the cupid on St. Valentine’s Day that brought mommy and daddy together to get married was shot by his own arrow and slowly bled to death in his lover’s arms. On my birthday, there was no party, not even a card, because “I didn’t need shit that won’t fit in a year or will break in a month”. The puppy that I wanted to get would be road kill I wanted to cry because my mom wouldn’t let me see my dad until he busted down the door and fought with the lovely person I refer to as my mother. He went through all that just to hug me, give me a present, and tell me “happy birthday”. But I didn’t get to open the present ’cause she threw it away.
I wasn’t always too close with her. I came home from school one day to show her another report card with straight A’s, waiting for her approval, but I found her in her bedroom crying. I cried too and gave her a hug, but I got a slap in the face for not coming home directly from school. My brother walked in through the door (I remember one time he made a smack sound and said I hit him, and I got punched in blame). He didn’t even see what was happening between Mom and I. When she was shooting up or getting trashed, I would hide from her in the closet. I didn’t want to come out. Once she locked Blair out of the house and me in because I was always out and he was always in. A lot of her drunk friends would come in the house. They were nice…but too nice.
My first drug experience followed that. She said it would “take the pain away”, then shot me up. And you know kids — they hate shots and scream at the sight of blood while they bawl. I watched her mouth move to words while nothing came out, and in ten minutes the room was moving very fast. Her voice came back in the distance, saying, “This won’t hurt much now that you’re fucked up”. I thought it was fun, but I was scared as well. I felt someone touch my leg and I didn’t like it. Whoever it was, they obliviously didn’t care. I remember smelling beer strongly and then I was suddenly lying on my own floor naked. I reached for my clothes, but I was still moving slow, moving very slow to music. Then I felt the floor hold me down. It was pulling me down and I couldn’t get up. It was like carpet enclosed and grabbing my arms and legs, recklessly. Then came the pain. Nothing had every hurt like this. It was like being scalped with Chinese torture devices but in a very unusual place. I heard a man’s voice. I knew it must’ve been the guy doing this. My last thought was about the cop that made me take off my clothes in the bathroom to look for scars and bruises. I remembered him asking, “Have you ever been touched in any way that you didn’t like?”. And then I opened my eyes and wondered if I was living. The pain was never-ending. The floor gripped harder, and I felt my teeth dig into my bleeding lip. My tongue had been shoved into something rough and wet. My mom said, “Are you done? I need my money”. It was done.
I was still in pain as the floor let go. I never thought that a shot could have that effect on me. I was still naked on my floor, but now the floor wasn’t pulling me in. And little did I know, it would happen again. But the floor would become a friend, a love, an enemy, even a best friend, or some guy I met at a concert. It would all happen again. Every story is a little different, but the cases are always the same. And even before that, I didn’t realize that my beloved mommy who I trusted, who I believed in, one of the most important people in my life, would let it happen again and again. Not only let it happen again, but get paid for it. I was her personal BP (baby prostitute), a six soon to be seven year old whore, and even before that I had no idea I was being hurt, abused, taken advantage of, lied to, screamed at, and beat up by the person said they were doing it “for my own good”. “I needed to be punished. I wasn’t a good girl like everyone thought” I was the deceiver, I was the trouble brought onto her. She left me in the hospital. She didn’t want me, so my dad brought me home. She left me in the car for two days once. And what I just found out today was that when my mother played “Here Comes the Sun”, she would shoot my brother up with heroin and beat him. Robb’s mom overdosed on drugs, and the last words she said to him were, “It’ll all be better someday. It’ll all be fine when the sun comes up.” Little did he know that she meant she was going to die before the sun came up.
Then when I was seven or eight years old, I was raped sober. And if I told anyone, he’d kill me. Later that week, I found my cat on the doormat in front of the house…eviscerated. I thought if I told, it’d be me next time. Later I would look up and realize I loved him. And that since rape was the only sex I’d ever had, that rape must be the way people “make love”. He must’ve loved me so much he couldn’t wait ‘till I was ready. He wanted it so bad because he felt such adoration for me. And I had already lost the fight. I knew I wouldn’t be strong enough to fight in the war, let alone win it.
When she would get upset, my mother would chant. She would say things like, “When they come, lovely daughter, they will come, they will come, and they will give me the child they have stolen. They replaced my baby with you.” She would chant and if I was somewhere, she would describe numerical codes, mixed up numbers, over the phone. She was an insomniac mainly because of the crystal meth. She always talked about “them”, about the god that died because of “them”. She once burned me close to my wrist, and now I have a little scar still there today. She threw me under a fence, piercing my calves. I still have those marks, as well. I was told that my grandmother hit her and ended up in jail. She ended up running away after that, and becoming a whore and a drug dealer at fourteen for the Hell’s Angels. She was a musician, so she always pushed us to be musicians. Now I play the drums and my brother is a guitarist and a singer! I guess she did something right. My brother and I went to see her in a hotel once when she was getting trashed, and overnight she tried to cut off my brother’s arm.
Well, we all have bad memories that leave us to be the way we are, good or bad. Sometimes I wonder if other peoples’ memories make them taste blood. If they make them kill their pets, literally disembowel them and stab them over and over again. Or try to kill their family members. Hear distorted music riddled with messages, or look into mirrors and watch their face turn into a woman’s with eyes that look like something Marilyn Manson might pull off. Make their nose bleed until it’s pouring into their teeth. Their dad walks in and asks what happened. They drink nail polish remover, not because of the music or the backward words spilling out of the cuts on their wrists telling them to, but because hurting yourself and others is the only way it goes away — for a limited period of time. The hurt can come back any time. If they’re real bad memories, it can make them black out and question how they went from sitting in their room to standing in the middle of railroad tracks with a knife. Shining black droplets of worn red signs of life that was once there. Not being able to sleep because you have to wait for the Camera Man, the director, the witch, the thing that watches but never cuts the film. When it’s finally done, does that mean they’re free to live or die? Knowing that every time they sleep, something changes. A dresser is moved, a drawer is ajar, a bloody napkin is left on their night stand. They sleep, but only because they’re can’t fight time — let alone the pills — or the knowledge that people, being humans, need rest. They talk to themselves in hope that one voice of reason that isn’t there will come back. Or last, but not least, hoping one moment of happiness will come. Just like when Robb died.
Oh yeah, Robb died October 15, 2004. Yep, two months ago. Johnny ran away and his mom was too high to care. Jess was sent away for almost killing her parents. Heather hitch-hiked to Florida to attend Robb’s funeral, but when she arrived at the exact hour at the place where the funeral was supposed to be, no one was there. And guess where I’m going tomorrow. Florida. Sarasota, to be exact. Well anyway, the last words he said before he died were, “It’ll be okay some day. It’ll all be fine by the time the sun comes up.” A few days ago, I went to see the sun come up. I hadn’t looked at the sky lately ’cause I thought I’d be afraid that it wouldn’t be the same. The stars aren’t as bright, the sky isn’t so blue, the clouds don’t look like marshmallows anymore. I went to see the sun come up just like he said. I waited two hours, but it never came. And then I realized the sky will never look the same again. I remember listening to the song “The Story So Far” and my CD player skipping on the part where he says that. At the time, I had pink spiked pink hair (I always have different colored hair) and I wore a long coat over a zip-up shirt. I threw my CD player down. I was still having arguments with my split personalities. There was a fence along side the bridge I was sitting on and I started to climb it. Then a car drove by and honked the horn, causing me to fall onto the concrete. And just as I looked up, this kid in the back seat lipped out, “DON’T JUMP!”. My CD player still skipped while I walked home crying.
I miss those nights where we’d get high and watch the sun come up. Everything was fine. My “issues” never bothered me during those few rare moments of happiness. The twenty of us geeking out over all kinds of shit that didn’t matter. Just like Johnny always said, “We could’ve stopped then. We could’ve all been fine”. And look where we are. Jess locked up and all lawsuit-ed out, Robb dead, Heather searching for the answers we didn’t care about for the questions we didn’t ask, and…oh yeah, Johnny Boy just came home. I knew he’d be with Baz. If any of us had a problem, we’d go to New York with Baz. He’d take care of us. When Johnny came back, I asked him why he didn’t stay. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I was forever running away. I still am. He said, “Well, Kitten, on my way home I asked myself why, too. But I thought back to when we first met, and how I always wanted to stop and start all over and be okay again. I thought about what Robb always talked about. Kitten, someday will never come and the sun will never come up until you look for it. James, I looked, but in all the wrong places. Today is is that someday. Look outside, Kitten. The sun is shining. Remember when you were in a placement and you told me about how you would sit in the back room and watch the cars drive past? Do you remember how you always wanted to be in that car, or when we looked at the airplane flying past and you said you wanted to be in it going to a better place? Well, on my way home, I realized today is my someday. The sun is up, and I was in that car, and I am in a better place.”
Now it’s Christmas and I’m wearing Jess’s bracelets that I found in our mailbox. I’ve been through all this shit, and this still isn’t even a little bit of my “story”. The stars aren’t as bright, but I can still wish on them. Since you’ve been gone, I’ve been afraid to look at the sky. I went to go see the sun come up, just like you said to. I waited, hoping that for a minute perhaps…just maybe, you wouldn’t be so far away from me. And maybe for a second I would feel like myself again. Happy, not so dead inside. Maybe just for a second it would be the same. Just for a little while. It never came, and then I knew the sky will never really look the same again. Even after every one was gone, after my friends went their own ways, there was still someone who knew all of this and who still cared. If this ever is read by someone else or is made into something artistic, that’s great. | https://medium.com/@vanjazmin/jasmines-story-2bc13f1fb16a | ['Van Jazmin'] | 2019-10-24 08:51:06.806000+00:00 | ['Autobiography', 'RIP', 'Teenage Angst'] |
Crypto Tax Summary | As part of The Token Handbook, I have just released The Tax Chapter — 8,000 words on tax treatment for crypto-assets. I have also included a short essay on how I think tax should work and how it ties in with a universal basic income. When I speak to audiences, few people know any of this stuff. This does not constitute professional advice, which you should seek separately. Here are some of the key takeaways:
Coins and Tokens are Taxed as Assets
Whether we like it or not, no cryptocurrency or token yet qualifies as money, and none of them is taxed like money. Think of them as taxed like gold or stocks — when you buy, you have a basis price, and when you sell you have a net gain or loss. You must compute this net gain or loss for the end of the year for each asset you hold, however briefly. You may also benefit from long-term capital gains treatment in some countries, like the US.
ICO Income is Taxable Income
If you raise money by selling stock to investors, you don’t pay any tax on that. However, if you raise by selling tokens, tokens are seen as a “good,” and that good has a value, and you have just received income for selling that product. Don’t forget to pay your tax on it.
Setting up a Nonprofit Foundation Avoids the Tax
You won’t pay tax if you set up a non-profit foundation before your ICO. You also won’t have any shareholders and will have to conduct your affairs as a foundation. This is another reason I keep saying ICOs are for project finance, not start-up finance.
Don’t Use a Transaction-Based Charging Model for Tokens
Both the ether fee price and the tax treatment make a transaction-based model impractical. If your project has raised a utility token, go to an all-you-can eat subscription or a staking model. In general, any payment less than about $10 isn’t very practical on the ether blockchain right now, though that may change.
Give Your Users a Proper Tax Report at the End of the Year
If your system works with cryptocurrencies or tokens, it makes sense for you to help your users compute their tax liability at the end of the year. Some companies have charged extra for this. A bit of extra programming will keep each account up to date at all times. You do this by asking for their tax currency and computing the value of each transaction in that currency and recording it. Then just add them up on demand and your client has a tax report.
Gambling and Betting Can have Different Tax Treatment
Some projects are declaring themselves gambling platforms, which benefits from different tax treatment in some countries, like the UK.
Tokens can have Serious Value when Allocated
As some people who went through ICOs last year have learned, when you are allocated your tokens matters, and it can matter a lot. Think through your allocation of tokens and try to do it as early as possible for the least gain. The initial gain when you accept your tokens will probably be counted as ordinary income for that year. You could potentially suffer an “IRS attack” if you pay a lot of tax for tokens that are valued highly in the months after an ICO and then go back down later.
Mining is Taxed as Ordinary Income
Most countries (not Belarus!) will tax your mining income as ordinary income.
Jurisdictions Matter
Switzerland, Malta, Gibraltar, and some other jurisdictions do offer tax advantages, both for corporations and nonprofits. At the moment, Australia probably has the most sensible approach to taxing crypto-assets.
Paying People in Cryptocurrencies and Tokens
Paying your people in ether may seem like an easy, simple way to pay, but it has some serious downsides. There will be a tax liability at the end of the year. You may be responsible for withholding or paying part of it. Paying people in highly volatile instruments probably doesn’t make that much sense. It’s wise to pay mostly in fiat and maybe some in crypto-assets.
You May be Audited
Both your company/foundation and many of the individuals could draw an audit for last year or this year. Audits are expensive. This, unfortunately, is part of the ugly reality of trying to fit our new world into their old world. The people auditing your firm my have no idea what auditing means in this context — yet you may still have to do it. I list helpful resources at the end of my longer chapter.
Token-Based Accounting Systems
At Consensys, a smart group of people are developing the Balanc3 system to help solve many of these problems. As an early beta tester, I’m very excited and can’t wait for the system to come out.
How Should Governments Tax?
I’ll invite you to read my entire chapter, which advocates a smart-contract-driven consumption tax that goes hand in hand with a universal basic income. It should be easy to set this up and save people around the world perhaps $1 trillion in crazy tax fees, plus align incentives to make better financial decisions.
I hope this gives you some appreciation for the complexity of trying to invent a new world while still being governed by the rules of the old one. Tax treatment is different for different people in different places — be sure to seek the help of a tax attorney or advisor to put yourself on the right side of the law.
Please read The Token Handbook and its new Tax Chapter.
DAVID SIEGEL is CEO of the Pillar Project, a nonprofit Swiss foundation building the world’s first smart wallet for crypto-assets. He is also the CEO of 20|30, a blockchain innovation company. He is the author of Pull, business strategy in the age of the semantic web, and The Token Handbook, the first book on tokenomics. | https://pullnews.medium.com/crypto-tax-summary-2c56a19963c1 | ['David Siegel'] | 2018-06-11 11:49:26.944000+00:00 | ['Taxes', 'Blockchain'] |
Unbanking of the world: Sentinel Chain | This article is a continuation of my previous article called “Unbanking of the world: Bitcoin vs. Blockchain” where I discussed the relationship banks have towards blockchain and bitcoin and the narrative they are creating.
In the “Unbanking of the world” series I will be highlighting blockchain projects that I believe have the ability to empower the unbanked people of the world.
The pitch:
“The Sentinel Chain is a B2B marketplace specifically designed to provide affordable and secure financial services to the unbanked”
Vision:
Initial Coin Offerings have been the buzzword for the last couple of months. Investors are flocking towards the newest and hottest ICO´s in the market, in an effort to get their hands on it before whitelists are filled or hard-caps are reached. The huge growth in ICO´s have made it extremely difficult to identify projects that are actually seeking to bring value to the world and not just based on hype and speculative behavior.
Blockchain at its core was created with the goal to enable financial inclusisvity and equality to the world. It is therefore a sight for sore eyes to see InfoCorps´s new blockchain project Sentinel Chain entering the market. Sentinel chain aims to bring banking and financing to the unbanked and underbanked population of the world by creating the worlds first platform that is able to accept the use of livestock, such as cattle as collateral.
Today, farmers all around the world do not have access to traditional lending and financing services due to the lack of collateral. Farmers, unlike others have much of their capital locked up in livestock, rather than assets such as mortgageable houses.
Livestock is not recognized as collateral by banks and financing services because of the absence of information in regards to ownership and verified systems that are able to translate livestock into concrete value, resulting in no legally recognized collateral.
Livestock will be turned into collateral by creating a blockchain based platform called Sentinel Chain, and through the the utilization of RFID tagging designed to be both tamper and theft proof live stock will be able to be registered, quantified and identified. Furthermore, simple mobile softwares will be used in order to smoothen the ease of use for the people in the unbanked world, while combating the tedious practices of banking and financial institutions. Finally, the underbanked and unbanked farmers of the world will be able to take advantage of lending and financing services.
Value proposition and how it works:
Sentinel Chain with its first-mover advantage is bound to be groundbreaking if successful. Success would mean credit access to a huge untapped market (farmers) and a change in how lending and financing services have traditionally been managed and executed.
The blockchain market is flooded with projects that take on a huge problem to solve, by creating one blockchain to rule them all that will be able scale and grow in order to process the amount of transactions that they are aiming for when mass adoption of the technology happens. However, Sentinel Chain has a different approach to this matter. They want to combine various blockchains in one ecosystem to deal with the scalability and processing issues that may occur in the future. This ecosystem will work together and fulfill each others needs instead of having one blockchain to deal with it all. The ecosystem will be structured as follows:
Crosspay blockchain:
With each respective country that Sentinel Chain targets, a private crosspay blockchain will be created. The private Crosspay blockchain will be utilized as a store of information, where farmers can by the use of the Crosspay mobile app privately access their information, with regards to loans and other information.
The tamper proof RFID tagging technology, cross pay mobile application and blockchain technology will all be vital components of the Crosspay blockchain. They will all be working together to unlock the value of the “dead capital” tapped in livestock.
The Crosspay blockchain will use a native cryptocurrency token called “Local Crosspay Token”, which will be pegged to the value of the country´s native currency.
Consoritum Blockchain — Sentinel Chain:
The blockchain will operate within decentralized governance and is connected to multiple Crosspay blockchains, thus creating a hub-and-spoke ecosystem, providing a low-cost cross-border financial infrastructure, enabling flow of liquidity to farmers and the unbanked world via a network of financial providers. Sentinel Chain will be the main chain, where the tokens reside and services, such as crowdfunding, collateral and loans are accessed.
VeChain Blockchain:
Sentinel Chain has recently partnered up with VeChain, which is best known for its powerful public provenance blockchain that can be used to combat counterfeit luxury goods. VeChain´s blockchain will be integrated with Sentinel Chain´s blockchain. Information, such as age, weight, health of livestock will be stored publicly on the VeChain blockchain in a immutable and transparent manner, while keeping the farmers privacy in tact on the Crosspay blockchain.
Chain of incentives:
To further strengthen the ecosystem Sentinel Chain wants to introduce a “Chain of Incentives”. The ecosystem is maintained by balancing the incentives between the unbanked, insurance companies and the lending outlets. It works as a retention tool for existing parties involved in the ecosystem and as a catalyst for new parties to get involved. Incentives for the various parties:
Peer-to-peer lending pools, banks and financial institutions will be incentivised by financial incentives. They are going to be able to tap into a huge market for micro financing. A market that has not been able to be taken advantage of before, due to transparency and trust issues.
Sentinel Chain´s ecosystem of blockchain´s will provide the transparency and trust that has been missing in the past, and lenders will be able to access all the information needed to make a valid decision when issuing loans. Information pertaining to the health and realness of the livestock, the ownership of the farmer of the livestock and whether the livestock has been collateralised for other loans.
Governments will be incentivised by this huge market that opens up, in terms of supporting the ecosystem with adoption and regulation, as farmers being able to get financing will in turn increase output and growth.
Insurance companies will be have a completely new market open up in front of them and just like the lenders they too will be able to access all the necessary information needed to issue an insurance policy.
Farmers will have to be transparent about their livestock and themselves in order to be eligible for insurance and financing. The economic incentive in form of financing is larger then the cost for getting insurance and registering livestock on the blockchain.
The Sentinel Chain Token (SENC):
SENC will primarily be utilized as a medium of exchange for the Local Community Token (LCT), which is used to make payments for services or participate in projects.
Partnerships:
As a function of their ties to InfoCorp, Sentinel Chain boasts an impressive list of real world partnerships that will partake in bringing the project to life. According to Sentinel Chain´s whitepaper the partners are as follows:
“ MediShares : Is the world´s first global marketplace for mutual aid backed by ZhongTopia, the largest online mutual insurance in China with a membership base of 10 million users. MediShares platform can be integrated to Sentinel Chain as financial service proivder and offer its services to Sentinel Chain´s unbanked market.”
: Is the world´s first global marketplace for mutual aid backed by ZhongTopia, the largest online mutual insurance in China with a membership base of 10 million users. MediShares platform can be integrated to Sentinel Chain as financial service proivder and offer its services to Sentinel Chain´s unbanked market.” “ Maybank is Malaysia’s largest bank by both market capitalisation and total assets. It is also one of the largest banks in Southeast Asia, with total assets exceeding US$164 billion and net profit of US$1.63 billion for 2016. As the leading Malaysian banking group with a strong regional presence in South Asia and Southeast Asia, Maybank acts as the main provider of settlement and foreign exchange services to InfoCorp, in facilitating Sentinel Chain’s operations.”
is Malaysia’s largest bank by both market capitalisation and total assets. It is also one of the largest banks in Southeast Asia, with total assets exceeding US$164 billion and net profit of US$1.63 billion for 2016. As the leading Malaysian banking group with a strong regional presence in South Asia and Southeast Asia, Maybank acts as the main provider of settlement and foreign exchange services to InfoCorp, in facilitating Sentinel Chain’s operations.” “VeChain is renowned for creating a powerful public provenance blockchain that can be used to combat counterfeit luxury goods. As livestock ownership and owners’ data remains on the Sentinel Chain, livestock, the provenance of the livestock can reside on a public provenance platform that is integrated to Sentinel Chain, such as VeChain. This can be useful in the case of cross-border livestock trade and food supply chain where proof of origin is required.”
Sunny Lu, the CEO of VeChain and Roy Lai, the CEO of Sentinel Chain had the following to say about their partnership:
“VeChain’s collaboration with Sentinel Chain represents a new chapter in inclusive finance. Our solutions will build positive social outcomes in ASEAN — by using Blockchain & IoT to lay sound foundational digital infrastructure which will support new data-centric business models.” Sunny Lu, CEO, VeChain. “Sentinel Chain’s partnership with VeChain will preserve the right of every individual, particularly the rural unbanked and underserved — to have full access to quality financial services such as livestock insurance and microfinance.” Roy Lai, CEO, Sentinel Chain.
In addition to the partners mentioned above, Sentinel Chain has entered into a partnership with Cloudwell. CloudWell is a fintech company headquartered in Bangladesh which facilitates instant payment services for milk supply and has access to over 300,000 farmers. CloudWell, through Agent Banking Outlets at the Co-Operative Society or Village Milk Collection Centre, also offers financial solutions to the dairy farmers, herdsmen, and milkmen of Bangladesh. The partnership with Sentinel-Chain will allow Cloudwell to offer their customers financial services with better rates.
And lastly, Sentinel Chain has created an ambassador network of worldwide influencers to promote Sentinel´s vision. So far two impressive ambassadors have joined their network, Cetalin Ivan and Bernardo Corti.
The prestigious role of a Sentinel Chain Ambassador means he or she carries the commitment to champion the mission of financial inclusion and contribute his or her expertise to improve the lives of the unbanked through the technology of Sentinel Chain — A representive from Sentinel Chain.
Cetalin Ivan is a member of the European Parliament for Romania and Bernardo Corti is the Co-founder of Cryptologic and CEO of BitSign. They both will be assisting in spreading the Sentinel project around in Europe and the Latin American region, while establishing firm networks.
Team:
In total Sentinel Chain consists of 9 people. It is a team with a wide specter of experience and knowledge. Noteworthy members of the team are:
Roy Lai is the CEO and founder of Sentinel Chain. He has experience in the banking industry and has created payment solutions and micro financing infrastructures. Roy implemented FAST , which is a national real-time networking connecting 14 banks in Singapore. He also spends his time teaching Blockchain Programming and smart contracts at the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
is the CEO and founder of Sentinel Chain. He has experience in the banking industry and has created payment solutions and micro financing infrastructures. Roy implemented , which is a national real-time networking connecting 14 banks in Singapore. He also spends his time teaching Blockchain Programming and smart contracts at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Zann Kwan is a foundation member and has been a FinTech entrepreneur in bitcoin and blockchain technology since 2013. She is one of the pioneers in the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem in Singapore and took the lead in the implementation and launch of the first ever bitcoin ATM in Singapore and the asian market.
In addition to the a outstanding team, Sentinel Chain boasts a impressive advisory board:
Bo Shen is the the founding partner of Fenbushi Capital (with Vitalik Buterin ) and BlockAsset. Fenbushi Capital is best known for its involvement and funding of the crypto sphere and seeks to to accelerate the inevitable future of blockchain economy by supporting as many companies as possible. Fenbushi Capital has experienced partners in both traditional finance and the blockchain sphere.
is the the founding partner of Fenbushi Capital (with ) and BlockAsset. Fenbushi Capital is best known for its involvement and funding of the crypto sphere and seeks to to accelerate the inevitable future of blockchain economy by supporting as many companies as possible. Fenbushi Capital has experienced partners in both traditional finance and the blockchain sphere. David Lee has experience from the fintech and blockchain-space in Asia, as well as Silicon Valley. He is the co-founder of BlockAsset. He has previously invested in blockchain projects such as Zcash, OmiseGo, Qtum and TenX.
For all team members and advisory board, please visit Sentinel Chain´s website.
Outlook:
Sentinel Chain is a refreshing and robust project that is taking the first step towards financial inclusion for everyone in the world, which is exactly why bitcoin and blockchain was created. I myself believe in this project and am looking forward to the day when i can become part of Sentinel Chain´s ecosystem and get to know unbanked and underbanked farmers on the other side of the globe that may need funding.
Unfortunately, Sentinel Chain´s whitelist has been filled and the ICO is going to end on the 8th of March. However, Sentinel Chain´s tokens will hit various exchanges during Q2 of 2018. Stay tuned! | https://medium.com/hackernoon/unbanking-of-the-world-sentinel-chain-b3d57e85da48 | [] | 2018-03-06 17:12:51.356000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Unbanking Of The World', 'Bitcoin'] |
647. Palindromic Substrings | Solution explanation
Q: Given a string, your task is to count how many palindromic substrings in this string.
The substrings with different start indexes or end indexes are counted as different substrings even they consist of same characters.
Example 1:
Input: "abc"
Output: 3
Explanation: Three palindromic strings: "a", "b", "c".
Example 2:
Input: "aaa"
Output: 6
Explanation: Six palindromic strings: "a", "a", "a", "aa", "aa", "aaa".
Approach:
Using dynamic programming approach we will form a matrix that consists of indices of two pointers in the given list and the values of say M[0][1] starting at index 0 and ending at index 1 is True is this substring is a palindrome else False
s = "abca" n = len(s) dp = [[0] * n for _ in range(n)]
then we loop through this matrix checking two rules:
if the starting and ending values are equal and
if the difference between the two pointers is less than 2, so we can ignore whatever element in the middle and consider the pattern as palindrome as for example “aba” so this is a palindrome even if we changed b to any value
check if the in between pattern is a palindrome as well, i.e. have a true flag in the matrix like for example “abbba” is we are checking from index 0 to 4, if we checked we should have M[0] == M[4] both are equal to “a” the other rule is 4–0< 3 which is False the last rule if the inbetween pattern is a palindrome which is should be True,i.e M[i-1][j+1] = True,M[1][3] | https://medium.com/@omaraymanomar/647-palindromic-substrings-8d131e3184f | ['Omar Ayman'] | 2020-12-20 16:58:25.076000+00:00 | ['Problem Solving', 'Dynamic Programming'] |
Environmental Odour Impacts | Environmental Odour Impacts
Odours have become a priority concern for facility operators, engineers and urban planners who deal with waste and industrial treatment plants. The subjectivity of smell perception, its variability due to frequency and weather conditions, and the complex nature of the substances involved, has long hampered the regulation of odour emissions.
These work summarize and introduce the main issues and contents fully described in the Edited Book “Odour Impact Assessment Handbook” published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The book provides a comprehensive framework for the assessment, measurement and monitoring of odour emissions, and covers:
• monitoring compliance withre source consent conditions;
• investigating odour complaints to determine if an offensive or objectionable odour is present;
• odour characterization and exposure effects;
• instruments and methods for sampling and measurement;
• strategies for odour control;
• dispersion modelling for odour exposure assessment
• odour regulations and policies
• procedures for odour impact assessment
• case studies: Wastewater treatment, composting, industrial and CAFO plants, and landfill
Intended for researchers in environmental chemistry, environmental engineering, and civil engineering, the handbook is also an invaluable guide for industry professionals working in wastewater treatment, environmental and air analysis, and waste management.
1. Odour: origin and definition
Odour is the property of a substance, or better; a mixture of substances that depending on their concentration, are capable of stimulating the olfaction sense sufficiently to trigger a sensation of odour (Brennan, 1993; Devos et al., 1990; Bertoni et al., 1993). Even better, odour is a sensory response to the inhalation of air containing chemicals substances. When the sensory receptors in the nose come into contact with odorous chemicals, they send a signal to the brain, which interprets the signal as an odour. The olfactory nerve cells in humans are highly sensitive instruments, capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of a wide range of odorous chemicals. The type and amount (or intensity) of odour are both important in processing the signal sent to the brain. Most odours are a complex mixture of many odorous compounds.
Fresh or clean air is usually perceived as not containing any contaminants that could cause harm and it smells clean. Clean air may contain some chemical substances with an associated odour, but these odours will usually be perceived as pleasant, such as the smell of grass or flowers. However, not everyone likes the smell of wet grass or hay. Due to our sense of odour and our emotional response to it being synthesized by our brain, different life experiences and natural variation in the population can result in people having different sensations and emotional responses to the same odorous compounds.
Odour is a parameter that cannot be physically measured, unlike wavelength for sight or pressure oscillation frequency for hearing, nor can it be chemically determined as it is not an intrinsic characteristic of themolecule. It represents, in fact, the sensation that the substance provokes after it has been interpreted by the human olfactic system. The impossibility of physically and chemically measuring odour, the complexity of the odorants, the vast range of potentially odorous substances, the physical and psychic subjectivity of odour perception and environmental factors, together with the complexity of the olfactic system, represent a series of obstacles that render the characterization of odours and the control of olfactive pollution particularly complex (Zarra et al., 2007a; Dalton, 2002).
Public opinion plays a decisive role in evaluating the extent of annoyance caused by bad odours, often leading to associating unpleasant or malodorous emissions with any industrial or sanitary installation (Bertoni et al., 1993; Stuetz et al., 2001). In fact, even though nuisance odours are not generally associable to harmful effects on human health, they do represent a cause of undoubted and persistent annoyance for the resident population, thus becoming an element of contention both in the case of existing plants as well as in the selection of new sites (Shusterman et al., 1991; Zarra, 2007b). In this light, the impacts caused by the aesthetics of the plants and their inclusion in the landscape, the noise produced, the traffic generated and, above all, the emissions of unpleasant odours are becoming increasingly important (Zarra et al., 2008b).
Over the last few years, there has been more and more technical and scientific interest in these matters thanks to the greater attention being paid to protecting the environment and human health and, above all, due to the growing number of plants located in urbanized zones (Zarra, 2007b). As a result, for some time now, attention has been drawn to the need to monitor air quality in relation to environmental odour levels. However, the particular and complex nature of the substances responsible for odour impact, their variability both over time and with respect to meteoclimatic conditions and the subjective nature of olfactic perception are factors delaying any such regulation (Park and Shin, 2001; Zarra, 2007b).
As described in the following chapters, the components that can be evaluated in order to identify an olfactic type annoyance are concentration, intensity, hedonic tone (i.e. the pleasant or unpleasant sensation obtained from an odour) and quality (association of an odour with a known natural compound). As detailed later, of these components, only the first can be determined in an objective manner, while the others are highly subjective (see Part 3).
2. Quantifying Odour
Dynamic olfactometry, electronic noses (e-nose) and specific chemicals can be used (with varying success) to indicate the relative amount of odorous chemicals present in the air. This and other techniques for odour sampling and measurement are described in detail in Part 3.8.
Briefly, we could distinguish between sensorial, analytical and mixed methods. Sensory analysis, carried out prevalently using dynamic olfactometry, provides precise data on odour concentration, but it does not allow to evaluate the magnitude of the disturbance to which a population is exposed, nor can it determine the effective contribution of different sources to the level of environmental odour (Jiang, 1996; Sneath, 2001). The principal causes of the uncertainty of the olfactometric method are the significant biological variability in olfactic sensitivity and its inability to detect low odour concentration. Even though the introduction of criteria for the selection and behaviour coding of the panel has notably increased the repeatability and reproducibility of the measurements, the variability associated with the use of human subjects as detectors constitutes one of the principal limitations (Koster, 1985; Zarra et al., 2008b).
Analytical methods (GC-MS, colorimetric methods) allow the substances present to be screened and their concentrations identified, but they do not provide information on the odorous sensation produced by the mixture as a whole (Davoli, 2004; Zarra et al., 2007b; Zarra et al. 2008c). The analysis methods are also heavily influenced by the sampling techniques (Gostelow et al., 2001) which differ according to the type of source (areal or point, active or passive type) and the actual sampling methods (see Part 5). In order to reduce problems linked to sampling, a number of recent literary works propose the use of portable GC-MS analysers (Zarra et al., 2008b; Zarra et al., 2008c).
3. Effects of Odour
Odour exposure could cause annoyance and nuisance. A more serious effect, it may lead to feelings of nausea and headache, and other symptoms that appear to be related to stress. It has been postulated that the mechanism of ‘environmental worry’ helps to explain the occur- rence of physiological effects in people exposed to odorous substances at concentrations much lower than might be expected to lead to actual toxic effects (see Section 2.5).
Many odorous compounds are indeed toxic at high concentrations, and in extreme cases of acute exposure toxic effects such as skin, eye or nose irritation can occur. However, such effects are most likely to occur as the result of industrial accidents, such as the rupture of tanks containing toxic compounds or severe upset conditions in chemical or combustion processes.
Repeated exposure to odour can lead to a high level of annoyance, with the receiver becoming particularly sensitive to the odour. Complaints are most likely to come from individuals who are either physiologically or psychologically sensitive to the odour, and certainly a combination of both types of sensitivity will increase the likelihood of complaint. The individual components of an odour necessary to cause an adverse reaction from people are usually present in very low concentrations; far less than will cause adverse effects on physical health or impacts on any other part of the environment.
The odour threshold values for many chemicals are several orders of magnitude less than the relative threshold limit values (TLV). This means that the chemicals can be smelled at much lower concentrations than those causing adverse effects on health. Therefore, if present in sufficient quantities, these compounds would create an odour problem at much lower concentrations than would be needed to create a public health problem.
Despite these examples, it should not be assumed that odour thresholds will always be much lower than toxicological thresholds. The potential for significant adverse effects on public health from chemicals in odorous discharges should be considered on a case-by- case basis.
There is very little information available about the physiological effects of odour nui- sance on humans. However, it is known that prolonged exposure to environmental odours can generate undesirable reactions in people such as unease, irritation, discomfort, anger, depression, nausea, headaches or vomiting. In our experience, other effects reported by people subjected to environmental odours can include:
• difficulty breathing;
• frustration, stress and tear fulness;
• being woken during the night by the odour;
• odour invading the house and washing;
• reduced appetite and pleasure in eating,and difficulty preparing food;
• reduced comfort at night;
• reduce damenity due to the need;
• embarrassment when visitors experience the odours;
• reduced business due to prospective customers being affected by the odour.
All these aspects are related to odour attribute and the relative response of people, discussed in Part 2.
4. Odour Impact Assessment Approaches
Odour impact is defined as the alteration of air quality in terms of odours that cause nuisances. An assessment of odour impacts in the environment may need to be carried out for a variety of reasons, including:
preparing or evaluating resource consent applications, or impact assessments, for three separate categories:
1. renewing an existing activity,
2. proposed modifications to an existing activity (mitigation or process change),
3. proposed new activity.
1. renewing an existing activity, 2. proposed modifications to an existing activity (mitigation or process change), 3. proposed new activity. monitoring compliance withre source consent conditions;
investigating odour complaints to determine if an offensive or objectionable odour is present.
The methods used to assess the odours will depend on the type of situation. A number of different techniques for odour assessment are available and discussed in Part 7. The choices of the best tools to use for an odour assessment partly depend on whether the assessment is an evaluation or a compliance issue.
Evaluation involves assessing the actual and potential effects of an activity to determine whether significant adverse environmental effects will occur. If the consent is granted, the consent holder is then required to comply with (and be able to demonstrate compliance with) any conditions imposed as part of that consent. These two processes for evaluation and compliance are quite separate, and often the evaluation criteria are different to the criteria imposed as conditions of consent. Assessment tools can also be classified in two categories, methods with direct measure- ment of odour exposures or their assessment by dispersion modelling, and respectively:
1. Odour impact assessment from exposures measurement;
2. Odour impact assessment from sources.
All these tools with their strengths and weaknesses are discussed in Part 7, where the criteria for choosing the best one according to the specific situation are also presented.
Main References
Bertoni, D., Mazzali, P., and e Vignali A. (1993) Analisi e controllo degli odori. Quaderni di Tecniche di Protezione Ambientale n.28. Pitagora Editrice, Bologna.
Brennan, B. (1993) Odour nuisance. Water and Waste Treatment, 36, 30–33.
Dalton, P. (2002) Olfaction in Yantis, in Handbook of Experimental Psychology. S. Stevens (ed.), Vol. 1, Sensation and Perception, 3rd edn. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, pp. 691–746.
Davoli, E. (2004) I recenti sviluppi nella caratterizzazione dell’inquinamento olfattivo. Tutto sugli odori, Rapporti GSISR.
Devos, M., Patte, F., Rouault, S., et al. (1990) Standardized Human Olfactory Thresholds, p. 165. Oxford University Press, New York.
Gostelow, P., Parsons, S.A. and Stuetz, R.M. (2001). Odour measurements for sewage treatment works. Water Research, 35 (3), 579–597.
Jiang, J.K. (1996) Concentration measurement by dynamic olfactometer. Water Environ. Technol., 8, 55–58.
Koster, E.P. (1985) Limitations Imposed on Olfactometry Measurement by the Human Factor. Elsevier Applied Science.
Park, J.W. and Shin, H.C. (2001) Surface Emission of Landfill Gas from Solid Waste Landfill. Atmospheric Environment, 35 (20), 3445–3451.
Reiser, M., Zarra, T. and Belgiorno, V. (2007) Geruchsmessung mit allen Mitteln — wieaufwendig muss die Analytik von Geruchsemissionen sein? VDI
Berichte 1995, ‘Geru ̈che in der Umwelt’, 13–14 Novembre 2007, Bad Kissingen (D), ISBN: 978- 3–18–091995–9.
Shusterman D., Lipscomb, J., Neutra, R., and Kenneth, S. (1991). Symptom prevalence and odour-worry interaction near hazardous waste sites. Environmental Health Per- spectives, 94, 25–30.
Sneath, R.W. (2001) Olfactometry and the CEN Standard prEN13725, in Odours in Wastew- ater Treatment: Measurement, Modelling and Control. R. Stuetz and B.F. Frechen (eds), pp. 130–154, IWA Publishing.
Stuetz, R. and Frechen, F.B. (2001) Odours in Wastewater Treatment: Measurement, Mod- elling and Control. IWA Publishing, ISBN 1–900222–46–9.
Zarra, T. (2007b) Procedures for detection and modelling of odours impact from sanitary environmental engineering plants. PhD Thesis, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy.
Zarra, T., Naddeo, V. and Belgiorno, V. (2007a) Gestione e controllo delle emissioni odorigene da impianti di compostaggio con tecniche analitiche. ECOMONDO 2007, pp. 73–78, Maggioli Editore, ISBN: 978–88–387–3979-X.
Zarra, T., Naddeo, V. and Belgiorno, V. (2008a) Tecniche analitiche per la caratterizzazione delle emissioni di odori da impianti di compostaggio di rifiuti solidi urbani. Emissioni odorigene e Impatto olfattivo. Geva Edizioni.
Zarra, T., Naddeo, V. and Belgiorno, V. (2008c) A novel tool for estimating odour emis- sions of composting plants in air pollution management, in stampa su. Global Nest International Journal, 11 (I.4), 477–486.
Zarra, T., Naddeo, V., Belgiorno, V., et al. (2008b) New developments in monitoring and characterization of odour emissions — at the example of a biological waste water treatment plant. Zeitgema ̈ße Deponietechnik, 2008. Oldenburg GmbH, Vol. 88, ISBN 3–486–63102–0. | https://medium.com/energy-environment/environmental-odour-impacts-a2b6a391f0bc | ['Vincenzo Naddeo'] | 2020-11-10 14:30:59.200000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Odour', 'Pollution', 'Environment', 'Air Quality'] |
Why Speed (and any other positive adjective) is Terrible as a company value | Creating company values can be a step towards creating a company culture that aligns with the desires of the company leaders. They can also create confusion and are often ignored.
When done well, they provide a guide for people at all levels of a company to make decisions that the company directors themselves might make. When chosen poorly, they can cause stalemates, become outdated and be applied in ways never intended.
At one time, I worked at a company that had Speed as a company value. This seemed sensible at first look and I was initially on board. As the company grew and I witnessed how this value was used, however, I quickly changed my mind and realised how damaging this type of term can be when used as a company value.
Let’s consider the intention when someone sets Speed as a value. They’re saying they want value to get to clients/customers as soon as possible. The response when someone says that: No shit! Really?
Every company providing any goods or services wants things to be done sooner. They want ideas to be tested to get feedback, they want production pipelines to be shorter, they want typists to type faster, they want faster throughput in anything they do. In this context, saying that speed is a value provides literally zero value. You may as well have a value that says “We do good work”.
In my experience of management in software companies, zero value is actually better than average, so I would be okay with that. But it gets worse.
Any company, providing any product/service, struggles with the cost/quality/time triangle (sometimes cost/scope/time). Anything that any company or person provides for another has its own balance of these to produce whatever is their thing.
When a core value of a company is one of these balancing pillars, it skews any conversation about how to approach pretty much anything. Take staffing: ‘why wouldn’t we grow the team at this cost? Don’t you value speed?’. Take any software problem: ‘Why can’t we hack this together even if we’ll need to rewrite it next month?’. Any measure of quality: ‘Why can’t we ship this? Company value is speed. It says so on the wall over there’
As a company grows, especially a tech startup, operations shift from a small team who all sit in the same room to multiple departments that, especially now, might even be remote. Sure, there are so many companies that lament the feeling of speed they had in the early days, but the requirements of these teams are vastly different. As a team grows, sure people can do things quickly, but in order to actually be effective there is no getting around the overhead of communication, especially written communication.
The joke becomes, velocity is speed with a direction.
I’d like to mention a value that appears to go against what I’m saying. Ryanair values reducing costs. But more specifically they value reducing cost for their customers. This means that if a part costs more for the company, but maybe lasts longer or requires less maintenance then it reduces cost for the customers. This is a perfectly healthy company value.
Articulating the values you want in a team or company can be very difficult. They can be interpreted in so many ways. But, simply saying you want your team to be good won’t make them so. | https://medium.com/@stephen-beeson/why-speed-and-any-other-positive-adjective-is-terrible-as-a-company-value-2d20e2faea2 | ['Stephen Beeson'] | 2020-12-05 17:03:03.116000+00:00 | ['Management And Leadership', 'Software Development'] |
Paving the way | Use-cases
AI & Big Data
AI and Big Data are two buzzwords that everyone heard at least once before. They are genuinely transformative technologies that have nearly unlimited upside potential. The automation of work that began in the early XVIII century with the steam engine’s apparition leads to a massive industrialization trend and advancements that were impossible to achieve since the birth of humanity. This movement sparked an explosion of innovations and discoveries that enabled the human race to conquer the space two centuries later.
Machine learning and, more recently, deep learning have the same potential to disrupt and innovate industries beyond our current understanding. We are at the dawn of a new era of our civilization, and the current state of AI can be compared to the first steam engine; it works and does the job but can be improved thousand of times both in scale and efficiency. It can be improved in the same way the rocket engine was the culmination of generations of improvements upon the stream engine helping humankind put a step on the Moon’s soil.
However, deep learning algorithms require a lot of raw data and computational power to process and train to achieve better results — the parameters of the networks are adapted dynamically with every new pair of training data and its result. This uncovers one of the secrets of deep learning: data. Data is the new oil. The more data you have, the more precise the results will be. The downside is that big data means immense computational power.
Today, the most widespread neural networks have obtained their parameters by running over vast GPU-powered clusters. We believe the next major movement regarding artificial intelligence and deep learning would be to run deep learning algorithms on a “global supercomputer” by leveraging the DLT to function. It should employ algorithms to evenly distribute those tasks on subsets of nodes that are part of the network and can handle the job (i.e., are equipped with GPUs or specific hardware).
Nonetheless, deep learning algorithms have many applications, some that are already mainstream, mainly in the fields of computer vision like autonomous driving, natural language processing like real-time translation, the automation of tasks like RPA, and many more.
DAOs and DACs
Decentralization is a core feature of any cryptocurrency network, and its adopters should be the ones that dictate the path and vision of it in a pseudonymous and decentralized way. Zenon Alphanet release offers the complete infrastructure for users to vote or propose new ideas and upgrade or enhance the network according to their vision. Combining the governance system with the delegation feature where ZNN coins act as votes, Zenon becomes a DAO following its community’s rules. Leveraging smart contracts and the upcoming SDKs, anyone can create, deploy, manage, and interact with DAOs or DACs. Even more, exciting and brand new use-cases can arise if they are further enhanced with AI.
Oracles
Any DLT network needs to have the ability to interact with external data. Oracles are designed to supply and feed external information into the network, and they represent the bridge between on-chain smart contracts and off-chain data. Sentinels and sentries will have the possibility to act as oracle nodes for the Zenon ecosystem. They can validate data from various applications and industries such as prediction markets, supply chain management to more complex areas such as DeFi (insurance, loans, stablecoins, etc.).
Secure Data Storage
Network nodes process and store transactional data inside a decentralized ledger accessible for everyone, anytime. Any sensitive records, such as financial documents or biometric data, can be safely stored and retrieved. Each record will have a unique hash, and its authenticity can be instantly validated, without having the prospect of modifying the information in any way. Paired with a next-generation protocol like IPFS, it can offer endless possibilities for various domains such as real estate, accounting, notary services, etc.
Decentralized Digital Identity
One of the main qualities of a DLT is its immutability. A decentralized digital identity service can foresee and prevent digital tampering, replicated identities, and identity theft. Blockchain-based solutions promise to pave a way to reimagine identity services, and Zenon will offer the tools to build such services.
The digital era has confirmed to be shifting to a more knowledgeable society, taking advantage of the current emerging technologies. Artificial intelligence is influencing the fate of practically every industry and every human being; together with Big Data, IoT, DAOs, and Oracles, DLT will create a solid foundation for any type of IT&C system.
To summarize, Zenon will attempt to add value and deliver solutions in four primary areas of interest: | https://medium.com/@zenon.network/paving-the-way-1332f61a66b2 | [] | 2020-10-07 15:02:42.186000+00:00 | ['Distributed Ledgers', 'Zenon Network', 'Zenon', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Open Urban Mapping — Russia. Hooray! We have recently completed… | Segmentation tackles these challenges tolerably well, but building classification (residential/commercial/etc.), which is an important in our commercial product, will likely perform poor results.
The numbers and the proposed Release plan
To test the data and stay updated, check out our GitHub repository.
We’ll be publishing the data by region, starting with those regions where we surpass the current state of the OSM by count the most (Geoalert (Free) / OSM).
Aggregated statistics for the regions are already there and can be accessed by the reference in the repository.
Top regions of the Russian Federation by the count ratio of buildings (Geoalert / OSM)
Republic of Chechnya
The first place in rating is taken by the Republic of Chechnya, a rather remote and rural region, for which only the capital city of Grozny is mapped in the OSM, while most of the other municipalities only contain administrative boundaries and main roads. Neither is the coverage better for Chechnya in the commercial maps such as Google or 2GIS or Yandex Maps, which normally have the most detailed data for Russia.
The private sector has been actively developed and changed over the past years, therefore it differs by more than two times with our premium based satellite imagery output (220 K vs 490 K).
To see how the building footprints are distributed among the municipalities of Chechnya, we queried OSM for administrative boundaries and managed to find 314 borders out of 360 declared officially. This indicates that most settlements (55%) can be uploaded to the OSM as is, without the risk of data conflicts. Here is a couple of graphs for clarity:
Moscow region
As you can see from the rating above even the well-covered Moscow region comes in the top of it. However the difference between the results obtained from commercial imagery, and those from Mapbox Satellite, is relatively small.
Since the mosaic of Mapbox Sattelite images has the better quality for the Moscow region than for the territories of Chechnya or Tyva, the generated dataset has less missing objects (calculated through Recall) as well as less false positives (calculated through Precision). The predicted building classes are also added (see the class_id attribute).
This dataset contains more than 2.6M features!
Getting statistics within the settlements boundaries (data from OSM), it’s gonig to turn out that approximately 9% (or 900+ settlements) do not contain any building features. Basically, these are “dachas” (small settlements) with the area smaller than 1 sq. km, but among of them there are also 3+ sq. km.
67% contain fewer in OSM than in Geoalert Open Urban Mapping. Count ratio for the total area is 2.8
Data Downloading, Validation and Import — what to do next
All statistics to play with can be found here. You are welcome to copy and reuse them as you wish.
All dataset can be downloaded via the link posted on the project’s Github: https://github.com/Geoalert/urban-mapping
An obvious question that arises when preparing data for imports into OSM is how to avoid data overlap conflicts. The Geoalert platform automatically merges the predicted building footprints with the current OSM data fetching it through Overpass turbo API. At this stage the algorithm compares the predicted building footprints with those presented in OSM for the given area, and if both sufficiently overlap (IoU), it replaces the model output with the one taken from OSM and merges the attributes. Such features have its attribute “is_osm” set to True and should be excluded from the import.
Footprints merged with those in OSM are shown in green (Kaah-Khem, Tyva)
The other question we were asked by the users — how to reduce the data size to upload it into JOSM (stand-alone OSM editor) without slowing down the application.
In the future, we look forward to extracting our data in small batches, but for now the suggested way is to use GDAL or QGIS to clip it by the smaller areas you re going to validate and import.
The OpenStreetMap community has strict rules as to what data can be imported and how it must be imported. To abide by these rules, we have created a page for our project in the OSM Wiki (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geoalert_Open_Urban_Mapping).
We hope that the OSM community will help us with validation of Open Urban Mapping data according to the established rules.
As a conclusion
To use or not to use automatically generated data is always a trade-off between the desirable quality of the cartographic work and the time devoted to it. By our estimates for some cartographic tasks it can speed up the whole process ten times and more.
As we see the growing number of projects around OSM using or implementing AI assisted mapping — we will see more companies contribute and permit to use more recent and/or better quality imagery for humanitarian response and for filling gaps in the world map which still is far from its completeness.
OSM populated area coverage statistics. Source: https://disaster.ninja/.
More to come. Stay tuned!
References | https://medium.com/geoalert-platform-urban-monitoring/open-urban-mapping-russia-ca978dfb4636 | [] | 2020-10-22 16:11:12.777000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Openstreetmap', 'Mapbox', 'Urban Planning', 'Earth Observation'] |
Key things I picked up while working with Scala | Technology vector created by fullvector
As an individual who, up until only a couple months back, predominantly worked with languages such as Java and C#, Scala seemed like a whole new world. In the beginning, it was quite challenging to grasp and get comfortable with as it was so different from what I was used to. Now, coming toward the end of my 4 month co-op placement here at Hootsuite, I’d like to share some of the things I learned whilst working with Scala.
No more Null values
NullPointerExceptions are thrown when a method unexpectedly returns null and when this possibility is unhandled in code. Code bases and patterns I was more familiar with would generally be scattered with many instances of these if item != null or try/catch statements as a safety check in order to avoid this and similar exceptions.
I soon came to realize how null is not really a necessity as it’s merely a representation of an optional value that can be absent. In Scala, the idea of returning null is strongly discouraged as we prefer an explicit type representation. Scala, therefore, provides the opportunity for a type safe, clean and error handled code base, where we use practices such as an Option , Either , or Try .
Option:
Option is a way to represent values that may or may not be available. Option[T] holds the optional value of type T which is either an instance of Some[T] , if there is a value present, or, an instance of the object None , if there is an absence of value.
def name(first: String, last: String): Option[String] = {
if (valid case) Some(first + last)
else None
}
Having the method signature return with an Option[T] , explicitly informs the caller if there is some value, they will get Some[T] for use or if there is a possible absence, a None is returned. We can then use pattern matching, Scala’s version of a switch statement, to handle these cases:
val greeting: String = maybeName match {
case Some(name) => “Hello ” + name //ex returns “Hello John Doe”
case None => “Hello No Name”
}
Either:
Either, similarly to Option, is an instance of two types: either a Left or a Right. By convention, Right is used on a successful return of our expected value, much like Some[T] is. Left is used as a replacement of None , a failure path in which we are presented with a missing value. Unlike Option, Either allows us to smoothly throw specific exceptions or other types of errors instead of merely returning None . This, thereby, provides the caller with more context when something goes awry.
def name(first: String, last: String): Option[Exception, String] = {
if (valid case) Right(first + last)
else Left(new NoNameException(“Invalid Name”))
}
Try:
Try, similar to both Option and Either, results in a successful computed value or some throwable in the case of error. Try[T] , if successful, is an instance of Success[T] and results in the value of type T . It is an instance of Failure[T] , however, if during computation something unexpected occurs.
def name(first: String, last: String): Try[String] = {
if (valid case) Success(first + last)
else Failure(new NoNameException(“Invalid Name”))
}
Having the return type to be Try[T] , informs the caller that the computation can result in an error and they need to deal with the possibility of it.
val greeting: String = maybeName match {
case Success(name) => “Hello ” + name
case Failure(exception) => “Hello No Name”
}
Benefits:
These changes result in both more explicit and refined code. Using Option , Either , and Try also led me to understand a new style of programming and, more importantly, a powerful and cleaner approach to handling errors.
Using Higher Order Functions
One thing quite unfamiliar when learning Scala code was trying to understand a more functional programming approach on things. Being used to objects, constructors, getters, setters, and so on, in Scala all these boilerplates and accustomed patterns were gone. What became very recurrent was the use of higher order functions, and as a result, I was deeply exposed to working with them.
A higher order function is simply one that can take other functions as parameters and can return other functions. This allows functions to be passed as arguments to other functions. Map is a key example of a highly used higher order function.
.map
Map is commonly used to perform an operation on each element of a collection, resulting in a new one. Say we are given a list of integers and we want to double the value of each element, we can use .map :
val myList = List(1, 2, 3)
val myNewList = myList.map(i => i * 2)
// List(2, 4, 6)
The compiler knows the parameter type based on the type .map expects, so no need to explicitly declare int i . Moreover, in Scala, an underscore is a placeholder for parameters inside anonymous functions, so a shorthand practice, we can also use an _ to write the same code:
val myList = List(1, 2, 3)
val myNewList = myList.map(_ * 2)
// List(2, 4, 6)
Other collections, like the List example used above, have their own map method. For example the Map Collection:
val myMap = Map(“a” -> 1, “b” -> 2, “c” -> 3)
val newMyMap = myMap.map{case (key, value) => key -> (value * 2)}
// Map(“a” -> 2, “b” -> 4, “c” -> 6)
Shorthand:
val myMap = Map(“a” -> 1, “b” -> 2, “c” -> 3)
val newMyMap = myMap.mapValues(i => i * 2)}
// Map(“a” -> 2, “b” -> 4, “c” -> 6)
Small Aside: Immutability and Referential Transparency
Immutable means that we cannot change or mutate variables. In Scala, we prefer immutable code.
Referentially transparency refers to if functions evaluate to the same result given the same argument values. This is an ideal practice and requires functions to be free of any outside sources that can modify it’s behaviour. To clarify what I mean with an example:
def timesTwo(x: Integer): Integer {
x * 2
}
Given timesTwo(3) , we know that passing in 6 in place of this method will provide the same output, however:
var two = 2
def timesTwo(x: Integer): Integer {
x * two
}
Because the variable two can be modified by external sources, this method is not referentially transparent as the call timesTwo(3) may not always result in 6 now.
Benefits of Map:
So what are the benefits of .map versus say a for loop? Well, this is a lot more polished and uses less lines of code than if we were to use a for loop for the exact same output. Maps also provide the immutability factor which for loops lack. Although for loops can be written, albeit with more code involved, to account for not modifying the original collection, maps provide this immutability cleanly. In addition, Map works inside its own scope and utilities the variables within. A for loop may need variables outside of its scope, further increasing the overall chance for unwarranted mistakes.
.flatMap
FlatMap, can be thought of as a combination of the .map function followed by .flatten for the final result. Flatten meshes a collection of collections to create one single collection with the elements now becoming the same type.
val myList = List(List(1,2), List(3))
val newMyList = myList.flatten
// List(1,2,3)
FlatMap is a lot more powerful than Map as it allows us to chain operations together and it also becomes extremely useful when we are working with optional values. For instance, say we have a list of strings and we want to convert them to a list of integers:
val strings = List(“1”, “2”, “a”, “b”, “3”)
using .map , we have Some and None in our list because toInt cannot convert strings “a” and “b” to integers:
val mapStrings = strings.map(toInt)
// List(Some(1), Some(2), None, None, Some(3))
using .flatMap , this can be avoided:
val flatMapStrings = strings.flatMap(toInt)
// List(1,2,3)
For Comprehensions
At first, when trying to comprehend Scala code, it was quite difficult for me to have a clear understanding of what these .map on top of numerous more .map functions were doing. For-comprehensions which, not to be confused with for loops, are syntactic sugars for the organization of multiple operations. Example, this line of code:
a.flatMap(x => b.map(y => function(x, y))
…is equivalent to the following piece, but using for-comps:
for {
x <- a
y <- b
} yield function(x, y)
The <- are calls to .flatMap and the yield calls .map . An = may used for any other basic variable assignments. Furthermore, see how it is much more clear to comprehend? One notable benefit of for-comprehensions are that they allow code to become a lot more understandable as it greatly improves readability when dealing with numerous operations.
Final Thoughts
Although I mentioned the difficulty of Scala numerous times, it is now by far one of the most rewarding languages I have learned and I hope this sheds some aid to anyone learning Scala for the first time! 🤗 | https://medium.com/hootsuite-engineering/keys-things-i-picked-up-while-working-with-scala-51fe335f92aa | ['Mayesha Kabir'] | 2019-08-29 22:45:51.551000+00:00 | ['Sofware Development', 'Functional Programming', 'Co Op', 'Scala'] |
How an Ordinary Experience Led me to Extraordinary Opportunity | A family friend helped me get my first job. At the age of sixteen, dressing sandwiches with a smile became my life. As often as I could, I would show up to work and learn everything I could about Subway. For every six-inch piece of bread; each customer was allotted three slices of cheese on their selection. I was to always upsell cookies at the end of the line and not forget that additional toppings cost extra.
In my teenage years, my mind was set on making something of myself. The path to get there was uncertain but the grit to succeed well intact. I would do my job well; I had to. I came from a single-parent household and watched my mother work multiple jobs as I grew up. As the age of adolescence passed, I needed to show I could pull my own weight. No longer would my wallet be reduced to minimal allowances but instead I would earn my own money. No more begging for cash or doing odd tasks for a few dollars. I wanted what every kid from humble beginnings wants: to provide and to make money.
But that wasn’t enough. One day an older gentlemen came into Subway. His suit was tailored and he had a car that I had only seen in commercials. He spoke of his business and a prospective deal he was working on. I looked down at my employee shirt, then back at him. At that moment, I knew there had to be more. I served him well but that moment plagued me for months. That man’s lifestyle was foreign to me. There was no example of people like him where I came from. The divide between the businessman and I was glaringly obvious. It’s the travesty that plagues our nation to this day. Football would be my way to achieve that sort of success. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way for many. One percent of student athletes in high school make it on the collegiate level; and one percent of collegiate athletes succeed to professional heights.
President Obama has called for our society to be the bridge for the young man l was. He calls for investments in first jobs for young people, and I urge America’s leading companies to lead that charge. Young people don’t only need jobs, they deserve hope and a glimpse of their future. I’ll never forget the moment at Subway where I first saw an example of what I could be — and the lasting effect it had on me.
There is a need for young people to be exposed to the professional environment. This experience provides hands-on, applicable learning that produces skills transferable to any career they choose to pursue later in life. They need to learn simple things like being on time, an understanding of workplace responsibility, and presentation training. Summer jobs provide a pathway to all of those skills, and more.
Now that I’m in a position of leadership, I hired a young adult to work in my non-profit organization. He’s smart and intelligent, but extremely raw. What he lacks in skill, he makes up for in determination and will. I’m excited that I get to offer him exposure to a world he’s never experienced. Let’s commit ourselves to a future where young people are not bound by their socioeconomic status but instead extended an opportunity that will last a lifetime.
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn | https://medium.com/revenge-of-the-jocks/how-an-ordinary-experience-led-me-to-extraordinary-opportunity-34dae2d15fa7 | ['Russell Okung'] | 2016-11-07 19:23:29.386000+00:00 | ['Opportunity', 'Revenge Of The Jocks', 'Education', 'Diversity In Tech', 'Startup'] |
Live Free or … | It is perfectly perfect she feels discontent!
When malignant power demands she be pent.
It is perfectly fine to shout: This is not fine!
It is her right unspoken to draw the Stop line!
The curve of her nature so beautifully swirls.
Her Choice is her Lord in the New Normal World!
The colorful quirks pen the might of her goal —
No dread-foisted netting would flatten her soul!
Her body, her judgment, her personal flavor —
“My wholeness is sacred!”, her voice would not quaver.
The intimate moments amidst jolly sociable —
Stealing this wealth would be never negotiable!
Her elements work in a synergic coherence,
To counter the novel life-changing appearance.
Her mind punctures holes in the petty, false tale!
The shield of her reason would not ever fail.
She doesn’t feel threatened by invisible prowlers!
Ending the folly and exposing the crawlers
Is a lifelong commitment — she never would stray.
None of her liberties she will ever betray! | https://medium.com/no-crime-in-rhymin/live-free-or-279c981bf56b | ['Tonia Nem'] | 2020-05-16 03:18:36.552000+00:00 | ['Creative Writing', 'Pandemic', 'No Crime In Rhymin', 'Freedom', 'Poetry'] |
The perpetual pain of living in a in a dystopian, communist country ruled by Third-Worldism | Today’s post is not about discussing writers, poets or philosophers. It’s about opening up and expressing the feelings that a country like Venezuela can cause on its inhabitants.
I am not going to talk about the typical problems of not being able to have savings for a house, or a car (because, unlike normal countries, the salary that a graduated professional can aspire to is about $40 a month, and that’s not the minimum wage stipulated by government law). Today, I’m referring to the homeless. The elder, the children, mothers, adolescents, families and so on.
The amount of homeless people (and others who, despite having a roof to sleep on, no longer have money to eat) is staggering. When I was a child, there where some, as every city has… but they were so few that one could actually remember them and recognize them. Nowadays, that’s simply impossible.
There are so many children, grandmas and adults wandering the streets that one can’t keep count on them. And every time you see them, there it goes. That feeling of sadness that gives you goosebumps. All you see on their eyes is anger, hunger, desperation and sadness. I can’t speak for everyone else, but at least, I can say that every time I look in their eyes, it’s like they could steal a small piece of my soul.
It’s truly saddening to know that, as long as the communist regime that leads my country remains in power, there will be more and more impoverished people who will eventually become homeless. Its maddening to know that you can only help a few.
And this is just one of the “little” things that leave sequels in one’s mind. There are images that I will never be able to erase from my mind: grandparents dressed as complete civilians (not in rags), walking in the street and opening the garbage to rummage.
A young man in a bank uniform running to a trash can from a restaurant to find something worthwhile. In a country like Venezuela it is not necessary to dress in rags so that people recognize a hungry person: 80% of the population is hungry. | https://medium.com/@tanya-akkari/the-perpetual-pain-of-living-in-a-in-a-dystopian-communist-country-ruled-by-third-worldism-c0262370928d | ['Tanya Akkari'] | 2020-03-07 00:26:47.427000+00:00 | ['Venezuela', 'Communism', 'Venezuelan Politics', 'Dystopia', 'Poverty'] |
How to Quit Smoking… | After listening to a short conversation and grazing over Allen Carr’s “Easy Way To Quit Smoking” I realized it really is that easy.
Like turning a light switch off or on-you are either ready or not. The first and fourth days are the toughest for me. Once you make it through the first few hours of withdrawel you have a choice to make. End the discomfort, or embrace it totally. If you choose the latter, you will begin to feel better immeditely. If you choose to view yourself as as non smoker, you will be. Actively smell your hands, clothes, car, and home. Enjoy a fresh candle or a clean breeze coming through the window without the cloud of smoke staining the moment.
My simple suggestions have worked for me and a handful of friends, and i hope they help you or a loved one as well!
Start on a Friday. Take the day off and emphasize that your only goal in the entire world (for the next few days at least) is to start a new chapter. I dont care who you are, when you wake up on a workday without having to go in-it still feels like a snowday.
Waking up with the satisfaction of a day off will be a reminder that you deserve better, and you have earned it. This is the ideal tone to set for this journey.
Now, the only two activities for this weekend can be put in two categories: exercise and self care.
Everyone has their own definition of the two and there are no rules here. Living in Northeast Ohio provides the opportunity to bike and hike our many trails through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park system. Fresh air, sweat, and sunshine are the perfect combination to overcome a craving. They are also great reminders that there are fun and rewarding endeavors on the other side of smoking.
Taking a walk, calisthenics, gym time, whatever it might be-exercise is essential.
“Self Care” also has many definitions and can even carry a negative connotation with some people. I have been there and understand how hard it can be to put yourself first. One of the scariest aspects for me was an underlying fear that I would love it, and quit putting everyone else’s needs before mine. That fear came true, and I couldnt be happier. It feels great to help people, but even better when your own affairs are in order first.
My weekend included a lot of meditation via YouTube, reading via Summit County Public Library, and stretching. Hours of stretching. Candles, comfort food, great coffee (one cup-not in the morning), tea, classic film, stupid comedies, loud music, holes punched in walls, lots of Serenity Prayers, contemplation, and observation.
Any other weekend would consist of minimal amounts of the above activities. Overshadowed by bars, and house parties, beers, beers, greasy food, and NetFlix. As much as I do enjoy those things, my underlying fear that they were a great way to avoid facing my problems was showing itself as a reality. My fear that there is a better way for ME to live and that I will have to leave the known and the people and the drinks and the places and the Parliament Lights in order to see what else is out there-that fear was actualized.
I wish I had one of those Medium style articles that baited you with a “4 easy ways…” type headline to make quitting smoking easy. But the truth is you dont want to quit smoking….
You want to start living.
My real advice-you fucking deserve it. Treat this endeavor as if your life depends on it, because it does. | https://medium.com/@TryingAgain/how-to-quit-smoking-254e05c6801b | ['Joseph James'] | 2021-08-23 02:04:01.658000+00:00 | ['Self Care', 'Self', 'Improvement', 'Life', 'Sobriety'] |
Travel Show Pivots to Livestream Spa & Beauty Treats: Stay Happy and Healthy During the “Corona-cation”. | Y’all may have heard that we were spa-ing and shopping our way across the USA, to produce Style Holladay a shopping channel meets Travel Channel show and supplement to Life’s A Holladay podcast. But something happened along the way: the coronavirus.
Two weeks ago I wasn’t worried. I’ve been upping my immune system since way back and it just seemed like it couldn’t touch me. But now, worries that I could inadvertently catch the dang thing whilst traveling and become a carrier — means I grounded myself.
Doesn’t it seem surreal? It’s as if we’re all in a science fiction movie. Normally bustling towns, attractions, offices even my beloved spas and shops practically abandoned. I saw last night (as I was Netflixing “The Great British Bake Off”) that the movie “Outbreak” was a top download — jeez!
Roadtrip To Be Continued. . .
What could I do? I felt bad for the sick, the homebound & the businesses that have helped me in my endeavors. Kapow! It hit me, I had learned to livestream for the shopping show and had to switch platforms due to the um, failure to launch well, with the first choice.
The new platform allows me to co-livestream with spa & style experts no matter where in the world they are. So why not livestream WITH the spas remotely? Social distance, check, not spreading germs, check, bringing the spa virtually to y’all, check, check!
We’re broadcasting Spa Treats, Healthy Cooking, DIY Beauty Treats, Fashion Episodes and Travel Tours, it’s a Corona-Spa-Cation! Some shows will even be shoppable. Because we’ll be live, be sure to subscribe to our Spa Suitcase eletter for heads up on upcoming episodes.
You can watch the livestream live on CandyHolladay.com, Art of the Spa facebook, Candy Holladay youtube and partner facebook pages. Playbacks will be available for select episodes.
Until this madness finds a resolution, may we all build and find strength, comfort and joy — and spa time- with each other.
Spa cheers, Candy
PS If you’re interested in collaborating on a spa, healthy, beauty or fashion live experience, or have a spa, product or topic you’d like to see on the show, contact me at SpaWithCandy(at)SpaBrunch.com. Sample episode available. | https://medium.com/@candyholladay/shopping-travel-show-pivots-to-spa-livestream-in-aid-of-coronavirus-cabin-fever-b8f1ed590d1c | ['Candy Holladay'] | 2020-03-19 05:04:26.185000+00:00 | ['Fashion', 'Livestream', 'Beauty', 'Health', 'TV Shows'] |
Hacking the Hunger Hormone | Appetite may sound like an all-powerful barely extant Greek goddess…
But in reality, it garners many more followers and worshippers than a real goddess ever could.
The mysteries of when we get hungry, when we don’t, and what we get hungry for have answers as vast and varied as the questions asked.
Some hunger clocks run like autonomous machines, barely warranting a second thought. And some are so erratic that their host bodies end up with eating disorders, weight gain, low energy, or unhealthy cravings.
Prominent and curious scientists have come to study ghrelin, a particular hormone associated with hunger, to begin to form answers.
Ghrelin: a hormone mostly produced and secreted by the stomach, though small amounts are also released by the small intestine, pancreas, and brain. It has several jobs, but it mainly awakens appetite, triggers food consumption, and encourages fat storage.
Okay, so ghrelin makes you hungry.
Is it really as simple as that?
Here’s how it actually works…
Ghrelin’s Journey
When you feel hunger, it’s because ghrelin has reached your brain in a significant enough proportion to cause the brain to tell you to eat.
But ghrelin actually does more than that.
It also has an effect on circadian rhythms, the way we taste food, how we seek rewards, and how we metabolize carbohydrates. It’s a pretty busy hormone.
In fact, ghrelin is also commonly held responsible for weight gain in dieters — when the body isn’t used to restricting food access, it produces more ghrelin to try to convince you to eat the way you were eating before, as a survival mechanism.
When your stomach is empty, or at least empty at a time when it isn’t used to being empty, your stomach makes ghrelin and sends it to the hypothalamus — that’s the part of the brain that deals with your hormones and appetite.
Once the hypothalamus receives enough ghrelin, a few things happen…
Your body hangs on to fat. This has an evolutionary purpose — if the body is hungry, and there isn’t any food around, it’ll slow down the thermogenesis of brown fat (a type of fat that is awakened by cold). Your body wants to make sure that if you starve, it’s got energy reserves saved up for you.
The stomach prepares for food to reach it in a process called gastric motility — basically, it becomes stretchy!
You notice you have an appetite. Scientists have found that ghrelin levels are highest in the bloodstream just before you eat, but decrease for up to three hours after you eat.
It would seem that being able to control ghrelin could be a powerful tool in regulating appetite, which most people consider the hardest part about maintaining healthy eating habits.
How to Master It
There are a few ways to tame what may be an unruly or overactive production of ghrelin…
First and foremost, make sure that you’re eating your meals at around the same time every day. Remember, your circadian rhythm is involved, and if you’re not hungry at consistent times, you’ll need to train your body to return to hunger in the morning, afternoon, and early evening.
The more regular your meal times, the more controlled your body’s release of ghrelin will be.
Next, sleeping unrestful, not enough, or at varying times can disrupt your natural production of ghrelin and even increase it.
Sleep can also increase your body’s production of a hormone called leptin, which can help you to eat smaller portions and less frequently!
When you’re trying to lose weight, it’s important to note that the more and faster you lose weight, the more your body tries to get it back by telling the brain to eat… with ghrelin.
Slow and steady weight loss helps you to keep the weight off for longer periods of time since your body isn’t panicking at the thought of how it will survive as you’re rapidly losing mass!
And remember, ghrelin is stimulated by an empty stomach — so don’t let your stomach get empty! Light snacking on healthy foods with low caloric density (high water content) can help you to stay feeling full without needing heavy, high-calorie meals.
Our language around weight loss, dieting, and hunger can be very toxic.
It’s vital that we acknowledge there is no morality inherent in being over, under, or average weight. We are just a mass of electrified signals trying to survive — when your body tells you it’s hungry, it only wants what’s best for you!
You can help your hormones and yourself by training your body to release hunger hormones only when necessary.
If you enjoyed these thoughts and think we’ve got something in common, I have a feeling you’re going to love the Urban Monk Academy. It’s the home of every class I teach — from Qi Gong to Life Gardening to Dream Yoga to Gut Health and even Tantra — and for two weeks, you can try it for free. | https://medium.com/@pedramshojai/hacking-the-hunger-hormone-913a606cd251 | ['Pedram Shojai'] | 2021-06-10 16:55:29.911000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Food', 'Weight Loss', 'Health', 'Eating Disorders'] |
Advancing Equity: A Generational Legacy | Photo credit: Rachel Hodgdon
Looking at legislative and corporate governance advances in the US over the last several years, it would be easy to view the progress we’ve made in the struggle for greater equity as a twenty-first-century phenomenon.
And yet, it’s important to acknowledge these achievements — the landmark 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, for example — not merely as a product of recent social enlightenment but as the result of many generations of activism. Taking a broader historical perspective also makes it less likely we’ll take our successes for granted. If we can learn anything from the past, it’s that freedoms are hard won — and even harder kept.
As part of the work we’ve been doing at IWBI around health equity, I’ve been thinking a lot about how many people — even in a wealthy country like America — are disadvantaged from birth by circumstances over which they have no control, often encountering discriminatory behaviors throughout their lives that prevent them from fulfilling their potential.
These systemic prejudices impact personal, social and professional opportunities, impoverishing our nation’s political, economic and cultural landscape. It’s a deeply embedded societal pattern that’s hard to disrupt.
Racial and gendered biases have been skewing our society for centuries: while #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter social movements have recently become powerful platforms for action, the wounds they aim to heal have accrued over generations. The drive for real and lasting change has undoubtedly garnered momentum in the last few years but we can all recognize its roots in the very same struggles our parents and grandparents have been confronting for decades.
Both my grandmothers were notionally disadvantaged — by their gender, ethnicity and religion — and yet the lives they chose to lead have positively impacted my view of the world and of what I can achieve in it.
My maternal grandmother was the first from her family (with a lineage that could be traced back for thousands of years) to marry a non-Chinese person. Her husband, my grandfather, was a fair-skinned, red-haired, Irish Catholic, whose family cut ties with him after he married my grandmother. My paternal grandmother lost her husband when my dad was just six years old, leaving her a young widow, a working mother and the sole Jewish lady in town. Over the course of their lives both my grandmothers experienced prejudice from many people in many places.
As a child, my otherness was always evident and could have been a source of anxiety or shame. But my experience as part of this extraordinary family tree was an inclusive one. Rather than feeling ashamed of the things that set me apart from my peers — whether it was the color of my skin or because I was the only Jewish kid in the class — I was brought up to be proud of the things that made me different.
It’s not always an easy way to live, though. I’m lucky to have enjoyed the support that has underpinned my personal and professional progress. I wasn’t worried about coming out to my family or community. Though I know it’s a harrowing experience for many. Thanks to their courage, my grandmothers were able to pass on a legacy of open-mindedness that lives in me, and informs my thinking, to this day.
We’ve seen that it takes generations to unravel legacies of bias, injustice, and hate that have deeply rooted themselves in the minds and hearts of individuals and societies as a whole. We can already witness the cultural changes that are happening as members of Gen-Z and Millennials increasingly occupy leadership roles and call upon their organizations, governments and communities to examine and redress injustice and inequality.
Activism isn’t all about grand gestures: the change that can happen when we consistently disrupt social patterns is exciting and powerful. Continuing important work, whether by following in the footsteps of civil rights leaders or of quiet activists like my grandmothers can lead to profound shifts in perspective and culture — whether it’s marriage rights, voting rights or the law that is currently being considered by Congress to increase federal protections for women and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
The struggles we’ve seen play out in 2020 have exposed a dark underbelly of discriminatory and prejudiced thinking that still pervades our society. At IWBI we know that organizations have a critical role to play in creating places where everyone has an equal opportunity to do their best work, to be healthy and well, and ultimately to thrive. We want WELL to be a roadmap for doing just that, building upon the 25 WELL features that address themes across justice, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
We’re calling upon leaders in advancing health equity from activists, to executives, to religious leaders to identify how to strengthen WELL as a vehicle for leveling the playing field for everyone everywhere. If you’re inspired to join our movement, you can contact us at [email protected].
Rachel Hodgdon is President and CEO of the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), a public benefit corporation and the world’s leading organization focused on deploying people first places to advance a global culture of health. | https://medium.com/@rachel-hodgdon/advancing-equity-a-generational-legacy-fe6a62c584d5 | ['Rachel Hodgdon'] | 2020-12-15 17:18:43.858000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Equity', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Leadership', 'Diversity'] |
There’s a new player in the OLED TV market: Skyworth will offer OLED and LCD smart TVs in the U.S. in 2021 | There’s a new player in the OLED TV market: Skyworth will offer OLED and LCD smart TVs in the U.S. in 2021 Charlie Jan 15·2 min read
Skyworth had a big CES footprint in 2020, but the global pandemic interfered with its plans to ship its smart TVs in the U.S. market. The company plans to make that happen in 2021, and its lineup will include an OLED smart TV using a panel manufactured in the fab it co-owns with LG.
Skyworth won’t rely on OLED alone to raise brand awareness. It will also ship a wide range of LED-backlit LCD TVs, ranging from the super-budget 1080p TC6200 series (32-inch and 43-inch); to the mid-range 4K UHD UC6200 series (50-inch to 75-inch) and UC7500 series (43-inch through 65-inch); and the high-end UC8500 series (55- and 65-inch) with variable refresh rate (up to 120Hz) for gaming. The company did not provide pricing information.
[ Further reading: TechHive’s top picks in smart TVs ] Skyworth Skyworth’s low-end UC6200 sereies still features 4K UHD resolution.
All U.S. Skyworth TVs will run Android TV 10. The UC7500 series and above feature Bluetooth 5.0. The 55- and 65-inch XC9300 OLED series and the UC8500-series LCD series will sport high-end goodies such as HDR, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. These sets will also be equipped with far-field microphones for voice control.
Skyworth Skyworth’s high-end UC8500-series of LCD smart TV feature quantum-dot technology and support Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos
Skyworth is new to the U.S. market, but they’re no babe in the woods. The privately owned Chinese manufacturer is 33 years old and has been player in the worldwide consumer electronics market for more than 20 years. We have yet to test any of the company’s TVs, but if they’re fab partners with LG, we expect good things.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@charlie11754764/theres-a-new-player-in-the-oled-tv-market-skyworth-will-offer-oled-and-lcd-smart-tvs-in-the-u-s-263409237731 | [] | 2021-01-15 11:03:10.262000+00:00 | ['Internet', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Electronics', 'Home Tech'] |
A Fábrica de Arquitetos VII - Mediator Pattern + MediatR | Welcome, my name is Lucas and i’m 20 years old and i’m .Net Developer over 5 years ago. Let’s Code! | https://medium.com/@lucas.eschechola/a-f%C3%A1brica-de-arquitetos-vii-mediator-pattern-mediatr-dc31dc1c3340 | ['Lucas Eschechola'] | 2020-12-07 13:42:08.826000+00:00 | ['Dotnet', 'Mediator', 'Mediatr', 'Software Architecture', 'Design Patterns'] |
Getting Started With Concurrency in Python: Part I — Threads & Locks | The Basics of Threads
Python has two main modules that implement threads — thread and threading . The difference between them is that the latter one is an object-oriented implementation — and that is what we will be using in this article.
A Thread class is instantiated as follows (target is the function we want to execute in the thread):
Thread Class Instantiation in Python
In basic terms, once we create a thread instance, we have to start it with the .start() method. Take a look at the very simplistic example of just one thread below, where I/O bound is simulated with .sleep() .
Example of a Thread in Python
A thread is considered to be alive once it has started. The thread stops being alive after its run is terminated (upon either successful job completion or an interrupt/error). We can check the state of the thread using .is_alive() .
Building up on this simplistic example, if we want to run multiple threads in parallel, we have to start each one and join them in the end, using the .join() method. It’s important to understand that all threads belong to the same process, which means they all share the same data (variables, resources, etc.) — and we shall see how this can create problems later on.
Multiple Threads Example in Python
Threads can have names (either default or custom names passed as an argument) and machine-oriented identification numbers. We can access these using t.name and t.ident , respectively. Moreover, any given thread can know its own name — this is possible with threading.currentThread() module function.
We can also pass arguments to threads as in the (rather silly) example below: | https://medium.com/swlh/getting-started-with-concurrency-in-python-part-i-threads-locks-50b20dbd8e7c | ['Narmin Jamalova'] | 2020-11-20 18:34:45.974000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Threads', 'Programming', 'Python3', 'Concurrency'] |
Decentraland Metaverse Is Ready To Host Its First Virtual Fashion Week | Decentraland, Metaverse is getting ready to host its first fashion week. For this they collab with UNXD, who recently hosted Docle&Gabana’s first NFT clothing collection
Decentraland Metaverse Is Ready To Launch First Fashion Week:
As The business of virtual clothing is surging, so the Decentraland, Metaverse decided to host its first fashion week. Besides it, fashion is upgrading to key area businesses with a potential of $1 trillion a year — metaverse. And Decentraland will also spread its stake in the market by arranging its first fashion show week.
However, a virtual land of Decentralnd’s fashion district recently sold out for $2.4 million. For this initiative, they also did a collab with UNXD. This fashion week will take place in March 2022. This Metaverse space will continue to host runway shows for four days and with great experiences with UNXD, a luxury marketplace built on the Polygon blockchain network.
On Sunday the Decentraland tweeted :
“Have your collections ready!” calling brands, fashionistas, designers to prepare for the event scheduled for March. 24 to 27, 2022.“
The Metaverse:
The metaverse is an online 3D virtual space, where people interact with others in form of avatars. In this space, people can play games, work, and can do networking with each other.
A place where users can buy, and trade digital assets.
The asset management company of cryptocurrency grayscale previously said that
metaverse has the potential to become a $1 trillion annual revenue opportunity.
Moreover, these virtual characters also need virtual clothes to appear in the virtual world. Which is increasing as a high-demand sector.
Additionally big fashion names like Dolce&Gabban, Gucci, Balenciaga, and Ralph Laureninvade the metaverse. The UNXD arranged Dolce&Gabbana’s first NFT clothing collection and the Collezione Genesi a group of nine non-fungible tokens designed by Domenico Dolce, and Stefano Gabanna that was sold in September for $5.7 million.
Digital clothing from Ralph Lauren and Gucci was also featured on avatars by a separate collab with the avatar app zepeto. It is Asia’s biggest virtual fashion platform with nearly a quarter-billion of users, a report by BBC.
While Decentraland’s skyrocketed fashion district drew attention in a short period. As it gained $2.4 million from a company in cryptocurrency that bought a virtual parcel there.
Lorne sugarman, the CEO of metaverse group told insiders, about his company deal that was signed in November.
“We think the fashion district purchase is like buying on the fifth avenue back in the1800’s or the creation of rode drive.“
Please don’t forget to leave your comments and feedback. As well as you can connect with us on our NFT based community on our social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Feel free to share your thoughts, and comments with us.
Disclaimer: We are not experts or financial advisors. Kindly, take your decisions at your own risk.
Visit :: https://nftstudio24.com/decentraland-metaverse-is-ready-to-host-its-first-virtual-fashion-week/ | https://medium.com/@NftStudio24/decentraland-metaverse-is-ready-to-host-its-first-virtual-fashion-week-6346e85e1fd3 | [] | 2021-12-30 12:02:22.486000+00:00 | ['Metaverse', 'Opensea Nft Marketplace', 'Nft Collectibles', 'Nftart', 'Nft'] |
Implementing FA2 | Implementing FA2
Overview
As outlined in March, FA2 (TZIP-12) is a multi-asset interface for tokens and multi-token contracts on Tezos. FA2 broadens the potential for tokenization on Tezos significantly, supporting a wide range of token types (e.g. fungible, non-fungible, non-transferrable, etc.) and use cases. In practice, it aims to support novel implementation patterns alongside well-known patterns like single-asset fungible tokens (i.e. ERC-20) or NFTs.
Since our first release of FA2, we’ve updated the TZIP-12 specification to include a Michelson interface, refined prose around token supply behaviors, and provided standardized error messages.
With this post, we’re releasing an initial implementation of a multi-asset contract based on FA2 in SmartPy, available in the Dev version of the SmartPy IDE.
We also briefly discuss the pros and cons of several implementation patterns for FA2 permissioning, one of the main concerns of the effort.
Upcoming releases will provide several new LIGO implementations of FA2 (e.g. single and multi-asset for NFTs, fungible, etc.), a benchmarking of initial FA2 implementations, as well as tutorial quick-starts in the assets portal.
In addition, ongoing work continues to ease the lives of tooling developers and extend FA2 in terms of permissioning (e.g. whitelist, allowance), metadata (e.g. rich metadata spec for NFTs, implementation guidelines), and new functionality enabled by potential protocol amendments.
Key Resources
FA2 Implementation Patterns
FA2 has been designed to facilitate multiple implementation patterns around permissioning. As noted while introducing FA2, we’ve identified and outlined three implementation patterns: the monolith, the wrapper, and the transfer hook. We describe and compare these patterns below.
As included in the introductory FA2 post, FA2 facilitates multiple implementation patterns
Monolith
In a monolith contract, permissions are contained within a core FA2 contract. This is likely familiar to those used to the most commonly used ERC-20 implementations on Ethereum which include Approve and Allowance within the same contract. Unsurprisingly, FA1.2 contracts deployed to date have followed this pattern as well.
Although benchmarks are ongoing, current gas constraints in Tezos suggest the monolith pattern is currently the most viable option in terms of gas efficiency for the time being given the cost of inter-contract calls (compared to wrapper- and hook-based options).
However, monolith architectures are less modular and make permissioning less flexible to upgrade out-of-the-box (although operators make this easier). Changing or upgrading the permissioning logic of a monolith contract may require redeploying the contract and/or an extensive migration.
That said, FA2 seeks to reduce this tradeoff by specifying operators (similar to the notion in ERC-777/1155) and allowing the user to assign permissions over their tokens to another contract. Importantly, these can also include generalized permissioning contracts (e.g. a smart contract wallet) or application-specific permissioning contracts (e.g. specific to an exchange) which may be more easily upgraded or adapted as needed.
Wrapper
In an on-chain wrapper implementation, a separate “wrapper” contract applies permissions and forwards calls to the core FA2 contract which manages the token’s ledger (mapping addresses to balances).
Wrappers enable modularity, ideally with composable contract pieces (e.g. whitelisting or allowance wrappers) which extend core functionality and can be upgraded or replaced over time. Upgradability is a big advantage of the wrapper pattern, because permissioning can be upgraded without touching the core ledger contract.
On the downside, expressive wrappers currently face practical limitations in Tezos as they require inter-contract calls for both transfer and view operations. And from a client perspective, such architectures can be more complex as the client needs to be aware of both the wrapper permissioning contract and the core ledger contract. A wrapper-based approach to permissioning may also produce fragmentation and a weaker network effect for a standard by requiring wallets and other third-parties to support multiple wrapper variants.
Transfer Hook
In a transfer hook pattern, a core FA2 contract calls another contract which defines a permissioning policy regarding who can send and receive tokens. The permissioning policy contract can include granular permissioning rules, including allowance, whitelist, and other functionality.
Among upsides of the hook pattern is a separation of concerns, namely that core transfer logic is fixed in the core contract while permissioning rules in the hook contract can be upgraded easily. In other words, the permissioning rules of the token contract can be upgraded with ease without requiring any storage migration of the FA2 ledger state.
As in the case of contract wrappers, gas is a limitation for such architectures in Tezos today given the inter-contract calls’ cost and sensitivity to the size of the contract they’re interacting with. In other words, more complex permissioning policies in a hook contract are very clearly felt by the user, especially as use of the contract generates increasing contract size.
Comparing Wrappers and Hooks
The table below enables easy comparison of on-chain wrapper, source-code wrappers, and transfer hooks.
A comparison of the on-chain wrappers, source code wrappers, and transfer hooks
What’s next?
Upcoming releases include new FA2 implementations (e.g. NFT, fungible), benchmarks of FA2 performance, FA2 tutorials, and permissioning plug-ins, such as whitelisting. We’ve also recently provided reference implementations in both SmartPy and LIGO for an independent security audit and continue to welcome product feedback on anything FA2 or assets-related.
A Special Thanks*
Special thanks for invaluable conversations, advice, and feedback about blockchain-based assets from those listed below (and anyone we’ve forgotten)
* does not indicate endorsement of TZIP-12
Gabriel, Tom Jack, and team from LIGO
Benjamin, Raphael, and Bruno from Nomadic Labs
The SmartPy team
Nicolas and Santiago from OpenZeppelin
Greg and team at 0x
Matej and Istvan from Stove Labs
Devin and Alex from OpenSea
Alex from Blockwatch
Tarun Chitra from Gauntlet Networks
Arthur Breitman
Serokell
Tezit
Jared from Compound
Michael from Baking Bad
Luke and Brian from Coinbase Custody
Gavi and Viktor from Anchorage
Vertalo
Philippe from Horizon Games
James and Tyler from camlCase
Chris Goes and team at Metastate
Mike Radin from Cryptonomic
ZenGo
Marco from Tezos Foundation
Madfish Solutions
Jev from ECAD Labs
Klas from Kukai
Pascal and Mike from Airgap
Ron, Mason, and James from Tokensoft | https://medium.com/tqtezos/implementing-fa2-526dc4ef4715 | ['Tq Tezos'] | 2020-05-06 21:01:01.146000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Tezos', 'Smartpy', 'Ligo'] |
How A Contrarian Idea Gains Traction: The Incredible Story Of James Hutton | What led to Hutton forming his ideas and what was instrumental in them gaining traction?
In order to analyze this, we need to be very careful in trying to avoid survivorship bias. By looking at all the different contributing factors, we can surmise which ones were the crucial ones.
His starting line
James Hutton was living in an era which would subsequently be known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The waters of dogmatism were beginning to be lifted, and people were starting to question the official explanations of how the world works. The time was right for new ideas to emerge, and to gain a foothold.
The old establishment institutions like the Church no longer had the power to enforce their vision on everyone. Society was undergoing a huge transformation in the way things were done. A spirit of freedom was bursting out, slowly establishing itself in the minds of people.
Hutton was also lucky that he came from a family in good standing and had money. So this gave him an advantage over the vast majority of people from poorer conditions that did not have his opportunities.
While these factors played a role, they were not the determining ones. Many other people fit into these categories as well, yet they didn’t meet success. What made Hutton so special?
The birth of an idea
How was the idea born? Hutton started noticing patterns around him that caused him to start thinking about alternative explanations to how the world was formed.
Those patterns were out in the open for everyone to see though. People could see the different rock strata with their own eyes and at times fossils of water-borne creatures were found high up in the mountains. However these findings were usually taken to support Noah’s Flood.
What Hutton did was to take the same evidence that everyone else had access to, but reinterpret it in a different way.
He did have specialist knowledge. He studied medicine, which was the best place in those days to learn about chemistry, as well as other sciences. This distinguished him from the general masses and even much of the gentry, but there were still thousands of other guys who did this.
He had an interest in geology, but so did hundreds of others.
Looking at his starting line, it was not much different from that of thousands of other men of his generation and so he had no insider track to develop the ideas that he did. There must have been other factors that were crucial for this.
His strong points
1) Charisma
One thing that Hutton had and that had drawn many of the greatest Scottish thinkers towards associating with him, was his charisma. Jack Repcheck in his biography of Hutton “The Man Who Found Time” includes a telling description of the man:
“He was a late bloomer who came of age during a watershed period of Scottish history. A jack-of-all-trades, Hutton tried being a lawyer, doctor, and farmer before finally finding his true calling as a scientist. Though he was the last of the great Edinburgh scholars to publish his seminal ideas, he commanded the respect of all the other participants in the Scottish Enlightenment. All who came in contact with him noted his animated personality, his energy, and his good cheer. People were simply drawn to him.“ Jack Repcheck
Charisma is an important characteristic for anyone who wants to build a network of contacts, as well as convince others of their ideas. If you are a charismatic person, other people are naturally drawn to you.
It seems that Hutton, even though he had his specific peculiarities, was a charismatic man that could inspire others. He used this trait in order to build lasting friendships with people like Joseph Black or John Playfair, which would prove crucial for spreading his ideas.
2) Love of learning
Hutton was a man who above all else was curious. He wanted to know how things worked and was always learning about new things, exploring and trying to find explanations for what he discovered. He was doing it not for the money, but for the knowledge itself. He was motivated intrinsically.
This is very important if you want to overcome different challenges on your journey. People who are primarily motivated by extrinsic factors like money, usually give up at the first sign of trouble or failure.
This type of intrinsic motivation is very important for drive and persistence. Hutton was very driven and persistent.
Hutton didn’t give up when he was met with ridicule. Instead, he just started working harder in order to find further evidence to support his claim.
3) Keen eye for detail
One thing that distinguished Hutton from others was his keen eye for detail. He noticed the little things that others missed.
This keen eye for detail manifested itself after 1754, when Hutton started to work on his own farm. This is where he used his power of observation to find out the different natural processes at work on his land.
“Ironically, erosion, evident in so many parts of Scotland and the essential starting point for Hutton’s theory, is not very obvious in the region around Slighhouses. It is a testament to Hutton’s skills of observation that he properly assessed its power not by watching storm waves decimate the North Sea coast but by watching his soil wash away.” Jack Repcheck
Hutton was always observing and looking for better explanations:
“Most of us look. The genius sees. Hutton noted when something wasn’t quite right, didn’t fit. Rather than dismiss such incongruities or explain them away, he investigated further. He asked questions. Why, for instance, was one layer of rocks, called Salisbury Crags, darker than others in the area? What were fish fossils doing on the summit of a mountain?” Eric Weiner
Hutton’s curiosity and keen eye for detail let him to see oddities, which then led him to pose questions. These questions were instrumental in furthering the direction of his research.
4) Eventually built a strong network of contacts
James Hutton lived in a period which has since been named the Scottish Enlightenment. He became a part of the inner circle and some of the major figures of that era like Joseph Black or John Playfair became his closest friends. So he managed to build a strong network of very smart, but also influential contacts.
5) Polymath (could bring in ideas and observations from different subjects and combine them)
One of the primary strengths of James Hutton was the fact that he was a polymath. He tried his hands at a variety of things and could bring in ideas and observations from different subjects (chemistry, farming, …etc.) and then combine them.
Hutton was a very practical man and could spend hours observing different phenomenon and thinking about them. He was also adept at first principles thinking by looking at something, going down to its first principles and then coming up with a new explanation or process.
For example he used his knowledge of chemistry to come up with a new process of making sal ammoniac, which is a mineral that is used in metalworking and was becoming more important as the industrial revolution was getting off the ground.
At the time, the only viable source of this mineral was Egypt. James Hutton and James Davie experimented with this mineral for a bit and came up with a new way to create it from coal soot.
Based on this process, Davie created a company to manufacture it and Hutton became a partner in it. Hutton had no involvement in the daily running of the company, but the fact of being a partner gave him a comfortable steady and automatic income.
Together with his family inheritance, this freed up Hutton from having to do a daily job and gave him a lot of spare time which he could use for more productive purposes.
So being a polymath and adept at first principles thinking, allowed him to create passive income, which then freed up his time. The free time then gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted. This was instrumental in allowing Hutton to explore, experiment and come up with his theories.
Potential Obstacles
There were many potential obstacles that Hutton needed to overcome and which could have stopped him along the way.
One big problem showed itself up on the personal level. Hutton had problems with the fickle nature of women and often ended up heartbroken. This is how he described it in a letter to his friend:
“O, if the ladies were but capable of loving us men with half the affection that I have toward the cows and calfies that happen to be under my nurture and admonition, what a happy world we should have!“
For many guys, this is a huge problem that can often cause depression and lack of will. Hutton struggled with it, but at the end came to accept it and instead started focusing on his work.
This could also be tied to some of his weak points. Hutton was a bit of a loner and not good with words, so not very persuasive. This weakness in social skills was a key factor in his life.
Another potential obstacle manifested itself on the societal level. He was living in a society where the religious factor was still very strong and most people looked at the world through a religious lens.
This state of affairs was one of the main hurdles for anyone trying to push through a radical reinterpretation of the world. Luckily, the times were changing and Hutton also lived at a time, when the religious establishment was losing its power and people were slowly adopting a more scientific outlook on life.
The X-Factor
If you want to win a war of ideas, there are two factors that you need to take into consideration. There are two processes at play: the process of coming up with the idea, and the process of spreading it.
Hutton was a man who who did not seek glory or ambition, but instead was in it for the joy of discovery. As his friend John Playfair described it:
“He was one of those who are much more delighted with the contemplation of truth, than with the praise of having discovered it.”
Hutton was good at coming up with ideas, but bad at explaining them. If you want to convince people that you are right, you need to be able to explain your idea and convince others of its rightness. Then you need to promote it. This is where Hutton failed.
As Eric Weiner noted in his “Geography of Genius”, marketing is fundamental for success:
“Talent alone was not enough. You also need marketing. Beethoven wouldn’t be known as a genius if he wasn’t good at marketing. Mozart had a built-in marketing machine with his father. The notion of the lone genius is a folktale, a story we like to tell ourselves. If you don’t have the possibility to sell yourself, to be known, you won’t be a genius. You cannot just sit under a chestnut tree and write or paint or whatever. I know five painters who are real geniuses, but no one has discovered them. You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory.“
You might have the perfect solution, but if you don’t know how to market it, then you won’t get too much success.
Hutton’s ideas did not gain much traction during his lifetime. He made speeches and wrote a book to explain them, but the arguments were not very clear and the book was very long and written in a very obscure and hard to read way.
This stands in stark contrast to the ideas of Hutton’s main competitor in the scientific explanation of the world, Abraham Gottlob Werner.
During Hutton’s life and later, Werner’s ideas were very popular. This is because, as opposed to Hutton, Werner was a good marketer. He explained his ideas well and had the ability to inflict passion about his explanation in the people who were listening to his speeches. In that way, he trained thousands of students who were dedicated to his ideas and who helped spread them.
When Hutton died, it seemed that his theory on how the world works would soon die a very quick death after him, and that Werner’s ideas would dominate.
However there was one residual thing that ended up tipping the scales in Hutton’s favor in later stages. While Hutton was bad in spreading his ideas to a wider audience, one of his advantages was that he had built a quite good network of influential thinkers, who became his friends.
One of these was John Playfair.
Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Tipping Point” described three types of people who are instrumental in an idea spreading and gaining popularity: mavens, connectors and salespeople.
Mavens are the guys who have the ideas, connectors are the guys who have the wide social network and connections, while salespeople are the ones who sell the idea.
James Hutton was the maven. He came up with the idea of how the Earth was formed and of deep time. He associated with other mavens of the Scottish Enlightenment, some of which knew others and through these connectors he managed to meet many influential people. So he had the maven and connector part down.
He just didn’t have the salespeople to market his ideas, since he couldn’t do it himself. However luck would have it, that one of the influential people that he had met, John Playfair, would turn into a salesperson of Hutton’s ideas after Hutton died.
The thing is that while Hutton did not have the necessary skills to promote his idea well, he did build up all the right circumstances and set them in place in order for serendipity and luck to play its part.
If you manage to reach the connectors, there is a greater chance that a marketer will find you. In Hutton’s case, one of his connections turned into a marketer.
After Hutton’s death, John Playfair saw that the idea of his friend was quickly dying. Playfair decided to revive it and turned into an evangelist for his dead friend’s theory.
He saw that the book that Hutton left was very hard to read, so he decided to write an easy to read book to explain Hutton’s ideas. The result was a book called “Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth”, which came out in 1802.
This was the first shot in the battle to popularize Hutton’s ideas. At Playfair’s funeral, one of his nephews summarized how powerful this book was:
“With what success “Illustrations” was attended we may judge from the fame and credit which have been attained by the theory, which, but for its commentary, seemed likely to be known only through the erroneous statement of its opponents.“
This book was also the instrument through which Charles Lyell, one of the most prominent geologists of the 19th century, learned about Hutton’s ideas. After reading the book, he became a convert to deep time and the idea that the Earth is still being shaped by the same natural forces that shaped it in prehistory. And through Lyell these ideas got to Charles Darwin, who then used them as a basis for his theory of evolution.
Going back to the comparison between Hutton and Werner, Werner was a popularizer who had a gift for enthralling many different people towards his view, while Hutton was more personal and instead only had a limited number of very good friends who however became dedicated to his ideas.
Luckily these good friends were very influential and later would play an instrumental role in spreading his ideas and enthralling others for them. Playfair was able to step into the role of a popularizer when he wrote his illustrated book on Hutton’s theory, but the the biggest and most influential popularizer was Lyell, a man who learned of the idea from reading Playfair’s book. | https://medium.com/renaissance-man-world/how-a-contrarian-idea-gains-traction-the-incredible-story-of-james-hutton-d0352d47f622 | ['Peter Burns'] | 2020-04-28 12:17:55.500000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Innovation', 'Ideas', 'Science', 'Paradigm Shift'] |
Watching TV is getting Harder… | Photo by Mollie Sivaram on Unsplash
The Cable Cutter movement had a beautiful run with a broad catalog of content available at a simple, digestible price. Unfortunately, that’s changing. With the growing marketplace of network subscriptions leading to more exclusive licensing, TV is becoming harder to watch. Consumers are finding themselves in an endless game of musical chairs — or musical subs.
The mess that was traditional cable has found its way to new media.
The result of content being spread thinner across multiple platforms will inconvenience and increase the consumer’s cost. The opposite effect a service should have.
Photo by Michael Marais on Unsplash
As Disney’s The Mandalorian comes to an end, my monthly subscription is getting redirected to Amazon Prime for the latest season of The Expanse. With The Office leaving Netflix for NBC’s Peacock, I will find an alternative way to watch The Office and find something new on Netflix (like Brooklyn 99).
Fortunately, there’s an equalizer to the inconvenience and increased cost of services. It’s called competition, and in online media, one of the biggest competitors is piracy. On paper, companies can’t compete with online piracy. Despite being illegal, pirated copies of media are widely available online. They pose a significant threat to legitimate means of consumption.
The music industry is a perfect example of what happens when consumers have a reliable, convenient, and affordable offering. Services like Spotify and Apple Music have been so successful that the idea of having individual MP3’s stored locally on your device feels antiquated.
Taylor Swift withheld her music from being available on streaming services until 2017. In the lead up to her album Reputation, Swift finally added her back catalog to Spotify and Apple Music — with a caveat. The upcoming album would not be available on the services for at least one week. Without availability through convenient streaming platforms, Taylor Swift’s Reputation was one of the most pirated albums of the year.
It turns out when a legal, convenient, and affordable alternative is available — most people will choose it. | https://medium.com/@scotts-thoughts/watching-tv-is-getting-harder-eeb06df9ed9f | ['J.P. Scott'] | 2020-12-23 23:34:50.607000+00:00 | ['Gadgets', 'Film', 'Technology', 'Television', 'TV'] |
Hacking HTTP with HTTPfuzz | So you’ve been given a web app to pentest. Maybe it’s a banking app or a document workflow system. Either way, you need to make sure it’s done safely. Modern web applications have a large attack surface, and testing everything by hand is inefficient. That’s where fuzzers come in handy. Fuzzers allow you to generate new inputs based on a seed and pass them to a program. Fuzzing can quickly show areas that are worth further examination.
I’m going to walk you through finding bugs in the Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA) with HTTPfuzz, but you can apply this steps to any target as long as you have permission from the owner. HTTPfuzz is a flexible HTTP fuzzer written in Go. It can fuzz any part of a request: multipart file uploads, multipart form fields, text request bodies, directories, filenames and URL query parameters.
Attacking services without consent is illegal in most countries. You can follow along using Docker on your computer without risking your freedom. Be sure to stop the container when you’re done using it, and only bind it to localhost to prevent yourself from getting hacked.
Caveat Emptor
A fuzzer is a very clumsy tool. It can knock systems offline, lock user accounts, fill up databases and generally annoy our friends on the blue team. I’d recommend only running a fuzzer against a development instance of the app. It’s useful for finding bugs before the software goes to production. Don’t run a fuzzer on a shared application unless you’re sure your inputs won’t cause damage and you have permission from the operations team. It’s best to set a delay between requests if you’re running HTTPfuzz against a shared application, and be sure to check how many requests you’ll send before firing your lasers.
What is HTTPFuzz?
HTTPfuzz is a flexible CLI HTTP fuzzer written in Go. It supports fuzzing any part of a request body, including multipart file uploads, JSON fields, HTTP Headers and URL parameters. HTTPfuzz can be extended with Go plugins for better integration with your pentesting workflow.
Plugins
HTTPfuzz plugins are simply Go plugins that export a method named New that returns an implementation of HTTPfuzz’s Listener interface. Everything you need to know to write plugins is in the gist below.
A Listener receives a stream of Results from the fuzzer. A Result contains the HTTP response from the target, the corresponding request, the payload, payload location and the time the request took. Plugins can use this to save requests and responses to a database, check for vulnerabilities and anything else you can think of.
File Uploads
Many apps allow users to upload files for all kinds of reasons: photo galleries, documents, scanning cheques and much more. File uploads expose tons of attack surface. XSS, path injection, introducing malware into a network, remote code execution and so much more is available to you by bugs in file uploads. DVWA is no exception.
File upload in DVWA. Do you notice anything interesting about the filename?
Automatically Generated Files
The easiest way to check which file types are allowed is simply uploading different kinds of files and looking at the responses. If a website says it only accepts photos, try uploading a PHP file or an executable and see what happens. For example, JPEG photos always start with the bytes FF D8 FF. You can use a hex editor like Hex Fiend to see the byte patterns at the beginning of every file of the same time.
If the whitelisting is done correctly, it will check the first few bytes of the uploaded file against a list of expected file signatures. HTTPfuzz generates files by putting header bytes for the file type at the top of a byte array filled with random bytes. These generated files will probably not be valid, which is why you’d use user-supplied payloads once you’ve determined how restrictive the validation is.
We can combine this with a simple plugin that tells us when a file has been successfully uploaded to let us enumerate the allowed file types.
This plugin determines if a file has been uploaded by checking for a success message in the response body.
Build the plugin and send off the automatically generated file payloads. We’ll be able to see what’s allowed based on what is successfully uploaded.
Finding what file types and extensions are allowed with automatically generated 4KB files using Burp Suite as a proxy.
Running this reveals that DVWA does not perform any filtering at all on uploaded files: it’s a free for all.
User-Supplied Payloads
Now that we know what kind of files are allowed, it’s time to see if any vulnerabilities can be exploited. We should see if we can exploit bugs in how DVWA handles filenames and types based on what we discovered with the automatically generated files. Since we know DVWA doesn’t perform any filtering, we should try for PHP code execution.
PHP payloads. The first is the succinct “China Chopper” PHP webshell and the second will dump information about the PHP environment.
PHP Code Execution
One of the payloads was a PHP program that would display information about the server’s PHP environment. Since DVWA has a file inclusion vulnerability, we can execute our payload by passing the saved payload’s filename to the vulnerable “page” URL parameter.
Using the local file inclusion vulnerability to trigger our payload.
We could stop here since we owned the box, but I want to show you some more HTTPfuzz features.
Command Injection
You can mark targets in text request bodies with the delimiter character. By default, it’s “`”. The command injection challenge sends an IP address via POST request to a vulnerable ping function. You can often find vulnerabilities like this on routers and online vulnerability scanners. Consider the following request:
A HTTP POST handler that pings any IP address passed to it. Note the backticks around the IP where we want to inject our payloads.
We’re trying to execute code on the DVWA. We’ll try the Unix and Windows command injection payloads from the command-injection-payload-list and examine the results in an intercepting proxy to see if any of these give us a clue how to exploit the vulnerability.
Brute Force
HTTPfuzz makes it easy to brute force your way into valid accounts. The DVWA has a brute force challenge that accepts the username and password as GET parameters. Consider the HTTP request below.
Login HTTP Request with credentials in URL params
First, we’ll need a wordlist with common passwords. I’ll use rockyou.txt for this demonstration. We’ll also need to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful login responses. An easy way to do this is to submit an invalid password and observe the response.
The message “Username and/or password incorrect.” always appears when login fails.
Trying to send a bad password gives an error message. That’s good enough for us. We can create a HTTPfuzz plugin that returns the payload used when that error message isn’t in the page. That payload should be the password.
A httpfuzz plugin that detects if our brute force attack was successful.
Build the plugin and pass it to HTTPfuzz to see if admin’s password is in rockyou.txt. Since the password is in rockyou.txt, the plugin will print it so we can solve this challenge.
Command to build plugin and brute force the password URL param with rockyou.txt.
Running this attack shows that the admin’s password is indeed in rockyou.txt. This attack may seem contrived, but many appliances and programs have known default passwords. The Mirai botnet spread by brute forcing known default router passwords via telnet.
Get httpfuzz
You can check out httpfuzz on GitHub. It’s written in Go and GPLv3 licensed. It runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. It’s a versatile HTTP testing tool that can perform many attacks, like dirbuster style directory brute force attacks and HTTP header fuzzing. | https://medium.com/swlh/hacking-http-with-httpfuzz-67cfd061b616 | ['Jonathan Cooper'] | 2020-12-22 22:50:45.555000+00:00 | ['Web', 'Golang', 'Penetration Testing', 'Tools', 'Hacking'] |
Grasping Gradient Descent using Python | Grasping Gradient Descent using Python
Photo by Fineas Anton on Unsplash
Overview
In this post, we’ll explore Gradient Descent from the ground up starting conceptually, then using code to build up our intuition brick by brick.
While this post is part of an ongoing series where I document my progress through Data Science from Scratch by Joel Grus, for this post I am drawing on external sources including Aurélien Geron’s Hands-On Machine Learning to provide a context for why and when gradient descent is used.
We’ll also be using external libraries such as numpy , that are generally avoided in Data Science from Scratch, to help highlight concepts.
While the book introduces gradient descent as a standalone topic, I find it more intuitive to reason about it within the context of a regression problem.
Setup
In any modeling task, there is error, and our objective is minimize the errors so that when we develop models from our training data, we’ll have some confidence that the predictions will work in testing and completely new data.
We’ll train a linear regression model. Our dataset will only have three data points. To create the model, we’ll setting up parameters (slope and intercept) that best “fits” the data (i.e., best-fitting line), for example:
Image by Author
We know the values for both x and y , so we can calculate the slope and intercept directly through the normal equation, which is the analytical approach to finding regression coefficients (slope and intercept):
# Normal Equation import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt x = np.array([2, 4, 5])
y = np.array([45, 85, 105]) # computing Normal Equation
x_b = np.c_[np.ones((3, 1)), x] # add x0 = 1 to each of three instances
theta = np.linalg.inv(x_b.T.dot(x_b)).dot(x_b.T).dot(y) # array([ 5., 20.])
theta
The key line is np.linalg.inv() which computes the multiplicative inverse of a matrix.
Our slope is 20 and intercept is 5 (i.e., theta ).
We could also have used the more familiar “rise over run” ((85–45) / (4–2)) or (40/2) or 20, but we want to illustrate the normal equation which should come in handy when we go beyond the simplistic three data point example.
We could also use the LinearRegression class from sklearn to call the least squares ( np.linalg.lstsq() ) function directly:
# Least Squares from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
import numpy as np x = np.array([2, 4, 5])
y = np.array([45, 85, 105]) x = x.reshape(-1, 1) # reshape because sklearn expect 2D array x_b = np.c_[np.ones((3, 1)), x] # add x0 = 1 to each of three instances theta, residuals, rank, s = np.linalg.lstsq(x_b, y, rcond=1e-6) # array([ 5., 20.])
print("theta:", theta)
This appraoch also yields the slope (20) and intercept (5) directly.
We know the parameters of x and y in our example, but we want to see how learning from data would work. Here's the equation we're working with:
y = 20 * x + 5
And here’s what it looks like (intercept = 5, slope = 20)
Image by Author
Gradient Descent
Why?
The normal equation and the least squares approach can handle large training sets efficiently, but when your model has a large number of features or too many training instances to fit into memory, gradient descent is an often used alternative.
Moreover, linear least squares assume the errors have a normal distribution and the relationship in the data is linear (this is where closed-form solutions like the normal equation excel). When the data is non-linear, an iterative solution (gradient descent) can be used.
With linear regression we seek to minimize the sum-of-squares differences between the observed data and the predicted values (aka the error), in a non-iterative fashion.
Alternatively, we use gradient descent to find the slope and intercept that minimizes the average squared error, however, in an iterative fashion.
Using Gradient Descent to Fit a Model
The process for gradient descent is to start with a random slope and intercept, then compute the gradient of the mean squared error, while adjusting the slope/intercept ( theta ) in the direction that continues to minimize the error. This is repeated iteratively until we find a point where errors are most minimized.
NOTE: This section builds heavily on a previous post on linear algebra. You’ll want to read this post to get a feel for the functions used to construct the functions we see in this post.
from typing import TypeVar, List, Iterator
import math
import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from typing import Callable
from typing import List
import numpy as np x = np.array([2, 4, 5]) # instead of putting y directly, we'll use the equation: 20 * x + 5, which is a direct representation of its relationship to x # y = np.array([45, 85, 105]) # both x and y are represented in inputs
inputs = [(x, 20 * x + 5) for x in range(2, 6)]
First, we’ll start with random values for the slope and intercept; we’ll also establish a learning rate, which controls how much a change in the model is warranted in response to the estimated error each time the model parameters (slope and intercept) are updated.
# 1. start with a random value for slope and intercept
theta = [random.uniform(-1, 1), random.uniform(-1, 1)] learning_rate = 0.001
Next, we’ll compute the mean of the gradients, then adjust the slope/intercept in the direction of minimizing the gradient, which is based on the error.
You’ll note that this for-loop has 100 iterations. The more iterations we go through, the more that errors are minimized and the more we approach a slope/intercept where the model “fits” the data better.
You can see in this list, [linear_gradient(x, y, theta) for x, y in inputs] , that our linear_gradient function is applied to the known x and y values in the list of tuples, inputs , along with random values for slope/intercept ( theta ).
We multiply each x value with a random value for slope, then add a random value for intercept. This yields the initial prediction. Error is the gap between the initial prediction and actual y values. We minimize the squared error by using its gradient.
# start with a function that determines the gradient based on the error from a single data point
def linear_gradient(x: float, y: float, theta: Vector) -> Vector:
slope, intercept = theta
predicted = slope * x + intercept # model prediction
error = (predicted - y) # error is (predicted - actual)
squared_error = error ** 2 # minimize squared error
grad = [2 * error * x, 2 * error] # using its gradient
return grad
The linear_gradient function along with initial parameters are then passed to vector_mean , which utilize scalar_multiply and vector_sum :
def vector_mean(vectors: List[Vector]) -> Vector:
"""Computes the element-wise average"""
n = len(vectors)
return scalar_multiply(1/n, vector_sum(vectors)) def scalar_multiply(c: float, v: Vector) -> Vector:
"""Multiplies every element by c"""
return [c * v_i for v_i in v] def vector_sum(vectors: List[Vector]) -> Vector:
"""Sum all corresponding elements (componentwise sum)"""
# Check that vectors is not empty
assert vectors, "no vectors provided!"
# Check the vectors are all the same size
num_elements = len(vectors[0])
assert all(len(v) == num_elements for v in vectors), "different sizes!"
# the i-th element of the result is the sum of every vector[i]
return [sum(vector[i] for vector in vectors)
for i in range(num_elements)]
This yields the gradient. Then, each gradient_step is determined as our function adjusts the initial random theta values (slope/intercept) in the direction that minimizes the error.
def gradient_step(v: Vector, gradient: Vector, step_size: float) -> Vector:
"""Moves `step_size` in the `gradient` direction from `v`"""
assert len(v) == len(gradient)
step = scalar_multiply(step_size, gradient)
return add(v, step) def add(v: Vector, w: Vector) -> Vector:
"""Adds corresponding elements"""
assert len(v) == len(w), "vectors must be the same length"
return [v_i + w_i for v_i, w_i in zip(v, w)]
All this comes together in this for-loop to print out how the slope and intercept change with each iteration (we start with 100):
for epoch in range(100): # start with 100 <--- change this figure to try different iterations
# compute the mean of the gradients
grad = vector_mean([linear_gradient(x, y, theta) for x, y in inputs])
# take a step in that direction
theta = gradient_step(theta, grad, -learning_rate)
print(epoch, grad, theta) slope, intercept = theta #assert 19.9 < slope < 20.1, "slope should be about 20"
#assert 4.9 < intercept < 5.1, "intercept should be about 5"
print("slope", slope)
print("intercept", intercept)
Iterative Descent
At 100 iterations, the slope is 18.87 and intercept is 4.87 and the gradient is -32.48 (error for the slope) and -8.45 (error for the intercept). These numbers suggest that we need to decrease the slope and intercept from our random starting point, but our emphasis needs to be on decreasing the slope.
Image by Author
At 200 iterations, the slope is 19.97 and intercept is 4.86 and the gradient is -1.76 (error for the slope) and -0.48 (error for the intercept). Our errors have been reduced significantly.
Image by Author
At 1000 iterations, the slope is 19.97 (not much difference from 200 iterations) and intercept is 5.09 and the gradients are markedly lower at -0.004 (error for the slope) and 0.02 (error for the intercept). Here the errors may not be much different from zero and we are near our optimal point.
Image by Author
In summary, the normal equation and regression approaches gave us a slope of 20 and intercept of 5. With gradient descent, we approached these values with each successive iterations, 1000 iterations yielding less error than 100 or 200 iterations.
From Scratch
As mentioned above, the functions used to compute the gradients and adjust the slope/intercept build on functions we explored in this post. Here’s a visual showing how the functions we used to iteratively arrive at the slope and intercept through gradient descent was built:
Image by Author
Take Away
Gradient descent is an optimization technique often used in machine learning and in this post, we built some intuition around how it works by applying it to a simple linear regression problem, favoring code over math (which we’ll return to in a later post). Gradient Descent is useful if you are expecting computational complexity due to the number of features or training instances.
We placed gradient descent in context, in comparison to a more analytical approach, normal equation and the least squares method, both of which are non-iterative.
Furthermore, we saw how the functions used in this post can be traced back to a previous post on linear algebra, thus giving us a big picture view of how the building blocks of data science and an intuition for areas we’ll need to explore at a deeper, perhaps at a more mathematical, level.
This post is part of an ongoing series where I document my progress through Data Science from Scratch by Joel Grus. | https://python.plainenglish.io/grasping-gradient-descent-using-python-8fc21a600c2f | ['Paul Apivat Hanvongse'] | 2020-12-27 21:34:28.604000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Gradient Descent', 'Machine Learning', 'Python Programming', 'Data Science'] |
Winter Haiku | 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/afwp/winter-haiku-8606181c2c06 | ['Lisa Spray'] | 2020-12-22 15:02:38.759000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Nature', 'Winter', 'Poetry', 'Hiku'] |
Spreading Milkweed, Not Myths | Myth #4: Because milkweed is toxic, you shouldn’t plant it.
Milkweed does contain toxins that can be harmful to pets, livestock and people. The milky sap for which it gets its name leaks out from the stem or leaves. This sap contains toxins called cardiac glycosides or cardenolides, which are toxic to animals if consumed in large quantities.
The good news? Milkweed does NOT taste good.
“Animals usually do not eat milkweed unless good forage is scarce or under conditions where plants freeze, etc. “ — USDA
The myth here, is that you shouldn’t plant milkweed at all. The truth is…most animals won’t eat it because of the taste, and here are some tips for handling milkweed if you’re hesitant.
Being careful and aware goes a long way.
Wash your hands and use gardening gloves like you would any other plant. Be careful to not include it in the hay of grazing animals and make sure there is always plenty of other food for them to forage. Know that your pets will likely avoid it, but if you’re nervous, research the milkweed species you plant to see toxicity levels. Take steps to prevent accidental ingestion, such as instructing children that the plant is poisonous and to avoid any contact with their eyes after touching the plant.
Monarch on milkweed by Tom Koerner, USFWS
All in all, planting milkweed is a sure way to help save the monarch. So let’s spread milkweed and cut back on the myths. Find native milkweed seeds near you.
The blog was inspired by Milkweed misconceptions from Monarch Joint Venture
Additional References:
Milkweed FAQs
Conservation Practitioner’s Guide
USDA Milkweed
Posted by Danielle Brigida, USFWS | https://medium.com/usfws/spreading-milkweed-not-myths-5df8c480912d | ['U.S. Fish', 'Wildlife Service'] | 2017-04-19 15:04:38.060000+00:00 | ['Gardening', 'Nature', 'Conservation'] |
Challenge 1: Design Thinking. Challenge 1: Design Thinking | Empathize :
What problem are you solving?
The problem of having to purchase a ticket between each mean of transportation.
Who is your audience?
All people that use either public transport, including cycling, driving, and walking.
Who is your client’s competition?
Our competitors are Google maps, Moovit, Transit, Waze, Ridlr, Ridepal, Trafi, Fanzone, Charoit, Loup.
What’s the tone/feeling?
The application offers an amazing service. Having the possibility of getting the best combination (that includes waiting time, prices…) is very convenient. Also, the interface is user friendly with the map that shows clearly how you can move.
After conducting the interviews I came up with the defining part. | https://medium.com/@anasselouali-em/project-9ff9b99f8cf5 | ['Anass Elouali'] | 2021-03-15 20:34:36.146000+00:00 | ['Design Thinking', 'Ironhack Prework', 'Citymapper', 'Challenge'] |
FAST FASHION: OUR CLOSET’S MONSTER | FAST FASHION: OUR CLOSET’S MONSTER
Fast fashion are the brands that produce volumes of clothing throughout the year. Brands are making clothes at an affordable price which results that consumers can update their wardrobe very quickly. The concept behind fast fashion is to get the newest fashions in the market as quickly as possible when they are on trend, so fashion retailers try to capture them when they are high in trends to meet the consumer demand, but sadly they just discard them after some time. It’s a term used to describe merchants’ extraordinarily fast turnover of fashion designs.
picture taken from pinterest
According to a report by the Danish Fashion Institute, it is also the second-largest polluter after oil and gas. Fast fashion is a word used by retailers to describe how designs move swiftly from catwalks to catch fashion trends. It is based on the most recent fashion trends seen during fashion weeks for both spring and autumn wear.
But did you know the impact of fast fashion on environment?
Picture taken from Pinterest but edited by myself
Yes, this is the actual reality of fast fashion. Have you ever asked this question to yourself that what is the impact of fast fashion on the planet, on workers, or animals, and on consumers?
According to a study, the average consumer now buys at least 60% more clothing than they did in the last 15 years. Each minute more than two tons of clothing are bought in the UK. So, if you look at the above data that means that fashion industry is responsible for at least 20% of global wastewater. Yes!! You heard it right. 20%. Because so little clothing, shoes, and other textiles are recycled, millions of tonnes of clothing, shoes, and other textiles end up in landfills every year. Only around 12% of the fabric used in clothes gets recycled on a global scale. However, our earth is being harmed by our over use of low-cost clothing. It results in a significant increase in pollution and the loss of natural resources.
Picture taken from pinterest
H&M is one of the most famous and the second largest fashion retailer brand in the whole world. This company had failed to pay at least 8,50,000 garment workers there living wage. And not only this many female workers are also get physically and sexually abused. Isn’t it disgusting? I don’t understand Like how these big brands are trying to make us fool in every possible way. Not only this but there are many more brands we should avoid if we want an ethical and sustainable wardrobe like Shein, Mango, Zara, Forever 21, Fashion Nova and many more.
Screenshot taken from Pinterest
Now, the question is how to recognise a fast fashion brands and how to avoid them? Because there are so many brands available in the market.
Okay! So lemme tell you.
Fast fashion manufacturers provide a new line of clothing every week. They offer them at a reasonable price. They also employ several marketing strategies to persuade clients to purchase these new fashionable garments. They attempt to conceal false facts in order to deceive customers into believing that they are a trustworthy and long-term in business.
After seeing this information, Now it is our responsibility to avoid fast fashion brands.
Article References: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200710-why-clothes-are-so-hard-to-recycle
https://goodonyou.eco/what-is-fast-fashion/
https://www.sustainably-chic.com/blog/fast-fashion-brands-to-avoid
Picture references: https://pin.it/6n3zv0n
https://pin.it/6n3zv0n
https://pin.it/3t28FC9 | https://medium.com/@mallikasinghal9817/fast-fashion-our-closets-monster-89f8bd8577b2 | ['Mallika Singhal'] | 2021-09-11 18:02:50.839000+00:00 | ['Pollution', 'Clothing Brand', 'Clothing', 'Waste', 'Fashion'] |
How to Build Your Portfolio as a Content Writer | If you’re a writer, you would like to have a portfolio so that clients could look into your work and hire you. You’d be thinking, Why a writer requires a portfolio? Why is it essential? How will this help? Will it attract more clients? What if they do not like my work?
Well, if you’re a writer (beginner or a professional) you need some clients or want to urge employment that you simply think will assist you in future.
How will you tell another individual that you’re a right person? How will they know that you simply perfect for his or her work? that’s when portfolio jumps in.
Now you’ll be thinking “I am just a beginner what should I include in my portfolio, I haven’t had any clients yet?” you don’t need clients to create your showcase, it’s your own choice, which niche you decide on, what proportion you’re employed thereon and the way you present yourself to the client or anyone who wants to rent you?
I have gathered some points to create a decent portfolio as a content writer,
Identifying your niche
As a writer you’d like a distinct segment (specialize field) on which you would offer your work. this might be confusing at start but once you’ve figured it out it won’t bother you in future. I even have mentioned some beginner niche examples below:
• Blog writer
• Book reviewer
• Email writer
• Technology
• Daily life problems
Which articles should I include?
Once you’ve selected your niche, now you’ve recognized your part of work. Here comes another question which articles should I include on my portfolio?
I might suggest including the recent best-of work in your portfolio but remember including the work that’s associated with your niche.
Categorizing
To make your portfolio better you ought to categorize your work and include up to 3–2 articles in each. Don’t throw all of your work in your portfolio because it won’t be helpful because the client is curious about his work, how you would help him.
The less and to the point articles, the more chances of building a good portfolio.
Publishing your articles on freelancing platform
In this era, everyone needs their work in short time, they don’t wait. If you write a piece of information and don’t post it online, then other person won’t await your email that you simply could send him your work so that he or she will examine.
So what do you have to do?
Publish your work online. There are tons of platforms for writers in lately like WordPress, medium, LinkedIn and lots of more. But what we’d like is our clients should read or see our work and it might get tons easy once you have shared the link.
Are you ready to start your career in content writing? Hope this article helped you. | https://medium.com/@lashari-writes/how-to-build-your-portfolio-as-a-content-writer-40954f3f7b0a | ['Muhammad Abdullah Lashari'] | 2020-12-26 15:00:58.661000+00:00 | ['Content Writer', 'Beginner', 'Niche Selection', 'Portfolio'] |
K-Means Clustering Project: Banknote Authentication | K-Means Clustering Project: Banknote Authentication
Using Python (Pandas, NumPy) to gather and assess the data and scikit-learn to train a K-Means model to detect if a banknote is genuine or forged. John Chen (Yueh-Han) Jun 1·5 min read
Have you ever been in a situation where you were handing money to the clerks at a supermarket only to find that the money is fake while there was a long line of people behind you waiting to check out? Or even more embarrassing, you didn’t carry other banknotes? I personally had experienced this situation one time and that embarrassment of being assumed to be an immoral cheapskate just stuck in my head for a long time. This motivated me to conduct this project, building a K-Means Clustering model to detect if a banknote is real or fake.
Photo by Ystallonne Alves on Unsplash
Dataset Overview:
This dataset is about distinguishing genuine and forged banknotes. Data were extracted from images that were taken from genuine and forged banknote-like specimens. For digitization, an industrial camera usually used for print inspection was used. The final images have 400x 400 pixels. Due to the object lens and distance to the investigated object gray-scale pictures with a resolution of about 660 dpi were gained. A Wavelet Transform tool was used to extract features from these images. (Source: https://www.openml.org/d/1462)
Since I am a beginner in the ML world, I tried to make this project as simple as possible and only focused on running the K-Means model and calculating the result. Thus, for the purpose of focusing on K-Means itself, I only picked out two variables to build the models, which are V1 (variance of Wavelet Transformed image) and V2 (skewness of Wavelet Transformed image).
Alright, before diving into the project, let me walk you through every step in this project:
Step 1: Gather and Assess the data. (Full code) Step 2: Run K-Means.(Full code) Step 3: Re-run K-means several times to to see if we get similar results, which can tell if the K-Means model is stable or not. (Full code) Step 4: Analyze the K-Means computing results Step 5: Calculate the accuracy of the result! (Full code)
Let’s get started!
Step 1: Gather and Assess the data.
Image by author
The first step in building K-Means is to assess if this dataset is suitable for K-Means; if not, then we should choose other clustering models. After seeing this plot, I found the data distribution in the graph is neither too wide, nor too centered at one place, therefore it is worth trying to computing K-Means on this dataset. But, there is no obvious cluster in spherical shapes so we should expect the K-Means model won’t work perfectly here.
Step 2: Run K-Means.
Image by author
The start signs are the centroid of each cluster. And this graph seems to work fine.
Step 3: Re-run K-means several times to to see if we get similar results, which can make sure the K-Means model is stable in the dataset.
The section of the code is inspired by Dabbura, the author of this famous K-Means article.
Image by author
My third step is to run K-Means several times since K-Means will be randomly choosing initial places to be centroids, and then they will be changing their places according to the average distances from the members of each cluster, which will be set as the new centroids. Therefore, we normally will get different results every time we rerun K-Means, but if the results are too different among many tests, then it means that K-Means might not be suitable for this dataset, since it is not stable. Here, after running K-Means 9 times, the results we got are very similar, which means the K-Means here are stable. | https://towardsdatascience.com/k-means-clustering-project-banknote-authentication-289cfe773873 | ['John Chen', 'Yueh-Han'] | 2021-06-03 02:47:53.157000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data', 'Unsupervised Learning', 'Data Mining', 'Data Science'] |
Violence Against Women of Color | Breaking The Silence about Police Brutality Against Women of Color
Mapping the Margins by Kimberle Crenshaw introduces the idea of Intersectionality. Intersectionality has quite a complex meaning so I am going to take some time to take it apart and explain it. Intersectionality refers to the idea that every person is made up of various different components such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Each of these different parts create an overlapping system that makes up a person and neither one of the components can exist without the other. For example, a white woman in the United States may experience some type of inequality or unfairness due to her gender, but she wouldn’t experience any racial injustice because she is white. At the same time, a woman of color in the United States not only deals with injustices because of her gender, but she also deals with discrimination because she is of color. For the woman of color, her race and gender overlap to create her identify. She can’t be seen as just a woman or just a person of color because she experiences the world in terms of both of those components. Crenshaw seeks to look at how different dimensions of identity intersect. She points out that institutions at all levels fail to serve people in regard to intersectionality because they only focus of one of the components mentioned at a time. To illustrate her argument, she gives many examples in her article, but I will focus on one example. Crenshaw points to the flaws in the Immigration and Nationality Act passed by Congress which was meant to help immigrants who were married to American citizens and were being abused by their spouse. Because many of these individuals were only able to get to the United States by marrying an American citizen, they feared being deported if they reported the abuse, so they stayed silent. In an attempt to fix this issue, the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed the immigrants to stay in the country without their spouse. The catch was that they had to provide some sort of evidence to prove that their spouse was abusing them. Crenshaw states that this solution was not enough because most of the immigrants did not have enough recourses to support themselves and stay in the U.S independently and many of the immigrants are unable to speak English so they may not even know about this Act. So, in order to benefit from this Act, the immigrant would have to be English speaking and somewhat wealthy to be able to provide proof of abuse and support themselves without the help of their spouse. This leaves out the abused immigrants who are unable to speak English and have no money other than what is being provided by their spouse. Therefore, intersectionality is ignored in this situation and fails to serve everyone.
Now, I am going to shift my focus to look at police brutality thorough an intersectional lens. In 2017, people of color had three times higher chance of being killed by the police than white people. Although black men are killed by the police at a higher rate than women, much of police violence against women of color stays hidden. Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color points out that we can’t only focus on fatal shooting and excessive force. We must also address things like police sexual violence. She says that we don’t know exactly how many women are killed and brutalized by the police each year because no one collects or reports that kind of information, and police departments are not required to report this. We can only get glimpses of these types of brutally when cases such as Sandra Bland’s surface the web. She says, “just because the number of black women incarcerated were smaller than the number of black men, that didn’t mean their experiences didn’t have something to teach us about larger patterns of racial injustice and white supremacy in America.”
Just to give you an idea of police brutality towards black women, I am going to briefly focus on Sandra Bland’s story. In 2015, her story surfaced the web and caused quite an uproar. Bland was a black woman who was pulled over by a white police office for not using her turn signal. After being pulled over, her discussion with the police officer got heated because the officer asked her to put out her cigarette and she refused. The officer, Brian Encinia, had his dashcam on. In the dashcam, Encinia draws his taser and yells, “I will light you up! Get out! Now!” Bland then exited her vehicle. The two moved out of the video frame, but a bystander continued to video tape the rest of the incident. Encinia slammed her head into the ground, at this point Bland screamed out that the she could no longer hear anything because of the impact, then he continued to pin her to the ground by holding her arms behind her back and using his knees to keep her on the ground. Bland was heard yelling and crying. Bland was charged for assaulting a public servant and was placed in Waller County Jail. Three days after Bland’s arrest, she was found hanging in her cell. It was said that Bland had committed suicide with a trash bag, but many people thought differently. A few months before her death, Bland had created a video series called “Sandy Speaks” in which she spoke about different matters such as the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality. None of her family and friends believe that she could have committed suicide because she was a bright young woman who was excited to start a new job soon and had so much to live for. In one of her videos, Bland says, “there has been something really heavy on my mind, a seed that I feel like God has truly planted in my life, work that He has set for me to do, a message that He has for me to get out…” and then she goes on to speak about unfair treatment by the police towards black people. She finishes with, “if we want a change, if we really want a change, we can truly make it happen!” it was, still is, difficult for people to believe that someone with this much purpose would end her own life. After her story came out, the conversations about police brutality towards black women began to surface once again. I focused on her story because I believe that her mistreatment was solely based on the fact that she was a black woman. Can you imagine this same situation if Sandra Bland was white?
Sandra Bland is just one example of why intersectionality is important. We cannot say that all women have similar experiences when dealing with the police because a woman of color will have a much different experience with the police than a white woman. It is important to look at different dimensions of each person’s identity and understand that each component goes hand in hand and effects an individual’s way of experiencing the world. | https://medium.com/gendered-violence/violence-against-women-of-color-ba6be6147eec | [] | 2018-03-28 00:20:59.606000+00:00 | ['Sandra Bland', 'Violence', 'Police Brutality', 'Crenshaw', 'BlackLivesMatter'] |
Helping property owners protect fish | Hydraulic Project Approval (HPA): A tool to protect fish and their habitats
HPAs are meant to ensure that construction or other work in or near a waterbody is done in a manner that protects fish and their aquatic habitats. However, this tool is only effective if people follow the approved plans and guidelines in their HPA.
To better understand the frequency of HPA noncompliance, the department conducted a study project in the Hood Canal area. From July 2017 to February 2019, a WDFW biologist was dedicated to studying compliance coordination and conducted 175 site inspections on 98 HPA-permitted projects.
As part of an HPA compliance study project in Hood Canal, a WDFW biologist and contractor discuss possible solutions to compliance issues.
About 83% of site inspection visits encountered at least one instance of HPA noncompliance, which can have a profound impact on fish habitat.
In addition to documenting noncompliance issues, the WDFW biologist worked to help landowners and contractors identify and create solutions to compliance issues. Contractors found this collaboration to be a helpful partnership and voluntarily corrected any non-compliant concerns that were identified.
“WDFW’s Compliance Biologist has been very helpful, providing continued oversight of the work and quick feedback on the site. When there are any concerns or questions, she is extremely helpful in finding a quick and easy modification or suggestion to allow the work to be completed on time.” — Jenny Rotsten, Sealevel Bulkhead Builders, referencing 2018 HPA compliance pilot project
Compliance program helps promote good stewardship
In 2019, the Washington Legislature adopted the Chinook Abundance bill that, among other things, grants WDFW new civil compliance tools to help landowners follow fish protections. It specifies that when there is an HPA violation, WDFW must first try to get voluntary civil compliance by providing expert assistance. In April 2020, the Fish and Wildlife Commission adopted rules to implement this new law.
WDFW biologist performs compliance patrol of un-permitted projects on the shoreline of Hood Canal as part of a 2018 study project.
The department is now creating a statewide program to help landowners resolve potential issues and ensure construction projects are complying with HPA requirements. This program will also help water users protect fish by properly installing and maintaining fish screens on their water diversions.
However, WDFW does not have the capacity to provide additional coordination to landowners and contractors for their construction activities. Improving the effectiveness of HPAs will require dedicated staff to conduct site inspections and provide technical assistance.
The department is requesting $2.5 million during this legislative session to help fund this work throughout the 2021–23 biennium budget.
The Governor’s proposed 2021–23 budget partially funds this request. However, there is a an ongoing funding gap of $500,000 per biennium, which may slow the department’s ability to implement these improvements.
Providing technical support to landowners and contractors
Non-compliance of HPA requirements, intentional or accidental, hurts orca, fish, and fishing opportunities. While there are criminal situations where actions cause significant and intentional harm to habitat, most non-compliance issues are easily corrected in the moment with technical assistance.
WDFW wants to help people comply with the law. Our best chance of doing that is to have dedicated inspectors at construction sites during key points of work so they can fix non-compliant issues quickly and avoid damage to fish and their habitats. Preventing or correcting issues early in the project also reduces construction costs as it is often more difficult to remove or redo a non-compliant structure.
Contact
Tom McBride, Legislative Director
360–480–1471
Randi Thurston, Habitat Program Compliance Division Manager
360–870–4450 | https://medium.com/@wdfw/helping-property-owners-protect-fish-297b7711a777 | ['The Washington Department Of Fish'] | 2020-12-22 22:32:42.854000+00:00 | ['Shoreline', 'Salmon', 'Habitat', 'Conservation', 'Construction'] |
Momentum — The Mentor Driven Acceleration Program | Momentum Start-Up Accelerator is a 3-month startup acceleration program designed for ventures formed by Students & Alumni of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC).
In 2001, IDC faculty decided to develop and launch the IDC Entrepreneurship Club (IEC), thus initiating what would become Israel’s largest Student Entrepreneurship Club, serving over 1,000 students annually.
Momentum Start-Up Accelerator serves as the flagship program of the IDC Entrepreneurship Club — students and alumni of IDC, who have already begun working on their venture and are past the ideation stage, can apply during one of the two enrollment periods which occur at the beginning of the winter and spring semesters, accordingly.
As the enrollment process starts teams are handpicked from a long list of applicants by various criteria as Idea Assessment, Pitching, Business Model and Scalability Potential.
During the program, in which each batch period is one full academic semester, participants go through a planned syllabus structure designed to propell their Start-Up from Pre-Seed stage to competing at a higher level, whether by raising capital or by competing as a structured business over a market niche.
In addition to the structure of the program, which covers all relevant aspects for an emerging Start-Up (whether it be Storytelling, Market fit & Validation, Legal & Fiscal Advisory, or the Demo Day — a highlight event in which participants pitch their Start-Up to VC & Angel Investors), participats also earn a Mentor to guide and advise them throughout the program.
Mentors at Momentum serve as the key player of the program, as they are sharing with the participants invalueable lessons learned from their proven experience in the private sector.
There are various great Acceleration programs out there, many focusing on different stages that Start-Ups are at, or even at specific emerging industries. In addition, most Acceleration programs are obligated to their investors due to the fact that such programs have to make sense economically.
However, as a non-profit, full time volunteering based organization, what makes Momentum unique is that the participating teams are the client, and not the product — Momentum reversed the order of the model. | https://medium.com/@domhur/momentum-the-mentor-driven-acceleration-program-ea99db900fe | ['Dominik M. Hurmann'] | 2020-12-19 23:53:10.375000+00:00 | ['Accelerator', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Israel', 'Technology'] |
What is the meaning of baby blues after pregnancy? | A mother can experience mild depression and mood swings right after childbirth. These behavioral and mental changes are called baby blues. This is common in new mothers and usually fades away after a few weeks. The major reason behind this can be hormonal fluctuations they go through.
About More Information Download PinknBlu App Now : https://tinyurl.com/pinknblu-android | https://medium.com/@bobdumbre467/what-is-the-meaning-of-baby-blues-after-pregnancy-e017bce06d62 | ['Bob Dumbre'] | 2020-12-24 05:44:19.431000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Parenting', 'Pinknblu', 'Parenting Advice', 'Pregnancy'] |
9 Ways to Stop Designing the Same Old Stuff | 9 Ways to Stop Designing the Same Old Stuff
Last decade we reached peak homogeneity. Let’s mark the new one with an explosion of uniqueness.
Photo: Erlon Silva — TRI Digital/Getty Images
More than a year ago, in Boris Müller’s now-famous “Why Do All Websites Look the Same?”, he stated that today’s internet had become bland. That all interfaces are starting to look the same. Web design seems to be driven by technical and ideological constraints rather than creativity and ideas. He wasn’t wrong. Many others have noticed the same patterns.
It’s 2020 and uniqueness in interface design has only gotten worse. Through the maturation of UX design; the proliferation of templates, UI kits, and frameworks; and the stranglehold of data on design decisions, unique expression in websites and apps has been squeezed out in favor of the affordances offered by sticking with what’s expected.
This isn’t entirely bad. Design has become homogenized because those patterns have been proven to work. If design achieves its purpose, it’s good design.
But I can’t help but think that effective design and unique expression aren’t mutually exclusive. Innovation doesn’t have to be at odds with affordances. There must be ways to rise above the sea of sameness without compromising design performance.
How did we get to this place of interface blandness? And how can we break out of it? Let’s dive in.
Why do all websites and apps look the same?
To understand how to overcome this challenge, we must first appreciate how we got here.
Ten or 15 years ago, the web was still the Wild West. Mostly lawless, very experimental. We made sites in Flash with mystery navigations, sound effects, and gratuitous animations simply because we could. The technology was exciting and ripe for experimentation.
But then everyone got more serious. Websites went from being impressive extras to the necessary core of many businesses. And with that importance came a new level of expectation. Looking cool became far secondary to converting well.
The art of design got overwhelmed by data and the practicality of designing quickly at scale.
Content agnostic themes and templates
The proliferation of CMSs like WordPress led to a flood of websites based on mass-market templates designed to work for a wide range of uses, and therefore content-agnostic uses. This is their strength, but it’s an even bigger weakness.
A fundamental tenet of good UX design is an intimate connection between content and its form. When you separate the two, you’re creating a system that tries to standardize everyone into one structure rather than letting their needs dictate a unique set of design requirements. Function following form rather than form following function. That’s not design at all, and it’s created millions of websites that look similar and aren’t fit for purpose either.
Scalability and reusability
People started building much larger and more complex apps online, which necessitated systems that allowed for scaling. If everything is unique, it’s far too time-consuming to grow. So generic, but practical frameworks like Bootstrap caught on because they allowed people to build stuff quickly and at scale with less technical knowledge required.
Trendsetters like Google and Apple released well-documented design systems and guidelines, and then everyone started copying them (often at their client’s request) to fit in rather than swerving toward something new. It made life easier but allowed less room for differentiation.
Global trend amplifying bubbles
Go on Dribbble or Behance and you’ll find the homepages are full of the same superficial trends. Flat design, long shadows, glowing buttons, playful illustrations, or whatever the flavor of the week is now.
It used to be that design had regional flavor. You could tell the difference between Swiss design and Japanese, Danish, and Midwest American. For that matter, you could tell the difference between the look of a fashion brand, a tech company, and a small family business.
Now we all look the same places for inspiration, and those outlets amplify the most superficial and attention-grabbing trends across the globe in seconds. The internet has made the world of design much smaller.
Cheap stock everything
Tired of seeing the same Unsplash photos everywhere? (I’m guilty! There’s one at the top of this story.) Or the same generic stock illustrations of people at work on devices? Images speak a thousand words. If we’re all using the same images, we’re all saying the same thing. They are free or cheap, high quality, and easy to find. And they are killing the uniqueness of every project we use them on.
Data-driven design and affordances
Part of the maturation of UX design has been the integration of data into design decisions. Very little is left to instinct or guesswork when we can leverage user insights and analytics to decide which design solutions perform best.
When you see a landing page with a full-screen hero image overlaid with a buzzword-heavy introductory statement and a single call-to-action button, it looks the same as every other landing page simply because that formula has been proven to work. Why reinvent the wheel when the ones we’ve got work well?
Logos top or left, nav links horizontally across the top, hamburger icons in the corner, tab bars along the bottom: Users have learned to recognize these patterns over years of repeated exposure. Their reliability has created affordances that help us know how to use something without having to think much about it. Deviating away from those accepted patterns is seen as too great a risk. Performance dominates creativity.
Responsive design laziness
Before the popularity of smartphone screens, web design was far more like print design. You could pick a fairly standard canvas size and design a single experience that nearly everyone would see in the exact same way (unless they used Internet Explorer, in which case it was usually broken). This freedom allowed for greater experimentation.
When responsive design became a necessity, suddenly every interface had to be a fluid system of design “reflowing” into infinite, different-sized containers. This added a new layer of constraints and made good web design far more difficult. Naturally, designers looked for shortcuts.
Whether designing “mobile-first” or not, content started assuming patterns that would easily reflow into a single column. We reused these patterns over and over again without scrutinizing whether that delivery of content was actually optimized for a mobile/touch experience. Or, for fear of making responsive design too hard, we made everything very mobile friendly at the cost of not giving more to large-screen users on high-speed connections.
In short, we took the lazy path, and that meant someone on some device was getting a less-than-optimal experience. A more boring one, too.
Why is design sameness a problem?
Because every company and every user has different goals and needs. There are no one-size-fits-all approaches that can cover the diversity of what we want to achieve online.
When everything looks the same, nothing stands out. Nothing is special. Does your brand want to blend into the crowd of website sameness, or rise above it by breaking new ground and kickstarting new trends?
We’ve been scared to take that avant-garde position for fear of sacrificing affordances for style. But these things are not as mutually exclusive as we’ve been led to believe.
I argue that the day of bland, but successful enough websites and apps is coming to an end. The no-code/low-code revolution combined with A.I. means creating professional-looking, but generically designed interfaces is easier now than ever before, while ironically, the technology exists to do more interesting and experimental stuff online than we thought possible even a few years ago. We are living in a golden age of design and user experience opportunity, yet most of us are squandering that potential through data-driven sameness and lazy design masquerading as efficiency.
As Boris Müller says:
We can do everything in a browser. From massive-scale layouts to micro-typography, animation, and video. And what do we do with these incredible possibilities? Containers in containers in containers. Gigabytes of visually bland mobile-first pages contaminated with JavaScript. Generic templates that follow the same visual rules. If my younger self could have seen the state of web design 23 years later, he would have been very disappointed. Web design’s problem is not the limits of technology but the limits of our imagination. We’ve become far too obedient to visual conformity, economic viability, and assumed expectations.
After years of design style convergence, the 2020s will be the decade with a mature enough design ecosystem to allow uniqueness and innovation to flourish in a sustainable way. Success will no longer be guaranteed by how well you step in line with established trends but driven by how you differentiate.
Weapons to fight design sameness
It’s easy to get stuck in our ways, to reuse the same processes, to duplicate proven solutions rather than interrogating if there’s something better. It takes a conscious effort to keep our design thinking fresh. Here are some ideas to try.
1. Get broader inspiration
We need a much larger view of the design world than what’s trending on Dribbble. Look at TV and gaming. Book covers and magazines. Fashion and vehicle design. Architecture and industrial design. Get engrossed in nature. Study design history rather than what’s been popular in the past year. A broader base of inspiration creates a greater variety and more timeless design.
2. Educate your clients
How does the old saying go? “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Well, Henry Ford didn’t build horses because he knew of a better combustion-powered future. Your clients may want the same horse they saw their neighbor prancing around on. It does look fancy, after all, but is it what their business actually needs? You might be the one to open their eyes to innovate rather than duplicate.
3. Follow trends so you know when to break them
Don’t abandon Dribbble entirely. Staying aware of what’s popular is necessary if you want to buck the trend. Study why people get engrossed in certain design solutions so you know how best to deviate when it’s time for differentiation. As Hilary Archer said:
Being aware of these trends can help designers move in a different direction and try new things. Awareness of trends can help us to respond to a brief in the most appropriate way — step in line or swerve.
4. Pivot toward bespoke design
If your design business plan relies on cranking out slightly customized WP template sites, you’re part of the problem, not the solution. A.I. will be taking that job anyway, so the prudent move is to shift toward strategic UX thinking and custom design services.
5. Think before you stock
Not every project will have the budget, but you might be surprised at how effective it is to commission a few custom images to make a design really sing. Whether you art-direct a small photoshoot or collaborate with a colleague on new illustrations, where your brand and key selling points are concerned, avoiding stock is an easy ticket to unique expression.
6. Experiment with tech
WebGL, variable fonts, video, CSS animation, image recognition, NFC, Javascript trickery. There’s little we can’t make happen on the web or in apps these days. Don’t be afraid to design something you’re not sure how to build, and push development to catch up. If we all play it safe, we’re designing the same way we did five years ago. Your work may be outdated the second it’s live.
7. Question your assumptions
Before you go reaching for those geometric Grotesk fonts we all love, consider whether something with more character might better suit your message. Keep using that flexible 12-column grid that works so well, but explore how often you can break it to create variety in scale and alignment rather than walking the same line every time. Take the time, if only a little, to experiment free of constraints and assumptions. You may validate that what you assumed was best all along, or you may discover a fresh take on an old problem.
Go the extra mile to make something special as often as you can, even if it’s not the easy path.
8. Practice real responsive design
Even if you don’t use a mobile-first approach to every project (I sometimes don't), put responsive design at the core of your thinking and never an afterthought. Make it not about “How can I fit this same content in a narrower viewport?” and more about “What about this experience needs to change to make it purpose-built for a great mobile experience?”
9. Go the extra mile, but accept when you can’t
If you truly want to break free from design sameness, it may require a bit of sweat and extra money. A few more hours of experimentation, or an extra phone call to convince your stakeholders. Take that chance. Go the extra mile to make something special as often as you can, even if it’s not the easy path. You’ll never regret it. | https://modus.medium.com/9-ways-to-stop-designing-the-same-old-stuff-a7e3fd8c7e55 | ['Benek Lisefski'] | 2020-02-11 00:55:57.272000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Craft', 'Web Development', 'Creativity', 'UX'] |
Inslee signs bipartisan bill to support business and workers | Gov. Jay Inslee today signed legislation providing relief for businesses and workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. SB 5061 will increase minimum unemployment benefits for workers and provide significant tax relief for businesses over the next five years, to support recovery from the economic impacts of COVID shutdowns. The legislation, which was requested by the governor, is a critical piece of the state’s COVID-19 recovery plan. It passed with strong bipartisan support in both chambers.
Gov. Jay Inslee signs SB 5061.
COVID-19 has caused deep economic hardship for many workers and businesses. This bill, along with other relief we’ve provided, is another step in helping to mitigate these very difficult impacts.
SB 5061 relieves employers of individual benefit charges for claims that occurred between March 22 and May 30, 2020, the period of the governor’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order, and caps certain tax rates through 2025. Together, these actions prevent a $1.7 billion spike in unemployment taxes over the next five years, including just over $920 million in rate increases this year. At a time when revenue is down and employers are facing increased costs of business, this bill offers much needed relief.
The legislation also addresses the hardship being faced by workers, putting more money into the pockets of those experiencing unemployment by increasing the minimum benefit starting July 1. This builds on investments the governor made last November when, through budget authorization, he added over $9.5 million to resolve top unemployment claims adjudication issues, hire an additional 60 adjudicators and 32 dual language agents, and increase technology support and materials translation.
Additionally, SB 5061 makes policy updates to ensure that Washington’s unemployment insurance system is more nimble and responsive during public health emergencies. This includes eligibility for individuals at high risk for severe illness and their family members. It also ensures that federal money will not be left on the table when federal support is available for certain benefit programs and makes improvements to the state’s Voluntary Contributions Program which allows employers to buy-down rate increases even further.
Businesses and individuals won’t have to go through any additional processes in order to receive the deductions or increased benefits.
The bill was crafted with support from the Employment Security Department and their Unemployment Insurance Advisory Committee, which is composed of representatives from statewide business and labor organizations.
“The hospitality industry has been hit the hardest by this pandemic, and on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of businesses that have been impacted, we are grateful this is the first bill this session the legislature and the governor have taken action on,” said Anthony Anton, president and CEO of the Washington Hospitality Association. “Historic relief is on the way for workers and businesses, and SB 5061 sets the groundwork for additional relief efforts underway.” “SB 5061 recognizes that for many workers, the minimum benefit doesn’t meet the needs of themselves or their families, and by providing a modest increase, the Legislature will put more money in the pockets of the people who need it most,” said Joe Kendo, government affairs director for the Washington State Labor Council. “That means more groceries, fewer evictions and increased financial stability for people who need more than just a bridge to their next job.” “This legislation is a first step in the right direction and will significantly reduce the increase in unemployment insurance taxes facing Washington employers because of the pandemic,” said Kris Johnson, president of the Association of Washington Business. “We know more needs to be done, including a commitment to funding, and look forward to continued collaboration with the governor and legislature to restore lost jobs and begin rebuilding the economy.”
The legislation, which was sponsored by Sen. Karen Keiser, is the first to pass out of the legislature this session.
“This bill is responding to an urgent need. Employers are seeing increases of 300 to 500 percent and more in their unemployment premiums. SB 5061 provides a bridge for those who need it most,” said Keiser. “And it’s also going to help thousands of low-wage workers in our state who might end up being homeless because they can’t afford to pay the rent or keep the lights on or keep groceries on the table. These are real people. This isn’t just numbers.” Sen. Curtis King, who co-sponsored SB 5061, joined the governor for the announcement saying “Thank you so much for putting this bill forward … to help our businesses that have been struggling so vitally just to keep their doors open. It’s a great first step. I think there’s more work to do and … I look forward to continuing to work with you as we move forward to help businesses across the state.”
Rep. Mike Sells, who chairs the House Labor and Workplace Standards Committee, sponsored the companion bill in the House.
“Traditionally, for employment security, when you see a recession on a chart it’s like a bell-shaped curve, when you see this it’s a spike and it really happened almost overnight that we went from 500 calls a day to 26,000 at one point,” said Sells. “There’ll be changes, and some of them will be slow because we’ve never been in this situation before, but it won’t be the last time our state will face a health emergency. So further work will have to be done to be better prepared for the next one.”
Read the full bill here. | https://medium.com/wagovernor/inslee-signs-bipartisan-bill-to-support-business-and-workers-d550a3a52551 | ['Wa Governor S Office'] | 2021-02-08 21:12:12.057000+00:00 | ['Unemployment', 'Legislation', 'Washington'] |
Design / UX: Specialists vs Generalists — What’s Better? Here’s the truth | When I’m out teaching, I frequently get asked “What’s better? To be a jack of all trades designer, or someone that specializes in one specific area of UX? Should I be a full-stack designer? A Unicorn? What do all of these terms even mean?”
Ignore all of the dumb terms for a moment and let’s focus on the real question: Should I focus on being good at one thing, or should I try to be good at all things? Is it even possible to be equally good at all parts of the design process?
So what’s the answer? Is it better to be a specialist or generalist?
The design field is a lot like the medical field: For the first few years of the path to becoming a doctor, you get “Basic training”, or a general education of the body and its functions. After this general education, many doctors decide to just stick to being generalists — also called “General Practitioners”(I’m aware that this is grossly simplified).
Being a general practitioner is sufficient for most cases. However, sometimes you need deeper knowledge to solve very specific problems. For these cases, some doctors go on and study a few more years to specialize on particular parts of the body, like the brain, the heart, or the feet, or how to make people’s faces look younger.
Those specialists end up working either in their own practice or at a big clinic where their services are needed often. They also likely contribute to their specific niche in the medical industry in the form of submitting new research papers to help push the field forward.
But every medical student starts their education with a baseline of general knowledge about how the body functions. It’s generally not possible to be equally good at unrelated specialties like heart surgery and sports medicine, because those individual specializations are too deep to master both equally in any reasonable amount of time. By the time you’ve mastered one, you’d have already forgotten half of the other.
The Truth About Design is that for the first three years of your career, you’re going to be a general design practitioner. If you go to any good design program, you’re going to learn and practice the full spectrum of UX disciplines. In your first few jobs, you’re likely going to be working at small companies that don’t have the need or budget to hire a team of specialists. In your first three years on the job, you’re also simply not going to be good enough at anything to be able to specialize.
The Truth About Design is that for the first three years of your career, you’re going to be a general design practitioner.
Being a generalist is great for at least 80% of cases where a designer is needed. Jack-of-all-trades generalists make great freelancers and great employees at design agencies or small-to-mid-sized companies. Most companies don’t need full-time specialists all of the time. It’s rare that a company needs enough usability testing for someone to do it full-time. Same with content strategy, or information architecture. In many real-life situations, you don’t need to be a master of one discipline of UX, you need to be competent at a number of disciplines, and be able to switch between them. This is also important from a team perspective. If multiple people have overlapping skillsets, then once you’re maxed out on the amount of work you can take on, someone else on the team can help out, and vice versa.
Being a generalist is great, however, it’s not the generalists that push the industry forward.
All of the expertise we have in the industry came from specialists who spent years getting better and better at some niche part of the profession and then spent more years talking about it at conferences and writing articles and books. Specialists draw from the deep wellspring of new ideas and spread that knowledge to the masses of generalists. I’m talking about people like Luke Wroblewski, the expert on mobile design. Or Jorge Aranjo, the eminent expert on information architecture. Or Alan Cooper, the man who invented most of the UX research techniques we use today. Without these specialized experts, the generalists would have no knowledge to draw from.
This is the true meaning of the “T-shaped person”.
The horizontal top line is a set of skills in which you have decent understanding and knowledge, and the vertical center line is a single skill in which you have deep expertise. For example, you might be decent at creating prototyping in code, research, visual design and usability testing, but when it comes to strategy definition and interaction design, you are a master.
Specialists draw from the deep wellspring of new ideas and spread that knowledge to the masses of generalists.
Once you have acquired that level of mastery, you can, if you like, go to the designer’s equivalent of a big clinic where highly specialized skills are needed: A big tech company like Google, Apple or Facebook. After a few years there, you might find the work you do at a big company like that too stifling, but that’s a story for another article.
Discovering your specialty will come as a natural consequence of pushing yourself to your limits
If you decide to just do WordPress redesigns for the rest of your life, sure, you’ll never need to specialize. And if that’s your thing, I won’t judge you for it. But don’t you want to know how far you can go? Where your limits are? And if you just stick to one trick, what are you going to do when the market shifts and that trick is no longer needed?
For example, when I was first starting out, I did everything, including coding. Once I even wrote a basic CMS for a client. As the projects I worked on got larger and more complex, I noticed that I hit a plateau when it came to my coding skills: I just didn’t understand JavaScript, and that was clearly where the industry was going. So I gave up coding in order to focus on just the design aspect as part of a larger team.
Don’t you want to know how far you can go? Where your limits are?
I hit similar plateaus later on in my career with research and visual design: I am a good researcher, but I couldn’t hold a candle to the researchers at Walmart or Google, who had degrees in psychology and anthropology and did this all day. I’m a very competent visual designer, but I hit a similar plateau when I was working with the visual designers at Google, who are basically artists moonlighting as UI designers during the day.
But I haven’t been able to find an interaction designer that is clearly better than me. And I noticed that those designers and researchers never really thought about strategy, markets, and context.
So eventually, through the process of pushing myself into new and tougher situations, pieces of me fell away until I was left with Interaction Design and Strategy. A fortunate teaching opportunity at General Assembly made me aware of my abilities as a public speaker, presenter, and writer. And that’s my core skillset, at which I am able to play at the highest level, with no plateaus in sight. But I still feel like I have so much more to learn.
Summary
Being a generalist is great. But if you’re in the design industry, I truly hope that once you’ve mastered the basics and discovered which areas of the craft you gravitate towards the most, you decide to pick a specialty.
What’s cool about the design industry versus the medical field is that it’s not nearly as complicated and the fields are more interconnected, so it actually is possible to develop deep expertise at multiple areas over the course of your career. Probably not all of them though, because you have to account for interest levels and natural inclinations. But deciding to pick a specialty is an adventure of finding out how far you are able to push yourself in life. | https://medium.com/truthaboutdesign/design-ux-specialists-vs-generalists-whats-better-here-s-the-truth-fe9e44b428cd | ['Jamal Nichols'] | 2019-02-27 04:38:39.822000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'UX Design', 'Design', 'Design Thinking', 'Product Design'] |
a new patriot in the nation of two | a new patriot in the nation of two
a poem about betraying your country and being loyal only to love paulmartincurry Follow Dec 27, 2020 · 2 min read
Photo by Matias N Reyes on Unsplash
Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night
Come, my beautiful comrade,
compassionate compatriot
and only friend.
It’s time for the fire again.
Come, let’s burn our stupid blue passports
Let’s burn that beautiful flag
they wave in front of our eyes, so we can’t see
who of us dies.
Let’s burn down that big white slave house in a big white blaze
(we all know we have coming)
Let’s march into the embassy with guns — humming.
Let us ask the rest of the world what to do with us,
then let us do worse.
We are not Americans anymore.
We are not anything anymore.
Thank (the) god (we don’t believe in)
we’ve broken the curse.
We belong to no country or king or dream.
Only a nation of two.
One I will likely die for
without ever being asked.
Come, you will be the benevolent ruler
and I will take on every other task.
(except maybe managing the money)
Our flag will be your favorite painting.
Our anthem shallow breathe.
We will pledge our allegiance with our eyes
and worship our state-sanctioned religion with our bodies
every night in our state-sanctioned bed.
We will be lead, by our hearts —
but that does not make us peaceful
doves waiting to die.
No, you and I, we will make secret war on the world
infiltrating all its most prized parts —
learning all we can about these enemy lands.
(mostly what they drink and how they dance)
We’ll stockpile an arsenal of memories
to make us safe from everything but ourselves.
And we will conquer each other again and again and again.
Discover — a civil war in our nation of two
Recover — after heavy casualties and somehow continue.
Come my beautiful comrade,
Now is the time.
Death is at the door
and I am tired of waiting politely
in a nation I don’t love anymore.
Light the fires.
Let us burn off our birthplace
and blood ties to the land.
Let’s immigrate to a country we can believe in again
A country of just me and you.
One soul
A Nation of Two. | https://medium.com/illumination/a-new-patriot-in-the-nation-of-two-3ac194f52ef4 | [] | 2021-03-01 11:28:33.439000+00:00 | ['Free Verse', 'America', 'Poetry Sunday', 'Poetry', 'Kurt Vonnegut'] |
Woobledy Work | You’re Forever Yours, Faithfully, Semi-Selfie with the Chartres labyrinth of St. John’s Episcopal Church
Survival schemes are shapely pruning of the psyche. It’s by way of weeding that we’re fed any part and parcel deliverance from dread. We’re suited for depopulating the intractable spurts flung as far and easily as pollen on our breezes. Durability is dependent upon our breadth of seeing. The lens with which you lead your life informs the relevance of nearly all sightings. Therefore, magnifying as many crucial components that tip the scales toward reverent reverberations is explicitly encouraged. Upping your own ante is anything but self surface service. The staggering charge gripped tightly that you hold as fiercely as Joan of Arc dashed out with her swords or as swiftly as fabled King Arthur pulled Excalibur from the stone wield your preferred path. Wobbledy work is for those motivated authenticity-collectors. Tuning in to turn on the steadied synthesis of where we get shaken augments our strength.
If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be. ~Yogi Berra
Are you made of mountains or simply climbing them? There was a time when you could set me down, pin me down, and I would merely strive to do your bidding. I might as well have been building my own alps I next attempted conquering. Then, my trembles began to bubble as tiny flares poking through my positive exterior. Occasionally exploding across a screen such as the serene fraternity house lawn as midnight’s party was in full bloom. They’d be so flagrant they could stop traffic or a heated drinking game of quarters. Sometimes, they’d keep themselves private between just the two of us duking it out in an apartment, under the street lights of a lone Hollywood evening unusually barren of crowds, the boss’s office or private home. Living guarantees you’re gonna summon your share of spiritual apathy. So, the amount of your rise correlates to your outlook, which also leads to your in-looking.
Thy will be done on Earth as it is in everything. If at first you don’t succeed, peer, peek, stare deeper again, within. One’s willingness to empty the load of blame is quite the conversation place to start. When’s the last heartbeat you impressed the inkling that what you know in the mirror reflects what you are at your mortal core level? You don’t need a piece of paper to tell yourself nor anyone else that your qualifications are a human… being. You’re as conspicuous as cool and as terrible as terror if left uncharted. Yet, your possibilities to leap from ordinary to extraordinary are as common as selfies. Considering all of my sides usually allows me to settle away from anxiety. Without weakness, we’d have nothing to do. Without kindness, we’d have too much weakness. To become fluent in growth from stabilizing challenges as respectful interpretations of unbounded awareness is the most intimate action.
Peace can come if you try harder
Peace can come, ooh, if you really want it ~Stevie Nicks, Show Them The Way
Have you ever tried the scaling game? There are things we can be definite about and things we may be indefinite about. You’d never happily catch yourself driving cross-country and without ever stopping to rest, stretch, pee, or refuel your personal engine. Wherein every effort of processed movement before snapping you reward yourself with the acknowledged advantage of boundaries well kept. It’s the same as why one person dotes you while others may utterly ignore you. It’s your concentration of unrestricted compassion for yourself. I wish to ascend a literal peak. Although, I find I’m puffing at very few feet. When I forgive myself for wanting to quit I acquire added ounces of resilience. I attract and perform exactly what I’m meant to achieve if I’m enabling myself to truly lead. It’s similar to letting go. Do it for yourself as opposed to another. This is where we zoom in with our loyalty.
It’s wonderful how a piece of painted pavement can work such wonders for the soul! Insert the walk along one thirty-seven foot width replica of my beloved Paris city’s famous medieval marble labyrinth inside the Notre-Dame de Chartres Cathedral. The pulse of favorable persistence takes plenty of forms. Because I come to view the endless routes an experience may be deemed. Ergo, the finite can be removed from my hurt and replaced by an infinite capacity for change. I have the option to muster humor, a range of learning, the sedated relaxation of assuming the whole of humanity panhandles equivalent pain. An alliance of balance functions as a result of steering off base. The trapeze of tottering during a lifetime should give chase to joy. Any excuse otherwise is eclectically flimsy. If you’re slam-dunk ready for reliable nurturing, follow a dear friend’s advice to Embrace Your Wobbles. They’re the love jam to sweeten your existence biscuit.
Wonderful, Which is Yes, Photo by BradensEye featuring the gardens of St. John’s Episcopal Church
Creatively crafting a release of dirty energy is of unwavering worth. | https://medium.com/@bradenseye/woobledy-work-4991d7a5fab | [] | 2020-12-18 22:44:40.154000+00:00 | ['Awareness', 'Growth', 'Self Improvement', 'Kindness', 'Life Lessons'] |
HARA and BTPN-S collaborate to improve financial inclusion in rural Indonesia | At the end of November 2018, HARA helped the Indonesian bank BTPN-S provide micro-finance to over 700 farmers from 10 villages in Bojonegoro, East Java.
BTPN-S was able to extend their services to the farmers because of the assistance HARA had provided in streamlining the application process by gathering important data.
In total, BTPN-S approved of Rp 1.162.500.000 ($80.000) in micro-finance. The micro-finance ranged from a minimum of Rp 500.000 ($35) to a maximum of Rp 50.000.000 ($350) per farmer, with the average coming down to around Rp 1.650.000 ($115) per farmer.
“HARA provides new insights for BTPN Syariah, because this is the first time we have made an acquisition that did not use field officers from BTPN Syariah, but instead used the data and information provided by HARA. “We hope that this project can be expanded on a larger scale, so that the effect on the community and the effect for farmers is far greater.” — Arief Mediadianto, Business Development Specialist at BTPN-S
An estimated 55% of people in the remote areas of Indonesia regularly borrow money. Unfortunately, access to financial institutions is limited in these areas. And this is not only because there are only a few bank branches found in these more rural environments.
Often times, locals simply don’t possess the documents required to open a bank account or apply for a loan where banks are present. Sometimes this data is simply missing. This could be as simple as not having credit history, or a registered deed to a farmer’s plot of land.
“At the bank, the requirements are little bit complicated. You have to use a power of attorney, the head of the village, and a guarantee is required. When compared to other cooperatives or banks, I think it’s better with HARA. Besides that, it’s better because it’s in the village itself, so we don’t have to go to the city. You just need to bring a Kartu Keluarga (family card) and an ID Card, that’s it.” — Lisawati, farmer from Ngampal Village.
The result of this is that people in these rural areas have to resort to lending from middlemen that charge extortionate interest rates of up to 300 percent! The high interest rates charged by these loan sharks make daily life increasingly difficult for the farmers, especially if they have a family to provide for.
“HARA is tremendously helpful for smallholder farmers. This kind of activity greatly helps farmers to fulfil their needs HARA’s presence here […] helps us to come together to think about the people’s welfare in the years to come, and how we can bring it to perfection. That’s what I’ve been looking for.” — Mochamad Rodhi, Village Head of Kayulemah
HARA makes it possible for banks to extend financial services to rural areas by making the invisible visible. By collecting and verifying the data needed by financial institutions in an efficient way that benefits the farmer, all parties stand to gain.
Farmers get access to financial products while retaining the rights to their data, while banks are able to extend their services to a new demographic without the extra burden of collecting the data themselves. | https://medium.com/haratoken/hara-and-btpn-s-collaborate-to-improve-financial-inclusion-in-rural-indonesia-8bde0a171051 | [] | 2019-02-19 05:53:28.748000+00:00 | ['Agriculture', 'Indonesia', 'Blockchain', 'Financial Inclusion', 'Partnerships'] |
The Ultimative Bitcoin Guide | This guide always shows the best sites, informations and tutorials around Bitcoin, Blockchain and the Cryptocurrency universe. Bookmark now + feel free to share on all channels. It’s updated on a weekly basis.
Beginner Guides
Bitcoin explained in 3 minutes — https://medium.com/hubx/bitcoin-explained-in-3-minutes-6e3520c2516b
What is a Blockchain?- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WG7D47tGb0
Blockchain Explorers
DASH Block Explorer — https://explorer.dash.org/chain/Dash
Etherscan ETH Explorer — https://etherscan.io
Blockhain BITCOIN Explorer — https://blockchain.info/
Communities
Bitcointalk: Discussion about the Bitcoin Ecosystem — https://bitcointalk.org
STEEM: Decentralised social network platform — https://steemit.com
Reddit: Etherium — https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/
Reddit: Bitcoin — https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/
BTC-ECHO: News site and community (German)— https://www.btc-echo.de/
Exchanges
PRO TIPP:
Checkout HubX.io — Compare all exchanges incl. all hidden fees on the site www.hubx.io. Always get the best price for all major cryptocurrencys.
Coinbase — https://www.coinbase.com
Cex.io — https://cex.io
Coinmama — https://www.coinmama.com
Bittrex — https://bittrex.com
Bitstamp — https://www.bitstamp.ne
Bitfinex — https://www.bitfinex.com
BTC-C — https://www.btcc.com
Kraken — https://www.kraken.com
Luno — https://www.luno.com
Changelly — https://changelly.com
Shapeshift — https://shapeshift.io
Gemini — https://gemini.com/
GDAX — https://www.gdax.com
Poloniex — https://poloniex.com
BitPanda — https://www.bitpanda.com
Bitcoin.de — https://www.bitcoin.de
ICO
ICO Rating & Alerts
ICO Rating: Rating agency for ICOs — http://icorating.com/
ICO Alert: The only complete list of ICOs — https://www.icoalert.com
ICO Stats: ICO performance monitor — https://icostats.com
CoinSchedule: Best cryptocurrency ICOs — http://www.coinschedule.com
Make your own ICO:
CoinList: Fin. services for the next gen of technology — https://coinlist.co
Mining
Guides
What is Bitcoin Mining? — https://www.bitcoinmining.com
Etherium Mining Guide — https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/guides/how-to-mine-ethereum/
Mining Calculator
WhatToMine: Crypto mining profit calculator — https://whattomine.com
CoinWarz: Cryptocurrency Mining Calculators — https://www.coinwarz.com/calculators
Mining Hardware
GPUShack https://gpushack.com
Masternodes / Stacking
Masternodespro: Compare the Masternode ROI — https://masternodes.pro/
News Sources
CryptoPanic: A news aggregator platform indicating impact on price and market for traders and cryptocurrency enthusiasts. https://cryptopanic.com/
Cointerminal: Realtime cryptocurrency news — https://cointerminal.co/
CryptoAnalyst: Premier news analysis site — http://www.cryptoanalyst.co/
Pay with Crypto in Real Life (Web)
Abitsky: Cheap flights and last minute flights — https://www.abitsky.com
Expedia: Vacations, cheap flights, airfares — https://www.expedia.com/
eGifter: Online gift cards & group gifting — https://www.egifter.com
Newsegg: Computer Part, Laptop, Electronic — https://www.newegg.com/
Overstock: Designer brands — https://www.overstock.com
Pay with Crypto in Real Life (Offline Stores)
CoinMap: World biggest interactive map with offline points https://coinmap.org/welcome/
BitmapApp: IOS App with offline points — http://bitmapapp.com/
Podcast
Let’s Talk Bitcoin: One of the oldest Podcasts around Cryptocurrencys — https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter
a16z: Covers a range of topics in the world of technology, also Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrencys — https://a16z.com/podcasts/
The Bitcoin Game: Very young podcast from 2017, but high quality content
https://soundcloud.com/the-bitcoin-game
Coin Mastery: Great source for cryptocurrency news — https://www.coinmastery.com/
Portfolio Management
Blockfolio — http://blockfolio.com/
Cryptotrackr — https://cryptotrackr.com
Cointracking — https://cointracking.info/
Cryptotrack — http://cryptotrack.com/
Coinfyi — https://coin.fyi
Price Trackers
CoinMarketCap — https://coinmarketcap.com
Coindera: Bitcoin Alerts & Cryptocurrency Monitoring Made Easy https://coindera.com/
Cryptoalert: Never miss a crypto trade — https://cryptalert.com
Cryptowatch: live Bitcoin price charts — https://cryptowat.ch/
Taxation
BitcoinTax: Calculate Bitcoin Taxes for Capital Gains https://bitcoin.tax
Wallets
Software Wallets
MyEtherWallet: ETH & ERC20 Wallet — https://www.myetherwallet.com/
JAXX: Multi-Wallet for all major Cryptocurrencies — https://jaxx.io
Hardware Wallets
Ledger Hardware Wallet — https://www.ledgerwallet.com/
Trezor Hardware Wallt — https://trezor.io
YouTube Channels:
CryptoNick: Daily Cryptocurrency Content https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPWHmSfAsAiaKhMxNoIoByg
Ameer Rosic: Investor and a Blockchain evangelist https://www.youtube.com/user/AmeerRosic
Dr. Julian Hosp: Co-Founder of TenX & Blockchain Expert (German)
https://www.youtube.com/user/julianhosp
PRO TIPP
Do you want to buy Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencys always at the best rate? Checkout the site www.hubx.io — It’s the leading platform for comparing cryptocurrency assets. You can compare all major exchanges and never pay hidden fees again.
Written by Janos Konetschni, Q4/2017, V.1.03
Please feel free to give this article a clap and share it on all platforms. You want to add something? Please write in the comments below. | https://medium.com/hubx/the-ultimative-bitcoin-guide-fd9aad860328 | ['Janos Konetschni'] | 2017-12-06 14:15:40.752000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin Exchange', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
The Mistress | There’s no room for distraught. For I am the Mistress.
When I loved you
I knew it wasn't right,
that I must say adieu
and save my self from plight.
But rules were made for you
I am not the one to comply
In our little rendezvous
We can't be terrified.
I kiss you on those nights
Forget what world will say
I must keep you out of sight
And yet I chose to stay.
You break rules like the king
Yet I will never be your queen.
It was totally addicting
How your love gets me unclean.
Now, if love is a sin
then let me call me what you want
I am a willing victim
No one has ever taunt.
Society pulled my hair
Before your wife even does
Life is totally unfair
And that's the way it was.
I was just your lover
Accused of being ruthless
For they say I am a sinner.
Aren't we all? I digress.
Let me carry a cross
For being your wild entertainment
I am a figure of your chaos
Waiting for its entrapment.
Undress me with your thoughts
But let me escape with a nightdress.
There's no room for distraught
For I am the mistress. | https://medium.com/the-august/the-mistress-937c40d4c861 | [] | 2021-06-04 08:48:12.405000+00:00 | ['Poet', 'Regret', 'Sad', 'Poem', 'Mistress'] |
The Retail Apocalypse Has Arrived, What Will Rise From The Ashes? | If there was a silver lining to this year, maybe it’s that we didn’t have to brave holiday shopping at the mall. Goodbye, chaotic food courts. So long, grumpy mall Santa Clause.
In fact, 2020 may have put the days of mall shopping as we know it behind us for good. A decade in the making, the pandemic has finally wrought the retail apocalypse. As of October, 15% of America’s malls closed for good in 2020, according to a report by the Barclays investment group. Odds are, that’s just the beginning.
“What takes the mall’s place after we emerge from the pandemic may determine the fabric of American life for future generations”
“Good riddance,” you might think. “Malls are loud, annoying cathedrals to capitalism — no more, no less.” Yet the developers that own these spaces won’t just let them go to seed, and what takes their place after we emerge from the pandemic may determine the fabric of American life for future generations.
As a co-founder of experiential art-tech company Meow Wolf, I’ve made a business out of trying to realize a more imaginative and interesting future. In Santa Fe, that led our team to create The House of Eternal Return, an art experience that transformed a dormant bowling alley into a national sensation that attracted 400,000 visitors in its first year.
Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, NM. Photo by Kate Russell
The House’s success brought a deluge of commercial real estate developers to my doorstep. Collectively, they represent hundreds of malls and commercial centers across the country, each seeking a solution to the retail apocalypse. What do they plan on doing with all their empty square footage once we emerge from this pandemic? The common strategy that I’ve heard is quite disheartening: bail out big-box anchor tenants to protect against default before converting the spaces to online fulfillment centers.
Yikes. If transplanting digital retail warehouses into the heart of thousands of American towns feels ominously symbolic, that’s because it is. Malls aren’t just for buying things; for communities across America, they have served as “third places,” important social gathering spots outside of home and work. Rather than waving the white flag to mega online retailers, these commercial spaces should instead be updated with creative and enticing experiences worthy of leaving your home for.
“Developers of physical spaces have not been able to keep pace with digital developers…”
To do that, developers need to win back the hearts of kids, teenagers, and new families. Generation Z have abandoned malls for the same reason retail spaces are dead: there’s a more convenient and more interesting version on their phones (see: Roblox, Fortnite, IG, TikTok, etc). Developers of physical spaces have not been able to keep pace with digital developers who have crafted countless inspiring worlds for kids to explore, turning social media and mobile gaming into billion-dollar industries in the process.
But, as The House of Eternal Return proved, the physical world still has an edge. Real-life experiences, especially when they are mind-blowing and visually stunning, carry a prestigious value that the online world still cannot match. No matter how insane a virtual experience may be, there’s just no substitute for actually experiencing something IRL. In dollars and followers, Meow Wolf has proven that communities still have an insatiable desire to gather together — as long as you can deliver a remarkable and meme-able experience that is worthy of being shared on social media.
“Experiential Attractions are the new anchor tenant”
The old model for success — a big-box store, a movie theater and hodgepodge of retail stores — is now entirely extinct. Experiential attractions are the new anchor tenant. Meow Wolf is poised to prove this again in early 2021 with our second permanent art exhibition: Omega Mart at Las Vegas’ Area 15, an experience-centric mall-of-the-future created by Winston Fisher of Fisher Brothers Properties, one of the rare developers in this country who actively understands this emerging paradigm shift.
For of Resonating Lamps by teamLab
These attraction-anchored malls won’t just be monetary investments — they will be investments into a more inspiring, imaginative, and connected way of life for the American people. To center our country’s towns around warehouses for online retail is dystopian, a step toward a physical world that only exists to serve the virtual one. If you’re wondering what that might feel like, look around — it is not that different from quarantine.
We can choose to develop a more imaginative world. In Santa Fe, when the House of Eternal Return opened, we saw a vacant lot with a gutted bowling alley turn into a vaunted third place for my home city — a mecca of art and imagination that I wish I had when I was growing up. The same creative magic can happen in communities across this country.
“We can choose to develop a more imaginative world”
Transforming malls from retail hubs into social dream-a-toriums filled with art, technology, and play is certainly a major upheaval. But so was the concept of the mall itself, once upon a time. Not only did malls reward their investors; they made their communities closer, too. We shouldn’t give that up just because everyone is buying their Christmas gifts online. Commercial developers need to again learn what their communities are willing to leave the house for and then anchor their recovery strategy to that. And I can promise you, it is way more than the same-old mall Santa Clause from the 90’s. What communities are seeking are amazing experiences that remind us that the real world can still be a magical place. | https://medium.com/@spatialactivations/the-retail-apocalypse-has-arrived-what-will-rise-from-the-ashes-69fc1b70102 | ['Spatial Activations'] | 2020-12-23 16:10:37.909000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Retail', 'Malls', 'Experience', 'Attraction'] |
You Own Too Many Video Games | You Own Too Many Video Games
It is that time of year again. Black Friday. The time when bargain hunters wake up at five in the morning just so they can get a peek at a television that is on sale for a small fraction of the original price. The time when Fred Meyer puts socks and underwear at the forefront of their store, enticing innocent grandparents to get the stereotypical clothing gift for their little ones.
It’s also the time when digital game shops start putting half of their entire catalogue on sale, leading game hoarders like me to fight against the urge to splurge. Buying several game releases you’ve been waiting on for months is an exhilarating feeling, and it can happen all from the comfort of pajamas and warm blankets.
Before you know it, you look at the front of your Nintendo Switch and see that you’ve bought over a dozen indie gems that you haven’t even bitten into yet, all because you’re still trying to finish that AAA release that takes upwards of 50 hours. Does that mean you shouldn’t have bought those eShop games that were on sale? If you hadn’t, they would have gone back to full price, excluding them from your grasp for another eternity.
How then do you decide what to play when you own too many video games? What are the motivations behind devoting your precious time to one title while another sits lonely, waiting patiently to entertain and impact its player? Here are some tips to decide what to pull off the shelf of your personal library when you have some me-time.
Image by Enisaurus on Dribbble.
Pick up and play
Once you are an adult, gaming becomes a much more difficult hobby to navigate, unfortunately. You know, responsibilities and all that stuff are to blame. That doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to enjoy our childhood pastime, though. Even if it’s only for 20 minutes right before bed, it’s satisfying to wind down with an enjoyable title.
Some of the bigger, meatier releases pose a problem on this front. Many games of the current generation are so involved and so deeply narrative-driven that it makes it virtually impossible to pick them up and play for a small chunk of time. Sometimes you need a smaller release to engage in when all else fails.
Here’s where I suggest that if you are a grown-up who is inundated with the boring pleasantries of the working world and the chores of the household, you should go directly to the pick-up and play games in your library. Those retro hits like Super Mario World that require only ten minutes to complete three levels during a lunch break, or an indie stud like Gunman Clive that folds into your pocket on the Nintendo 3DS.
Sure, you want to get to the big release that you bought a couple of weeks ago, but that one can wait until vacation or a much-needed open patch of time in your life. Take what you can get with grab-and-go gaming. It’s like eating a piece of candy in the meantime until the cake arrives. Satisfying still, isn’t it?
What to play? So many games! Source: Shawn Laib.
Avoiding spoilers
Now, I realize waiting to play the enormous launch title you bought for your new PS5 or Xbox Series X has some gigantic drawbacks. Besides the fact that you bought a console possibly just to play that single huge release, you also have to avoid the avalanche of spoilers that fall upon you every time you open social media.
As already mentioned, games are so narrative-driven in modern times that any detail that slips across your eyes could completely ruin your own experience with the game. If you are paranoid about this possibility, then forgo my previous advice about tinkering with a small title. Dig into the one everyone is talking about, and then you’ll be able to add to the conversation instead of waiting on the sidelines, missing out.
Perhaps you bought a sequel to a game that you haven’t even played yet. Better to play the first one so that you can get to work on the next one as soon as possible. I know that my brother played The Last of Us this summer specifically so that he could hop in for the controversial follow-up. So if you see that there is some work to do before getting to the new release, prioritize those older games in your collection to get in on the new fun!
What is the most fun?
Sometimes it’s just as simple as what game you think you will have the most fun with. Not what game others have had the most fun with, and not the game that fits most snugly into your busy schedule.
Choose the game you’ve played every other year since you were a teenager, rekindling that magic you crave from previous times experiencing it. Play the game that your friend recommended to you in the genre that is your absolute favorite, allowing you to dive even deeper into the category that makes you the happiest.
Hobbies are about enjoyment, first and foremost. That same philosophy applies to gaming. Just because The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is considered the GOAT doesn’t mean that you have to keep playing it to the end if you aren’t feeling the same way about it.
Many gamers feel like it is sacrilegious to start and not finish a game, but if there is another title on the shelf you’ve been holding off on, you should probably quit and move on. We as adults don’t have that many hours in the day to play, so make sure whatever you’re playing is the experience that provides the most fun for you. All other reasoning is worthless without that ultimate joy.
Image by Scott Ulliman on Dribbble.
I hope that if you have been struggling to dig through all of your games for which one to enjoy next, these tips helped you even a little bit in your decision making. It is the holiday season, after all, so we should all get a little more time to play. Happy buying and happy gaming. | https://medium.com/super-jump/you-own-too-many-video-games-6a6cad99151f | ['Shawn Laib'] | 2020-11-27 22:41:28.519000+00:00 | ['Features', 'Gaming', 'Culture', 'Digital Life', 'Videogames'] |
Alicia Wood’s Story | Every day at VCRM is not like the other. We see so many faces walk through our door, each coming in with their own story and dream, to leave with a story that gives us goosebumps whenever we think about it.
Because of that, we decided to feature patient stories weekly — of course with their help and consent!
Our first story is a beautiful one that brings tears to our eyes.
Meet the beautiful and tenacious Alicia Wood!
When we reached out to Alicia about sharing her story, she told us, “It’s been a journey but I’m proud to share it, in hopes others won’t feel alone!”
“I’m one of those girls who knew I wanted to be a mom, like that was my calling in life. I dreamed of the day I could rub my big belly and feel every kick, wait in line at the elementary school in my minivan for school pick up before soccer practice, and plan crafts and after-school snacks. I studied hard and graduated college with a degree in Interior Design but with the end goal of landing the perfect job of being a stay at home mom. In high school, I always dealt with debilitating periods and when I was 24 years old I was finally diagnosed with endometriosis. The diagnosis was devastating and felt that my dreams of carrying a pregnancy, and being a mom, had been crushed. At a young age I was introduced to adoption and I learned that “family” wasn’t defined by DNA or by color but I didn’t understand how I could tie my desire to be a mom with carrying an adopted child.
Years later I met my husband, Brady, the conventional way, on match.com. One of the first things that drew me to him was the way he spoke of his nieces and nephews, his heart for a family, and his same outlook that family is defined by love. We married just months after we met and started to try for a family right away knowing of my endometriosis and that our age wouldn’t be on our side forever (we were 29 and 34 when we married).
Alicia and her husband Brady
I started a strict diet, we tracked my cycles, timed everything perfectly and were ecstatic to see two lines on a pregnancy test after 6 months of trying. Right away I envisioned the life that was growing inside of me. Unfortunately, just weeks later we found ourselves crying in the bathroom in the middle of the night, knowing we had lost our dreams and that I was miscarrying. First endometriosis, and now a miscarriage, I felt this was a cruel joke when my number one goal in life was to be a mom.
My cycle never returned even months after my miscarriage, so I was referred to a local fertility clinic in Oklahoma. There, I was diagnosed with PCOS, another blow, but felt I was in the right place to get pregnant. We started fertility drugs and my body always responded perfectly so every failed cycle was another rollercoaster ride. Eventually we were labeled “infertile” and were told our only option to carry a pregnancy was IVF. Around this time I had discovered embryo adoption/donation and felt this was exactly the road for us. At this point we were over the uphill of the roller coaster thinking a cycle was going to work only to be let down, and we felt that using embryos that had already led to successful births vs unknown would be the best for us, emotionally and physically! We were put on a waitlist at the clinic in Oklahoma, spot #4 and told it’d be 4 months MAX wait but that it’d move quickly. After almost 6 months of staying in the #4 spot we decided to look elsewhere.
Brady and I had families in big cities so we sought after fertility clinics in Dallas, Indianapolis, and Northern VA (where I was born and raised). Right away I ruled out clinics who either sent me right to a voicemail, didn’t return my call or had unfriendly front desk staff. I contacted VCRM, discovered that they had 3 sets of embryos we could choose from, and loved the responsiveness and friendliness of the staff. A few days later, on April 19th, we had a Skype call with Dr. Fady Sharara and just knew that this was the man who was going to make our dreams come true! We were sent the 3 profiles and after prayer and consideration we picked the set of embryos. Not long later I flew to Virginia to meet with Dr. Sharara and start the testing required. At one point I asked him if we had to do all the tests on this list and his response was, “the goal is to get you pregnant and be a mom, right?” Exactly. So I loved that he “dots his I’s and crosses his T’s”, he does lots of tests to make sure we are best set for success. His staff was there with me the entire way, cheering me on through every question, self-administered shot (Brady is beyond terrified of needles), and test result.
I was given my calendar with the estimated transfer date of June 19th, exactly 2 months after our first call with Dr. Sharara! That morning I arrived, with way too full of a bladder, and was handed a photo of our embryos.
What a sight to see the little cells that had the potential of growing inside of me and making us parents! While it was a rough journey to get to that day, I have to say being able to see that photo is priceless. Transfer went off without a hitch and I was officially “pregnant until proven otherwise”. I flew back to Oklahoma, with a big but careful pep in my step, and waited as patiently as possible for the first blood draw. A few hours after my first blood draw I get a call from Jessica with words I’ll never forget (in her most excited but trying to be quiet whisper voice), “Alicia, you’re pregnant!!!”.
We literally had all our eggs in this basket and it worked! We were still cautious, seeing if this rollercoaster would drop us, but with each blood draw my numbers continued to rise and this embryo was making its’ home for the next 9 months.
I write this, 30 weeks pregnant today, with tears in my eyes and rubbing my big belly, so thankful for Dr. Sharara and his staff. They gave us our dream. I now walk into my son’s almost done nursery, a room I questioned would ever hold a crib, grateful and beyond words for what VCRM has given us. Though my time was short with VCRM, we felt that our goal was their goal, and that our success was not just a statistic they could add to their list but something they cared about just as much as us.”
Alicia always walked into our office with the biggest smile and the most love. We could not be any happier for her and her husband, and cannot wait to meet their soon-to-be little baby boy, Ellis.
Follow us on Instagram at @vcrmfertility for more stories! | https://medium.com/@vcrmed/alicia-woods-story-58aa7b2f9c3f | ['Virginia Center For Reproductive Medicine'] | 2019-01-02 17:39:46.871000+00:00 | ['Ivf', 'Family', 'Baby', 'Pregnancy', 'Infertility'] |
It’s not just what you build, but Who you know that counts. | “These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.”
-Genesis 6:9 (ESV)
When I say the name “Noah,” what’s the first word that comes to your mind? If you’ve spent any time in church at all, I’m guessing you said “ark.” Noah is inextricably linked to the ark he built.
When the Bible begins to relay to us the story of Noah, it starts the account of his life by telling us that he “walked with God.” Now, I’m not saying the ark and that story aren’t important. But what if, in our focus on the ark, we’ve missed one of the most important things about Noah’s life? Noah walked with God.
We are all building something. Maybe a church, a business, or even a family. But in the hustle and bustle of life, don’t get so focused on what you’re building that you forget the most important thing…walking with God. That’s worship isn’t it? Walking with God.
Will you be remembered for what you built, or with Whom you walked? I pray my epitaph will be the latter. | https://medium.com/@chadbozarth/its-not-just-what-you-build-but-who-you-know-that-counts-2d3705f3752f | ['Chad Bozarth'] | 2021-08-17 15:57:12.775000+00:00 | ['Wisdom', 'Bible', 'Encouragement', 'Leadership', 'Christian Living'] |
Guidelines for constructive and empowering design feedback and critique | Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash
Regular, well-run feedback and critique sessions are critical for helping to refine a product and make it great, and a lot of these sessions do not help accomplish those goals.
Doing critique and feedback sessions in a way that is constructive and empowering, without hurting feelings and trust takes practice and patience.
My team does a daily demo and critique. We have found that the more often you provide feedback, the more it feels like coaching and the less it feels like criticism. Critique should be empowering and in service of making better products.
Frequent feedback also prevents people from going too far off course. Once people get really far off course, the critique and feedback become a lot more painful.
People will also often feel like because they have worked so hard and spent so much time on something that they want to go forward with it. They have become incredibly invested in it. Feedback after someone has become invested in something is usually too late, leads to hurt feelings and often puts you in the position of remediation, instead of driving alignment around the highest quality product and design possible.
I consider feedback and critique critical to building thoughtful and useful products. I’ve put together a list of guidelines that everyone doing product design critique should understand (and these can be adapted for other areas of design).
I put together this list of core guidelines for critique and feedback that will help you run and participate in better feedback and critique sessions
Here are my core guidelines for anyone providing feedback and critique:
Trust comes first
People do not like receiving feedback from people they don’t trust. There are probably some good evolutionary reasons for this. Trust must be established before feedback and criticism can work well.
With a lack of trust, people become defensive fast. With a lack of trust, people also will get very personal, very fast.
Do not invite anyone to a feedback and critique session who the rest of the team doesn’t trust. Do not invite anyone to receive feedback and critique who doesn’t trust the people giving them feedback.
For an internal design team, you all need to trust each other. Building trust comes first, and if you don’t have that trust built up, I do not recommend attempting a feedback and critique session with an entire team.
Everyone should know the critique process and guidelines
Anyone invited to give or receive feedback and critique should understand the rules of engagement and how the process is going to go. Most of what you see in this list is not that hard to achieve, but it’s important to recognize that people can’t learn or follow good feedback and critique practices if no one ever lays out the rules of engagement.
Codify the rules of engagement for feedback and critique. Put them in writing. Make sure everyone knows them.
Be transparent.
There should be alignment around what is trying to be solved
If people disagree on what is trying to be solved, we can’t have meaningful critique of a design that is attempting to solve a specific problem. The person receiving critique should introduce the problem they are trying to solve and any requirements they may be working with, and then go over their design.
Disagreement over whether or not a design meaningfully addresses a problem is materially different than whether or not the right problem is being attempted to be solved. Both are meaningful pieces of feedback, but they need to be handled separately. Critiqued can go really off the rails if these two things get mixed.
If there is disagreement over whether or not the right problem is being solved, a discussion can be had about that, but it should be divorced from the design being presented.
Critique and feedback can be given at various parts of the user-centered design process. Sometimes critique and feedback is about some early ideation and prototyping that is trying to discover the correct problem to be solved, and in this case, the feedback vary well may be a discussion about whether or not the proper problem is being solved. Other times the critique and feedback is about something much higher fidelity, and the purpose of the session is to refine it and validate the solution is correct for the problem.
Feedback must be 360
The key to empowering critique is that everyone is giving feedback, and everyone is getting it. When you get to a situation where an exalted few give feedback but never receive it, people become a lot more guarded.
I run our daily demo and critique session on our UX & design team where team members demo what they have worked on since our last session (or since they last had something demoable). I present my work like anyone else and receive feedback from my team members.
Because I put myself up for critique from everyone else on the team, no matter how new or junior, those people in turn feel empowered to receive feedback from me and others.
Anyone above receiving feedback is also above giving it.
Feedback is best when it is cross functional
Product design requires several different skills to bring a product to fruition, whether it be physical, digital or a combination. Feedback and critique are best when it is a cross-functional team, because owning a high-quality user experience takes a lot of different skills and roles. My UX & design team (we are a SaaS company with some consumer websites) has product designers, UX developers, and user researchers.
The feedback sessions include all of these cross-functional roles, because all of these roles contribute to figuring out what we should build and why and then actually seeing through the design.
The UX developers ultimately are tasked with putting the designs into code, and their work is what users actually interact with. In their process of taking a wireframe or visual comp and making it real, they may discover better ways to do something or things that don’t hold up as well in code, for instance. They provide this feedback, and the product designers will give them feedback on ways to tweak anything that comes up like this.
We also empower the UX developers to provide feedback on the product designs, as well as empowering product designers to provide feedback on the product when it gets in code. And of course, we are always trying to align our designs and products to what we are learning from our user research.
Feedback should be frequent
This is where most feedback and critique go off the rails. A lot of Scrum followers have a demo every sprint, which is typically every two weeks or so. This is way too infrequent to give actionable feedback that doesn’t cause a lot of problems.
Imagine spending two weeks working on something, perhaps with several other people, and then getting a bunch of feedback on potentially major changes. Imagine if some of the decisions you are getting feedback on were made in day one or two of you working on this. It will probably go poorly, feelings will be hurt, and people will be defensive.
You may even become even less likely to deliberately seek out feedback.
Two weeks is a really long time to go before a course correction. It’s also a really long time to go in-between receiving affirmation that you are on the right path.
The other direction this goes is that people wait so long in-between getting feedback, that no one is willing to speak up. The demo happens every two weeks, people clap, no one says anything, and then you move onto the next demo.
How valuable is an internal demo without feedback?
The genesis of my team’s daily demo and critique is that if you provide feedback opportunities often enough, people will embrace receiving and giving feedback much more. It will also be a much more empowering process.
The goal is to talk about what can be improved AND what was done really well
The second part of this is so critical. I don’t know why so many people miss this. Any coach would tell you it’s really important to reinforce when someone is doing something well.
If someone delivers a design that is really thoughtful and meets user and business goals, go over the specific areas they did well and why. You want them to internalize what they are doing well and make sure they do it in the future.
Critique is good at finding areas for improvement. This is also critical. This helps a design and product become more thoughtful. It’s what takes a product from good to great.
But if you only focus on the areas of improvement, people are missing a very important signal on the things they should do more of in the future. If you don’t reinforce when people are doing something well, they may change what they are doing and do worse work in the future.
Feedback must be both actionable by the person you are giving it to, and actionable in the sense that it is related to the problem trying to be solved.
Feedback must be actionable
The point of receiving critique is to get actionable that you can use to improve what you are currently working on or to help you with future work.
Non-actionable feedback can be true. But if it’s not actionable, and remember this phrase, “it’s true, but irrelevant.”
I’ve had people provide feedback on typefaces, color, and other core elements of a design system and design language during a feedback session on product features like filtering or tables to display data. That feedback is way out of scope and prevented us from addressing the actual problem we were trying to solve for users.
If there is already an established design system in place, that would be an inappropriate time to talk about making a large-scale branding or design system change.
Feedback should be in context
The design may be displayed on a device or in a context that is not a typical use case. A lot of designs are demoed on large monitors that are high resolution in conference rooms, which can lead to the design being critiqued in an atypical context.
How many of your users are using your website, for instance, on a big 1080p monitor with the browser going full screen? This can lead to people complaining about excess white space or the design being too sparse. But if your user base is overwhelmingly on 13-inch laptops and you design for this, the critique should consider this context.
Another common issue is the problem of “desktop viewpoint,” where a product may be primarily used on mobile, but all of the people critiquing it stare at it on desktop on their work computers and mostly provide feedback for desktop use cases. This is a misalignment with how your users see the product.
You can’t fully recreate and test all user contexts, but you should understand the context your users will use your products in.
Feedback must never be personal
Critique is not about critiquing the person; it’s about critiquing their work.
Telling someone they need to work harder or that they are doing bad work is not constructive. It’s vague. It’s hurtful, and it’s not focused on providing meaningful feedback that can help make the product better.
You also want positive, affirmational feedback to be focused on the quality of the work and how it helps users, and not on the person. A key part of feedback when done in a setting with a team is that other people can learn from each other and the feedback that each other is given.
For trust purposes, it’s important to only allow people to provide feedback if they understand this point.
Feedback should always be from the users’ perspective
We build products to help users do things better. We build products to delight users. We build products to make users’ lives easier.
We don’t build products to keep product managers happy. We don’t build products because a salesperson thinks it’s a good idea. We don’t build products to keep ourselves happy.
Feedback should not be about, “I personally think X, and therefore you should make this change to your design.” Feedback should be focused around, “how will this feature you have designed help a user do X better?”
Yes, some feedback will be more pointed, such as, “this font size and contrast does not appear to be WCAG compliant,” but I have found that as much as possible, try to phrase things like question, and have the designer respond. “Is this font size and contrast WCAG compliant?”
Give critical feedback in the form of a question as much as possible
People try to respond to statements with rebuttals. The goal of feedback and critique is to get everyone involved in the process to think more expansively and to work to improve the designs and products. It should be a collaborative process that yields better results for everyone.
Giving your feedback as a question allows a person to think of it as truly an exploratory question — a question they may have never considered — and that may reframe their thinking. This will also give them the ability to give a thoughtful reply that changes the thinking of the question asker.
Also, when you think of feedback as about asking questions and less about making statements, those giving the critique will think more expansively and start asking questions that they themselves have no preconceived notion as to what the answer is.
Questions are empowering and expansive. Critique is about empowering the entire team to do better work together.
Encourage people to ask questions and be expansive in their thinking
This goes beyond trying to phrase critical feedback in the form of a question. Encourage people to ask questions about anything they don’t know, anything that may be come up.
Questions help people and teams expand their thinking. A question may be a simple clarification about the design or a feature of the product itself. Or it might be something along the lines of, “what if used some machine learning in this part of your design to surface recommendations of X for users?”
Feedback and critique sessions are a great time for people to push each other to keep thinking of ways to refine and improve products and designs. Some of these questions, like the example above, may be more long-term thinking, but it’s good to get the team thinking and discussing those bigger pictures ideas organically as they come up.
Everyone giving feedback should understand user problems and goals
Good product design is user centered. Everyone giving feedback should understand your users’ problems and the goals they may have. Everyone giving feedback should understand the problem that is being attempted to be solved with this design.
This means that everyone giving feedback should be apprised of your latest user research and should ideally have direct exposure to customers through user research or other methods (even if just as an observer). It also means that everyone giving feedback should understand what problems this particular design is trying to solve.
If good product design is ultimately about how something works, everyone giving feedback should have a sense of what they are even working towards.
Everyone giving feedback should understand business goals
If you are making a product to sell, the designs that are made and the reasons for them should ultimately serve business goals. If people providing feedback don’t know these goals, the feedback they give may actually hurt your business goals.
The difference between selling mass market ad-supported business-to-consumer products and enterprise software as a service products (SaaS) are vast. Anyone who doesn’t really understand how you make money and what your future business goals are, is not in good position to provide feedback.
Everyone should be engaged
Close laptops and put phones away.
People are more confident presenting when people are engaged, and what’s the point of a critique session is people are half paying attention? A critique session is not a meeting where you can just idly check email during. This is a time to sweat the details.
The exceptions to this rule are if you are getting ready to present or if you are taking notes. I try to take notes on pen and paper during these sessions or use a white board to help myself stay as engaged as possible.
Negative people aren’t invited (but assume positive intent)
Negativity and mean spiritedness will kill morale in most situations. Mix it with a critique session, and it can be downright toxic.
My job as a design leader is to shield my team members from negative and toxic influences. Some people never provide actionable and meaningful feedback. Others provide good feedback, but not in a constructive way. This can hurt morale and can destroy the confidence of talented designers and will lead to worse work in the future.
If someone is being too negative, they won’t be invited to future sessions, but, this is key, assume positive intent with people, and let everyone know this as one of your core compacts with each other ahead of time. Letting people know that you are assuming positive intent with everyone who is in the feedback session will help people build trust and provide constructive feedback.
If the issue is with a designer working with a product manager or some other stakeholder and that person has control over the product that the design is for, I will help demo the design with my designer to help deflect some of the negativity. I will also work privately with that stakeholder to try to get their feedback to be more constructive.
Anyone can learn to give meaningful critique
No one is born being good at giving feedback and critique. We have to learn it. Teach people how to do it properly, give people the right tools and techniques to do it well, and make sure that everyone knows everything they need to know about your users and business first, and you can have constructive feedback and critique with anyone in your org. | https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-constructive-and-empowering-design-feedback-and-critique-5a2a5c460dc1 | ['Patrick Thornton'] | 2019-02-01 00:30:55.356000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Design Thinking', 'Design', 'Design Process', 'UX'] |
The Pleasure of the Process | The Pleasure of the Process
I took some time for rest and slow thinking, and it brought me back to why I pursue my craft.
Image via pxhere
I’ve not written anything for about a week, as I’ve been experiencing a bit of a lull in enthusiasm. The good thing about this is that instead of mulling this over and over and trying to push myself to do work that I know I can’t, I chose to take a rest and do something enjoyable instead. Unbelievably to many, this took a conscious effort, but that’s how my upside-down brain works. I consider this progress over my guilt-laden days of pretending to write while surfing the internet and playing solitaire all day.
I need some new clothes, but I’m skint and I have a ton of stuff that’s never been worn and doesn’t fit, so I decided to cannibalise a few items to make something new. My current project is a hoodie fashioned from two other hoodies and some random trimmings I found. Sewing is a great thing to do in order to relax the brain. You need to concentrate pretty hard, but it’s on one very specific and repetitive thing.
Because it’s a relatively simple task, my mind was free to declutter during the process, and I had a load of other random ideas while I was stitching pieces of fabric together. Not just for my writing, but for artwork that might actually get my long-awaited Etsy shop off the ground. Of course, I had a notepad nearby ready to scribble all this down, as and when the ideas flowed.
It’s pretty easy to make your own clothing if you’re not starting from scratch, so I just needed to swap some bits around, cut larger pieces off of one to add to the other, and to preserve the one zip that’s still working. I also managed to keep a bit of the print from the least-whole garment, so that was great. There was just one problem.
The smaller hoodie had a really handy pocket on the arm that I wanted to move across to the new one. I’d have to separate it from the sleeve because the recipient hoodie has longer arms. No problem, I thought. I’ll just unpick the stitching on the sleeve, and then re-install it in the new hem I’m creating to make the sleeves wider. A good idea, in theory, but the practical side didn’t go quite to plan.
I fixed the pocket in place with some pins and tacking stitches, and then neatly doubled-stitched it along the seam by hand (I don’t have a sewing machine at the moment, but being able to stitch well by hand has rescued many a pair of socks). I was almost done, and I turned the sleeve the right way round to check it all lined up, and… I had sewn the pocket with the zip on the inside of the pocket.
I was really annoyed and considered just leaving it like that, but I thought to myself, no, I want it done right, so I’ll just unpick it, fix it in place the other way round this time, and redo it. It was pretty awkward because there were four pieces of cloth meeting at one point (probably why I cocked it up in the first place), but I managed to get it sewn together with the zip facing outwards.
Once more, I turned the sleeve the right way round to see how it looked. I had only gone and sewn it with the zip pointing downwards instead of up towards the armpit. I was pretty pissed off by now, but I still wanted to get it right, so I patiently unpicked my neat and strong double-stitching and began the process over again. This time, finally, it was done, and it didn’t look half bad.
Now, I could actually fix the sleeves to the body of the hoodie, but before I started on that, I went for a little wander on YouTube, and I discovered this video of a baby bird hatching from its egg. It seemed to mirror how I felt about the never-ending pocket of doom I had created:
It’s both joyful and frustrating to watch. We first see the chick make a little hole in the shell, and there’s a tiny bit of movement we can spy through the hole. But the chick gives it a few seconds before it tries to peck away at it a little more. It makes an almost-perfect straight line, like you might make taking the top off of a hard-boiled egg for breakfast.
And then it takes another breather. It’s hard work for this little being, and it’s going to take a while to get out. We can see what might be a beak nosing through the hole, and it pecks along the edge to make it a little longer. But this takes time, and the chick pauses frequently while it’s working on chiselling a way out — it looks a little like it’s just having a nice lie-down before it gets on to the next bit.
There’s some visible wriggling, and the crack lengthens. The bird could emerge any moment! But not quite. The tiny creature keeps moving about, and the shell almost looks like it will split into two, but the bird isn’t quite able to manage it. It needs to build up the strength to break free. And so it continues. We can see tiny pink body parts, with perhaps some matted feathers, but we can’t tell exactly what they are yet.
Tiny fragments fall off of the shell as the bird wriggles some more, but the shell is still mostly intact. Every so often, the bird stops and then gets going again. The pauses are almost as long as the active moments. The bird is really taking its time over this. The crack widens some more, and we can see a bit more of the little wrinkled body within.
That was a big push, so it stops and rests again for a few seconds. Then it moves some more, trying to break the shell apart, but not quite able to do so, it pauses for another rest. This goes on for some time, exertion followed by rest, followed by more effort and more rest, until, eventually, a scrawny, naked and helpless bird emerges. It was all worth the wait. | https://medium.com/bulletproof-writers/the-pleasure-of-the-process-f13853b1d318 | ['Katy Preen'] | 2019-04-13 22:47:20.936000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Work', 'Work Life Balance', 'Writing'] |
Self Love- A Poem on Healing | Self love is a strange sort of existence.
Sometimes, you forget it’s uncommon.
Sometimes, you forget it’s attainable.
But, you never forget it exists.
It’s this type of potion that reminds you you aren’t required to be perfect.
The pleasant surprise of you finally getting to enjoy the calming confetti you’ve been throwing on everyone else’s lives.
Confetti is for celebration,
and sometimes it’s hard to celebrate ourselves.
So I’ll remind you:
Just because you don’t like your body, does not mean you can’t respect it.
Cutting yourself up won’t get rid of the claustrophobia you feel from being in your own skin,
Bowing down to others won’t raise you up.
So yeah, it may take some adjustments to achieve self love.
You may lose some people.
You may lose those who used you as a footstool or a floor mat,
but you won’t regret your own forward motion just because of what you left in
the past.
It will all be worth it.
The transformation your mind took into a sort of no man’s land will
eventually dissipate as you learn to stop blaming yourself as well as learn to
gain personal responsibility.
Balance.
That’s all self love is.
A magical concoction that can be dangerous if mixed improperly.
Horribly dangerous.
So be careful.
Ask those you trust to hold you accountable,
but most importantly,
hold yourself accountable.
Remember you aren’t perfect,
but that doesn’t make every one of your actions excusable.
Patience.
Patience.
Patience is the key.
You will slowly drift in and out of recovery remission and relapse.
Until suddenly one day,
while you’re drinking your coffee,
or walking your dog,
or comforting your friend,
that you haven’t picked up a blade in years.
And that lighters remind you more of birthday parties than they do of the darkness,
and you’ll smile.
Recovery isn’t instantaneous,
but it’s possible,
So, while self love is a strange, uncommon way to exist
find how that existence looks in you.
Hug it around the neck
and make it your best friend.
Make the love you have for yourself your best friend,
and work harder for that best friend than you do for any other person.
That beautiful day of realization will come
and you will sigh,
maybe even laugh
and you will be grateful for everything you’ve sacrificed. | https://medium.com/@greysonlee-am/self-love-a-poem-on-healing-b5c3bcd9818f | ['Greyson Arnold'] | 2020-12-24 03:15:51.526000+00:00 | ['Courage', 'Healing', 'Self Love', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Poetry'] |
Data Handling From Different File Types And Basic Database Manipulation Using Python | Hello learners. In this article, I am going to discuss three basic problem statements that can be helpful in your “Data Science” journey. This article holds the methods to handle data and load data from different file types like CSV, EXCEL, JSON and about querying simple SQL database using Python.
Problem Statement 1:-
Suppose, you have a machine learning model ready and you want some ready-made data set to train and test our model before deploying.
Soln:
The “scikit-learn” library of python provides the user with three sample datasets, available as preloaded sets inside the library.
load_digits() — This data set is used mostly for image classification models. load_boston() — This is used for linear regression, multiple regression and other regression problems. load_iris() — Classification problems can be tested best on this data set as it provides some labelled cluster types as data.
loading readymade datasets from Scikit-Learn
Here, dataset is the module of sklearn library that holds all the pre-loaded datasets. Hence we need to import it from sklearn first.
feature and target extraction from the loaded data
Similarly, we can load the other two data sets as follow;
loading boston and iris data by using scikit-learn
One crucial and useful thing in the pre-existing data set is that we don’t need to clean the data set and make it ready manually. The data is available as a ready to use set, which in term allows us to skip the data wrangling processes before training our Machine Learning model.
Problem Statement 2:
how to use a CSV(Comma-Separated Value), Excel, JSON file data as the input data in your model?
Soln:
The pandas library of python gives enormous freedom and control to the programmers. You can use its built-in functions to load the files as a python dataframe. “Dataframe” in python is just like a table having rows and columns, which holds data and provide many functions that can help us to manipulate the table elements and make the data table ready to use.
Loading different type of files using pandas dataframe
Problem Statement 3:
How to load data from an SQLite database into your python snippet, which means how to connect database with the python code?
Soln:
There are many types of databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite etc. Among these SQLite comes with a database browser and very easy to operate. Let’s have a look at how to query from a SQL database.
Using the SQL query to perform operation on databases
So basically what happens here is, we make a connection of our python code with our SQLite database first by using .connect() and then we pass the required query “SELECT * FROM Album” as an argument along with the python object conn. The python compiler passes the command to the SQLlie editor and makes it execute, collects the output data of the database query and stores it as a dataframe data4.
So, what is an SQL query?
This is just like a command we give to our machine through the command line. Here we give this command known as a query to the SQL database. “Album” is one of the tables in the database and by using SELECT * you are passing a command to the database to select all the rows of the table “Album” and return the output/ print them in the console.
Loading the data to a data frame object is the first step we perform while creating a machine learning program or model.
That’s all for today guys, please subscribe, share and comment.
Thank you. | https://medium.com/machine-learning-kickstart/data-handling-from-different-file-types-and-basic-database-manipulation-using-python-b5092c0d65bd | ['Abhijit Tripathy'] | 2020-05-03 15:47:28.257000+00:00 | ['Python Programming', 'Scikit Learn', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Pandas Dataframe'] |
Is Becoming A New Mom Career-Limiting? | It would seem falling pregnant is the worst thing for your career in corporate South Africa. With unpaid maternity leave as the legal norm, new mothers have more than baby blues to deal with.
My entire life changed when I got pregnant, and my husband’s hardly changed at all,” says 30-year-old Lilly Jensen (name changed to protect identity).
In a few months, Jensen went from being a successful managing editor at a local magazine on a promising career track to a stay-at-home mom.
Her pregnancy, and the subsequent maternity leave, completely derailed her career. With her baby at home, little support structure, unreliable help and a husband not legally allowed to take paternity leave, she had little choice. After two months back in the office, she quit.
“I wouldn’t have felt so helpless if Jack had been allowed to take leave,” she says. “I might have made a different decision if I’d had the support. I felt I had no other option.”
Maternity leave is often treated as a punishment in the workplace, says Manisha Maganbhai-Mooloo, a partner at Adams & Adams Attorneys, a South African law firm.
With no legal equivalent of maternity leave for new dads in South Africa — fathers may take three days of paid family responsibility leave around the birth of the baby, if it’s not used up on other events the leave was designed for — the bulk of the responsibility and burden of parenthood falls on the mother.
“Pregnancy is treated as a penalty and almost acts as a halt to promotional prospects,” says Maganbhai-Mooloo. “Projects are halted and a women’s career is sent on a completely different trajectory.”
Anita Bosch, lead researcher at the Women in the Workplace Research Programme at the University of Johannesburg agrees, saying that pregnancy is treated as an anomaly. Keeping in mind that the workplace was developed with men as the model workers, maternity leave negatively impacts a woman’s career, says Bosch.
“You hear comments around the workplace about a ‘staffing problem’ when employees fall pregnant.” The legal minimum for South African maternity leave is four months unpaid, and it only applies to women. There’s no paternity leave, no leave for adoption, or surrogacy.
“It’s left to companies to offer more generous policies to their employees,” says Maganbhai-Mooloo. And if companies don’t offer paid maternity leave, employees have to turn to the Unemployment Insurance Fund, a government-run organization, to pay them a monthly stipend. A year later, and Jensen is still waiting for her payout.
“I don’t know how single moms do it,” she says.
Maganbhai-Mooloo is frustrated by the inherently unfair maternity law in South Africa. Despite good labor laws, even by international standards, South Africa lags behind with legislature on maternity.
“The law needs to be amended to allow for paid paternity leave and paid maternity leave,” she says. “Not to mention surrogacy and adoption leave.”
However, in her opinion, the ideal should be shared parental leave that can be evenly divided between the two parents, to split the onus of parenthood and equally distribute the effect a baby has on both career paths. After a challenging birth, and a severe bout of post-partum depression, Maganbhai-Mooloo herself would have preferred her husband taking paternity leave soon after birth, with her maternity leave kicking in only after she’d dealt with the baby blues.
South Africa still has a long way to go. With mothers penalised for pregnancy, and fathers unable to step-up, paternity leave would help to equalize the playing ground. Unpaid maternity leave also places new mothers at a huge disadvantage. As a 2013 report by the Human Rights Watch discovered, unpaid maternity leave can lead to serious consequences for health, finances and career paths.
“I felt like a deadweight when I was pregnant,” says Jensen. “And I shouldn’t have to feel like that.”
If you enjoyed this article, please click the 👏 button to help others find it too! | https://medium.com/mission-succexy/is-becoming-a-new-mom-career-limiting-32ae8aa41987 | ['Samantha Steele'] | 2017-11-09 19:36:00.574000+00:00 | ['Feminism', 'Motherhood', 'Career Woman', 'Career Paths', 'Work Life Balance'] |
Who are the real victims of this crash? | Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash (altered by author)
To the Editor:
I read your article about the new regulations for the financial sector and I have to say, I’m outraged. How dare they try to protect my investments? If I want to lose my life savings to a conman, that’s my business.
What about the real victims of this crisis, the bankers? Haven’t they suffered enough? Their bonuses have been slashed to mere millions. Five-car garages don’t pay for themselves, you know. And what’s the point of having one if you don’t have an extra Ferrari parked out front just to impress the neighbors?
Same thing with yachts. And private planes. Think of all the underpaid craftsmen who will lose their jobs. The super rich may be less than one percent of our population but they make all the important decisions so naturally they deserve the bulk of our wealth. This is America, not Cuba. Our forefathers worked hard to create a system that cheated the poor at every turn. Let’s not let them down by turning it into one that benefits us all.
Signed,
A Patriot | https://medium.com/down-in-the-dingle/who-are-the-real-victims-of-this-crash-c696fd319566 | ['Darrell Miller'] | 2020-12-03 03:21:24.035000+00:00 | ['Freedom', 'Inequality', 'Money', 'Satire', 'Humor'] |
Serverless Orchestration with AWS Step Functions: Lessons Learned | The London Philharmonic Orchestra performing at the Southbank Centre
The emergence of Cloud computing, and the more recent emergence of MLOps (the combination of Machine Learning and Operations), has shown that there is an eagerness from businesses to take advantage of Machine Learning technology. Although businesses in certain sectors already use ML, many are still in the early stages of adoption. They are yet to advance their ML capabilities to something more than just a science experiment.
The Applied Data Science and Machine Learning (ADSML) team at Sainsbury’s Tech carries a vision: “To give colleagues and customers access to automated data-driven support for all their complex decision making”. We want to be able to help make these decision-making algorithms as accessible and as automated as possible.
A year ago or so, the ADSML team was new to the world of serverless architecture and building data pipelines that productionise data science algorithms. We built our first couple of pipelines with similar approaches. The first being 10–12 different Lambda Functions chained together, with each triggered by the output of the previous Lambda landing a file in S3. Each Lambda would perform a small part of the pipeline. This would include ETL (Extract-Transform-Load), algorithm execution and post processing. Although these pipelines worked well, we soon figured out the limitations of this approach and of Lambda Functions in general. These limitations were:
Messy S3 buckets: loads of files landing into different areas in S3
No single view of execution flow, no graphical/easy way to track the executions in real-time
With around 8000 execution per day, it made it very difficult to find single points of failure
It was difficult to install branching logic. Branching logic is when the pipeline is able to split and go down different routes depending on the outcome of a step. For example, there may be a step which determines whether we should retrain a model, if it does, it will proceed down the retraining route, if it doesn’t, it will proceed down the inference route.
The solution to this would be to use a tool which can orchestrate all our Lambda Functions. The tool should allow engineers to build pipelines where points of failure are easy to identify, errors are dealt with and state isn’t lost. This is where a service named AWS Step Functions comes in.
Step Functions is an AWS service which gives users a reliable way to chain together all components of a pipeline. It’s a fully managed service which means that you won’t have to worry about setting up the infrastructure in order to run it. All of this is handled by AWS so there’s no more painful machine configuration and maintenance (see Airflow). Various AWS services are available to use, and executions can be coordinated and tracked in a visual way. You can create pipelines which are easy to run and debug, but it also makes branching or parallel steps easy.
Step Functions uses state machines which allow you to define your workflows as individual tasks called “States”. Each state can perform many different functions, which defines the “Type” of state you want to use. This includes:
Task state (do some work)
Choice state (make a choice between branches of execution)
Parallel state (begin parallel branches of execution)
and more
The configuration of state machines is written in Amazon’s States Language which is a JSON-based, structured language used to define each one of your states. The following is an example from the AWS Step Functions developer guide. It shows a state named HelloWorld that executes an AWS Lambda function.
"HelloWorld": {
"Type": "Task",
"Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:0000000000000:function:HelloFunction",
"Next": "AfterHelloWorldState",
"Comment": "Run the HelloWorld Lambda function"
}
Within each state definition you will need to specify the following:
The name of the state
The ‘Type’ of state (as described above)
The type of resource you want to use. This can be invoking a Lambda function, creating a SageMaker training job, etc.
The name of which state will come next. This is what allows you to chain states together
Then, as you create more states and chain them together, you can always refer to the visual representation of your workflow to see how it works. Below is an example of a simple workflow we developed.
{
"StartAt": "generate_uuid",
"States": {
"generate_uuid": {
"Type": "Task",
"Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:eu-west-1:0000000000000:function:generate_uuid",
"ResultPath": "$.run_metadata",
"Next": "set_config"
},
"set_config": {
"Type": "Task",
"Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:eu-west-1:0000000000000:function:set_config",
"ResultPath": "$.config",
"Next": "prepare_feature_set_correlation"
},
"prepare_feature_set_correlation": {
"Type": "Task",
"Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:eu-west-1:0000000000000:function:prepare_feature_set_correlation",
"ResultPath": "$.run_metadata",
"Next": "run_register_task_correlation"
},
"run_register_task_correlation": {
"Type": "Task",
"Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:eu-west-1:0000000000000:function:run_register_task_correlation",
"ResultPath": "$.run_metadata",
"End": true
}
}
}
The config defines how the workflow will run across the multiple Lambda functions. It shows that the state machine starts from the ‘generate_uuid’ state which runs a Lambda function, and ends after the ‘run_register_task_correlation’ state, which also runs a Lambda function.
Plugging this config into Step Functions produces the lovely graphic of your pipeline, shown below.
Workflow visualisation provided by the Step Functions console.
With this graphical view of the pipeline, any state that passes will light up green, whereas failed states will light up red. This makes it easier to go straight to the relevant error messages to find out what’s gone wrong. Cool, right?
Although Step Functions has improved our ways of working and helped us manage our pipelines, it does come with some limitations:
State machines have to run from the beginning each time. This means if for some reason the workflow fails at any step, you can’t restart it from that step. This can become annoying if one of the first steps is a time consuming ETL step.
Amazon States Language has a bit of a learning curve and can possibly be a deterrent for engineers who are more used to something like Airflow.
Step Functions integration is currently limited to certain AWS services
Like all other AWS services, Step Functions has limits. Make sure to check those before determining whether Step Functions is the best tool to use for your use case.
Data has now become a focal part of our business so it is now essential to productionise the exploitation of that data. This will enable the decision makers of the business to do their jobs faster, and with more confidence. The ADSML team always looks to re-evaluate how we deliver our solutions, and the introduction of Step Functions is a great example of that. As we continue to develop the data pipelines with an orchestra of services, Step Functions will be continue to be the conductor. | https://medium.com/sainsburys-data-analytics/serverless-orchestration-with-aws-step-functions-lessons-learned-3ba143538b8f | ['Fatlum Vranovci'] | 2019-10-22 08:48:16.143000+00:00 | ['Serverless', 'Programming', 'AWS', 'Data Science', 'Data'] |
Supervised learning problems, statistical thinking, and other banal concerns | Image by author
The supervised learning problems generally fall into three categories: binary classification, multiclass classification, and the last, regression problems.
With binary classification, there are only two possible outcomes, generally, yes or no. With multiclass classification, the result can have an infinity of possible categories, always more than two. Unlike binary and multiclass classification, regression problems tend to have a continuous solution. This last group of problems looks for trends instead of trying to classify the outcome into different groups.
Let’s explain better the differences between these three categories with some examples. The binary classification is used to solve problems where the answer can be one of two values, for instance, whether a photo has a dog: yes or not. But if the idea is to answer the dog’s breed, then it is a multiclass classification problem where each breed is a class. However, if the answer sought is the dog’s age, which is a continuous value between 0 and usually near 12, then it is a regression problem.
In the three cases presented above, a large number of images train the model. In the first case, the training photos have a “is a dog” or “is not a dog” label. In the second case, they have Beagle, Dalmatian, Poodle, Bulldog, Chihuahua, or any other breed as a label. In the last case, the dog’s age will be the label used in the images.
After knowing the type of problems that can be solved by machine learning, it remains to be answered how. There are several types of algorithms, some more suitable than others to answer specific questions. Selecting the most appropriate algorithm to solve a problem is not an easy task. It depends on the type of situation, the data we have access to, and the amount of them, the training power, but above all, the model’s generalization capacity trained in a limited number of data to predict the outcome of a new event.
“All generalizations are false, including this one.”
Mark Twain
Very similar types of machine learning algorithms can solve the three previously mentioned supervised categories of learning problems. Let’s check some of these algorithms using some examples again.
Decision tree
The decision tree algorithm is one of the most used Machine Learning algorithms for classification problems. It is a user-friendly algorithm. With it, it is possible to show how the machine makes predictions by creating a graphical tree, thus becoming easy to understand.
Starting with the tree’s root node, a specific feature is tested in each tree’s node. Depending on the outcome, it follows different branches on the tree, trying new nodes where other features are tested until reaching a terminal node. The outcome of this terminal node is the prediction result of the model.
Let’s understand how this works using an imaginary loan approval example. It is possible to create a dataset using historical data. As the target of our prediction is used the loan status. Credit History, Income, and Loan Amount will be our Features.
Decision tree sample data
On the first node of the tree, it checks the customer credit history. In our example, we have four customers with good credit history, two of them with a target equal to “No” and another two with a target equal to “Yes.”
Then, it checks the customer’s income. There are two customers with good credit history and high income in our sample data, and these two customers have the target labeled as “Yes.”
Finally, it used the requested loan amount. Based on our data, the tree should consider high provability to approve loans to customers with good credit history, high income, and that request a big amount of credit.
Loan approval decision tree. Image by author
The feature importance and the subsequent order to test the tree features on each node is decided based on the Gini Impurity or Gain Information criteria. These two criteria identify the degree of uncertainty for each feature. When building the tree, the model must first test the resources with the greatest gain of information (i.e., least uncertainty). This dependence between the data uncertainty and the tree structure is a disadvantage of this algorithm since a small change in the data can affect the tree structure.
Random Forest
The Random Forest Algorithm uses the output of multiple Decision Trees, randomly created, to generate the model’s final result. Each tree is made with a random subset of features and data, and subsequently with a different structure. In the end, this algorithm combines the output of each decision tree to generate the final result.
The process used to combine the multiple individual tree outputs to get a final result is called Ensemble Learning. Ensemble Learning assumes that the results obtained from consulting a diverse group of models are likely to be better than the results obtained from a single model. The point here is how the result of the several models can generate a single final output. There are several techniques for it. The most simples ones are considered the most frequent result (i.e., most voted) or the average between the several results.
Random Forest. Image by author
k-Nearest Neighbor
A common supervised machine learning algorithm for multiclass classification is k-Nearest Neighbor. This algorithm assumes that similar things are near to each other. The idea is to compare the distances between the new element that we want to predict and the known elements. Each element represents a point in a multidimensional space, where each element’s feature is a spatial dimension. Euclidean distance or Manhattan distance determined how near is the new element from its neighbors. In the end, elements of the same class should have the shortest distance between them. Considering the class to which belong to the k elements nearest to the new element, we can deduce which class the new element belongs. Minimizing the distance is a crucial part of this algorithm. The closer you are to your nearest neighbors, the more likely you are to be accurate.
k-Nearest Neighbor. Image by author
The algorithm has the disadvantage of requiring an enormous calculation power since, for each new sample, it is necessary to iterate with the training data again. However, recommendation systems widely use this algorithm.
Naive Bayes
Another family of supervised learning models is the Naive Bayes family of classifiers. This algorithm is based on Bayes’ theorem, which is mostly used for binary or multiclass classification. It’s called naive because it has as a basis the assumption that all features are independent of another. In practice, this is not often the case because features are usually somewhat correlated. Since the statistics of each feature are calculated independently, learning a Naive Bayes classifier can be very fast. However, the penalty for this efficiency is that the prediction performance of Naive Bayes can be a bit worse than other more sophisticated algorithms.
This algorithm uses the independent probability that each feature belongs to a class without considering other features to predict the model’s result. Let’s illustrate this using our imaginary loan approval example, considering only the “Income” feature:
Income data sample
First, it is necessary to get the frequency table:
Frequency table
Using the frequency table, get the “Likelihood of Evidence” of the “Income” feature:
Likelihood table
With this training data, it can be concluded that, for eight denied loans, five have “Low” income. In other words, the likelihood probability of customers with “Low” income has a loan denied is 5/8 = 0.625. The notation of this is:
P(“Income” = “Low” | “Loan Status” = “No”).
Likewise, from twelve requested loans, eight were denied, and six have low income, resulting in:
P(“Income” | “Loan Status” = “No”) = 8/12 = 0.667.
P(“Income” = “Low”) = 6/12 = 0.50.
Applying Bayes’ theorem, we can calculate the probability of having the loan denied when the customer has a low income:
Bayes’ theorem application
This results in a probability of 0.8375 of having the loan denied.
Similarly, the probability of the remaining feature components can be calculated for the different outcome classes. Finally, the class that gets the highest probability will be the predicted class.
Regression
Machine learning uses several types of regression algorithms. Among them are: Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, and Polynomial Regression.
Linear Regression uses a linear function to describe the relationship between the outcome and its inputs. An input value X associated with an output value Y can be represented using a point in a Cartesian coordinate system. In this way, a set of points in the plane represents a significant number of occurrences. Linear Regression consists in finding the straight line that best fits with this set of points. The best-fit line is called the regression line.
Linear regression. Image Image by author
Predicting the value Y using a value of X is just a matter of applying the linear equation of the identified regression line:
Where m is the slope of the identified line, and b is the value of Y when X is equal to zero (i.e., the point where the line cuts the Y-axis).
But what is meant by “best-fitting line”? Firstly, it is necessary to measure the difference between the observed point and the predicted value (i.e., the point in the line).
Difference between the predicted value and the real one. Image by author
Secondly, the square of the difference between the predicted value and the real one is calculated for each point. Finally, the average of this value is inferred, resulting in an indicator called Mean Squared Error. The most used criterion to find the best-fitting line is the line that has the minimum Mean Squared Error.
However, it is not always possible to find a straight line that follows most points. Sometimes the line that best fits is a curve that results from an nth degree polynomial. In these cases, the Polynomial Regression algorithm is applied, transforming the equation of the line to:
Now imagine that instead of having a single feature X, there are two features: X and Z. In this case, the line becomes a surface, and the goal becomes to identify the surface that best fits all points in a three-dimensional space.
Three-dimensional space. Image by author
Logistic Regression differs from the previous by having a categorical variable as its output, instead of a continuous value. The output of this algorithm is the probability of the sample belonging to one class versus another.
Logistic Regression. Image by author
Similar to Linear Regression, a line’s equation describes the relationship between features and output. However, in this case, the result to get is the probability of the equation result belonging to a specific class. The way to evaluate this probability is by using a logistic equation that returns a value between 0 and 1. A Logistic equation is an S-shaped curve called a “sigmoid curve.” This curve is represented using the following equation:
Where y is the output of the linear function, and y0 is the value of the sigmoid’s midpoint. | https://medium.com/@cgrodrigues/supervised-learning-problems-statistical-thinking-and-other-banal-concerns-788a5a4faa49 | ['Carlos Rodrigues'] | 2020-12-02 11:15:41.981000+00:00 | ['Decision Tree', 'Linear Regression', 'Machine Learning Ai', 'Naive Bayes', 'K Nearest Neighbors'] |
What is law of attraction and how it will work for you. | All of us have so many goals in our life. And to fulfil that goals we all do hard work. But still we do not apply the required energy to fulfil our goals. Actually you have to use both of your mind to have the large amount of potential inside you. Have you been heard the name of law of attraction.
Well this law is not a magic as most of the people think it is. As we know that the attraction has been happen within two opposite things. Whether it is male or female, positive or negative charges etc. But whatever we feel we attracted it more an more in our life. It means whatever vibration we released the same vibration will come into our life.
But we have to understood that there are certain forces in our planet through which we can communicate. Actually whatever we think , our brain has released certain vibrations which we can’t see. And everything in this universe is an energy.
And most of the people when using law of attraction they do not follow the correct rule. They will do the same techniques which they have been used before. So here you will know what is law of attraction and how it will work for you.
1. What is law of attraction.
Law of attraction is nothing but just a simple universal law which is based on the property of attraction.
Whatever type of vibrations you have released it just come back in the same form and you will attract it more into your life.
It means if you are in a high vibration, so you attract a lot of high vibrations to your life and opposite of it is also the same. Means if you want to bring positive or negative experiences to your life, it is totally depending on the way of your thought process.
If you think positive , you attract more positive experiences to your life and if you will think negative you will attract more negative experiences to your life. But this Loa depends on many factors just not only on your thought process.
Most of the people used the law of attraction to fulfil their goals or whatever they want in their life. For example: Some people want more money than that which they are getting right now, or may be some people want their dream car or dream house.
And after applying the Loa most of the people will manifest what they want. And they will be happier in their life.
2. How the Loa work for you?
The most important thing which we have to understood when applying the law of attraction is that it is mainly dependent on three factors: Ask , Believe And Receive.
Actually ask means first of all you should be very clear about what you want. It means you have to exactly know what you want in your life.
Believe means you should have a blind belief in the Loa. It means that if you want something to the universe , you will definitely get it no matter whatever the circumstances or situations come towards your life. Whatever you want in your life you have to believe that you have already have it in your life.
Receive means whatever the opportunity you have been given by the universe , you have to ready to receive it. It means according to your desire the universe will give you different opportunities and you have to identify it and ready to receive it , so that your desire or whatever you want is manifested.
Actually Law of attraction has so many factors so then the law is working otherwise it is not. First of all you have to be in alignment with the universe , and you have to believe on the universe , that whatever your desire is , it is definitely manifested.
Most of the people doesn’t believe in the law of attraction just because they have a belief that whatever we should have to get in our life , it is only achieved just by the hard work. They can’t believe that how they can get something just by applying simple positive affirmations as most of us doesn’t even fulfil their desires by doing so much hard work.
But this is not true at all. You do not need to do hard work to achieve success. Actually law of attraction will be apply by various ways.
This is very important that you should daily write your goals that you want to achieve in a format that you will already reach to your goals. This is very important because both of your brain whether it is conscious or subconscious should have to work simultaneously.
Only then the large amount of energies will work on to your goals. Because your both mind will be aware of your goals. Actually to fulfil your goals, you just have to take care of the following things.
First of all you should always feel and lived happily. It means that you should always be in a high vibration. And enjoy every single moment of your life.
Read more……… | https://medium.com/@shubhamdb444/what-is-law-of-attraction-and-how-it-will-work-for-you-d80d7ea92d28 | ['Shubham Dubey'] | 2020-11-16 06:13:56.395000+00:00 | ['Belief', 'Gratitude', 'Manifestation', 'Law Of Attraction', 'Miracles'] |
No | No
Photo from Pixabay
My voice died a little that day
The day the boy kept pushing when I said NO.
Come on, he said
No
Please
No
It will just..
no
Just this once..
no…
and then I found out I never had the choice anyway.
My voice died a little more
When one by one my friends left the table
“Sorry you guys broke up but we were more his friends anyway”
I sat at the table
Quietly singing happy birthday.
With shaking hands I stacked these bricks
and built a wall instead of me.
And my cry echoed in the chamber, bouncing off all the walls
and drowning me in its sorrow.
So, I stayed quiet .
Quiet for years —
Like the stillness of winter,
Sitting in my tower,
Surrounded by people,
But always alone.
And then she came.
I could see my fire in her eyes.
She came from my womb and my fire was there.
She looked at me and rekindled the blaze,
It’s time to come out now, Mom
I need you.
When they tried to tickle her,
no
When they tried to tease her,
No
When they tried to belittle her,
No
When they tried to silence her,
NO.
My words rose up like smoke
Almost choking me to get out.
Her and I sat in the ashes of the bricks
While embers flickered around us. | https://medium.com/resistance-poetry/no-d12de46b8e7f | ['A. J. Gabs'] | 2020-12-08 11:26:39.227000+00:00 | ['Resistance Poetry', 'Strength', 'Motherhood', 'Rape', 'Pain'] |
7 Ways To Deal With People Who Have Lost Their Parent(s) | It will either make you or break you
It is a matter of Choice♡
Receiving unconditional love is cherished by all. And especially during this difficult times, when everything seems to be going wrong, we cannot help but feel lonely and un-loved. Losing someone important in our life , as many people already have during this pandemic, affects us a lot, and changes us either partially or completely.
But the sorrow of losing one’s parent(s) tops the list of the grief one can ever feel. Be it due to their demise, or due to bitter relations, or even lost connections, “losing” one’s parent(s) either way is wounding.
Picture credit- healthline.com
I have people around me, who have lost their parent(s) through one way or the other. And staying around them has made me realise the few similarities they share.
So..here is my guide on 7 Ways To Deal With People Who Have Lost Their Parent(s) —
1.Don’t ask if they hesitate to reveal- “This is the most common and most terrible mistake that we usually make when we have such friends.”
Picture credit- shutterstock.com
We become so curious about their “experience” that we forget about their “need of privacy” and question them (sometimes continuously). Don’t. Though some people do like to share to keep off the burden, some don’t due to various personal reasons like: not wanting to remember it, or it being too personal, or too graphic, etc. Though some ask only for the sake of gossip, there are genuine people out there too. XOXO.
2. Ensure if they wouldn’t mind talking about it in the future- “Sudden discussions about their parents will, most of the time, make them feel uncomfortable.”
Picture credit- shutterstock.com
This behaviour can sometimes even be toxic and can be considered immature too. This even makes them lose interest in you and you might eventually lose contact with that person. Therefore, when you talk, talk about it once and for all, confirming if they would mind talking about, especially when such topic arises out of the blue. On the other hand, if you could not discuss it before, make it a Golden Rule to not to bring it up anytime, until and unless they themselves initiate it and want to talk about it. Be all ears then.
3. Don’t Sympathize “too much”- “Though we never know how much is too much for a person, we can always look out for hints.”
Picture credit- heartmanity.com
Most of the one’s I have come across don’t like being looked at as a pitiful person. That is simply considered bitter and mean because, we tend to treat them like someone who is underpriviledged and less like a normal person. This makes them feel inferior, and usually “too much” of sympathies seem to mock them about their losses.
4. Let Them Struggle and Be!-
“This headline might seem harsh, but trust me, treating them differently and not letting them take the charge makes it harsher for them.”
Picture credit- pinchofattitude.com
In simple words, let them do their work on their own, unless they ask you for help. You helping them out of pity all the time will eventually make them feel useless. Moreover, it isn’t like they have become weak after the incident. Remember, They Are Stronger Than You Think!
5. Never Introduce them as “That Person”-
“Let’s just focus on the person and not the past”
Picture credit- fearlessmotivation.com
We usually tend to relate a person with the shortcomings of their past. Let’s introduce their achievements instead. Tell people : The one who achieved something….and not the one who lost something.
6. Don’t mess with their emotion-
“They may or may not be emotionally stable, but messing with their feelings can cost you your friendship, especially if they are still recovering from their loss.”
Picture credit- goodtherapy.org
Stable people might regard you as an immature and unstable people will be possibly offended, either way ruining your relation with the respective person.
7. Trust is the Key Word-
“Trust, but verify”
Losing a parent is hurtful, and it makes them sensitive to any kind of hardships. Especially the one valuable trait, called trust. Years to gain, seconds to lose…is the game of trust.
Picture credit- Keepinspiring.me
Therefore, by losing their trust, we are adding to their long list of hardships. Hence,they have very little need of your unfaithfulness. | https://medium.com/@Ayapiri_Debbarma/7-ways-to-deal-with-people-who-have-lost-their-parent-s-f7598983bd05 | ['Ayapiri Debbarma'] | 2020-12-29 18:25:10.081000+00:00 | ['7 Ways', 'People', 'Losing', 'Parents', 'Dealing With Loss'] |
Jahi Virgolius Carter. | Jahi Virgolius Carter.
April, 2020, 23
Strain review
Gorilla Glue #4 “A great time to be stuck”
20:1
Rewind two days earlier I’m peeling myself from the couch after a much anticipated 4/20 celebration with one of my sticky favorites. “Gorilla glue” a,k.a “Gg4”or “Original Glue”. Bright green buds coated in a white blanket of resin cuddled by orange hairs gives a pungent earthy smell accompanied by a peppery scent and lemony aroma as I place the dense brittle bud between my grinders teeth. Fast forward to A modest taste of citrus and herbs bathing over me as I inhale the smooth. A strong profile of Myrene, Limonene, and Caryophyllene are present with each inhale.Veteran cannabis consumers would be proud to include this onto their flavor pallet as it not only offers a bold flavor, but also potent psychological and physical effects with a 20:1 THC to CBD ratio. First arriving with a heavy buzz this strand keeps the consumer focused and relaxed before lulling them to a sound sleep. Also aiding to lull depression, stress and anxiety this indica dominant hybrid makes for the perfect creatives aid. Or the perfect “Glue” to keep you relaxed on the couch all day. | https://medium.com/@jahicarter/jahi-virgolius-carter-9a4112c00a3e | [] | 2020-04-23 21:36:12.918000+00:00 | ['Thc', 'Terpenes', 'Flowers', 'Cannabis', 'Review'] |
Helping Raise a Sibling at 15 Yrs. Old | When you lived all your childhood as an only child you learn to do things for yourself. I was 15 years old when my baby sister was born. Never did I think I would ever have a sibling. For me being an only child was very sad, lonely, and at times depressing. I grew up with no one my age and I kind of became a custom to it. When my sister was born I was a sophomore in high school and was one of the only kids in my grade to have a really big age gap between siblings. I didn’t have a problem with it because for the first time I could have conversations about having a sibling in general. Since I was older and had such an age gap between my sister and I, it was easy for me to adjust to the responsible older brother. I took care of her, fed her, changed her diaper all the necessities. I know a lot guys in general or older brothers wouldn’t bother to do those things but for me I didn’t mind. Every summer I would watch my sister since I was in high school and she was now a toddler. I would wake up go to her crib and then take her out, feed her, change her diaper, etc. I provided 2 meals a day for her. We played games, watched TV, went outside for walks and went to the park. I know it’s a lot of responsibility for a now 16 year old but to me it was fun spending time with my sister. I had been longing so long for a sibling that this was less of a chore and more about making memories. Fast forward to 10 years later, I am 25 years old and she is 10. We are still super close and hang out all the time. We watch Netflix, play video games, go play soccer, drink Starbucks, go to the beach! You know the usual California thing. I like to think of this experience as training for when I become a Father, which will be in the far future because this kids was expensive! LOL | https://medium.com/@mmunoz169/helping-raise-a-sibling-at-15-yrs-old-38a10bedeec3 | ['Michael Munoz'] | 2020-12-26 22:42:35.102000+00:00 | ['Brothers', 'Baby', 'Life Lessons', 'Siblings', 'Sisters'] |
Bancor Unchained: All Your Token Are Belong To Us | This post is the first in a series of Unchained Reports, covering the often overlooked details about projects in the current “ICO bubble”.
Last week, the Bancor project raised ~$150M. The team stood up an impressive campaign, ending with the largest amount raised in an ICO to date.
Bancor’s main product is said to be a way to provide liquidity to the “long tail” of tokens, and seems to be an interesting idea, that deserves exploration. It is lead by an accomplished team of entrepreneurs, and already produced some great-looking demos.
I took some time to read many of the materials published by Bancor, including its smart contract code. I was absolutely astonished by some of the things I found, including what I consider dangerous backdoors.
In this report, I will detail my findings, including the team’s ability to take anyone’s tokens arbitrarily. But first, a brief introduction on what smart contracts are, and why it’s so important to read and review them.
Did you read your smart contract?
“Smart contracts” are at the heart of the Ethereum blockchain. They are written by coders, so some people think of them as “apps”. But in reality, they aim to replace legal prose. Smart contracts can describe, for example, a set of conditions that will control who gets a pre-deposited amount of money. Or they can describe who will get to decide what happens with a pool of coins.
They are very much like regular legal contracts. But unlike regular contracts, there are no judges to make decisions at their discretion. Instead, blockchain participants will run the smart contract code to decide what’s the outcome of a transaction. There’s only one way to “interpret” a smart contract, and that’s the way a computer would. The intent of the contract writer does not matter, nor does the understanding of any counter party. The only thing that matters is what’s in the code.
Reading Bancor’s contracts
A lot of ICOs use smart contracts to raise money. Bancor is one of them.
This report is (at least) as much about the importance of reading contracts as it is about Bancor itself. I won’t be touching the actual details of Bancor’s protocol at all. I recommend reading Bancor’s whitepaper for that, which is very well written, and also Emin Gün Sirer and Phil Daian’s breakdown on its potential problems (Edit, 22/06/2017: and Bancor’s very detailed response, which was published after this report).
Instead, we will look at the contract of the actual crowdsale: did the contract code fit the sale terms that were published by the project?
Then, we’ll look at the contract governing the token created by that crowdsale, BNT, and the dangerous backdoors that contract contains.
Crowdsale Unlimited
Bancor’s crowdsale went live on June 12th. Prior to its start, in a blog post, the team pubished the sale terms, including the following:
The sale would run for no more than 14 days.
There would be a “hidden cap” for the amount of funds to be allowed in, which would be revealed when raising 80% of the cap.
During the first hour, called the “minimum time”, all funds would be allowed in, even if above the “hidden cap”. If the sale goes over the “hidden cap” during the first hour, it would stop immediately at the end of this first hour. Otherwise, it will continue until reaching the “hidden cap”.
However, the crowdsale contract, viewable here, told a slightly different story. I’ll explain what the contract says in words, and add code snippets so you can follow along if you can read contract code.
The sale will, indeed, run for a maximum of 14 days.
The corwdsale duration, in the actual contract code
There will be a “hidden cap”, and the team will cryptographically commit to it (meaning it’s hidden but can’t be changed after the sale starts). It will be revealed whenever the team decides to reveal it.
The “hidden cap” was to be revealed, and set, whenever the contract owner calls this enableRealCap function, which sets the totalEtherCap variable
The sale was to have no limits (other than a 1,000,000 ETH “safety limit” which equals roughly $400 million dollars, 4 times the “hidden cap” that was later revealed), until the team would reveal the “hidden cap”. Not until 1 hour passed, as the blog post detailing the sale terms promised. In fact, I can think of no reasonable way they could codify this promise into a contract, without revealing the “hidden cap” beforehand.
The safety cap is 1,000,000 ETH, until the enableRealCap function, from the previous snippet, is called by the contract owner to replace it with the “hidden cap”.
This etherCapNotReached modifier is called before every “contribution” to the sale, to assert that the total amount contributed isn’t higher than the current totalEtherCap, which is set to 1,000,000 ETH (above) until the contract owner decides to reveal the “hidden cap”.
As the sale started, people rushed to get their ethers in. The Ethereum network had a hard time processing all those transactions, as it frequently does during high-profile ICOs. As the first hour was approaching its end, about $70M worth of transactions were confirmed by the network, with tens of millions more sitting in the backlog, waiting to be confirmed.
In order to comply with the terms the project published before, they had to stop the “cap-less first hour” at that point, and reveal the “hidden cap” very soon after, once $80M was reached, which was ~80% of the hidden cap.
Instead, they released this critical update, saying:
We have decided to extend the minimum time to THREE HOURS in order to allow the Ethereum network to process all PENDING transactions and allow everyone who’s transactions have failed to RETRY. Our intention remains to include all early contributors.
Many were surprised by this. Some investors were grateful, as they weren’t able to get in during the first hour due to a high load on the network. Yet others were furious — probably the ones that already managed to get in — they were promised that the cap will be enforced after 1 hour, but now that the “minimum time” was expanded to 3 hours, they were effectively being diluted.
One group wasn’t surprised: those that took the time to read the contract before hand. They always knew this was an option.
It is hard to tell whether extending the “minimum time” was good or bad. The key takeaway from this ordeal though, is that when a contract gives its owner capabilities that aren’t listed in the official announcements and blog posts, some people who didn’t read the contract might end up being upset.
But for those who didn’t read the contract, a bigger surprise is in store…
A token full of back doors
When people think of “cryptocurrencies” or “digital assets”, or whatever the cool kids call them today, they think of decentralized, censorship resistant tokens, that no central party could control for any reason. And while some projects have various degrees of (de)centralization, I have never seen a token as centralized as BNT, that puts so much power in the hands of so few.
The BancorTokenContract controls the actual BNT token and its behavior. It is currently owned by the BancorCrowdsale contract, which is owned in turn by a closed-source contract which is most likely a “multisig” account held by the project and/or its partners.
These are the powers that the BancorCrowdsale contract allows its owners:
All transactions using the BNT token can be disabled by the team at any time for any reason. Presumably the capability is there to allow the tokens to be frozen immediately after the crowdsale for about a week, until Bancor’s main product is ready. However, for some reason, after they’ll unfreeze the tokens, the team will retain the option to freeze transactions again at any time.
In BancorTokenContract, contract owner (the contract below) is allowed to disable transactions
In BancorCrowdsale, contract owner (the Bancor team) is allowed to use BancorTokenContract (above) to disable transactions
The team can issue new tokens at any time. Bancor’s “changer” product requires the ability to create tokens programmatically based on a market-making formula distilled in another smart contract, so it must have the ability to create more tokens. However, for some reason, the team has the ability to create new tokens arbitrarily, for whatever reason they choose.
In BancorTokenContract, contract owner (the contract below) is allowed to issue new tokens arbitrarily
In BancorCrowdsale, contract owner (the Bancor team) is allowed to use BancorTokenContract (above) to issue new tokens arbitrarily
Shockingly, the team can DESTROY any tokens FROM ANY ACCOUNT, at any time. Once again, Bancor’s “changer” product requires the ability to programmatically destroy tokens sent to its contract, so there has to be a functionality to destroy tokens — but it could be easily limited to destroying only tokens sent to that contract. Instead, the team has the power to pick any account’s tokens and destroy any amount of them, at any time, for any reason.
In BancorTokenContract, contract owner (the contract below) is allowed to destroy anyone’s tokens arbitrarily
In BancorCrowdsale, contract owner (the Bancor team) is allowed to use BancorTokenContract (above) to destroy anyone’s tokens arbitrarily
This third point is unheard of. I’ve looked at other high-profile contracts managing other tokens, and couldn’t find anything similar. This puts unprecedented, and worse, unexpected power in the hands of the contract owners.
How did this go by unnoticed?
For anyone who’s been in crypto long enough, this is a big no-no. How come no one noticed this?
Well, people did notice.
As noted in this blog post, two security auditors were invited by Bancor to inspect the contracts. However, the blog post only refers to the positive points from the audits. The post didn’t list the concerns that both auditors raised, and instead linked to their full reports which are very lengthy and highly technical. I doubt many people took the time to deep dive into the full reports.
Martin Holst Swende, Security Lead at Ethereum, wrote in his report:
The Bancor protocol implementation has a security model based on centralized trust: the owner of the contracts have (sic), to a large degree, full control over assets traded over the platform… Since the bancor protocol is fairly a complex scheme … it makes sense to have a centralized model, at least initially.
While Ethereum Foundation’s member Nick Johnson wrote in his own report:
Participants should note that the contracts as authored for the crowdsale are not trustless, and depend on the good behaviour of Bancor. Bancor have stated that this is intentional, intended to allow them to respond to and remedy any issues that come up during the crowdsale and in early operation, and that manual oversight will be exchanged for more automated operation once they are confident the system is working as intended.
So, both of these respectable auditors found that the contracts are fully centralized, in an unprecedented way. When they told the Bancor team, Bancor just said “we know, that’s the point”.
Now, the team’s reasoning seems to be that while their main smart contract is still being tested, they should retain full control in case anything goes wrong. They expand on this approach in a blog post about “learning from the DAO”. That blog post details the team’s control over their main “changer” product, control which they plan to diminish over time, but it doesn’t mention at all the backdoors listed above.
From Wikipedia’s article on backdoors:
Although normally surreptitiously installed, in some cases backdoors are deliberate and widely known. These kinds of backdoors might have “legitimate” uses such as providing the manufacturer with a way to restore user passwords.
I’m pretty sure that the Bancor team has no intention to misuse these backdoors, and that they believe they have “legitimate” uses. I’m not 100% sure of their legitimacy myself, but in any case I would argue that their existence should be clearly communicated to investors.
People in this space expect the control over tokens to be fully decentralized, and if for some reason they’re not, this should be made very clear.
Upgradeability
Bancor’s contracts are “upgradeable”, meaning they can replace them with new functionality, giving them more power, or removing power from themselves. They promise on some communications they will gradually remove their control over the system.
The currently deployed BancorCrowdsale contract is planned to be replaced by BancorChanger in the next few days, however this new contract still retains the 3 backdoors: freezing all transactions, issuing new tokens, and destroying any tokens.
The risks
As I mentioned before, I trust that Bancor’s team won’t try to misuse this backdoor. However, having so much power concentrated centrally, creates a potential single point of failure. The keys held by the team could be stolen for example. Or, law enforcement could force the project to freeze or destroy tokens if they realize this is possible (and if for some reason they would suspect any wrongdoing).
It could be argued that BNT investors would be at risk of the team being compromised anyway, so these backdoors don’t add any significant exposure. It could also be argued that if these backdoors are misused, Bancor could always use its reissuance capabilities to restore the state prior to any misuse.
However, because the existence of these backdoors isn’t properly communicated, this puts many users at risk, and especially exchanges.
Exchanges that list the BNT token, might not be aware that if the team’s keys are compromised, the exchanges could lose access to deposited tokens. This could raise regulatory concerns, but also technical risks: exchanges normally don’t “monitor” accounts to check that tokens are “still there”. They assume that once deposited the tokens stay in place, unless they’re moved. If an exchange’s tokens are destroyed (or frozen) while the market is active, this could bring a world of pain to the exchange operator, who might not be able to reverse executed orders.
Recommendations and Conclusion
For the Bancor project : I would recommend to immediately restructure the contracts to remove the team’s capability to freeze, issue, or destroy assets arbitrarily. Otherwise, a proper advisory should be given to investors and industry members about the existence of these backdoors, and how to mitigate their risks.
: I would recommend to immediately restructure the contracts to remove the team’s capability to freeze, issue, or destroy assets arbitrarily. Otherwise, a proper advisory should be given to investors and industry members about the existence of these backdoors, and how to mitigate their risks. For exchanges : The safest route would be to delay listing BNT tokens until the team removes the backdoors. If this is not possible, at the very least inform users during the deposit process that their tokens may be frozen or destroyed by Bancor, and adapt the exchange’s system to monitor that tokens remain non-destroyed and liquid.
: The safest route would be to until the team removes the backdoors. If this is not possible, at the very least inform users during the deposit process that their tokens may be frozen or destroyed by Bancor, and adapt the exchange’s system to monitor that tokens remain non-destroyed and liquid. For future crowdsales: In order to be fully transparent with potential investors and users, it would be best if ICO projects share a clear “English translation” of their smart contracts, that explain step-by-step what the contract does. More than anything else, it should focus on the differences between the written terms and the contract itself, differences that sometimes have to exist.
And for users: always read the contract before you sign. The security of smart contracts depends on the users reading them. If you can’t read code yourself, find someone who can. | https://medium.com/unchained-reports/bancor-unchained-all-your-token-are-belong-to-us-d6bb00871e86 | ['Udi Wertheimer'] | 2019-01-19 17:32:12.307000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'ICO', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Bancor'] |
Introducing MUM Network | MUM is a project for music and movie lovers. Our main objective is to create a platform for music and movie fans where they can interact with one another from different parts of the world. More interestingly, they get paid for doing what they enjoy.
Our Mission
Our mission is to create an enabling environment where fans can monetize their time and passion.
How It Works
Everyday we come online, we see people who are passionate about music and movies sharing their passion on several social networks without being rewarded for adding value to the network. We have come fill in the gap by creating a social media that acknowledges you deserve to be paid for your time and content. Users of our platform will be rewarded with our reward tokens for interacting with the network.
MUM Network Tokens
MUM will operate a dual token system.
(I) Governance Token
(ii) Reward Token
MUM Governance Token
Utility
1. Governance.
2. Frictionless farming.... Hold to get more MUM.
3. Staking... Get MRT.
Tokenomics
Token Name: MUM Token
Token Symbol: MUM
Max Supply: 100 Billion
60% Burn on token issuance day.
28% Pancakeswap liquidity
10% Development & Marketing.
50% vested for three months.
2% Team allocation. Not vested.
5% Tax function on each transaction and distributed to holders.
Stealth launch. No Presale.
MUM Reward Token
Utility
1. Rewards for MUM social media.
2. Used as MUM Power. MP empowers your upvoting weight and earn you 50% of MRT emitted via each upvote.
Tokenomics
Name: MUM Rewards.
Token Symbol: MRT
Max Supply: No Max
Buyback and Burn.
Funds generated from promotions on MUM social media platform and television channel will be used to buyback and burn MUM.
Official Links
Website
Medium
Official Twitter
Official Telegram
Telegram Announcement | https://medium.com/@MUMNetwork/introducing-mum-network-a8744a3047cf | [] | 2021-04-25 17:42:48.603000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Social Media', 'New Launch', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
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