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Marshall Major IV headphone review: On-ear sonic sweetness | At first glance, I thought Zound Industries—the company that builds speakers and headphones under license from Marshall Amplification—had to be pulling my leg. The cups on the $150 Marshall Major IV aren’t big enough to fit around a five-year old’s ears, let alone an adult’s.
Then I put them on. I’ll be darned. There’s a method to this “on-ear” versus traditional “over-ear” madness.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best headphones, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping.In your cupsI’d love to have been in the meeting where the idea for the first “on-ear” headphone was presented. Raised eyebrows aplenty I’m sure. I’m also sure doubts disappeared once the executives being pitched actually tried them. They can be pretty comfortable, and if the first batch sounded anything like the Marshall Major IV, those eyebrows raised once more for entirely different reasons.
So why does on-ear work? The fact is, headphones must make contact with your head at some point, and if they don’t put undue pressure on your outer ears, that can be as good a place as any. That said, it does take a bit of getting used to. At least it did for me—that the Marshall Major IV are on-ear headphones didn’t even register with one tester who commented only on the good sound.
Additionally, there are tons of headphones out there, and only the very best have ear cup cushions that keep your ears from uncomfortably contacting the rigid inner speaker grills. The manner in which the small cushions on the cups of the Marshall Major IV rest on your ears means you’ll never feel a hard, grating surface.
While the driver cavity centers nicely over your ear canals, the on-ear design does allow a bit more ambient noise into your ears than over-ear designs. Not a lot, but some. I like this, but you might not.
Marshall The Marshall Major IV on-ear headphones rely on a single multi-function joystick for control. It’s a joy once you’re used to it. Pun intended.
Inside the tiny cups are high-quality 40mm drivers. How do I know they’re high quality? Because these headphones sound excellent. But you knew that because you saw the Editors’ Choice logo up top. The Marshall Major IV utilize Bluetooth 5.0, and there’s a USB-C port for charging the battery (wireless charging is also supported, although only a USB cable comes in the box). The headphone also has a 3.5mm jack for hardwired use and the accompanying cable is a very nice wound, stretch type—-the best I’ve seen with a headset.
A tiny multi-function joystick is used to power-up and Bluetooth-pair these cans, adjust the volume, select the next/previous track, and invoke your phone’s digital assistant. It also controls your calls.
There’s a small learning curve associated with the joystick, which is colored Marshall gold, but it’s certainly easier than feeling around for multiple buttons once you’re accustomed to it.
Sonic goodness, long battery lifeThe Marshall Major IV sound great, and for my personal tastes, they’re nearly perfectly EQ’d. The first word that crossed my mind when I played the first track was “tight.” The Marshall Major IV aren’t bottom-laden in the subwoofer sense, but there’s a quite a bit of extremely focused bass, meaning the bass skews ever so slightly toward the lower mid-range. You might also interpret “tight” as “punchy,” as in what I look for when I’m mixing the bass in my own music. I like it. Opinions, again, will vary.
Beyond that, the overall mid-range definition is excellent. I was easily able to pick out individual instruments, without their location in the sound stage being overly accented. The high-end is bright without being overly so.
Bottom line, the Marshall Major IV are some of may favorite headphones, and I’ll be putting them into my mixing collection. Hardwired of course. Though not listed as top dog by the other listeners I consulted, their opinions were universally positive.
I’d love to say that the headphones ran for the claimed 80 hours, but they lasted me a good week with a couple hours of use each night, and my review had a deadline attached to it. I intend to continue using these cans for a good long while, so I’ll write an update to this story if I discover the claim is exaggerated.
Excellent cansI have a late 1960s Marshall 1960A 4x12 speaker sitting in my office, and a 50-watt CODE amplifier in my music room. To me, Marshall is studio and stage gear, not consumer electronics. So, I’m glad the storied company has selected a quality manufacturer to license its brand.
The Marshall Major IV might be a little pricier than they could be, but the nostalgia surcharge isn’t excessive for a headphone that sounds this good.
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/@amy53198210/marshall-major-iv-headphone-review-on-ear-sonic-sweetness-bcb5556d9450 | [] | 2020-11-29 22:26:05.513000+00:00 | ['Cutting', 'Security Cameras', 'Consumer', 'Home Theater'] |
Don’t leave fact-checking to the fact-checkers | Don’t leave fact-checking to the fact-checkers
To stop misinformation at its source, everyone (students especially) should learn how to verify information.
We’re living through a crisis of information (or rather, disinformation) that has led to calls for more fact-checking. There’s no shortage of professional fact-checkers at news organizations like The New York Times and CNN who have stepped up to help correct the record. The work they do is valuable, but it’s worth pointing out that their skills and tools aren’t unique.
Take it from me, Retro Report’s fact-checker: You can do what I do. Anyone with an internet connection can fact-check — and, with misinformation flooding the internet, everyone should. Professional fact-checkers can’t stop all misinformation at its source, or correct it forcefully enough to squash it once it’s out there.
That’s why we made a video, in partnership with New American History and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, to help students learn how to fact-check their history projects for National History Day. In it, I’ve created a crash course in how to verify the information you consume, create and share. (Teachers, it comes with a lesson plan, too!)
Here’s a general way to start.
Our educational initiative, Retro Report in the Classroom, has a free video and lesson plan for teachers who want to teach fact-checking skills to students from middle to high school.
1) Break it down.
Let’s say you have to fact-check the following sentence:
Donald Trump took the oath of office on Thursday, Jan. 17, 2017, wearing a blue tie.
The first thing a fact-checker would notice is that there isn’t just one claim of fact in that sentence; there are many! A fact-checker would verify that:
Donald Trump did take the oath of office. (He was sworn in, right?)
Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 17, 2017. (That’s the right day, month, year?)
Jan. 17, 2017, was a Thursday. (Not a Wednesday or a Friday?)
Trump was wearing a blue tie as he took the oath of office. (It wasn’t red? Magenta? Multi-colored?)
Breaking down sentences like this helps you to determine not just everything you’ll need to verify, but also the many ways in which a simple sentence could be wrong. In this case, there are three errors.
Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20 , 2017.
, 2017. Jan. 20 was a Friday.
Trump was wearing a red tie.
This is me, breaking down sentences on a Retro Report script.
I’ve found that mistakes often happen in the nooks and crannies of sentences, where there are claims you might overlook. You might check that Trump took the oath of office on a particular date, but don’t confirm which day of the week it was. I call these bone-headed mistakes, and they can happen if you aren’t being careful.
2) Determine where to look.
Each claim is different, and requires you to ask: where could I look to verify it?
The claims about Trump are easily checked in newspaper accounts and videos of the event. I used articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal (news organizations you can generally trust on basic matters of fact) to determine when Trump took the oath of office, and video from PBS to check the color of his tie.
But what about different sorts of claims, like scientific or historical ones? Generally, I go straight to the experts. Are there books or papers written by scholars on the topic? Can I access them online? Have magazines that publish in-depth and fact-checked reporting, like The New Yorker, run articles on the topic?
If I suspect I’ll be able to find relevant information on a given website, I often use a site-specific search to look up an exact phrase or name. That kind of search is more refined than simply typing related terms into Google.
3) Read around the topic and find the debate.
But if the claim is general, it’s often most useful to start reading around the topic you’re looking into. I sometimes start on Wikipedia. (Yes, that’s OK!) Those articles have footnotes, and the footnotes can guide further reading and research.
Source: Alamy.
Even if what I’m looking up is specific — a claim, say, about the history of poll watching and voter intimidation — I’ll often immerse myself in the debate about the topic. The debate could be scholarly, like researchers disagreeing about the implications of a study, or more obviously political. Often it’s somewhere in between. But reading around the topic and getting immersed in the debate is the only way to sharpen your judgment about which claims are based on good evidence and which ones aren’t. The key is to know enough to be able to distinguish a reliable source from an unreliable one.
When I first started fact-checking at a magazine, before I joined Retro Report, it took me a while to wrap my head around this concept: There’s no ultimate arbiter of facts out there. There’s no secret bible with every conceivable fact laid out and indexed for easy consultation. There’s no special equation that tells you whether a claim is True with a capital T. To be an effective fact-checker, you need to learn how to find good evidence, know when you have enough of it, and most important, know when you don’t.
This is how you inoculate yourself against misinformation. | https://medium.com/retro-report/dont-leave-fact-checking-to-the-fact-checkers-81cf0d30d705 | ['Joseph Hogan'] | 2020-12-29 22:00:53.434000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Research', 'Fake News', 'History', 'Education'] |
Self-Limitations or Conscious Choices? | Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash
When I saw the prompt yesterday I thought I had finally met my match. I didn’t see what I might have to add to the topic. After reading Marilyn Flower’s post and meditating on it during my swim today, I came up with some thoughts. First of all, this prompt follows perfectly from the weekend prompt of “Energy Flows Where My Intention Goes”. These and I think self-talk are the keys we must look at.
We all have limitations. There are twenty-four hours in a day and seven days in a week. We also have a daily limitation on how much energy we have. This will vary day to day. This will vary how we care for ourselves physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. If we rob from sleep too often, for example, it can affect our physical health, our mental capacities and such. Rarely do we reach our maximum energy limitation, but it can happen.
There are limitations that we need to deal with. They fall under the following categories; Physical, legal, and financial. Physical limitations would include things like time, physics, strength, and physical conditioning among others. Legal would be whether something is lawful or not. Financial would relate to monetary things. Many of these limitations involve time. I could probably never buy a luxury yacht to sail around the world but it could be that I can’t afford something else today…That could change over time if proper planning is done. The same thing can be said about strength or physical conditioning.
We tend to use the phrase self-limits or limitation because then we get the idea that we can’t change it. When talking about personal limitations I think we need to change to the three “Ps”. Preferences, priorities, and prejudices. Someone may say that they can’t fly. Of course they can, they simply need to get on the plane. That they can’t or won’t involves one of the three “Ps”. They might be too scared, too anxious, or something else but it is not a physical limitation.
I will use me for examples. Long ago in my life, I turned away from organized religions. I will likely not investigate Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or any other Eastern religion or belief systems due to that. I like many aspects of these but I do not think I would ever embrace them. It is not a self-imposed limit. It is probably a learned prejudice.
Working out is a personal thing to me. I have no problem with people that go to group aerobics classes. I used to go to the gym with a friend and they would do group aerobics. Now there are water aerobics classes that I have to delay my swims for. They often ask why I don’t join. I will even acknowledge that some of these classes may be a better workout than I presently do. I want the time spent in my mind while I swim. This is a preference I can live with. People often ask me why I am not in a relationship. I am not anti-relationship. It is not a priority for me at this point of my life. All of these examples are not limitations. They are choices.
Reiterating what is key here is that energy flows where our intentions go. I think all of us, like Diana, have experiences or situations that we can’t fully immerse ourselves into. That is because if we truly looked deep we would find our intentions are not on that at this point of our lives. That is ok. There is nothing wrong with that.
We need to cut ourselves some slack until they are prioritized to get our energy spent of them. I did that for many years while I taught. When they became important enough for one reason or another I got to them. If I didn’t, like that wooden ship model I never finished, I needed to admit that they were not meant to happen. | https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/self-limitations-or-conscious-choices-912eec51f688 | [] | 2020-12-02 10:04:04.266000+00:00 | ['Prompt', 'Short Story', 'Energy', 'Personal Growth', 'Mindset'] |
How to generate an HTML table and a PDF with Node & Google Puppeteer | Understanding NodeJS internally can be a little bit daunting (I know it was for me once). Node is a very powerful language and it can do a lot of things.
Today I wanted to uncover the power of Node’s built-in utility tool called fs (file system)
As per the fs docs:
The fs module provides an API for interacting with the file system in a manner closely modeled around standard POSIX functions.
Which is just a fancy way of saying that file system is a way in Node to interact with files for both read and write operations.
Now file system is a humongous utility in NodeJS that has a lot of fancy features. In this article, however I will only discuss 3:
Getting file information: fs.statSync
Deleting a file: fs.unlinkSync
Writing data to a file: fs.writeFileSync
Another thing we will cover in this article is Google Puppeteer which is this really cool, slick tool created by some awesome folks at Google.
So what is puppeteer? Well as per the docs, they say:
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome or Chromium.
So it’s basically a tool that lets you do all the cool browser related things on server. Like getting a website’s screenshots, crawling websites, and generating pre-render content for single page applications. You can even do form submissions via your NodeJS server.
Again puppeteer is a huge tool, so we will cover just a small but a very cool feature of puppeteer. We’ll look at how to generate a nice PDF file based on our generated HTML table file. In the process we’ll learn about puppeteer.launch() and understand a bit about page() & pdf().
So to again give a brief overview, things we will cover:
Generating stub data (for invoices) using an online tool.
Creating an HTML table with a little bit of styling with generated data in it, using an automated node script.
Learning about checking if a file exists or not using fs.statSync
Learning about deleting a file by using fs.unlinkSync
Learning about writing a file using fs.writeFileSync
Creating a PDF file of that HTML file generated using Google puppeteer
Making them into npm scripts, to be used later 🤗 🤩
Also before we begin here is the entire source code of the tutorial, for everyone to follow along. You don’t have to write anything, but you should write code along with this tutorial. That will prove more useful & you’ll understand more. SOURCE CODE OF TUTORIAL
Before we begin, please ensure that you have at least the following installed on your machine
Node version 8.11.2
Node Package Manager (NPM) version 6.9.0
You don’t need to, but you can also watch an introductory video (my first ever made) that talks about the basics in reading, writing, and deleting a file in NodeJS. This will help you understand this tutorial. (Please do give me feedback). 🤗
Let’s get started
Step 1:
In your terminal type in the following:
npm init -y
This will initialize an empty project for you.
Step 2:
Second, in the same folder, create a new file called data.json and have some mocked data in it. You can use the following JSON sample.
You can get the mocked JSON stub data from here. For generating this data I have used an awesome tool called https://mockaroo.com/ It is an online data generator tool.
The JSON data I am going with has a structure like this:
[
{},
{},
{
"invoiceId": 1,
"createdDate": "3/27/2018",
"dueDate": "5/24/2019",
"address": "28058 Hazelcrest Center",
"companyName": "Eayo",
"invoiceName": "Carbonated Water - Peach",
"price": 376
},
{
"invoiceId": 2,
"createdDate": "6/14/2018",
"dueDate": "11/14/2018",
"address": "6205 Shopko Court",
"companyName": "Ozu",
"invoiceName": "Pasta - Fusili Tri - Coloured",
"price": 285
},
{},
{}
]
You can download the complete JSON array for this tutorial from here.
Step 3:
Next create a new file called buildPaths.js
const path = require('path'); const buildPaths = {
buildPathHtml: path.resolve('./build.html'),
buildPathPdf: path.resolve('./build.pdf')
}; module.exports = buildPaths;
So path.resolve will take in a relative path and return us the absolute path of that particular directory.
So path.resolve('./build.html'); will for example return something like this:
$ C:\\Users\\Adeel\\Desktop\\articles\\tutorial\\build.html
Step 4:
In the same folder create a file called createTable.js and add the following code:
createTable.js script
I know that is a lot of code, but let’s divide it into chunks and start understanding it piece by piece.
Go to line 106
In our try/catch block we first check if the build file for HTML exists in the system or not. This is the path of the file where our NodeJS script will generate our HTML.
if (doesFileExist(buildPathHtml){} calls doesFileExist() method which simply returns true/false. For this we use
fs.statSync(filePath);
This method actually returns information about the file like the size of the file, when the file was created, and so on. However if we provide it an invalid file path, this method returns as a null error. Which we use here to our benefit and wrap the fs.statSync() method in a try/catch . If Node is successfully able to read the file in our try block, we return true — otherwise it throws an error which we get in our catch block and returns false .
If the file exists in the system we end up deleting the file using
fs.unlinkSync(filePath); // takes in a file path & deletes it
After deleting the file, we need to generate rows to put in the table.
Step 5:
So first we import data.json which we do at line 3 & then on line 115 we iterate each item using map(). You can read more about Array.prototype.map() here.
The map method takes a method createRow which takes in an object through each iteration and returns a string which has content like this:
"<tr>
<td>invoice id</td>
<td>invoice name</td>
<td>invoice price</td>
<td>invoice created date</td>
<td>invoice due date</td>
<td>invoice address</td>
<td>invoice sender company name</td>
</tr>"
const row = data.map(createdRow).join('');
The join('') part is important here, because I want to concatenate all of my array into a string.
An almost similar principle is used for generating a table on line 117 & then the html table on line 119.
Step 6:
The important part is where we write to our file on line 121:
fs.writeFileSync(buildPathHtml, html);
It takes in 2 parameters: one is the build path (string) and the html content (string) and generates a file (if not created; and if it is created, it overwrites the already existing file).
One thing to note here we might not need Step 4, where we check if the file exists & if it does then delete it. This is because writeFileSync does that for us. I just added that in the code for learning purposes.
Step 7:
In your terminal, go in the folder path where you have the createTable.js and type
$ npm run ./createTable.js
As soon as you run this script, it will create a new file in the same folder called build.html You can open that file in your browser and it will look something like this.
Generated HTML table.
Cool right? So far so good. 😅
Also you can add an npm script in your package.json like this:
"scripts": {
"build:table": "node ./createTable.js"
},
This way instead of writing npm run ./createTable.js , you can just type in npm run build:table .
Next up: generating a PDF from the generated HTML file.
Step 8:
First things first we need to install a fancy tool, so go in your terminal in your application folder and type in
npm install puppeteer
Step 9:
In the same folder where you have files createTable.js , buildPaths.js & data.json , create a new file called createPdf.js and add content to it like below:
createPdf.js script
As we did with createTable.js script, let’s break this down into chunks and start understanding this script step by step.
Let’s start with line 40: here we call a method init() which calls the method on line 30. One thing to focus on is that our init() method is an async method. Read more on this async function.
First in the init() method we call printPdf() method which is again an async method, so we have to wait for its response. The printPdf() method returns us a PDF instance which we then write to a file on line 33.
So what does the printPdf() method do? Let’s dig deep in it.
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto(buildPathHtml, { waitUntil: 'networkidle0' });
const pdf = await page.pdf({
format: 'A4',
margin: {
top: '20px', right: '20px', bottom: '20px', left: '20px'}
});
await browser.close();
return pdf;
We first launch a headless browser instance using puppeteer by doing the following:
await puppeteer.launch(); // this returns us headless browser
which we then use to open a web page:
await browser.newPage(); // open a blank page in headless browser
Once we have a blank page open we can navigate to a page. Since our web page is locally in our system, we simply
page.goto(buildPathHtml, { waitUntil: 'networkidle0' });
Here waitUntil: 'networkidle0; is important, because it tells puppeteer to wait for 500/ms until there are no more network connections.
Note: This is why we used path.resolve() to get absolute paths, because in order to open the web page with puppeteer, we need an absolute path.
After we have a web page opened in the headless browser on the server, we save that page as a pdf:
await page.pdf({ });
As soon as we have a pdf version of the web page, we need to close the browser instance opened by puppeteer to save resources by doing this:
await browser.close();
& then we return the pdf saved, which we then write to the file.
Step 10:
In your terminal type
$ npm ./createPdf.js
Note: Before running the above script, ensure that you the build.html file generated by createTable.js script. This ensures we always have the build.html prior to running the createPdf.js script. In your package,json do the following.
"scripts": {
"build:table": "node ./createTable.js",
"prebuild:pdf": "npm run build:table",
"build:pdf": "node ./createPdf.js"
},
Now if you run $ npm run build:pdf it will execute the createTable.js script first and then createPdf.js script. You can read more on NPM scripts on their official docs.
When you run
$ npm run build:pdf
It will run and create a build.pdf which will look like this:
Generated .pdf file on running createPdf.js script
And that is it, we are done.
You have learned the following: | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-generate-an-html-table-and-a-pdf-with-node-google-puppeteer-32f94d9e39f6 | ['Adeel Imran'] | 2019-05-15 21:53:56.949000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Node', 'Coding', 'Tech', 'Programming'] |
The Best Collected Travel Tales by Travel Psychologist Michael Brein | Mind-Reading Dolphins?
Three more sea-creatures stories
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION
DOLPHINS
MARINE LIFE
THE PARANORMAL
by Michael Brein, Ph.D.,
The Travel Psychologist
Story 1:
Mind-Reading Dolphins?
The Great Barrier Reef, Australia
The 1990s
Told to me by BB D. Can dolphins mind-read or be telepathic with humans? BB makes an excellent case that maybe they can and do. Or maybe it’s just a matter of intelligent animal perception? You be the judge.
I scuba dive a lot in Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef, and it can be pretty dangerous out there, because of the sharks. But, for me, personally, I’ve never been scared of sharks. I have actually hand fed them; I’ve worked with them at Sea World in Main Beach, on the Gold Coast of Australia.
I think dolphins and sharks are very telepathic and can maybe even mind-read with humans. They know exactly when you’re scared. They’re like dogs that way. They know when you give off the electric signals of being scared — that attracts them. But I think it’s also more than that. I think they can, in some sense, mind-read, too — or be telepathic with people.
I was stuck once in an underwater cave while free diving, and what happened was the water pushes you in there, and it’s so much pressure that you cannot get yourself out. I just didn’t panic, though. Iheld my breath.
I could see the light shining through on the surface, so I managed first to wriggle my arm out of the cave, and then I pulled myself out. And at that point, while still under water, and barely able to keep holding my breath, suddenly these dolphins just surrounded me and made like a swirling suction kind of motion through which I could funnel myself up to the surface.
Michael: They rescued you?
Yes, they rescued me; I know they did! I still get cold shivers when I think about it.
Michael: Did you have any mental communication with the dolphins?
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say it was any direct sort of mind-to-mind form of communication, per se, but I strongly felt they knew I was in trouble. Whether it’s a form of mind-reading, telepathy, or just some enhanced chemical or electrical sense of some kind, I do not know.
I just know they are aware when people are in trouble.
And, one other time, I was in a boat which was taking on water off of Catalina Island in California. We’d been sailing for hours, and I thought a big wave had just come over us and got the boat wet, but then, I soon discovered I was up to my ankles in water. I didn’t yet realize the boat was actually beginning to take on water and was in trouble.
And, on making our way back to port, I noticed that the dolphins suddenly surrounded our boat. They know when people are in trouble — they know instinctively.
I didn’t know where they had come from or how they knew, but, obviously; they knew what was happening and had come from somewhere maybe to be helpful in some way, huh? Pretty wild, don’t you think?
If you ask me, I think they are more intelligent than anything else on earth; you know. Even though it may be some kind of highly developed electrical sensing of some kind, I can’t help but feel they were consciously aware in some way of my mental state — maybe even a form of telepathy or brain-to-brain awareness which we might label as paranormal.
The Travel Psychologist’s Take:
The Deadly Fer de Lance Snake
I think there is a degree of telepathy between some animals, but it’s not always a good kind of telepathy.
For example, I collected a story once, in my travel tales series, where this woman was on a canoe inGamboa National Park in Panama City, Panama approaching the riverbank, and suddenly, the hair on her arms stood up on end, and she got this mental message “Stop, turn around, go away, go back. Don’t come any closer!”
And then she looked at the bank where she was about to land the canoe and step off, and there facing her was this deadly poisonous fer-de-lance snake all curled up, nearly within striking distance of her, just looking right at her, staring into her eyes.
I think it communicated telepathically to her, “just don’t you come here!”
Her first thought was it must have been her ‘guardian angel’ warning her. I said it might have been her guardian angel, or maybe it was the snake itself, communicating with her telepathically?
I just brought that up half-seriously, for the sake of argument, just to entertain it as an alternate possibility, because it just seems to me snakes might just possibly be telepathic!
Who can say?
Read more of my deadly snake stories on Medium.com.
Story 2:
Sandy’s Whale Story:
Here’s Looking at You!
Baja California, Mexico
The Early 1990s
Told to me by Sandy P. I was I camped by the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California. It’s the place where the gray whales come in, and you can interact with them on the Mexican side.
And so, I went out into the bay in a small boat with a guide, and we waited patiently on the bay to see what would happen.
Suddenly, I saw this enormous shadow under the boat.
I knew it was a whale, so I casually thought, Okay, here’s a whale. But I had absolutely no idea what was in store for us!
The whale came up to the surface. It turned its head and looked right at me with that huge eye of his and then lifted his head high up out of the water.
Unbelievably, I was able to pet him — mind you — not just touch him once and have him disappear, but I actually stroked this whale. And then he silently and gracefully went down, disappeared, and this time came up on the other side of the boat. I pet him again!
The whale then went down under the boat again and came up again on the other side. This went on for 30 minutes.
Michael: What was going on?
I don’t know. This is one place in the world where the whales actually seek out human contact. I’m not the only one to have this experience, either.
And I had a baby whale come up out of the water, too. I almost kissed him.
And then another time there was a gap between a mother and a baby the whole time. I came to this area; I think three different times. The whole time, each time, I never felt unsafe, not even for a minute! They never, never even once hit the boat.
They were always very cognizant of where they were in relation to you, except the one time with a mother and her baby when the baby kept coming over to the boat. And the mother was trying to keep running interference.
This one time, the mother came over and knocked her head to the boat only slightly, causing us to rock-and-roll a bit.
And that was just it — just her message to us: we needed to stop interfering.
She wasn’t hostile, though, but she did knock the boat with her head a couple of times. She could have easily knocked us over, but she didn’t.
That was the simple message to steer clear of her baby.
Michael: Do you think she had the experience of being pestered by humans?
I don’t know. I don’t think so.
If they’ve done any studies on these whales here, it’s a place of peace and harmony where they birth their baby calves right outside the dunes where they can come into the lagoon, because they’re very protected there.
You know how you often hear it said you should never come in between a mother and a baby calf, right? Well, it’s definitely true. Yeah.
Michael: Now let me ask you this: when you had this huge whale I looking right at you, did you feel any kind of communication going on between the two of you?
It was as if it were looking at me to see if they could trust me enough to come up out of the water. I felt like I was being checked out. Because, otherwise, he would have just come up without the human contact we wanted to have with it. It would have just come up without any direct interaction.
But just the fact that he turned and looked at us was unbelievably bizarre in and of its own.
Michael: So what do you think whales were reading about you? What kind of person are you? A person who loves such encounters would be changed for life, I would think.
Yeah. That’s incredible.
Hummingbirds
I do have other stories which have to do with contact between humans and animals, you know, but I particularly like this next one.
We’ve had a lot of contact with hummingbirds, of all things. We had a hummingbird feeder.
Once we took care of a hummingbird inside the house for a 24-hour period. We took care of a hummingbird that crashed into the window one time and got stunned by it.
And when it recovered, my husband held it in his hands to let it go, whereupon it flew right up in front of his face and made eye contact with him as if to say, “Thank you!”
Margaret Howe Lovatt
Story 3:
“Dolphina,” the Dolphin Lady, Again!
One lady’s being upfront and personal with dolphins
Bimini, The Bahamas
2008
Told to me by Robin B. I went with a group of animal communicators to swim with wild dolphins. Being with a group of animal communicators is what made the trip even that more special because, as part of the process, we would “talk” to the animals before we went out, so they would be ready for us and be very willing.
And we just had, indeed, one such incredible experience with them, where they do come to you. You don’t go to them; they come to you.
And, if they stayed around your boat, we’d then send a couple more people into the water to see if they’d still stay around. It was a kind of stepwise approach.
And then, if they stay, it’s game on: everybody gets in the water.
And so, one day, we were all in the water. There were probably about 20 dolphins out there with us. These were bottlenose dolphins, and they were just all swimming around us. And it was absolutely amazing. They would just come within inches of your face, though never touching.
And the rule is you don’t touch them, either. You know, they’re still wild animals. You have to respect them, but they do want to interact with you. They totally come to you.
Michael: Do they feel good about humans?
Yes, they do. Especially humans who have open hearts because that’s what their messages seem to be focused on: they’re trying to help us open our hearts.
They’re such joyous, amazing creatures.
Anyhow, I was just in awe of them. Of course, you’re in probably 30 feet of water or so with snorkels. The seas were a bit rough. For our part, we weren’t all that far from land. I don’t know how to gauge the distance. You could see land off in the distance. But you know, we weren’t.
So I was out there ecstatic. They’re just coming all around us and wanting to interact,
I was having a hard time with my snorkel. And I think I must have twisted something. And the water was getting in, and I was having an increasingly hard time breathing. And I am fumbling, all the while, what with this dolphin being just upright like this (demonstrates to me), just as close as you and I are together. And it’s just watching me.
And it’s like my entire demeanor is like, Oh my god, I don’t even care that I can’t breathe because you’re so amazing you’re right here with me!
I’m thinking this.
Michael: Are you having eye contact with him?
Oh, for sure. That’s right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah!
And he’s just right there all the while, being very still, just watching me while I’m struggling. And I can’t breathe.
Michael: Does he know you’re struggling?
Oh, yes; he does. But he can’t do anything. But the thing is, he just sits there and is calm all the while.
So finally, I get it together, and I’m able to take in some deep breaths and relax, you know, because, God, I’m sure the energy of just being here is the ultimate big experience that it is, huh?
And he’s just so patient. I am quite surprised. You’d think I would have kind of scared him out of the water, what with all my nervous human energy.
Yeah, but anyhow, so he just stayed with me until I totally was able to relax enough and just calm myself down. And then he just sort of looked at me and then swam off.
I’m thinking he was likely a male, as I found out later he was a male.
And then, you know, all these other ones were swimming all around. And then I noticed a friend of mine was diving down, and his fin came off in the water. So I then dove down to try to retrieve it for him and give it to him, because there was some current.
So then I started kicking really hard. And, in the process, my own fin fell off. So, of course, I give up on him because I’ve got to retrieve my own fin. So I went to swim by it, and wouldn’t you know it: there’s a dolphin just right next to the fin, about six inches away from it, just hanging with it as the current was kind of taking it farther away from the boat.
And so, I swim up to it, not wanting to swim too fast because I don’t want to spook him. But I need my fin back because it’s a little scary being out there. And without fins, given there’s a strong current out there, you can so easily get too far away from the catamaran.
And so, you have to always be conscious of staying close.
And so anyhow, I slowly creep up to the fin, slowly floating toward it. So, the fin now rests between me and the dolphin.
And it just looked at me, and I just looked at it. And then I slowly pick up the fan and put it on, and then it just kind of hangs in there for a minute. And then it’s like, “Okay, you’re okay.”
And then off he goes!
Michael: So, he connected with you. He knew you were trying to get the fin to put it on; you think?
Yeah, I think he was just kind of watching it for me, just kind of making sure I was okay. I mean, it was just a very tender feeling, you know. It’s the sort of feeling you got when you were in the water.
I am just absolutely blown away by the whole thing.
And this is happening all the while, among all this burst of activity of the people and the dolphins. All this is going on betwixt and between all that’s going on with all the people and the dolphins swimming around together.
And when I finally get out of the water because I was just so exhausted — I’d been out there for over an hour — one of the women on the boat shouts, “Oh my God, Robin, we’re all starting to call you, “Dolfina!”
And I say, “Well, why is that?”
And she says, “Because they were all around you.”
And I say, “Well, they were around everybody!”
“No, no; not like they were around you!”
I guess because, after all, they could see easier all what’s going on from their vantage point being up above.
And they go, “Oh, no; they just were around you the whole time.”
I went, “Wow, that’s interesting!”
“Yeah, I think he was just kind of watching it for me… ”
So not only was “talking” (animal communicating) with the dolphins prior to swimming with them an integral part of the process but “talking” with them, so-to-speak, afterward, was also to be part of that very same dolphin experience.
Later that night, when we returned to where we were staying, as part of our dolphin experience, we all were asked to have another “conversation” with a particular dolphin we met during the day.
So, of course, I wanted to “talk” to the two dolphins that interacted up close and personal with me during the day.
And so I call to them in my mind. And I don’t know… Michael, do you know about animal communication? Have you ever done anything with that or heard of it?
Michael: No, not much.
It’s basically telepathy.
Michael: Okay.
So you just get yourself into a quiet space. And then, you know, you start communicating.
They say some people hear; some people feel; some people get images; sometimes you get combinations of all the above. And I kind of get a bit of both — a little of a lot of those things.
I usually “hear” them, you know. I hear them along with some imagery.
And I immediately hear this little voice saying to me, “Well, that was ME both times!”
And so I say, “Oh, cool. Well, thank you very, very much.”
And I find out it was a little male under two-years-old. And what I found out afterward is that from the number of spots they have, you can kind of gauge how old they are because as they get older, they get more spots.
So the number of spots on his body was consistent with that age he told me he was, yeah, around two years old.
And so I thank him for hanging out with me when I was in distress.
And in my “conversation” with him, he said, “I wanted you to know what true compassion feels like.”
And I then got this huge overwhelming feeling of compassion come over me, such that I just sat there and cried. I mean, tears were rolling down my face.
It was as if he was then sending me this same very compassion yet again.
Furthermore, he said, “You know; you give compassion to others. And I just wanted you to know what it feels like to be on that other end, the receiving end.”
And it was all very, very sweet, and very humbling.
And then he said, “It’s very easy to give compassion to those who are loving and open and easy. But that same compassion certainly needs to go to those who aren’t so easy to love. They need that same unconditional compassion.”
Michael: And this is not something you would have ordinarily come up with yourself?
No, no, not at all! I mean, it was just this beautiful little lesson of compassion. It was just so beautiful.
So we just “talked” for a while longer. I got a some more detail about his family, and, you know, just a bit more about who he is. But, in the end, the gift that he wanted to give me was already given, and it was an amazing gift at that.
The next morning, I walked over to one of the cabins, to a woman I had befriended on this trip but never knew her all that well before this trip.
She was a sweet, sweet woman who was having a hard time on this trip. I found out later. This was her first time she’d been out without her lover who’d recently had to put her into a nursing home because of developing Alzheimer’s. So she was having a hard time with that.
And she had also been suffering from very bad rheumatoid arthritis. And she didn’t have her normal person to help her, like, to get into her wetsuit stuff, put on sunscreen in places she couldn’t reach, and so on.
I just more or less adopted her during the week because I saw she needed the help. And so that’s how our relationship started.
So, naturally, I told her the story about this little dolphin I talked to during the day because she, herself, did not go to our evening exercise thing; she went to bed early.
And here’s what’s so amazing: she says, “Robin, when you were out there swimming, I called the dolphins to you. I told them that if anybody deserves love that it’s YOU.”
Of course, it was her way of thanking me for all throughout the week of my helping her — to say to me that that’s what she was doing. So, according to her, that’s why the little dolphins came to me — they kind of came around full circle to me. It was just a really beautiful sweet moment on love.
From the Internet
There was a lady who was said to have lived and developed an unusual relationship with a dolphin named “Peter.”
Margaret Howe Lovatt took part in the 1960a in a NASA-funded research effort. It was said that in part she developed even an unusual relationship that was said to even have had a sexual component, by the way.
The director of the project was Gregory Bateson, and she met John C. Lilly, as well, a famous neuroscientist at the time with the California Institute of Technology.
The purpose of this “Dolphinarium” project was to teach dolphins human language.
So, over two years, Dr. Lilly and Margaret Howe tried to prove that human language could be mimicked by dolphins. The project had mixed success, but Margaret was so-named, or at least thought of as, perhaps, the first “Dolphina”— the Girl who Talked to Dolphins, a documentary by Christopher Riley. | https://medium.com/the-best-collected-travel-tales-by-travel/three-more-sea-creatures-stories-87588e6e8434 | ['Michael Brein'] | 2021-01-06 18:07:31.490000+00:00 | ['Travel Writing', 'Wildlife', 'Dolphins', 'Travel', 'Psychology'] |
Хуульчдын сэтгэцийн (сэтгэлзүйн) эрүүл мэнд (I хэсэг) | Эх сурвалж:
American Society of Addiction Medicine. Volume 10, Number 1, January/February 2016. The Prevalence of Substance Use and Other Mental Health Concerns Among American Attorneys. p.46–52.
ABA Journal, February 26, 2016. Lawyers’ Alcohol-Use Study: Implications, Next steps Discussed.
The George Washington Law Review. Volume 83, Number 2, February 2015. What Makes Lawyers Happy?
National Task Force on Lawyer Wellbeing. August 2017. The Path to Lawyer Well-Being. | https://medium.com/@suvdaasuri/%D1%85%D1%83%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%87%D0%B4%D1%8B%D0%BD-%D1%81%D1%8D%D1%82%D0%B3%D1%8D%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B9%D0%BD-%D1%81%D1%8D%D1%82%D0%B3%D1%8D%D0%BB%D0%B7%D2%AF%D0%B9%D0%BD-%D1%8D%D1%80%D2%AF%D2%AF%D0%BB-%D0%BC%D1%8D%D0%BD%D0%B4-i-%D1%85%D1%8D%D1%81%D1%8D%D0%B3-17451170eecb | ['Suvd Tuul'] | 2020-12-24 10:00:30.083000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Lawyers', 'Wellbeing'] |
Increase Your Developer Confidence With a Great Django Test Suite | Increase Your Developer Confidence With a Great Django Test Suite
How to write tests for your Django applications that boost your team and are actually useful
Cartoon by the author. It’s just soda in the test tube, but I’m not taking chances with that beaker.
If you regard writing tests as a lame checkbox task, nothing could be farther from the truth. Done correctly, tests are one of your application’s most valuable assets.
The Django framework, in particular, offers your team the opportunity to create an efficient testing practice based on the Python standard library unittest . Proper tests in Django are fast to write, faster to run, and can offer you a seamless continuous integration solution for taking the pulse of your developing application.
With comprehensive tests, developers have higher confidence when pushing changes. I’ve seen firsthand in my own teams that good tests can boost development velocity as a direct result of a better developer experience.
In this article, I’ll share my own experiences in building useful tests for Django applications, from the basics to the best possible execution. If you’re using Django or building with it in your organization, you might like to read my Django series on Victoria.dev. | https://medium.com/better-programming/increase-your-developer-confidence-with-a-great-django-test-suite-e1d8e7df8c90 | ['Victoria Drake'] | 2020-10-18 20:09:41.827000+00:00 | ['Python3', 'Tdd', 'Data Science', 'Programming', 'Python'] |
Guide to Kubernetes Metrics. Recently I was asked to design a… | Background
Metric Types
According to Kubernetes monitoring architecture, metrics in a Kubernetes cluster can be divided into system (resource) metrics and service metrics. System metrics are generally available from every component running in the cluster such as container CPU usage. Service metrics are application specific metrics defined in application code such as request count to API server.
Kubernetes Metrics API
Kubernetes defines two sets of metrics API: resource metrics API and custom metrics API. Kubernetes provides two implementations for resource metrics API: Heapster and metrics-server while the custom metrics API is up to the vendor to implement. Details about each API will be described below.
Metrics Source
Resource Metrics API
What metrics does this API expose? This API exposes core system metrics, i.e., resource (CPU & Memory) usage metrics for node and containers. Note that this is sometimes referred to as master metrics API. The API definition can be found here.
Which components are involved? The metrics-server and heapster. Note: Heapster is being deprecated. Please consider using metrics-server if possible. Currently in GKE, heapster is responsible for sending the core system metrics to Stackdriver.
How to access this API? This API is made available under the /apis/metrics.k8s.io/ endpoint. For example,
Use $ kubectl proxy --port=8080 and $ curl localhost:8080/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/nodes for node metrics.
and for node metrics. Or use $ kubectl get --raw "/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/nodes" | jq for node metrics.
Custom Metrics API
What metrics does this API expose? Since this is a custom metrics API, it’s up to the metrics pipeline vendors to implement whatever metrics they want.
Which component exposes these metrics? Kubernetes defines this API but does not provide any official implementation. There are a few implementations such as the Prometheus Adapter and Google Stackdriver Adapter.
Prometheus Adapter. It queries Prometheus server to get metrics and then exposes them as custom Metrics API via Kubernetes API Aggregation. What metrics are exposed can be configured.
How to access this API? This API is made available under the /apis/custom.metrics.k8s.io/ endpoint. For example,
Use $ kubectl proxy --port=8080 and $ curl localhost:8080/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/ to check what resources are available.
and to check what resources are available. Or use $ kubectl get --raw "/apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/" | jq to check what resources are available.
Other Metrics
The resource metrics and custom metrics API are defined by Kubernetes and can be used natively by Kubernetes components such as the Horizontal Auto Scaler (HPA). In addition to these native Kubernetes metrics sources, there are many other sources of metrics such as the Prometheus metrics endpoints. Although these metrics are not considered to be “native” or “first-class” metrics in Kubernetes, understanding them helps you to build your own metrics pipeline for your own custom metrics.
Prometheus metrics endpoint
This is probably the most popular way of exposing metrics in Kubernetes. An application can use Prometheus client libraries to define and expose service metrics via an HTTP endpoint, typically under /metrics .
Many Kubernetes components exposes their metrics via the /metrics endpoint, including API server, etcd and many other add-ons such as Goolge Cloud plugin for Fluentd.
You can configure your Prometheus server to scrape metrics from the metrics endpoints and do further analysis. If you use GKE, you can use a prometheus-to-sd sidecar to push these metrics to Google Stackdriver Monitoring.
Misc
kube-state-metrics is a component that exposes metrics about object state, such as pod_start_time . These metrics are in Prometheus format and are exposed at /metrics endpoint.
It’s one of many officially supported exporters by Prometheus. This is an exporter that exposes metrics about Kubernetes nodes.
References | https://medium.com/@congliu.thu/complete-guide-to-kubernetes-metrics-24a8782c34cd | ['Cong Liu'] | 2019-03-04 02:45:37.450000+00:00 | ['Metrics', 'Kubernetes'] |
I Gave My Boyfriend A Blowjob in a Traffic Jam | I Gave My Boyfriend A Blowjob in a Traffic Jam
And it tasted good.
Photo by STANLEY NGUMA from Pexels
It happened last summer.
We had three months of perfectly lovely weather and decided to go on a road trip. It has been forever since the last time we took a vacation together — after we graduated, our jobs took most of our time.
I was extremely excited to spend the next weeks in a romantic trip with my boyfriend.
The weather was perfectly sunny, and we were in a good mood for traveling. Nothing could stop us.
Except that, on the first day of our adventure, we got stuck on a major traffic jam. We checked Waze, and it said there was an accident. Nobody was moving. I knew it’d take forever to get out of there. It was horrible — felt like we’d spend the rest of our lives stuck in that car.
After the first three hours, everything seemed way too dull. I had tried everything to entertain myself — I had scrolled down all my social media feeds, read one chapter of my book, and listened to music.
I had never felt so bored before — and I knew my boyfriend felt the same way.
Everything got better when I got an entertaining idea.
With butterflies on my stomach, I unzipped my boyfriend’s jeans and watched his reaction. I looked him in the eye, the anticipation building up. I wondered if the other drivers could see us, and the thought made me wet.
He stared at me with surprise. The car wasn’t moving at all, so there were no safety issues. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for his consent. He smiled, knowing where this would go.
My hand made its way under his underwear. His cock wasn’t hard yet, but I knew how to change that. I played with his dick gently, my hand going through the extension of the penis and the balls.
Gradually, I felt it was growing in my hands. There it was — my favorite cock in the world. Honestly, it was the perfect size for me; our bodies fit perfectly.
Once it was completely hard, the fun began.
I masturbated him slowly at first, my hand going up and down. He let his body relax completely, closing his eyes to enjoy it. All I wanted was to make him feel good. I leaned over to kiss his neck with a quick movement and increased the rhythm with my hand. I bit his ear gently, just the way I knew he liked.
Suddenly, a thought crossed my mind: we couldn’t clean it if he did come in the car.
It was my first time being so naughty in a car, and the risk of being caught made me brave. I had the solution to my problem. I leaned my head to his cock, kissing his thighs first to create anticipation.
The kisses tickled him a bit, so he chuckled. But once second later, he moaned in pleasure. My tongue licked every inch of his dick before it filled my mouth.
My pussy got wet with the taste of his cock.
Words cannot express how much I wished to have his dick in my pussy. But that would have to wait for a few hours. I channeled the frustration in the blowjob — it was satisfying enough for the moment.
I wanted it to be fast, so I didn’t waste any time with pre-gaming — I went full-force right from the start. I felt extremely excited as my head moved up and down. Knowing the head is a sensitive area, I sucked it gently and concentrated my tongue there.
He moaned in pleasure as I sucked his cock just as energetically as if it was ice cream.
Nevertheless, my boyfriend grabbed my hair to get control of the situation. I always thought it was sexy when he took control in those situations. He pushed my head gently towards his cock, helping me to keep a good pace. He always did that before he came.
His cock pulsated in my mouth, and I knew the end was close. With a quiet moan, he came. The cum tasted bitter, and I swallowed it straight away. My pussy was extremely wet, wishing it could have his cock. But I was proud of my accomplishment.
It was the perfect beginning of our vacation. | https://medium.com/sensual-enchantment/i-gave-my-boyfriend-a-blowjob-in-a-traffic-jam-cab50ea39453 | ['Claire Lowe'] | 2020-08-14 16:19:09.773000+00:00 | ['This Happened To Me', 'Sex', 'Fiction', 'Erotica', 'Short Story'] |
Clearing the Cobwebs | This trail I tread
Through cobwebbed past
Feels like a certain death
Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
The death of self
So long suppressed
Behind the smiling mask
Darkened corners
So long unswept
I fear to stir the dust
But stir, I must
If I’m to be
Set free from chains, long bound
Echos whisper
My mind’s eye sees —
Dear God, this cannot be!
Betrayed; BETRAYED!!
By mine own blood
This light, it burns my eyes!
Photo by Kat J on Unsplash
The tears, they fall
The sleep, I lose
My soul is torn in two
Don’t want to face
This buried pain
Of my forgotten youth
Don’t want to see
Don’t want to feel
Dear Lord, I-just-want-sleep!
But I’m led on
By one, my guide
And she, led by the Lord
And friends, I’ve too
To lend support
And catch me when I fall
Photo by Kunj Parekh on Unsplash
Eventually -
Or so they say
“This too, in time, shall pass.”
So, clawing forth
And trudging on
I focus on the day
When -
From chains, set free
My spirit soars
Proclaiming my new birth
Renewed in soul
The joy will flow
Living authentic Self
It’s then I’ll know
I’ll see the Why
Of all that I’ve been through
This tortured path
In vain, not walked
But strength for my resolve | https://medium.com/@gregorycade4/clearing-the-cobwebs-7e61b7eb1af9 | ['Gregory Cade'] | 2020-12-13 17:41:32.513000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Joy', 'Poetry', 'Pain', 'Loss'] |
Solace Within The Sea | 50 WORDS
Solace Within The Sea
Photo by Nate Neelson on Unsplash
I stared at the dark sea. The waves lapped ferociously upon the shore. My mind was on fire with the voices of discontent. They raged against the injustice of imperfections.
I desired nothing more than silence.
Legs trembling, I stood.
Quietly I walked into the glacial embrace of the water. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/solace-within-the-sea-8d180c4a77c3 | ['Reuben Salsa'] | 2020-12-14 20:00:45.035000+00:00 | ['Salsa', 'Death', 'The Bad Influence', 'Thrifty Words Challenge', '50 Word Stories'] |
Email marketing is dead? | What Is Email Marketing and why email marketing in 2021?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on sending email and developing relationships with prospects and customers. An effective email marketing strategy converts prospects into customers and turns first-time buyers into recurring customers one advantage of email marketing is that you can advertise the entire process.
1. Email marketing made simple a step by step guide.
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense ,every email sent to a potential or current customers could be considered email marketing. it involves using email to send advertisement request to business or solicit sale or donation
WHY EMAIL MARKETING IN 2021?
Because email helps to create a strong email marketing strategy that helps you reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase sales at an affordable cost just another platform and media have changed email marketing tools to give your business the ability to reach customers easier than ever.
I give you top a reason on the important of email marketing and how they can help your business
1. Stay in contact with your audience
Email has the ability to keep your customer informed , consumers are capable of checking their email when it is convenient for them, it can give them a feeling that you are thinking of them . This email can be as simple as saying “ Hi you’re on our mind here’s a special offer ! ‘or’ here is an update on what has been going on here inherent weeks
2. Reach customer in real-time
According to litmus,54% fo all email were opened on a mobile device This is significant and should come into play when playing any marketing strategy more and more consumer as using their mobile device to access not only email but all other type of media and information
3. People engage with email
As the year has gone by, email has fast become one of our main choices of communication , we have all been groomed to reply to forward click through to something or to sign up. We tend to do something with the email.
4. Email marketing easy to measure
Most email marketing tools offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates and open rates . This gives you a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working, which one to tweak or which ones to get rid of altogether . these metric should not be ignored
5. It’s affordable
You can reach large number of consumer for less than pennies per message , The cost per (possible) conversion is slow with email marketing I cannot believe every company dose’s not participate or engage more often
So yes while it does after a significant ROI it might be a wise idea to hire someone to manage these efforts. According to shoot it out design at a . with a 15000 email database your company would spend about 152 hour per year managing the campaign. This would include writing, drafting , scheduling, sending etc. Of the email, answering any question about any mixing coupon or other concern and database maintenance adding and deleting members , updating information and other tasks.
6.Allow for targeted messaging
The main idea here is that your potential customers aren’t at different stages of the buying cycle, some may be at the research and compare stage. reating buyers person can help you determine what kind of content to create for each step.
9. Everyone (almost) use email
A hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email . That alone should be enough to convince you to share an offer as much as possible . Remember brand awareness Email is especially huge in the B2B world as it accounts for the most prominent form of communication for 73% of business.
7. Increase brand awareness.
Nope , social media isn’t the only platform that help a company brand awareness Possessing a customer or prospect email address mean one thing they shaved a level of interest email marketing give you a the ability to increase that interest level that brand awareness by staying top of mind
8. It’s timely.
One of the benefit of email marketing can be to sell your product if you approach it in the correct fashion it’s important to use all the customer database and information you can sending customer a special offer on their birthday or letting them know their favorite dish is half off is much more effective than simply sending then a menu
The same study also shown that the buying process happen #time faster than in social media … According to the fourth source website 92% of internet users have at least one email account .
These strategies are considered to be the most traditional and are intended to increase impulsive behavior when announcing promotion or a new product
This email marketing strategy also .Can incorporate seasonal offers allowing you to promote a holiday special or an annual sale be sure to create a sense of urgency for an offer customers are much more likely to pursue when a deal is ending soon.
9. Everyone (almost) use email
A hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email . That alone should be enough to convince you to share an offer as much as possible . Remember brand awareness Email is especially huge in the B2B world as it accounts for the most prominent form of communication for 73% of business.
IS EMAIL MARKETING IS STILL EFFECTIVE
Email marketing is upto 40 times more effective than social media according to a study done by mckinsey & company.
The same study also shows that the buying process happen 3time faster than in social media … According to the fourth source website ,92% of internet users have at least one email account.
Email marketing has many advantages associated with it when used property it can leverage sales, generate new customers and help in their retention while social networks first need to engage people so that they can become customers.THrough email marketing you can have options for various communication strategies.
1.COMMERCIAL
these strategies are considered to be the most traditional and are intended to increase impulsive behaviour when announcing promotion or a new product
2.LOYALTY
in order to retain customers, those types of campaigns aim to promote their relationship with the brand of company , in order to generate more sales .
3. INFORMATON
these campaign are intended mainly to inform client for example about future event or to get feedback on a particular service or product
4. LOCATION
This is a strategy used to inform people about the location of the physical store , so that they can go in it and become customers. These strategies associated with relevant content conachive good results for companies , Unlike to what happens in social media . In email marketing there is a base of subscribers who are already interested in the subject sent by companies they can choose whether or not to open the email.
Among its advantages are the possibility of communicating , Through a more personal of allowing and facilitating the fact of allowing and facilitating the analysis of data which in turn helps to understand if the company objectives are in accordance with the result obtained.
Thise Email marketing tools are also allowed to you to perform A\B test , help you to understand which email work best allow you to target you public increase company awareness by sending weekly or monthly.
EMAIL MARKETING IS DEAD OR NOT ? FUTURE OF EMAIL MARKETING ?
IT all started in 1971 when a computer engineer Raymond Tomlinso sent the first email .
what might not seem as a very distant past is relevant in a rapidly changing technological environment 40years ago can be compared to a millennium ago.
Yes, email is old . But who said that old isn’t gold ?
According to a radicati report in 2015 the number of business and consumer email sent and received per day was over 205 billion , and in 2017 it will reach 269 billion and its is expected at expected to continue grow at on average annual rate of 4.4% over the next four year reaching 319,6 billion by the end of 2021.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF EMAIL MARKETING?
BETTER DATE AND PERSONALIZATION ARE THE FUTURE OF EMAIL MARKETING
Here are the same things you need to remember.
1. By 2023 there will be an estimated 4.3 billion global email users according to statista.
2. Since most users tend to look at promotional email in the same light as spam, future email marketing campaigns should aim to be more personalized.
3.Email marketing methods that make the message work more like a website are easily accessible on mobile devices will be more important. its hard to image a would without email more than 4billion people are expected to have at least one email address by 2023 making it one of the most common forms of communication on the planet with such a large user base it only makes sense that marketing teams of they to optimise to their intended audience inbox.
4. The key is properly managing email content that is educational and services the reader with helpful information and promotion email that leads to your product services .
As a the internet and how people access it shift with the advent of new device and standards it is important that your email marketing strategy reflect these changes to get a better idea of a what to impact , business news daily rescinded out to empact to get their insight on how email marketing will evolve in the near future.
1. Machine learning, AI and cloud based technology will change the future of email marketing as in most industries today machine learning and artificial intelligence are quickly becoming a major part of technology and have mode marketing automation a possibility tailoring messages to an intended audience based on customer data .
2. Personalization matters whether your email marketing strategy targets individuals or other business one thing remains certain: people want to feel like their specific needs are designed . consider your own email inbox for a moment . If you get an email that seems every promotion or unrelated to you . You are more likely to delete it or market it as spam than read it if you are creating an email marketing campaign you want to make sure your message passes that simple test.
3. Interactive email will more easily bridge the gap to a sale from the smart phone in our pocket to the specific internet browser we run tech companies are constantly trying to find way to dissolve the boundaries to a fluid user experience today email services are generally related to a specific application or web address dut email marketing expert beleving more interactive emails will take a the industry by storm in the coming years
“ the more interactive you can make something the more people look forward to using it “
by Zara Ameen CEO of CANZ marketing .
Such changes to the way email marketing campaigns are created would increase customer engagement and click-through rates combined with A1 technology. Lewis said users generated content into email dynamically creating more compelling storytelling and increased read and engagement rates.
4.Captiuating Storytelling will drive email marketing .
Everybody loves a good story and if yours small business has one your email marketing plans should reflect that .
Those show the prospect that we are up to date with the latest innovation and know tech well. Which reinforces our expertise which offers value to a wider demographic and building a strong customer in the funnel is a value added contest for new prospects and generally makes it as easy as possible for everyone to stay engaged without having to go into your sites .
5.Marketing emails should become compatible with mobile devices. Our world is it are a single connected in large part because of the miniature computer we carry around with us to our emails account. Social media network and personal data, Nearly everything and your brand post on the web should work on a smartphone to ensure that your omnichannel marketing effort doesn’t go to waste .
Responsive design email marketing campaign for mobile devices “will maximize device accessibility and user experience which will become increasing the gold standard.
Accounting for a smaller screen properly displaying your email in an app and marketing localization effort “will impact template design copy length and call to action and need to consider throughout campaign development.
TEN(10) BENEFIT OF EMAIL MARKETING
1.Unrivalled return on investment
2.Intantt impact
3.Reach a global audience
4.Easy to share
5.Easy to measure
6.Easy to get started
7.Drive revenue
8.Deliver targeted message
9.Reach an already engaged audience
10.Low cost
Email marketing is used by thousands of businesses of all sizes across the globe. Those who are unfamiliar with this method of marketing may not immediately understand why it is a So popular amongst companies in a variety of industries but there are ten reasons why email marketing is seen by many as the most effective marketing channel. | https://medium.com/@bloggerritik004/email-marketing-is-dead-3f52c241a13a | [] | 2020-12-09 11:31:21.204000+00:00 | ['Email Productivity', 'All About Email Marketing', 'Email Marketing Software', 'Email Marketing', 'Email Marketing Tips'] |
Six New Fundamental Rights for EU? | Ferdinand von Schirach published his new book “Jeder Mensch”. As always — title and content short and sweet. Since I enjoy reading Schirach and find his thoughts and statements interesting, I advertise here to think about “Every human being”. It is about nothing less than the expansion of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. He justifies (only in German) this necessity thus:
An update, a modernization is necessary, because many topics such as globalization and artificial intelligence are not covered by the existing fundamental rights.
Fundamental rights would have to be visionary and contain goals, and
Fundamental rights would have to be enforceable by “everyone”; the Charter of Fundamental Rights does not currently offer this possibility.
Probably it is the last point that the lawyer Schirach needed as a trigger; which articles do Schirach and other European Constitutional lawyers and scientists propose:
Article 1 — Environment: Everyone has the right to live in a healthy and protected environment.
Article 2 — Digital self-determination: Everyone has the right to digital self-determination. Excessive profiling or the manipulation of people is forbidden.
Article 3 — Artificial Intelligence: Everyone has the right to know that any algorithms imposed on them are transparent, verifiable and fair. Major decisions must be taken by a human being.
Article 4 — Truth: Everyone has the right to know that statements made by public officials are true.
Article 5 — Globalization: Everyone has the right to be offered only those goods and services that are produced and provided with respect for universal human rights.
Article 6 — Fundamental Rights Lawsuits: Everyone has the right to bring fundamental rights before the European Courts when the Charter’s fundamental rights are systematically violated.
I took the time to reflect on these six articles, and post my thoughts. My evaluation is guided
from the existing Charter of Fundamental Rights, i.e. is an extension really necessary,
is the demand clearly and unambiguously formulated, so that anyone can understand and agree, and
is the right visionary and takes us, the people, further, i.e. does it expand our rights and/or does it define them more clearly than the existing fundamental rights.
Article 1 sounds reasonable at first. Living in a healthy environment is desirable, is not required in this form in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and is goal-oriented. But what is a “protected environment”? Regardless of the fact that this can be perceived differently for each person, the term protected environment is far too vague: borders, closed doors to the protection of fauna and flora etc.
Article 2 is indeed a fundamental right and an extension is needed. This right includes the protection of personal data and the informed choice to use it, to release it, and I would agree with this.
Article 3 was probably the most difficult one for the authors. It is clear that knowledge is limited here and unknown territory is being entered. This article testifies to the hope of (still) being able to control the so-called algorithms. First remark, who decides what is essential. Inherent in artificial intelligence in particular is that an unessential thing becomes an essential thing. Artificial Intelligence is self-learning, which can’t/shouldn’t be designed with current morals in mind. “Burdensome algorithms” are supposed to be fair is a contradiction in terms. Fulfilling Art 2 would make Art 3 obsolete.
Article 4 — a matter of course. Schirach justifies this claim that humans know what is truth or lie. To this I remark: German officials are bound by the German constitution, EU officials by the EU Staff Regulations. Both do not oblige public officials to tell the truth, but they do oblige them to act objectively. Hannah Arendt, in her report “The Banality of Evil” on the Eichmann trial, recognized Eichmann as a public official who was not aware of any guilt and saw himself only as an executive body, i.e. in addition to objective and subjective truth, there is also that of public officials who do not (want to) know what truth is. Although Art. 4 is a noble goal, it cannot be fulfilled/enforced and is therefore obsolete.
Article 5 is reminiscent of the German Supply Chain Act. For economy and prosperity this demand is currently not useful, because this right conditions the other fundamental rights, can only be realized on the EU and thus negates globalization. The influence of the EU on the implementation of universal human rights is limited. If one thinks further, it means that suppliers of goods and services have an influence on the observance of universal human rights worldwide, which not only collides with the fundamental right to freedom. If, instead of universal human rights, the article aimed at fair remuneration and against child labor, it would be achievable.
Article 6 I could agree with, although the word “systematically” again leaves room for speculation and Art 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights already allows for legal remedies.
In summary, I only fully agree with Article 2.
The other articles are guided by current social conditions. For example, Schirach cites authoritarian populist presidents such as Orban and Trump as reasons for Art 4 and the “omnipotence” of global internet platforms that need to be prevented/contained for Art 3. Adaptation to new circumstances are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the further development of fundamental rights; fundamental rights are not fads.
Schirach’s “Every Human being” initiative calls for signatures. Unfortunately, however, there is no possibility of discussion or deselection/approval of individual articles, so that I do not sign this appeal in its entirety. | https://medium.com/@caroline-neufert/six-new-fundamental-rights-for-eu-847098a135c7 | ['Caroline Neufert'] | 2021-04-25 10:57:12.799000+00:00 | ['European Union', 'Fundamental Rights', 'Globalization'] |
Can C# 9.0 Outclass Python as a Scripting Language? | Python shines as a scripting or glue language, not to mention Python is simple, easy to learn, and that the Zen design philosophy adds to its awesomeness and readability.
Whereas C#, is often popular for its versatility, robustness, and safety, coupled with the fact that it is counted among the most evolving languages nowadays.
C# 9.0 was officially released on the 10-Nov-2020; thanks to its Top-level statements feature, it is now a much more scripting friendly language.
Both Python and C# are High-Level, Object-Oriented, and General-Purpose languages.
Given these points, what are the major differences between both languages?
Interpreted vs. Compiled:
Python is an Interpreted language, while C# is a compiled one, which can count in favor of Python since there is no compilation step; the edit-test-debug cycle can be shortened.
However, we will see how C# can be compiled and executed in one step, turning this advantage into a tie.
Dynamically Typed vs. Statically Typed:
Python is dynamically typed, which means that variables do not have a type, but values do; in other words, you can give a Python variable an integer value and then give it a string value.
C#, on the contrary, is a Statically Typed language; hence all variables must be declared to be of a specific type.
With this in mind, let us see some real-world usages compared in both languages.
Prerequisites:
SDK
Python:
Python recent SDK(v 3.0 and above).
C#:
.NET recent SDK (v 5.0 and above). | https://medium.com/swlh/python-vs-c-as-a-scripting-language-6f81f358719b | ['Sameeh Shkeer'] | 2021-01-05 13:04:28.565000+00:00 | ['Python', 'C Sharp Programming', 'Programming Languages', 'Scripting Language', 'Programming'] |
Around the Turn of the Year | CULTURAL PROMPT- “WHAT DOES DECEMBER MEAN TO YOU?”
Around the Turn of the Year
Raining Love
Around the turn of the year
we fit perfectly
under my umbrella
crafted of twelve
recycled plastic slices
containers of different colors
let’s squeeze together to its dark side
honey, it’s December now
and the downpour doesn’t stop
my heart is sad after all
and the taxi cab is waiting
even for the briefest moment
keep me warm with your breath
and leave me strong
without missing a beat
it’s funny and tough
discovered it in writing
under your fingerprints
December makes me frenzy
running into potholes
find hilarity in the barest holidays
Joanna Vang 2020 | https://medium.com/blueinsight/around-the-turn-of-the-year-1f22373efa77 | ['Joanna Vang'] | 2020-12-20 23:16:36.736000+00:00 | ['Blue Insights', 'Love Distance Love', 'Writing Prompts', 'Rainy Days', 'Cultural Prompt'] |
The Miner Zone community ecological development plan is launched, and you are welcome to join! | Miner Zone — a new generation of decentralized Internet form, is a data value sharing network based on blockchain technology to build a decentralized financial virtual reality industry ecosystem to empower the real economy.
Miner Zone’s technology expansion business involves 14 countries and regions, and 7 large-scale
A listed company, providing large-scale virtual reality ecological services, and 300+ virtual reality services for small and medium-sized enterprises.
It is negotiating with international e-commerce giants Ebay, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. to provide decentralized commercial virtual reality services.
As well as other investment institutions and partners oculus, sony, htc, bitmain, canaan technology, foreign communication, muzhong technology, etc.
Miner Zone integrates blockchain technology and combines the computing power support of 7 large-scale mining farms at home and abroad to provide virtual reality services for small and medium-sized enterprises, and has mass-produced the secure hardware network mining machine MZO, which constitutes a complete decentralization. Transform the financial virtual reality industry circle and empower the real economy.
MZO Mining Machine Model: Business
The secure hardware network mining machine MZO (MZ Origin), as the first self-developed hardware and software integrated machine in the field of blockchain in China, adopts the world’s first hardware privacy protection, combined with self-developed blockchain smart contracts and artificial intelligence AI special processing technology , With an autonomous, controllable and trusted execution environment, MZO provides strong privacy, high performance, and safe operation services.
Economists in the MZ Genesis Zone can use a secure hardware network mining machine (MZO) to obtain MZT by providing services, online activity, consumption, etc. based on the PoST time-space proof algorithm. The longer the active time on MZO, the MZT obtained more.
This community ecological expansion recruitment plan is to improve the Miner Zone ecological work efficiency and work quality, enhance the Miner Zone ecological ant’s professional quality and work ability, and make further efforts for the Miner Zone to improve the community’s ecological autonomy. At that time, community members can obtain MZT by completing tasks issued by the project party and participating in the activities of the project party, and members can select community nodes through elections and voting. | https://medium.com/@minerzone1/the-miner-zone-community-ecological-development-plan-is-launched-and-you-are-welcome-to-join-cf166e06a96d | ['Miner Zone'] | 2020-12-07 14:47:44.697000+00:00 | ['AI', 'VR', 'Minerz', 'B'] |
Set the Mood with Your Own Ceiling Light Fixture | If you need more light for your home and workshop, there are a wide variety of options from which to choose. This, however, wasn’t good enough for YouTube hacker GreatScott! Instead, he created a unique ceiling light fixture with nine GU10 LED spotlights for traditional white lighting, along with RGBW strips arranged near the upper outer edges of the cuboid to set the mood.
The structure consists of framing lumber as the main structure, VeroBoard Rapid (not the same thing as perfboard) that forms the bottom surface, and MDF as the top. Cleverly, the MDF top was recessed with a router in order to form a place for a aluminum profiles that hold the LED strips. Holes were punched in the bottom material for the GU10 spotlights, which are wired up inside the new structure.
While none of this sounds that complicated, actually making it took quite a bit of work, and there is a lot more wiring hardware than you might first suspect. While there is no automated control here beyond the phone app and remote control used for mood lighting, the project looks like a great target for an ESP8266 module, IFTTT integration, or other tricks. Perhaps this great looking build will be the inspiration for something even more fantastic! | https://medium.com/@JeremySCook/set-the-mood-with-your-own-ceiling-light-fixture-6044fbb101a8 | ['Jeremy S. Cook'] | 2019-02-26 21:01:16.212000+00:00 | ['Lighting', 'Decor', 'Technology', 'Esp8266', 'Lamp'] |
Nitrates — Best Plant-Based Pre Workout? | Photo by Kyle Johnson on Unsplash
Many recent studies have consistently shown the link between nitrates and enhanced physical performance. They can come in whole, plant-based or more synthetic, isolated forms. Today, they are considered an efficient performance-enhancing supplement from endurance training to weight lifters.
Natural forms of nitrates, such as beetroot juice — the most popular source — not only can boost exercise performance but can also play a much bigger role in our heart and brain health.
On the other hand, although nitrate salts (sodium, potassium) provide similar results concerning physical performance, they also come packed with not-so-good side effects for our health. Thus, the source of dietary nitrates are very important to be considered.
With that said, let’s dig into the wonderful properties of nitrates.
What Are Nitrates?
Taken from http://www.projectfeed1010.com/
Nitrates are inorganic compounds found naturally in plants (particularly in fruits and vegetables) as well as in the water, air, and environment. Dark leafy greens have the highest concentration of nitrates in plants.
Although beets are the most popular source of nitrates, they are not the highest sources. On a mg/100g basis, whole beets (110) have 4x less concentration than the winner arugula (480). The complete rank goes as follow:
1. Arugula (480) 2. Rhubarb (281) 3. Beet Juice (279) 4. Cilantro (247) 5. Butter lettuce (200) 6. Spring greens (188) 7. Basil (183) 8. Beet greens (177) 9. Oakleaf lettuce (155) 10. Swiss chard (151)
Plants absorb through their roots nitrates present in underground water streams. They supply nitrogen to plants, allowing them to form essential proteins and grow healthily. Besides that, fertilizers dumped on soil are high in nitrates and are essential for the production of chlorophyll in plant leaves — a key agent of photosynthesis.
They are also found naturally in many fruits & vegetables, in different concentrations. The levels of naturally occurring nitrates depend on a series of factors, including the species, fertilizer and soil conditions, environmental influences (light, season, temperature), production (storage time and temperature), and processing methods (blanching, boiling, peeling, washing, etc.).
Although the beneficial properties of dietary nitrates for human health are well-established, more isolated forms of nitrates that are used in food production have the opposite effect.
Nitrates in Cured Meats
Nitrate salts like sodium nitrate are utilized as a food additive and preservative in processed food like cured meats due to their powerful antibacterial properties.
Since 1999, the FDA has prohibited the commercial use of nitrates in the production of cooked meats, sausages, and even cheese, for safety reasons. However, they allow the use of sodium nitrate in uncooked, cured meats, with a limit of 200ppm.
Once in contact with the meat, sodium nitrate gets converted into sodium nitrite by meat bacteria, then followed processed into nitrous (within an induced acidic environment), and finally converted into nitric oxide, which reacts with the myoglobin proteins, giving cured meats their pinkish color and salty flavor.
Although increased bioavailability of nitric oxide in our bloodstream is associated with positive health outcomes, sodium nitrite can bind with certain byproducts of amino acid degradation in our liver, leading to the formation of N-nitroso components like nitrosamines (or nitrosamides) that damage our cells and DNA.
Because of that, nitrosamines are labeled as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization (WHO). This means that there is enough evidence that this compound is carcinogenic. In the same category are things like smoking, asbestos (silicate minerals), aflatoxins (fungi), etc.
Although being on this group does not mean that YOU WILL have cancer if you consume these substances, it does mean that your chances will be highly increased.
Nitrates from Plant-Based Sources
Taken from examine.com
Dietary nitrate from whole, plant-based sources, are highly associated with a number of benefits to human cardiovascular health, including helping to control vasodilation, regulating blood pressure, and improving blood flow. Furthermore, they are closely associated with brain health and cognitive function.
Dietary nitrates get converted into nitrites in our mouths, which then travel down our digestive tract, where they get converted into nitric oxide (due to stomach acid conditions), and finally entering our circulation system via resistance arteries, where their magic starts to happen.
Excess nitrates which did not get converted are excreted by our kidneys and get picked up by our salivary glands, where they accumulate and are released back to our body’s nitric oxide cycle on a demand basis.
To counteract the formation of nitrosamines, nitrate-rich plants are full of phytonutrients such as caffeic acid, ferulic acid, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), and other natural inhibitors of nitrosamine formation. You can find the complete list here.
Thus, it seems that plant-based sources of nitrates have the complete package to increase the bioavailability of nitric oxide in our bodies without harming it at the same time.
Nitrates and Health
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
There is a plethora of studies on the effects of daily consumption of plant-based dietary nitrates in both young and older adults. They have consistently shown solid and promising results concerning their positive health implications on all sorts of individuals, from clinically diagnosed patients to healthy adults.
Blood Pressure
Systemic hypertension (aka high blood pressure) is the largest attributable risk factor for mortality worldwide. Both high diastolic & systolic blood pressure are associated with increased risk of strokes, heart attacks, atherosclerosis, kidney failure, and cerebral hemorrhage. According to the WHO, an estimated 1.13 billion people worldwide have hypertension and numbers are predicted to increase by 1.57 billion by 2025 (slightly 1-3 adults).
A 2014 study found that a single daily dose of dietary nitrates (250ml beetroot juice) given to patients with hypertension during 4 weeks significantly lowered their blood pressure, even beyond conventional pharmacotherapy. They went further, suggesting a diet rich in dietary nitrates to be a cost-effective, affordable, and favorable approach for public health and treatment of patients with high blood pressure and at risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Another study published in the same year found similar results in overweight adults. They reported a decrease in daily systolic blood pressure via daily beetroot juice supplementation. However, these effects would not sustain after a week from the interruption of dietary nitrate supplementation.
A 2015 study focusing on younger healthy adults with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) — a group of lung diseases (emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and refractory asthma) characterized by increasing breathlessness — observed increased levels of plasma dietary nitrate and nitrite, reduced blood pressure (systolic & diastolic), and ultimately improved exercise performance, with a significant reduction in the cost of oxygen during moderate- and high-intensity exercises.
Brain Health
A 2010 study investigated the relationship between a nitrate-rich diet on brain perfusion (aka cerebral perfusion pressure) in older adults. They observed a direct impact on cerebral blood flow, specifically within the patients’ white matter — the brain tissue responsible for transporting messages between different areas of gray matter within our central nervous system. Despite the improved neurovascular response (or cellular metabolism), they noted that nitrates act preferentially on hypoxic conditions — when a specific region of the body is deprived of adequate oxygen supply at the tissue level.
Conditions that infringe the blood supply to vital organs of our body like CPP (brain) and ischemia (heart et al.) are closely associated with cognitive decline and dementia. Also, aging is strongly correlated with a decrease in cognitive function and degeneration of the brain’s white matter, which is vital for daily tasks such as memory and performing tasks.
A 2017 study concluded that the combination of regular exercise with beetroot juice yield improved brain function in older patients, with neural networks resembling those associated with younger adults. Moreover, the results showed a potentially enhanced neuroplasticity — the phenomenon of altered neural structure, function, and connection in response to environmental or bodily demands — which tends to deteriorate with aging.
Erectile Disfunction
A 2013 study reported a close relationship between a diet poor in fruits & vegetables with the risk of erectile dysfunction in Canadian diabetic men. They reported a 10% decrease in ED with one extra serving of fruits & vegetables per day.
Although these results might seem vague, ED is closely associated with a poor lifestyle lacking in physical activity and proper diet, as well as a number of conditions such as atherosclerosis (clogged blood vessels), high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, etc. A 2014 report found that ~18.4% of U.S. adult males age 20+ suffered from this condition (~18 million male Americans). These figures were drastically higher in men with diabetes (~51.3%).
Based on all the evidence listed, it would not be illogical to reason that a diet rich in plant-based sources of nitrates could reverse many of the symptoms that can lead to ED, heart problems, and aging-related conditions. Furthermore, it’s broadly accepted that only a plant-based diet is capable of reversing heart disease and is effective in regulating and preventing type 2 diabetes.
Nitrates and Gym Performance
Dietary nitrates are commonly referred to as ergogenic aids — substances or devices related to enhanced energy production and efficiency, leading to a competitive advantage in athletic performance. Beetroot juice and nitrate salt supplements (sodium & potassium) are the most popular sources. Many studies have linked them to enhanced physical performance in both endurance and strength scenarios.
Endurance/Resistance
Photo by Jenny Hill on Unsplash
A 2007 study investigating the effects of dietary nitrates on cycle ergometer performance after two separate 3-day periods of supplementation (0.1mmol/kg of sodium nitrate) on 9 healthy young, well-trained, men found increased muscle efficiency via lower oxygen demand during submaximal work on subjects given the nitrate supplementation. They observed no alteration in their lactate concentration (which tends to build up in the bloodstream when there is not sufficient oxygen available to break down glucose for energy), suggesting that energy production had become more efficient (most likely via improved basal mitochondrial efficiency).
A 2009 study went another route and gave subjects (8 active, healthy, men) 500 of beetroot juice for 6 days. During this time, they were asked to abstain from nitrate-rich food in their diets and were tested on different cycling exercises. During the trials, they found on subjects given the nitrate supplementation a reduction of oxygen cost (~5%) during low-intensity exercises and enhanced tolerance (~16%) to high-intensity exercises, suggesting improved mitochondrial respiration and muscle contraction efficiency. They also reported a significant reduction in resting blood pressure.
A (2015) study went further and tested cognitive function during exercise. Cognitive ability is sensitive to alterations in arousal, mood, and physical demands; consequently, high-intensity athletes tend to have their reaction time deteriorated over activity time. 16 male team-sport players were given beetroot juice supplementation for 7 days and tested with cognitive tasks during a prolonged intermittent sprint on a cycle ergometer on the 7th day after supplementation. The results suggested that dietary nitrates enhanced repeated sprint performance and likely attenuated the decline in reaction time that tends to occur during prolonged exercise.
Weightlifting/Bodybuilding
Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash
A 2016 study investigated the effects of dietary nitrate supplementation on resistance exercise performance, particularly on the bench press. 12 active, resistance-trained, men were given 70ml of “BEET It Sport” nitrate shot (~6.4 mmol of nitrates) and tested at an intensity of 60% of their 1RM within controlled parameters until failure. The results appointed to a significant improvement in repetitions to failure to subjects given the nitrate supplementation, no significant difference between blood lactate during trials, and no differences in fatigue measured by (RPE).
A 2018 study tested the effects of beetroot juice (BRJ) consumption on muscle power. They target 13 men and 7 women (ages 22–79), all normally active but none engaged in competitive sports. During the trial, subjects were tested on maximal knee extensions 2 hours after the ingestion of 140ml of commercial beetroot juice supplement. Compared to the placebo group, results showed a significant average increase in maximum velocity and power in individuals supplemented with BRJ. They found a correlation between maximum power and increased concentrations of plasma nitrites in all subjects and, particularly in females, a greater overall increase in maximum power.
All studies listed in this portion were randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, and crossover-designed. I’m not sure why the majority of physiological studies I’ve read focused on male subjects. However, it’s safe to assume that these results apply for all healthy individuals, regardless of gender.
…Why Not Just Buy Pre-Workouts?
If many pre-workouts already contain combined nitric oxide stimulating substances, why not just go for them?
Based on personal experience, even though some pre-workouts worked as they were marketed, they also came with a number of drawbacks which makes their relative worthiness questionable. Among the negatives were:
Most are overpriced Most ingredients (blends) are unknown for the regular consumer, which require proper, time-consuming investigation Many ingredients have little scientific literature besides marketing claims Side effects like post-workout anxiety, dizziness, headaches, and even heart arrhythmia in some cases (perhaps from excessive caffeine)
All these were reasons why I decided not long ago to ditch them and rely more on plant-based whole-foods to sustain my workouts. The main reason was that when put on a balance, the short-term benefits of taking them would not outweigh their potential negative short- and long-term effects. Credible scientific literature has also helped to support my decision.
A 2012 study investigated the effects of sodium nitrate supplementation on the performance of endurance athletes. They found an increased concentration of plasma nitrate & nitrite, but no improvement in physical performance. Furthermore, there was a significant increase in the concentration of plasma ET-1 after supplementation, which is present in high levels in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF), thus making their long-term safety questionable.
A 2014 review concluded that, when administered orally, most molecules marketed as nitric oxide boosters— L-arginine, carnitine, 2-nitrooxy ethyl 2-amino 3-methylbutanoate, arginine-alpha-ketoglutarate, etc. — have modest or no evidence available relating them to performance improvement following supplementation. This means that you could be overpaying for ineffective ingredients.
An interesting 2016 study tested the effects of 6-day dietary nitrate supplementation on peak anaerobic power in 12 trained Crossfit male athletes. Subjects were given 8mmol of potassium nitrate and were supposed to be tested 24 hours after the final dose. However, there were a number of reported gastrointestinal distress followed the ingestion of nitrate supplementation, a common side effect of nitrate salts. Because of that, subjects were tested 48 hours after the last dose in order to avoid the influence of stomach discomfort in performance. Nevertheless, results showed that peak power increased significantly overtime on subjects given the nitrate supplementation, but overall CrossFit performance (strength & endurance) remained unchanged.
This study recognized a series of limitations that probably impacted on the results. Among them were the extended period of time (48 hours) between the last dose and the test day, which most likely influenced on the concentrations of plasma nitrate & nitrite, and the actual CrossFit protocol which required all participants to lift the same amount of weight despite the variances in body mass and strength, which resulted on failed lifts and ultimately impacted on the time taken by each participant to complete the test. Because of the reported gastrointestinal distress, the conductors of the study advise the consumption of dietary nitrate via whole food forms like beetroot juice, which has also shown to have a greater impact on the metabolic cost of exercise comparted to nitrate salts.
Why Beets?
Photo by Nick Collins on Unsplash
‘Some might say you can’t beet beats’
Beetroots come with several benefits that go beyond their ergogenic properties, making it very hard to ignore the nutritional quality they bring to our diet and overall health.
They are full of phytochemicals such as nitrogenous betalains, a range of phenolics compounds, folate, and other potentially bioactive compounds that aid our body to combat inflammation and oxidation. Besides that, they are particularly rich in folates, which are essential to convert carbohydrates into energy, among other vital body functions.
However, as cited before, beets are shy from being the best source of dietary nitrates. Thus, even though it’s perfectly fine to rely on beetroot juice as a natural pre-workout, it’s advisable to consume a variety of nitrate-rich plant-based sources, such as other leafy greens. As a rule of thumb, you should be consuming a variety of fruits & vegetables every single day to rip the benefits that only plants can bring to our health!
Side Effects
Beets are rich in natural pigments called beeturia, which turn urine and stool red in high concentrations. Although the probable initial shock, these unusual colorations are not a cause for concern.
Always remember to check with your healthcare professional and do your own research before making any significant changes to your diet. Although incorporating plant-based dietary nitrate is deemed safe, any predetermined conditions like low blood pressure can raise a question mark. Always better safe than sorry!
Other than that, beets are relatively high in oxalates, which are compounds found naturally in plants that you may want to avoid if you are already at a higher risk of having kidney stones.
How Much and When Should I Be Taking BRJ?
The FAO & WHO Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) recommends an acceptable daily intake of 0–5mg per kg expressed as sodium nitrate or 0–3.7mg p/ kg expressed as nitrate ion. Regarding beetroot juice, there are no established limits. However, anywhere around 8oz (~1 cup) of BRJ is a commonly accepted dose.
Be sure to check what other nitrate-rich sources of food you are already incorporating into your diet if you want to quantify and track the number of daily nitrates you are regularly having.
Regarding the time of the day, consume BRJ at least 30min before your workout or exercise. To optimize its benefits, it’s recommended to consume it first thing in the morning though.
Need Further Help?
If you are not excited about reviewing studies for hours and hours or simply lack the time, I suggest researching for anecdotes and personal experiences from certified fitness coaches & nutritionists, YouTubers, and athletes. A personal favorite of mine is the natural vegan bodybuilder and YouTuber Brian Turner who vlogged the benefits he experienced with BRJ.
Conclusion
I hope that my article has helped or motivated you to give dietary nitrates a chance and see what benefits they can bring to your physical performance and health.
I’m personally going for BRJ so that I can see the results for myself (as I have always done!). Although placebo effects might take place initially, I’m pretty convinced that I’ll be able to comprehend the cause-effect relationship of BRJ consumption in the long-run. That might become another article.
Peace & eat your plants! 💪🌱 | https://mariovictorhashiba.medium.com/nitrates-best-plant-based-pre-workout-1c2c2a1cf276 | ['Mario V. Hashiba'] | 2019-12-04 02:48:00.156000+00:00 | ['Nutrition', 'Supplements', 'Health', 'Fitness', 'Nitrate'] |
Finding my better self — An ordinary middle class man life story. | I am Tim, the man who knew infinity is a metaphor. I chase down every one of my dreams. How can I do that? Yes I did so because my dreams were for the near future. I heard people saying “live in the present”. Sorry I am not interested. The present will be gone when we say the word present. So I wanted to live in the near future. Whatever I do is to be happy, proud and successful in the near future.
Who am I? I don’t want you to know who am I. But like I said, I was successful in many things. Sports, Academics, Impressing girls and Impressing guys :P
You must have read about the law of attraction from the book called “The Secret”. I am reading that book now… It says whatever you want with life without any side thoughts think about it and universe will return the similar frequency thoughts on you and the universe will change accordingly to make it happen. It is something like Paulo Coelho said. Yes it is, Go and google it..
I think the law of attraction worked for me as well during those days. I was always occupied. I had no time to think about other thoughts but only the mind to get what I want to done. I am a hard worker too. I work until I reach my target.
Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash
Everything started to change when you achieve at a milestone. Didn’t get it right? Huh me too.
What I was trying to tell you is that, when I reached some positions in my life my career, my work; I am like, Now what???? I am being one among the others who daily live.
Again the law of attraction started to work. I am started to get some negative thoughts. But it is fine… I am a challenger, I will figure it out.
But this is just capturing me. Again and Again. I am started to think my life as a hell. I always think about the unnecessary, unhappy life of mine.
This is not a story about myself. But it is a story of me living the next 6 months of my life with you. How I am going to transform the worst fears of my life and work on it and come up with it. If you are ready track me down.
My problems now? And How will I solve this in 6 months?
I am adding my day to day updates on how I am planning to solve my problems below. If you have any advice or suggestions please feel free to comment and help.
1) Unsatisfactory Job:
I love the company I am working. I do love the position I am in. I do love the people around me. Everything is so fine. But what I lack is my social life. I want a job which is more adventurous, more people oriented and breath taking stories to add to my life.
2) Beauty
I am an average good looking Indian guy. But when you start loosing your confidence on various parts of yours like your thinning hair. It starts to make you think you are loosing everything. When people while speaking to us looking at our thinning hair and wondering what happened? We start loosing our confidence. For me my thinning hair was the worst thing.
Captured By Author
3) Fitness
As I already mentioned you I was an athlete. I had good fitness. Due to my smoking high and smoking low habits everything ruined. Now even if I walk I can’t breathe. I am a basketball player, Running full court is a nightmare for me now. All this can be seen in my weakened body.
Photo by Adel on Unsplash
4) Special
How can you be special? If you wanted to feel yourself special you have to be new everyday. Everyday you wanted to try new things, read new things and gain new knowledge. Get more talent. I am becoming the same version of myself for a long time. Is that bad? Yes it is. I need to figure out a way to move from this.
Photo by Marc Schaefer on Unsplash
Let us work on my problems now. Day by Day. Each day I find solutions and I add to my list. Which I will do in the upcoming days and add in the routine.
180 Day Challenge => 4 Main Goals => Lots of sub goals.
Day 1 <> 25th April 2021
The beginning is the most important thing in whatever we do. As my first step, I am writing this blog to showcase the world (to make public my plans and my steps to achieve it) Which may impress someone like somebody’s did for me. I will populate this blog each day with more n more steps and the effects that I got from it. Let us catch it..
Day 2 <> 26th April 2021
My plan to restore my hair. I want to work on the most worst fear that I have as the start of my transformation. Thus I am starting out with hair restoration. | https://medium.com/@gentlemenindia5/finding-my-better-self-an-ordinary-middle-class-man-life-story-3382550c817 | ['Gentle Men'] | 2021-04-26 04:37:37.530000+00:00 | ['Inspirational', 'Fitness', 'Lifestyle', 'Life', 'Beauty'] |
Are you ready to unlock the power of LinkedIn? | Once we connect and decide to create or revise your LinkedIn profile, our ultimate goal is to focus on what you plan to achieve through establishing or improving your online professional presence.
During our initial discovery call, we will find out why you are interested in LinkedIn services Profile Optimization, share our approach (at a high level), and discuss a timeline to complete a draft as well as offer a quotation for our services.
Costs for this service range from $150-$300; a discounted rate may apply if multiple services are purchased.
During our 60–90 minute consultation (in-person, Skype or telephone) we will ask you several questions to have a better understanding of your professional history, skills and goals or your company’s products, services and goals. We want to find out about what makes you, or your business, unique to use this information to help you stand out in a competitive market.
Many clients tell us during our consultations that they did not think or realize information is compelling or relevant; however, a trained professional’s eyes (and ears) can provide a fresh perspective…and capitalize on our client’s best qualities.
If we do not cover something during our consultation, you will be encouraged to contact us to share additional information; many clients take us up on this offer because they may reflect on some of our questions and have more to tell us!
Next, we will deliver a clearly written draft for each applicable section along with detailed instructions to help you populate your profile. Telephone or in-person support is also available to help you through this process. The draft will include tips for your profile and background pictures as well as posting and content guidelines for our B2B clients.
We want every client who works with us to be satisfied with his or her updated, optimized LinkedIn profile. We invite suggestions and edits to our initial draft by Skype or telephone. For local clients, we will provide an opportunity to meet with us to discuss in-person the draft.
You know your career (or business) best, and we are fully committed to making your LinkedIn profile a reflection of you, your career story and accomplishments.
#LinkedinServices #Linkedin #Writing #Writer #professionalLinkedin #Toronto #Torontorresume #resume #Writingresume #Linkedinserviceswriting
Source: The Write Approach
Related Post: LinkedIn Services | https://medium.com/@winterdonna20/are-you-ready-to-unlock-the-power-of-linkedin-7a7571ff894d | ['Donna Winter'] | 2020-02-21 18:25:47.508000+00:00 | ['Writers On Writing', 'LinkedIn', 'Writing', 'Linkedin Profile', 'Linkedin Marketing'] |
These are the 5 Best Web Development Courses for Beginners — TechParams | Web development is the need of today’s world. Learning to build a website is like everyone’s need nowadays. Some people want to become a web developer to apply for a job, some for freelancing, and some learn for their own interests. But most importantly, every journey has a beginning and, a good start is what we all need just because a good start always leads to good results. So, here are some of the most proficient full-stack web development courses to help you in this journey:
1.The Web Developer Bootcamp — Udemy
Check the course here:
udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/
Created by Colt Steele
This full-stack web development course is one of the most comprehensive and effective courses available. Everything available in this course is up to date and relevant. In this course, you will build 13+ projects and also one gigantic production application known as YelpCamp. Tools and technologies covered in this course are:
For front-end development: HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap 4, JavaScript, jQuery, Semantic UI, DOM Manipulation
For back-end development: NodeJS, NPM, ExpressJS, MongoDB, REST, Database Associations
Additionals: Authentication, Authorization, PassportJS
Rating: 4.6
Time: 47h 8m
Pricing: Paid(30-day money back guarantee)
2.The Complete 2020 Web Development Bootcamp- Udemy
Check the course here:
udemy.com/course/the-complete-web-development-bootcamp/
Created By Dr. Angela Yu
This course is taught by the lead instructor at the App Brewery, London’s leading in-person programming Bootcamp and, it is one of the most comprehensive web development courses available online. This course is constantly updating With new content and projects. A massive amount of tools and technologies used are-
For front-end development: HTML5, CSS 3, Bootstrap, JavaScript, DOM Manipulation, jQuery
For back-end development: NodeJS, NPM, ExpressJS, MongoDB, EJS, Mongoose, SQL, Databases, APIs, REST
Additionals: Git, Bash Command Line, Authentication, Firebase, React, React Hooks and deployment
Rating: 4.7
Time: 54h 12m
Pricing: Paid(30-day money back guarantee)
3.The Complete Web Developer in 2020: Zero to Mastery — Udemy
Check the course here:
udemy.com/course/the-complete-web-developer-zero-to-mastery/
Created by Andrei Neagoie
This course is one of the fabulous courses available out there. You will be learning the most up to date skills. You are going to go from absolute beginner to mastery. This course is taught by Andrei Neagoie, who has worked in Silicon Valley and one of the top tech companies in Toronto. Furthermore, you can join the Discord community to solve your queries related to programming.
For front-end development: HTML5, CSS 3, Semantic UI, Flexbox, CSS Grid, Bootstrap, JavaScript, DOM Manipulation
For back-end development: NodeJS, NPM, ExpressJS, MongoDB, EJS, Mongoose, SQL, PostgresSQL, Databases, APIs, RESTful API
Additionals: Git, Github, Command Line, Authentication, Authorization, Security, Production, and deployment, React and Redux
Rating: 4.7
Time: 35h 3m
Pricing: Paid(30-day money back guarantee)
4.The Complete Web Developer Course 2.0 — Udemy
Check the course here:
udemy.com/course/the-complete-web-developer-course-2/
Created by Rob Percival, Codestars by Rob Percival
This course will introduce you to the revolutionary learning of Web development. This course starts with the fundamentals and then shows you how to build responsive websites. One of the final challenges is to build a twitter clone. You will learn how the web works? You will learn how to set up (free) hosting for your site and many more things.
For front-end development: HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery
For back-end development: PHP, WordPress, MySQL Databases, CMSs
Rating: 4.5
Time: 30h 38m
Pricing: Paid(30-day money back guarantee)
5.Ultimate Web Designer & Developer Course: Build 23 Projects! — Udemy
Check the course here:
udemy.com/course/web-developer-course/
Created by Brad Hussey, Code College
This course is one of the most beautiful courses available to become a web developer. In this course, you will get to learn about Visual Design, Web Design, Wireframing, Sketching, and Photoshop. Tools and technologies used are-
For front-end development: HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery
For back-end development: PHP, WordPress, MySQL, WordPress plugins
And you will get the Hands-on career-building section in this course which is one of the excellence of this course.
Rating: 4.5
Time: 32h 30m
Pricing: Paid(30-day money back guarantee) | https://medium.com/@techparams123/these-are-the-5-best-web-development-courses-for-beginners-techparams-baa083971841 | [] | 2020-09-24 04:13:35.008000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Web', 'Full Stack', 'Backend Development', 'Front End Development'] |
That Angry Man | Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash
That Angry Man
This might be the deepest dive I have done here. The simple answer is that the hardest emotion that I find hard to accept is anger. I have talked about getting agitated when I drive. Where I live has some of the worst traffic on the east coast. I drive about five kilometers to the gym. I live in a residential area. By the time I get to the gym using only local roads there is one spot that has ten lanes. Six on one side and four on the other. Sometimes all of those lanes are packed.
I get agitated at drivers. I don’t tend to curse at them. I don’t tend to curse at anyone at all. I use profanity so little that when I do friends look at me like I have been possessed. I used the “F” word in a joke once and the person I am closest to here looked at me and said, “I think that is the first time I have ever heard you say that word”. I have known her for twenty-five years. I have used it before. I just tend not to use them when I am angry. I choose to be more creative with my words when I am angry.
I needed to point out all of that to get to the issue. The anger that I find hardest to accept is anger that is directed at myself. I do curse. I do use that word and many others. The reason that nobody hears them is that I only tend to direct that level of anger at myself. It would be easy to tell you that I only to that when I have seriously messed up. It would be easy to tell you that I only do that when things have gone horribly wrong. The problem is that is just not the case. I get angry and curse at myself for doing things that I would be amused at if someone else did them. Like misplacing my phone. I have told myself how stupid I am for putting my phone down where I forgot I put it. I have done the same thing about my wallet. Putting things away wrong, spilling something. Things I would help someone else do and reassure them that everyone does that, I will yell and even curse at myself over.
I have high expectations for people. I have high expectations for myself. I am a huge advocate when something goes wrong to figure out a solution. Only after things are fixed to I worry at all about accountability. I do that for everyone but myself. For myself it tends to be accountability and then try to fix the problem, which usually takes about thirty seconds once I calm down and think about it.
Not to jump to another day’s prompt. But until I looked at today’s prompt I really hadn’t thought about this as an issue. I have a great time with my brain. It rarely races places I don’t want it to go. When I swim or walk I let it off leash and let it go where it wants. More than ninety percent of the time it goes good places. I do not have issues with wanting to hurt myself. I love the person I see in the mirror. When I look at the person in the mirror I do not see that angry person. He only comes out when I have messed up simple tasks. He doesn’t come out when it was work related. He doesn’t come out when I am doing serious things. He doesn’t come out when I can’t find the words to put on a page.
The only person that tends to see this angry person is, well I don’t even see him because he never looks at me in the mirror. He is just an angry voice that screams when I can’t find my keys or wallet. | https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/that-angry-man-5805a97a3e22 | [] | 2020-12-16 08:00:39.004000+00:00 | ['Confessions', 'Prompt', 'Energy', 'Short Story', 'Anger'] |
VR — Complex toys or powerful educational tools? | When most of our team (and well, whole Fortum) started their holidays in July, as a summer trainee I was keeping some of our projects up and running. What I didn’t expect then, was that I’d literally start putting down fires while the others were gone.
I worked with Fortum’s internal startup eSite, and especially with their VR, AR & XR trainings. The goal of the project was to improve the usability of the VR trainings and make the whole experience of participating in training smooth and easy.
VR: Virtual reality
AR: Augmented reality
XR: Extended reality
Photo by Lux Interaction on Unsplash
Using VR technology for organizing training can sometimes be quite challenging. People have very different levels of experience with VR equipment. For that reason, it might take quite a lot of time to learn the tricks of VR and start using the equipment fluently. In addition to this, the technology can surprise the user with unexpected bugs. After all, VR is still a developing technology that changes and evolves constantly.
Due to these challenges, until now it has been necessary to have a trainer hold the trainee’s hand throughout the training experience, ready to support with any difficulties they face. One sub-goal of our project was to minimize the need for this constant support and make the training experience so smooth that the trainee could finish the training independently. This would be valuable, since removing the constant need for a support person would make it possible to scale the trainings for a bigger audience without the need of recruiting a great number of trainers.
eSite has already come far with their work on VR trainings, and they have managed to get some really good results out of the first training sessions with VR technology. With design thinking methods, we hoped that we could take the trainings even further and help them achieve their highest potential.
So why are we then building trainings with VR?
Many of us have probably first heard about VR in the context of games and entertainment. However, VR technology has also been found to be a powerful tool for educating people. Especially valuable it has been in teaching people to operate in situations where failure would be dangerous or expensive if happening in real work environments. VR provides a possibility for achieving a realistic learning setting and immersion without any danger to the trainee or potential failure-related costs to the organization. At Fortum, VR training has been used for example for training people working in power plants to operate in radiation environments or to learn to extinguish small fires.
Here I am extinguishing a fire in the Realistic Fire VR training, using VR equipment by HTC Vive.
So, what did we do?
Ran a simulation about a typical training situation, and participated in a fire extinguishing training
Defined a customer journey for VR training and its pain points
Organized a test round with a low-fidelity training prototype with instructions for 6 people and observed them complete the training
Benchmarking
Created development suggestions for the VR training at hand and developed a set of heuristics to support developing user-friendly VR trainings in the future
Image from the Realistic Fire VR training
Key insights
Read about 3 of our insights, picked from among the whole set of 10 key findings here.
Simple commands
The biggest obstacle for a user in doing VR training is usually the adoption of a new set of controls and technology. Especially for older users, the use of VR controls is not self-evident, and it might take a while to learn the very basic logic of operating in the VR environment. Having to learn complex controls takes the users’ focus out of the main point of the whole training situation — the content of the training itself.
The more simple the controls of the training are, the more capacity the user can fix to accomplishing the learning goals of the training. For this reason, controls of VR trainings should be simplified to using only 1 of the buttons appearing in the controls, instead of utilizing multiple different commands for different actions in the training.
(In the cases where the idea is to simulate a very specific, motoric set of actions, complex controls might be inevitable. However, when teaching the user a process or an operations model, for example, simplicity is the way to go.)
2. Feedback & guidance
VR environments simulate real-life environments as accurately as they can. However, what it sometimes fails to replicate, is the natural feedback we receive in the real world from our actions (for example, the feeling of touching an item). For this reason, VR training should also focus on giving the user constant feedback on their actions.
Forms of feedback:
· Indicator of succeeding in a task. “You put down the fire, good job!”
· Indicator of failing a task. Preferably also telling why, especially since it might be difficult to understand in the VR world, for example, if failure happens due to misuse of controls. “You didn’t succeed in extinguishing the fire, since you didn’t use enough movement. Try again by moving the spray nozzle horizontally.”
· Support when the user is stuck. “You are too far from the extinguisher to grab it, move closer.”
3. Don’t assume anything when it comes to instructions
Even those tasks that feel self-evident for the developer might not be that for the user. Be prepared to explain everything, from the logic of the VR world to the content of the training. In our tests, to our surprise, we noticed that for many of the users, the first piece of instructions they needed was that in the VR world you can see more by turning your head to the left and right. All these features must be somehow introduced to the user.
A critical piece of instructions for VR training is of course the guidance that helps the user to go through the training. Instructions can be implemented for example with text and sound, or with elements in the VR environment guiding the users’ eye. Finding guidance should not require work from the trainee. Instructions can be either attached to the trainees’ sight or their eye can be guided with arrows, for example, to help them find the instructions from their environment. The instructions should also guide the user in real-time, not for example by providing all the instructions in the beginning and expecting the user to remember it all. | https://medium.com/fortum-design/vr-complex-toys-or-powerful-educational-tools-4654c50ea90d | ['Hanna Hämäläinen'] | 2020-12-08 10:25:21.511000+00:00 | ['VR', 'Usability Heuristics', 'Usability', 'Fortum', 'Vr Training'] |
Correlation between Bitcoin and Ethereum | The chart starts in June 2016 when Bitcoin was in the $600s. Ethereum obviously is showing the ICO boom and bust. As things have shaken out over the past 3 years, we’re roughly at the same valuations we were at 3 years ago. The crypto world has changed and matured so much over the past 3 years. Ethereum 2.0 is upon us, DeFi is poised to keep growing exponentially (post 2.0), and there are more and more plans to tokenize many assets on Ethereum being planned by many companies. The idea of smart contracts truly being programmable stores of value is maturing. Essentially, Ethereum can one day have countless tokens from countless companies on Ethereum. This vision is very powerful and if accomplished, will probably drive Ethereum’s value much higher. That being said, Crypto Financial Planning is showing Ethereum to be moderately overbought on a long-term basis. It is ok to buy Ethereum, but buyers should be aware that buying now could lead to some modest downside risk as there could be some short-term downside mean reversion. While the future looks bright for Ethereum, it is important to track the volatility to help inform potential times to sell and the best times to buy.
Similar to Ethereum because of the correlation, Bitcoin is also showing to be moderately overbought. Same logic — buying Bitcoin now means you could experience some short-term downside risk. But, as a long-term store of value, Bitcoin seems poised as a prudent long-term investment.
Crypto Financial Planning plans to explore other cryptocurrencies in future posts. There are many interesting competitors to Ethereum such as Dfinity, Stellar, EOS, Cardano, Ripple (XRP), and others. As of now, Ethereum has the most development, but it is important to study the competitive landscape on an on-going basis, which we will do at Crypto Financial Planning. | https://medium.com/@cryptofinancialplanning/correlation-between-bitcoin-and-ethereum-6e39be8e0558 | ['Crypto Financial Planning'] | 2020-11-11 14:48:15.780000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Eos', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum'] |
NLP Text Preprocessing and Cleaning Pipeline in Python | Through language we express the human experience. Language is how we communicate, express sentiment, listen, think and converse. Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been made in natural language processing(NLP) where computers can classify, generate, and respond to language like a human can. These models and algorithms have started to give computers the tools to understand the human experience. The most important reason that these areas have grown is because of the exponential increase in data that can be feature engineered and then fed into models.
Feature Engineering:
The data scientists, PhDs, machine leaning engineers, and data engineers who have been on the front lines of the advancements in natural language processing spend most of their time cleaning and exploring datasets.
Garbage in Garbage out
Models will produce state of the art results if they are fed state of the art data; models will produce garbage if they are fed garbage, therefore data cleaning is one of the most important parts of the entire machine learning process. It does not matter if you are training a state of the art transformer like BERT or old-school word2vec. The quality of data that you feed the model will determine the quality of the results that you get.
garbage in garbage out; data on fire in data on fire out
Feature engineering and data cleaning are not tedious and pointless tasks — they are important filtering mechanisms that work the same way the human brain does when it processes a language. When humans are young they learn how to separate noises from a language and then find meaning in that language through the most important words and phrases in that language. This process is similar to text preprocessing. Text preprocessing breaks down a corpus into smaller parts then extracts the most important information from those parts which a model will then derive meaning from.
#tldr show me the code!
Steps in the Pipeline
📜 ,👀, 📊 (Load, Look at, and Analyze the Data):
The first step of any machine learning pipeline is to load the data! For good measure we will also take a peek at the data to make sure everything loaded correctly and collect a few basic stats like the number of words, the number of lines, and the number of characters. This will give us a good idea of what we are working with for the next steps in the pipeline. I am using the Reuters dataset that can be found here.
data_folder = Path("/Users/emilyelia/Downloads/reuters/reuters/reuters/training")
file_to_open = data_folder / "104"
f = open(file_to_open) print(f.read())
num_lines =0
num_words =0
num_chars =0
with open(file_to_open, 'r') as f:
for line in f:
words = line.split() num_lines += 1
num_words += len(words)
num_chars += len(line) print ("numbers of words", num_words)
print("number of lines", num_lines)
print("number of chars", num_chars)
Tokenization:
Tokenization is the next preprocessing step. It takes the text corpus and it splits it into “tokens” (words, sentences, etc.).
This process is not as simple as using some kind of separator. There are a lot of different situations where separators don’t work such as abbreviations with dots like “Dr.” or periods “.” at the end of sentences. A more complex model is needed to properly tokenize, but don’t worry because tokenization is a built-in feature in commonly used NLP libraries such as nltk.
from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize, word_tokenize
f = open(file_to_open)
#use built in tokenize to seperate each indiviual word
nltk_words = word_tokenize(f.read())
print(f"Tokenized words: {nltk_words}")
Cleaning:
Cleaning is the process of removing all unnecessary content from the corpus. The unnecessary content includes stop words and punctuation since they do not add any value or meaning to the overall corpus.
Punctuation
Punctuation removal is an important step since punctuation does not provide any additional value or insight into the overall corpus and the vectorization of the corpus. Removing punctuation is best done after the tokenization step because doing so before might cause some unforeseen results.
Stop Words
Stop words are the most common words in the language that you are using. There are between 50–100 stop words depending on the library that you are using and they are words that don’t add meaning like “the”, “an”, and “it”. Removing these words will not change the meaning of the corpus that you are working with and it will lead to better results because the remaining words will be the most important to determining the meaning of the corpus.
print(nltk_words)
punctuation = list(string.punctuation)
stopWords = set(stopwords.words('english'))
filter = []
for w in nltk_words:
if w.lower()not in stopWords and w not in punctuation:
filter.append(w)
Normalization
Normalization is the process of returning to a standard form or state. In terms of text preprocessing, it means taking numbers, abbreviations, and special characters, and converting them to text. This process uses the same associations that our brains do when processing special characters, misspellings, and abbreviations by taking them and assigning them to the words that we say, read, or think in the language of our choice. I am using the library normalise that can be found here.
The most common features to normalize are dates, numbers, abbreviations, currency, percents, and misspellings. In normalise you have to list the abbreviations that you want to spell out and then call the normalise function to perform the rest of the normalizations.
from normalise import normalise
abbr = {
"lb": "pounds",
"USDA": "United States Department of Agriculture",
"cts": "cents",
"U.S.": "United States"
}
normalise(text, user_abbrevs=abbr)
nt =normalise(filter, user_abbrevs=abbr)
display( ' '.join(nt))
These normalizations ensure that the model will be able to understand all of the text that is has to process because the numbers, special characters, misspellings, and abbreviations will have the same representation as everything else in the corpus.
Check out the entire project here! | https://towardsdatascience.com/nlp-text-preprocessing-and-cleaning-pipeline-in-python-3bafaf54ac35 | ['Emily Elia'] | 2019-11-05 06:01:38.436000+00:00 | ['Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Programming', 'Computer Science', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science'] |
It’s Not Just Driving or Running — Simply Existing While Black Can Kill You | It’s Not Just Driving or Running — Simply Existing While Black Can Kill You
George Floyd was in agony and was no threat to anyone. He was murdered anyway.
Photo: Offices of Ben Crump Law
The list of unofficial criminal offenses that Black people can be killed for continues to grow. We can’t drive while Black (Philando Castile), jog while Black (Ahmaud Arbery), or sleep while Black (Breonna Taylor). And now, with George Floyd, we can officially add breathing while Black to that lineup of senseless violations.
It’s a never-ending demoralizing loop marked by a distinct pattern. If it’s a police-involved murder, the names of the officers are seldom released immediately. Local police unions step in and make a statement without verified evidence to present to the public. The officers usually get paid administrative leave. When it’s all over, there is no justice. Never any justice.
George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police is literally too close to home. The incident happened at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, a block from Phelps Park, where I played growing up. Like Eric Garner in New York, Floyd’s “I can’t breathe!” cries were captured on video:
Please, please, I can’t breathe. Please, man, please. I can’t move. Everything hurts. Give me some water or something, please. I can’t breathe, officer. They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me, man.
Floyd was right; they did kill him. An officer, Derek Chauvin, had his knee on Floyd’s throat for eight minutes while the man begged for his life. Witnesses begged the four officers involved to let him up. As people got closer, one officer threatened the crowd with a can of mace. Onlookers yelled that Floyd’s nose was bleeding, that he wasn’t resisting arrest, and that he couldn’t breathe.
An officer responded: “He’s fine!”
Floyd, who had recently been hospitalized after contracting Covid-19, was allegedly arrested for “attempted forgery.” And as punishment, he was murdered by police in front of a crowd. In handcuffs. A full-grown man kneeling on his throat. “He survived corona and couldn’t survive going to the store,” said Vanita Williams, a witness who knew him.
If history repeats itself, police and reporters will pry into every detail of George Floyd’s life, looking for justification for his murder. That’s what happened in 2016. About 10 miles from where Floyd was killed, a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop after Castile notified the officer that he had a legally registered handgun; at the time, conservative media leaped to falsely depict Castile as an armed-robbery suspect. With Chauvin hiring the same attorney who represented Castile’s killer — who was subsequently acquitted of manslaughter charges — it certainly seems like the same script is gearing up again.
No justice. No justice. Never any justice. It’s a narrative as old as time — and we’ll see if it remains true in my hometown yet again. | https://level.medium.com/breathing-while-black-george-floyd-rip-787d8ea707 | ['William Spivey'] | 2020-05-30 00:12:02.246000+00:00 | ['George Floyd', 'Minneapolis', 'Police Brutality', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Racism'] |
7 ways to co-parent in the first stages of a break-up | Dealing with co-parenting, especially in the initial phases of a breakup, can be extremely daunting.
We’ve all heard of The Great Indian Wedding. It’s the Disneyland where any Indian aunty worth her salt would get a chance to live her ultimate moment of glory — bagging a suitable rishta for her beta, beti, bhanja, bhanji, and other such bakras or rishtedaars.
But for all the tom-tomming we do about nuptials and their festivities, equally hushed and frowned upon even in today’s times is the Not-So-Great Indian Divorce. The deadliest nuke bomb of them all is of course “Arrey apne baccho ka toh sochte (You should have thought of the kids)!”
Any couple who does manage to survive all that and still separate, especially when kids are involved, must be given kudos if they manage to remain cordial with each other for the purpose of co-parenting.
Dealing with co-parenting, especially in the initial phases of a breakup, can be extremely daunting. The parents themselves are figuring out a new normal of what they want from life, how things are going to be and how to redefine their identity. There is an emotional scattering if not shattering, and in the midst of it all, you need to be strong for the kids’ sake. Challenging is perhaps not a strong enough word to describe this. It takes a lot out of a person to go through what is a traumatic experience, and still remain strong for the children.
Nevertheless, the show must go on. And kids will be kids. While it’s never easy, here are a few pointers that may help you deal with this minefield:
Acknowledge your decision to cut your losses works in the best interest of all.
When you walk out of a situation that no longer works or may even be toxic, you’re doing yourself and everyone else a favour. A fresh start, distance and emotional healing are the best environment for children, even if they have to be with either parent at a time. Living in a space where the parents are nasty, or manipulative or depressed or constantly bickering with each other on a daily basis becomes the unconscious background noise of a child’s psyche later on in adult life and can cause significant psychological damage. That’s not the emotional air you want them to breathe.
If nothing else, whenever you experience lets say pangs of guilt, or in those sneaky moments when you find yourself second guessing your decision to separate, this should be enough to replenish and/or fortify your resolve.
2) Recognise that kids are like psychic sponges.
Everything you feel, everything that you’re going through, they know and they too feel. They just don’t know how to express it coherently. So when they act out by say for example being more demanding or unreasonable, or withdrawing their approval and affection from you and raising the bar to unreasonable standards, know that actually they are seeking extreme validation from you that you will not abandon them. The more children feel daunted by the environment and/or adult’s actions, the more unreasonably they behave. While you’re at it, hugging and holding children is a wonderful and extremely effective way to convey to them that everything is going to be alright. That’s all they need actually.
3) Maintain normalcy in terms of children’s schedules and activities.
For them, life must go in and be stable and predictable in every other way as much as possible. Keep them engaged in activities and with friends, and ensure you physically and emotionally bond with them. Also, activities that involve constructing something, like blocks, art and craft, or anything creative is a wonderful thing in these times. The simple act of simulating construction goes a long way in reversing any psychological correlations of a family unit breakdown.
4) Don’t go polling for your child’s vote.
Not to mention that it is in extremely poor taste to badmouth your spouse and or their family, it reeks of insecurity. Your child loves both its parents unequivocally and unconditionally already. There’s no need to give him or her a reason to choose you over the other. Also, you are exemplifying this insecurity as a way of being to your child. This would be a grave disservice to them and yourself, especially as sooner or later as adults they will understand what you did, and somehow resent you for it.
5) Don’t separate the child from the other parent.
Never deny the other parent visitation and time together. Unless the other parent is abusive or violent, there is no need to do this. Keep your prejudices aside, and let the child experience both sides of their family origins. They have as much right to having their father as they do their mother. Children thrive on having both parents as role models, and not to provide them with this creates an imbalance in their future relationships.
6) Maintain grace and dignity at all times.
Keep the interaction between the two parents during and post break up civilized, if not cordial. How the child sees you handle conflict while growing up is exactly how he or she will handle conflict as they grow up. Dignity and grace are absorbed by osmosis and not artificially acquired.
7) Integrate a supportive ecosystem.
When you’re ready, it’s important to let the schoolteachers and school counselors know what is happening, so that they can be a wonderful, nurturing and neutral support system for the child, in what will otherwise appear an extremely nightmarish world to him or her. Teachers very often take on the role of a surrogate parent knowingly or unknowingly. For the child, they are larger than life and remain so for a long, long time. For younger children especially, play therapy if available, is highly recommended. It very naturally and organically draws out of the child any residual trauma that may, later on, turn into behavioral mis-patterns.
8) See if you can consult a therapist as well.
Releasing traumatic emotional and mental imprints is always a wonderful way to invest in yourself and a better future. | https://medium.com/@jyotsna-ahujak/7-ways-to-co-parent-in-the-first-stages-of-a-break-up-23504f482985 | ['Jyotsna Ahuja Kapoor'] | 2020-12-15 11:53:44.828000+00:00 | ['Childcare', 'Breakups', 'Divorce', 'Separated Families', 'Coparenting'] |
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by Martino Pietropoli | First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-fluxus/tuesday-bull-1110ec1fe2cf | ['Martino Pietropoli'] | 2018-08-27 23:43:39.251000+00:00 | ['Concept', 'Drawing', 'Tuesday', 'Art'] |
It’s okay to be a victim | Being a survivor of sexual assault is not the only way.
I get it, to have your fundamental boundary violated by someone who did what they pleased without your consent is one of the most terrifying, disempowering, and ultimately confusing things to happen to a person.
It creates anger, disbelief — many different mostly uncomfortable feelings and you want it to stop. To take yourself out of the role of victim and to take back some of your power and say that you survived this attack is a way of taking back a part of you that you did not give. This is the way most supportive staff will talk about people who have experienced sexual assault. This is the word a lot of writing about people who suffer the effects of a disrupted life as a result of sexual assault will use. And I really understand why. And I don’t think it’s a wholly bad thing.
But I want to make the case for being a victim and allowing yourself to feel hard-done-by, picked on, exploited, disempowered, scared and sad. And whatever else comes up as a result.
Shame
Sometimes I feel like refusing to call people who have experienced sexual assault a victim shames the part of them that feels that way.
The part of a person who has been attacked, had their choice removed and been betrayed by another human is allowed to feel sorry for themselves. They are allowed to feel the injustice and get angry about it.
When we go straight to calling them a survivor, we are again taking their choice away in how they see themselves, of how they feel themselves, if they even can feel themselves. It’s an implicit message that if you see yourself as a victim you are wrong to feel this way.
Missing the point
Positive psychology and spiritual bypassing are phrases I see more of each day. To instantly go to looking on the bright side of things, of finding the silver lining and striving for growth, misses the biggest point: we have ALL the feelings because they ALL need to be felt. They are all a part of the human experience, the beauty of the richness of life really. It feels almost trite writing that out, but I do wholeheartedly believe that no part of our daily experience should ever be negated. Any feeling we have is a message from our body about what we need. And to jump straight to moving forward, to leaping off our trauma into greatness and strength creates potential problems for the future and ignores the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. Not just ignores, outright suppresses them, banishing them to a place far away to make them more acceptable.
If you feel like you have been a victim of a violation, you probably feel like you need comforting, like it would be great to allow someone to look after you, even if you’re not able to let someone do that, it would be useful to acknowledge that and maybe even try to give yourself the thing you would like another person to. If you are instantly called a survivor, do you feel like you can feel sad? Would a survivor feel powerless and lost? No, they would get on and live their life and show their abuser they weren’t conquered by them. Again, not a bad thing, but I think this is a matter of timing. And this timeframe is not linear.
Experience it all
Allowing yourself, or allowing people in your life that have experienced sexual assault to describe themselves as a victim and experience all the unpleasantness that goes with that and be uncomfortable about it is a part of the process of moving through the trauma. It isn’t a permanent state, but I do think it’s a necessary one.
A time will come when strength and movement forward and ‘I’ll show them’ feels absolutely correct and will help you heal/push through/grow/move on/(insert appropriate next step).
But again, these states will not stick, they will change, adapting to the new you will take effort and energy, and you might just get sick of pushing, get caught up in the injustice of it, and feel like this thing that was done to you is too much to bear and you feel like a victim again.
A big ask
All of this is easier said than done. Especially for the everyday people in your life. And asking a professional who is supporting you through the after effects of an assault to allow you to be a victim is probably a risk too far. I think my aim for this is to raise awareness to the fact that an alternative is possible.
I also want to make it clear that if the professional that is supporting you is a psychotherapist or a counsellor and they don’t allow you to use the word victim to describe yourself that that is their discomfort. If a therapist ever tries to change the words you are using, unless this is in an exploratory way, you are quite within your right to refuse and to challenge them. Being able to challenge your therapist is a big deal and probably needs an article in itself.
You are the only you you have
Describe yourself however you feel is right. Be whoever you are however uncomfortable it makes other people. As long as you aren’t hurting others, your experience is valid and deserves to be communicated the way that feels correct for you.
And if it does feel too much to challenge all those external people, silently allowing yourself to describe you as you feel and offer compassion to those hurt parts, then you’re repairing a bit of what was injured. | https://medium.com/@curlyclaire/its-okay-to-be-a-victim-6a58f25a0f8b | [] | 2020-12-04 01:34:54.781000+00:00 | ['Trauma', 'Self Improvement', 'Sexual Assault', 'Self-awareness', 'Psychology'] |
Benjilock biometric smart locks will soon be available for your bicycle and your front door | Benjilock biometric smart locks will soon be available for your bicycle and your front door Gabe Jan 27·2 min read
We first encountered the Benjilock at CES in 2019, when the Hampton brand introduced its first padlock equipped with a fingerprint reader. Hampton showed three new biometric locks at CES 2021: A bike lock, a deadbolt, and a smaller version of its original padlock.
All three products keep to the brand’s philosophy of keeping it simple. Each one promises extremely easy set-up, and none depend on Wi-Fi connectivity. The Sport Padlock is significantly thinner than its predecessor and can be used on lockers and such. It can be programmed to recognize up to 10 different fingerprints.
[ Further reading: The best smart locks and deadbolts ]The padlock’s rechargeable battery provides up to six months of use on a single charge and is available now in six different colors from the company’s website at a suggested retail price of $30.
Hampton Products International You won’t need a key or remember a combination with the new Benjilock Sport Padlock.
The bike lock works using the same concepts as the padlocks and is available as an 8-inch shackle for $79. It features a pick- and drill-resistant cylinder and a bolt-cutter-resistant, hardened steel shackle.
Finally, the company took its first steps beyond the padlock, introducing the Benjilock Fingerprint Door Lock. The device combines the Benji lock’s biometric technologies with a smart keypad and Hampton’s deadbolt technology. It operates on four AA batteries.
Owners can unlock the deadbolt in three ways: Using their fingerprint, the keypad, or even a traditional key. Like the Benjilock, it stores up to 10 fingerprints, but also accepts up to 25 unique codes. It can be set up without the need for an app. The Benjilock Fingerprint Door Lock will be available in two finishes, Tuscan bronze and satin nickel, for a suggested retail price of $159.
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/@gabe93795903/benjilock-biometric-smart-locks-will-soon-be-available-for-your-bicycle-and-your-front-door-578a64d3969d | [] | 2021-01-27 19:18:56.793000+00:00 | ['Entertainment', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Music', 'Home Theater'] |
The Future of Coworking is Sustainable | In the wake of the pandemic, consumers are now demanding more sustainable products and services. But what does that mean for your brand?
Consumers have long displayed a frustrating paradox – a report from 2019 revealed that sixty-five percent said that they would buy from purpose-driven brands that advocate sustainability, while only twenty-six percent actually did so. Eco-friendly products are often viewed as luxury items due to the higher price tag and corporations that throw around terms like organic and green, purely from a marketing standpoint, have succeeded in watering down the meaning behind those terms to an extent where consumers may now view sustainability claims as being deceptive.
One of the side-effects of the pandemic, is that consumers are becoming more “woke” and displaying stronger convictions when it comes to buying from companies that align with their values. According to the 2020 Consumer Culture Report published by 5WPR, eighty-three percent of Millennials say it’s important for the companies they buy from to align with their beliefs and values while two-thirds have actively boycotted a company they have previously purchased from due to their stance on an issue. Younger generations are also increasingly influenced by external sources such as social media, role models, and celebrity endorsements.
But it’s not only the strategic decisions of your company that affect how your brand is viewed. When you’re operating a sustainable business that drives positive social or environmental change, it’s important to remember that the choices you make as a business professional also reflect directly on the values that you communicate through your brand.
So what does this mean for your brand as demand for sustainable products and services continues to grow? In order to remain competitive, companies will need to become more transparent about their supply chains and partners. And for the working environment, this means that the future of coworking is sustainable as companies transition towards the new economy. Brands that share office space will need to align themselves with coworking spaces that support their values for creating positive environmental impact. Authenticity here is key, and intentional choices with full transparency will drive home that message to your customers.
Impact Hub Stockholm has made a commitment to become certified Climate Neutral in 2021. Climate action has always been high on our agenda, and despite the financial challenges handed to us over the last year, we have made the decision to continue investing in reaching the goal of becoming the first Climate Neutral coworking space in Sweden.
Together with German company CO2-positiv! we will undertake an assessment of our impact from scope 1 – 3 based on data from 2020 to discover what our emissions were and to identify the areas that can continue to be improved upon. Our long-term goal is to reach Net Zero, meaning we aim to become Climate Positive, and like everything else we do, we hope to create a better world for the generations to come. | https://medium.com/@cathyxc/in-the-wake-of-the-pandemic-consumers-are-now-demanding-more-sustainable-products-and-services-5b52e3a9f9fa | ['Cathy Xiao Chen'] | 2021-03-04 22:36:54.502000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Sdgs', 'Innovation', 'Sustainability'] |
AYS Special: Frontex and Human Rights — How did we arrive here? Part 3 (2020-Present) | December 22: A new article by Der Spiegel shows the reluctance of German Interior Minister Seehofer to provide detailed information regarding the pushback off Samos island witnessed by a German federal police vessel on August 10, despite an internal document of the ministry proving that he had full knowledge of the events of that day.
December 18: Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) releases the ‘Black Book of Pushbacks’, two volumes (for a total of 1,500 pages), compiled by the BVMN thanks to the contributions of 15 organisations, which exposes in detail the illegal practice of violent pushbacks of migrants which have been taking place over many months at the EU’s external borders — with full impunity. The book, made in collaboration with the United Left (GUE/NGL) block of the European Parliament, brings the voices of 12,654 victims to European institutions as well as governments, and it aims to hold them accountable for the torture, the inhumane and degrading treatment, and the violation of the right to life that people seeking safety in the European Union are faced with.
December 15: Danish media report about indications that the Danish coastguard patrols deployed within Frontex operations in the Aegean sea will be moved away from the most ‘active’ zones to less ‘controversial’ areas, “because they refuse to use the violent push-back method to force migrant boats away.”
December 10: Josoor, a member of BVMN, report of an exchange with Frontex regarding a group of 70 people, who were pushed back onto an islet in the Evros river on November 11. Situated between Greece and Turkey, the islet “became a site of improvised detention, with neither authority allowing the transit group to leave … Josoor led calls on behalf of BVMN for the EU agency to act. Josoor requested timely intervention from Frontex”, alerting the authorities with specific information. A first letter directed to the Frontex Executive Director and several other emails were ignored. For 48 hours the group was forced to stay on the islet.
On the evening of 13th November, a day after the group was finally able to leave the island to Turkish territory, Leggeri finally sent a reply to Josoor’s urgent letter. The letter outlined that the location given did not fall under the Frontex operational area but that a Frontex team was deployed 32km away. He further stated that Frontex had transmitted the message to the responsible Greek authorities. According to the letter, the Greek authorities had informed Frontex that “there was a group of people spotted in the Turkish territory during the day of 11.11.2020, but they did not cross the border to the Greece territory”, failing to recognise that it was Greek authorities who had placed the group in this dangerous position on the island in the first place. This statement raises more questions than it answers, and represents an abdication of all responsibility on the part of Frontex.
Given the recent revelations of Frontex complicity, and even contribution, in pushbacks from Greece, /Josoor is/ deeply concerned by this latest reply. While the agency states that it places fundamental rights at the core of its approach, this image is significantly undercut by its daily practice at borders such as Evros.
December 9: The composition of the sub-group of Frontex’s Management Board that will inquire into the agency’s involvement in pushbacks is announced by journalist Giorgos Christides. A representative of Germany will act as chair, with representatives of France, the EU Commission, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Romania, Sweden & Switzerland.
December 8: The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) publishes “Migration: Fundamental Rights issues at land borders”, a report which looks at fundamental rights compliance and the correct application of the human rights safeguards in the European asylum acquis and the provisions of the Schengen Borders Code at the EU external land borders, including rivers and lakes. It was requested by the European Parliament on January 30. Regarding Frontex SIR and individual complaint mechanisms, it states:
In 2019, eight of the nine Serious Incidents Reports that reached the Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer related to land border surveillance activities. These are reports submitted by participants in Frontex activities or working in Frontex operations who come across fundamental rights violations during their work. In 2020, by 1 October, the Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer coordinated three such Serious Incidents Reports, two of which concerned land border surveillance. As regards the Frontex complaints mechanism, between January and August 2020, Frontex received 20 complaints (not all admissible) under Article 111 of the EBCG Regulation, six relating to land borders.
December 7: A Spanish media outlet publishes an article in which it claims to have had access to an 18-page report written by Frontex which details 33 possible pushbacks in the Aegean, 11 of which were witnessed by the agency. These possible pushbacks, which are reportedly described as ‘prevention of departures’ are different cases to the ones reported by the media. The report is to be analysed at the next Management Board meeting.
December 2: Arne Semsrott and Luiza Izuzquiza, freedom of information activists, reveal that Frontex has filed a case against them “before the General Court of the European Union in order to force” them to pay over €23,000 of legal fees, after they lost a lawsuit for information about Frontex ships in the Mediterranean. Already on January 31, Frontex had asked them to pay the legal fees.
December 1: Frontex Executive Director is called for questions in front of the LIBE Committee at the European Parliament, discussing ‘Recent allegations on pushbacks during Frontex operations in the Eastern Mediterranean’. He reiterates the defence that the agency expressed previously: that Frontex has no information regarding the pushbacks reported by media; that no Serious Incident Report (SIR) has been filed regarding those events; that the SIR mechanism is activated, national authorities are alerted and asked to investigate every time a suspected violation of human rights is witnessed; that not all interceptions are to be considered SAR events, meaning that they do not require rescue and therefore ‘returns’ cannot be considered pushbacks; that the agency needs to consider hybrid threats in the stretch of Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey.
He also goes into details regarding the reported pushback of the night between April 28 and 29, stating that Frontex surveillance aircraft G-WKTH did not fly that night.
Two days later, Der Spiegel publishes an article in which it cites an internal report to Frontex’s Management Board containing details about the flight of the aircraft on the night in question:
Less than 48 hours after the meeting, it is clear that Leggeri was not telling the truth. Either the Frontex boss deliberately lied to the European Parliament or misled it due to a mistake that was difficult to explain
Following the meeting, several Members of the European Parliament call for his resignation.
November 28: Der Spiegel publishes details of Frontex’s internal communication regarding the pushback of August 10. This also feeds into the concerns regarding the effectiveness of Frontex’s SIR mechanism.
November 26: The Romanian interior minister denies any wrongdoing in the case of the Romanian vessel MAI 113 implicated in the pushback off Lesvos of June 8.
November 23: In a letter addressed to the LIBE committee, Frontex Executive Director does not exclude that Frontex vessels or aircraft were in the vicinity of pushbacks. He minimises the documentation provided by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi and confirms that no SIR was filed following these events.
On the same day, Der Spiegel publishes details on the pushback off the coast of Lesvos that was carried out by the Greek coast guard on April 18. As shown in the article, an internal Frontex Serious Incident Report reveals that it was followed minute-by-minute by a Frontex aircraft.
November 19: Following a visit to Greece in March, The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) publishes a report on the situation of the immigration detention system, in which it calls for a reform to the system and for an end to pushbacks. It questions Frontex’s role in supporting Greek authorities at the countries’ borders, especially regarding the lack of monitoring officers within Joint Operation POSEIDON and “about the precise terms of engagement of FRONTEX vessels with boats carrying migrants that have been agreed between FRONTEX and Greece.”
November 10: European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly opens an inquiry as a follow-up of her 2013 Special Report and Recommendations regarding the functioning of Frontex’s complaints mechanism. She writes:
Seven years on from my Special Report, and aware of concerns having been expressed, I believe it is timely to assess how the Complaints Mechanism is functioning and have therefore decided to launch an inquiry on my own initiative.
She asks Frontex to reply to her questions by 15 January 2021 and “to organise an electronic inspection of documents relating to the Complaints Mechanism, including those setting out how Frontex followed up on reports sent to the Fundamental Rights Officer, either by Frontex or by national authorities”. She also asks the Fundamental Rights Officer to reply on “how Frontex ensures respect for fundamental rights in joint return operations”.
On the same day, an extraordinary meeting of the Frontex Management Board is held. At this meeting, Frontex is presented with a series of questions to be answered by the end of the month. As reported in a letter from Frontex Executive Director to the President of the European Parliament dated November 11:
As I informed the participants of the [Management Board] meeting, the preliminary findings of the inquiry conclude that there is no evidence of a direct or indirect participation of Frontex staff or officers deployed by Member States under Frontex operations in alleged “pushbacks” in the Aegean Sea.
The Management Board asks the Executive Director to ensure that the internal reporting system is solid and effective in order to allow for an immediate follow-up in case of incidents. It is decided to “set up a sub-group to the Management Board to further investigate the accusations of involvement in pushbacks in the Aegean. Frontex Executive Director releases a statement in which no attention is paid to such accusations. Instead he calls “for the creation of an evaluation committee to consider legal questions related to the Agency’s surveillance of external sea borders and accommodating the concerns raised by Member States about ‘hybrid threats’ affecting their national security at external borders where the European Border and Coast Guard Agency will deploy its standing corps”. Reading between the lines, this call will set the tone of Frontex’s refusal of pushback accusations to date, which will be repeated and reinforced in the following weeks. It is based on four main points:
◆ Frontex has no information regarding the cases reported by media on October 23, because no Serious Incident Report (SIR) has been filed;
◆ where suspected violations of human rights are witnessed, the SIR mechanism is activated, national authorities are alerted and asked to investigate;
◆ not all interceptions are to be considered SAR events, meaning that they do not require rescue and therefore ‘returns’ can not be considered pushbacks. Only emergency situations and distress calls communicated through official channels (MRCCs) fall into this restrictive interpretation of SAR;
◆ Greece, and Frontex with it, considers itself to be a target of hybrid threats, meaning that people on the move are used and ‘weaponised’ by Turkey, turning situations that appear to be SAR events into quasi-military actions, to be dealt with through different frameworks.
November 4: Seven Frontex officers are deployed in the Canary Islands to support Spanish authorities with the increased number of arrivals. Talks and negotiations start today to define the limits and details of further deployment in the area, which could mean resuming Joint Operation HERA II.
October 28: As a result of the joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson requests “an urgent extraordinary Frontex Management Board meeting on November 10, to discuss alleged pushback incidents in Greece and fundamental rights protection.”
October 27: Frontex launches an internal inquiry into the alleged involvement in pushbacks in the Aegean sea documented by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi. In the same press release, it announces that “so far, no documents or other materials have been found to substantiate any accusations of violations of the law”. The release carries on:
Earlier this year, […] Frontex Executive Director had already asked [Greek] authorities to investigate two events near its islands in the eastern Aegean Sea. They found no proof of any illegal acts in one incident and are still looking into another one.
[He] also alerted the members of the European Parliament of an incident earlier this year when a crew of the Danish vessels deployed by the agency was given incorrect instructions by the officers of the Hellenic Coast Guard. Following the incident Frontex contacted the Greek authorities and the misunderstanding was clarified with the Hellenic Coast Guard.
At this point of time, the still ongoing inquiry has not identified other suspicious cases than those already reported by the Executive Director to Greek authorities.
October 23: The joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi is published. The details of the pushbacks in the Aegean sea of April 28–29, June 4–8, August 15, and August 19 are made public on this date, revealing that Frontex was aware of this illegal practice being carried out by the Greek authorities, and that the agency actively participated in a number of illegal pushbacks.
October 14: Second operation in Montenegro, focused on the country’s sea border. Frontex will deploy aerial support, specialised officers and will provide technical and operational assistance in carrying out coast guard functions in international waters
October 10: Frontex awards €100m to Airbus and Elbit for drone surveillance services in the eastern and central Mediterranean.
October 2: Annual Report published by Frontex Consultative Forum. The Forum remains highly concerned about:
◆ the functioning of the Frontex Serious Incident Reporting mechanism, which has demonstrated its shortcomings more than once;
◆ the continued postponement in the revision of the agency’s Fundamental Rights Strategy;
◆ the impact of aerial surveillance in the central Mediterranean and the subsequent provision of information to the Libyan authorities, leading to increased numbers of people returned to the country to face indiscriminate detention and degrading conditions;
◆ the impact of the agency’s Multipurpose Aerial Surveillance on the Bosnian/Croatian borders, given the documentation of the violent and abusive behaviour of Croatian authorities;
◆ persistent allegations of pushbacks at the Greek-Turkish border in Evros and the low number of serious incidents reported through the Agency’s mechanism, “which Frontex attributed to the fact that officers deployed by the Agency were not deployed on the frontline where pushbacks have been reported”;
◆ the agency’s support to Hungarian authorities at the country’s border with Serbia and with return operations. The request to suspend the operations in the country, already stated in previous years, has become more urgent given the EU Commission’s infringement procedure against Hungary. “Against the Consultative Forum’s repeated advice, the Agency maintained its operational support to Hungary, suggesting that its presence on the ground could improve the situation. The Consultative Forum noted, however, that even though the situation did not improve, the Agency increased the number of staff deployed at the Serbia-Hungary border.
◆ The Report includes and external evaluation of the Forum itself. It “identified some existing challenges such as the high dependency of the Consultative Forum on the Agency’s willingness to seek its advice and to act upon recommendations, and the limitation posed to its work by an understaffed Consultative Forum Secretariat.”
September 23: The EU Commission proposes “The New Pact on Migration and Asylum”: a series of legislative measures that provide the framework of the EU migration and asylum policies for the years to come.
According to the Commission:
It provides a comprehensive approach, bringing together policy in the areas of migration, asylum, integration and border management … It aims to create faster, seamless migration processes and stronger governance of migration and border policies, supported by modern IT systems and more effective agencies. It aims to reduce unsafe and irregular routes and promote sustainable and safe legal pathways for those in need of protection … This common response also needs to include the EU’s relationship with third countries.
It is presented alongside a roadmap for its implementation which covers the end of 2020 and the whole of 2021.
The Pact foresees the recast of the 2008 Return Directive (which has been in negotiation since 2018), a full integration of the EU Return policy with its Readmission and Voluntary return policies and further effective operational support by Frontex:
Frontex must play a leading role in the common EU system for returns, making returns work well in practice. It should be a priority for Frontex to become the operational arm of EU return policy, with the appointment of a dedicated Deputy Executive Director and integrating more return expertise into the Management Board. The deployment of the new standing corps will also assist return. Frontex will also support the introduction of a return case management system at EU and national level, covering all steps of the procedure from the detection of an irregular stay to readmission and reintegration in third countries. In this way the Agency can realise its full potential to support return, linking up operational cooperation with Member States and effective readmission cooperation with third countries. (2.5)
It also intends to boost “Frontex’s access to naval and aerial capacity”. (4.3)
Frontex’s enhanced mandate should now be used to make cooperation with partners operational:
Cooperation with the Western Balkans, including through EU status agreements with the Western Balkan partners, will enable Frontex border guards to work together with national border guards on the territory of a partner country. Frontex can also now provide practical support to develop partners’ border management capacity and to cooperate with partners to optimise voluntary return. The Commission will continue encouraging agreements with its neighbours (6.4)
The Pact has been analysed and commented on by countless individuals, groups, media, and NGOs. Mainly it has been described as a missed opportunity to provide real change in policy direction and in addressing the concerns related to the mistreatment of people on the move.
Here are the analyses of BVMN and HRW.
August 15–19: Two more pushbacks at sea off the coast of Lesvos are uncovered by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Report, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi. ◆ On August 15, the Greek coast guard approached a boat that was close to the northern shore of Lesvos. They tried to push the boat away, then “masked Greek border guards boarded the boat, destroyed the engine, threatened the passengers at gun point and forced them to tie the boat to a speed-boat.” They were then towed into Turkish waters. The Turkish coast guard witnessed the scene but did not intervene for hours. The MAI 1102 was located only a few hundred meters away from the refugee boat. The boat can be clearly identified in a photo. A German navy ship on a NATO mission that observed the incident reported it to the German government.
◆ On August 19, “a dinghy was reported to have been pushed back from Northern Lesvos. The Portuguese vessel Molivos was five km away and appears to have changed course and headed towards the pushback before its transponder either lost the signal or was turned off.”
August 10: A pushback off the coast of Samos island takes place with the involvement of a German Federal Police vessel deployed with Frontex. The pushback is detailed in a Frontex internal report and published by Der Spiegel:
◆ At 6am, the Greek observation post “Praso” spot a rubber dinghy “clearly already in Greek waters.”
◆ 15 minutes later, the crew of the German ship BP62, Taufnahme “Uckermark”, arrived at the reported location. “The federal police found an overcrowded rubber dinghy with 40 people on board and stopped it. But they did not save the occupants from the sea, did not take them on board … The “Uckermark” blocked their journey until the Greeks ‘took over’ the incident” and then left.
◆ Two hours later, the Turkish Coast Guard is recorded intercepting the same dinghy in Turkish waters and dragging it back to shore.
◆ The document carries on, showing that the German authorities “sent an e-mail to the Maritime Coordination Center in Piraeus, responsible for the units at sea [asking] what had happened to the refugees.”
◆ In response, the Greek authorities stated that: “The rubber dinghy with migrants on board changed course when it saw the ship of the Greek coast guard and drove back towards Turkey,” and that the Greek Coast Guard used “border protection measures taken to prevent the arrival on Samos”.
◆ In an internal document of the German federal ministry of the interior reported by The Spiegel (article published on December 22), the version of the Greek authorities is contradicted: the federal police observed “that the (…) Greek forces physically took migrants on board” and moved them onto a Greek coast guard vessel.
July 24: Frontex Executive Director tells the LIBE Committee at the European Parliament that the agency had observed and recorded just a single incident which may have been a pushback in the Aegean.
July 15: Frontex launches a deployment in Montengro. It is the second operation of the agency in a non-EU country. Several officers are deployed to support Montenegro’s border guards at the border with Croatia. Operational plans include the expansion of the agency’s presence to border control activities at sea, including support in search and rescue.
June: First ‘voluntary’ return organised by Frontex, from Cyprus to Georgia, via scheduled flight. In July, Frontex will support France with a return operation via charter flights, returning 209 people to Albania. In September, Frontex will support Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands in the agency’s first joint ‘voluntary’ return operation, returning 50 people to Iraq.
June 10: In line with the 2019 Regulation, Frontex and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) sign an agreement to “work together to establish fundamental rights monitors, design their training programme and integrate them into Frontex activities.” The agencies aim to establish as many as 40 monitors by the end of the year and to integrate them within the Frontex Fundamental Rights Office. In reality, the first selection notices for these roles (1, 2) will be published on November 20 (first appointments expected for April/May 2021).
June 4–8: As reported in a joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi, between June 4 and June 8, four pushbacks are documented near Lesvos. In all cases, a Frontex vessel or aircraft is present and witnesses or participates in the illegal action. In particular, on June 8, a Romanian vessel MAI 1103, deployed within Frontex Operation Poseidon, actively participates in a pushback in the Aegean sea near Lesvos, directly blocking a boat with people on the move on board without proceeding with the rescue operation. Instead the vessel MAI 1103 moves away and leaves the Greek coast guard to carry out the pushback. The actions are recorded in a video by the Turkish coast guard.
May 29-June 1: BVMN publish three testimonies of abuses and pushbacks from Albania to Greece which took place over 72 hours.
◆ In the first, on May 29, a group of nine people was stopped by Slovenian and Albanian officers after having crossed the border from Greece, threatened with guns and then pushed back to Greece. The testimony indicates the presence of Frontex patrol cars on the scene.
◆ One day later, the group crossed the border a second time and was apprehended again in Albanian territory, by three officers: “one from Albania, one from Poland and one from Romania.” They were taken to Bilshit police station and “they were detained in this station for around five hours. At approximately 06:00, the authorities drove the group to the border in a 4×4 vehicle and ordered them back onto Greek territory.”
◆ On May 31, after having crossed the border from Greece into Albania, a group of 7 people is apprehended in the Albanian town of Miras, just two km from the Greek border. The ‘respondents’ recognised the distinctive armbands worn by the agency’s officers.
According to the respondent, those who stopped the group were equipped with night vision goggles. The respondent said that when the group were captured, the treatment was very “racist”. The authorities kept them waiting on the ground while laughing among each other, which “makes them feel without dignity”. The respondent claims that the Albanian police treated them well, that those who made them feel badly treated were Frontex officers.
… Of the seven who were captured, some tried to flee. However, these people were beaten by officers, with the use of a “kind of truncheon but like metal”.
The group was taken to the police station in Bilshit, denied food, fingerprinted, questioned, strip-searched and detained for the night. At 7.00 h on June 1st, “two Albanian and two Frontex police officers took them to the border area” with Greece.
May 28: In a written answer to the European Parliament, Frontex confirms that “sometimes due to tactical reasons for missions, law enforcement assets are not made visible. Making them visible might, especially if combined with other information, disclose sensitive operational information and thus undermine the operational objectives”. This feeds into many reports on the cooperation between Frontex and the Libyan coast guard and the lack of cooperation of the Agency with civil rescue vessels in the central Mediterranean (1, 2, 3).
May 13: Status Agreements with Montenegro and Serbia signed in 2019 are now operative after having been approved by the European Parliament
March-April: Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), Amnesty and HRW report on the situation at the Evros border. HRW testimonies “describe 38 deportation incidents involving almost 4,000 people, although some of these could be double counts.”
April 28–29: As part of the joint investigation by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Report, Der Spiegel, ARD and TV Asahi, the presence of a Frontex aircraft is revealed during a push-back initiated after a group of people landed on Samos. Greek authorities dragged them back to sea on a life-raft and pushed them towards Turkish waters. Frontex’s surveillance plane flew over the area twice while this pushback took place.
April 27: Statewatch releases an internal report circulated by Frontex to EU government delegations entitled ‘State-of-play report on the implementation of the 2019 regulation’. As Statewatch note:
The state-of-play-report acknowledges a number of legal ambiguities surrounding some of the more controversial powers outlined in Frontex’s 2019 Regulation, highlighting perhaps that political ambition, rather than serious consideration and assessment, propelled the legislation, overtaking adequate procedure and oversight. The incentive to enact the legislation within a short timeframe is cited as a reason that no impact assessment was carried out on the proposed recast to the agency’s mandate. This draft was rushed through negotiations and approved in an unprecedented six-month period, and the details lost in its wake are now coming to light.
The major legal ambiguities are:
◆ Regarding service weapons and “non-lethal equipment” (Art. 82), the Agency saught legal analysis, which confirmed that the 2019 Regulation does “not provide sufficient legal basis for the Agency to acquire, register, store and transport firearms in Poland. None of the Polish legal acts either directly or indirectly mentions the Agency as an entity which is entitled to acquire (possess) firearms or ammunition for the purpose of fulfilment of its statutory tasks and duties, without a permit issued by the Polish authorities.”
◆ Regarding the establishment of a new supervisory mechanism on the use of force (Art. 55), the agency found that such provisions are inconsistent with the standard rules on administrative enquiries and disciplinary measures concerned, lacking due independency and secrecy from the Agency. Frontex add that the “Standing corps being the first uniformed service of the EU will require different treatment in comparison to the regular officials working in the EU Institutions”.
◆ Frontex seek special treatment regarding immunities and privileges. “Protocol No 7 on the Privileges and Immunities of the European Union annexed to the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and to the TFEU” applies to the agency and its statutory staff. However, Frontex is not satisfied because the Protocol does not apply to non-EU states, nor does it “offer a full protection, or take into account a need for the inviolability of assets owned by Frontex (service vehicles, vessels, aircraft)”.
◆ Frontex lacks legal basis for conducting ‘voluntary returns’, since the 2019 Regulation refers to the ‘return’ definition set by the 2008 Return Directive and this does not cover ‘voluntary returns.’
April 18: A pushback of a boat carrying 30 people is carried out by the Greek coast guard off the coast of Lesvos during the night. Frontex internal documents reveal that a Serious Incident Report was filed on May 8 and the pushback was followed minute-by-minute by a Frontex surveillance aircraft. The internal document is published by Der Spiegel.
April 10: According to Amnesty’s report “Malta: Waves of impunity”, Frontex is implicated in the ‘Easter Monday pushback’. Amnesty concludes that the European Commission and Frontex propose a restrictive position of Frontex competence regarding search and rescue. According to this interpretation, search and rescue is the responsibility of member states and the Frontex mandate only requires the agency to promptly communicate relevant information to the competent maritime authorities (interpretation stated in writing by the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs and by Frontex Executive Director to the LIBE Committee and reiterated by Frontex Executive Director in a written reply to Amnesty).
April 2: In a meeting of the LIBE committee, Frontex Executive director describes the events of March 3, when a Danish vessel refused to execute a pushback that was ordered by the Greek Liaison officer, as “apparently a misunderstanding.”
March 14: Alarm Phone reports of a pull-back in the Central Mediterranean carried out by the Libyan coast guard and organised and coordinated by Frontex and MRCC Malta:
◆ At 15:33h CET, Alarm Phone received a distress call from 49 people … They shared their GPS position with us, which clearly showed them within the Maltese SAR zone … We immediately informed RCC Malta and the Italian coastguard via email.
◆ At 17:42h, RCC Malta confirmed via phone that they had sent two patrol boats …
◆ At 17:45h, we talked to the 49 people on the boat who told us that they could see a boat heading in their direction. Unfortunately, the conversation broke off and we were not able to clarify further details. This was our last contact to the people in distress after which we could not reach them any longer. Since then, we have tried to obtain further details from RCC Malta, but they claim not to have any information.
However, confidential sources have informed us that a Frontex aerial asset had spotted the migrant boat already at 6:00h when it was still in the contested Libyan SAR zone.
◆ At 18.04h, the Libyan coastguard vessel Ras Al Jadar intercepted the boat in the Maltese SAR zone
This means that the European border agency Frontex, MRCC Rome as well as RCC Malta were all aware of this boat in distress and colluded with the Libyan authorities to enter Maltese SAR and intercept the migrant boat.
March 13: Human Rights Watch informs Frontex about alleged abuse by non-Greek forces and asked about its deployments along the border:
All those interviewed said that within hours after they crossed in boats or waded through the river, armed men wearing various law enforcement uniforms or in civilian clothes, including all in black with balaclavas, intercepted everyone in their group. All said the men detained them in official or informal detention centers, or on the roadside, and stole their money, mobile phones, and bags before summarily pushing them back to Turkey. Seventeen described how the men assaulted them and others, including women and children, through electric shocks, beating with wooden or metal rods, prolonged beating of the soles of feet, punching, kicking, and stomping.
The agency replied saying that it did not have the requested information and that it would respond as soon as it did.
March 12: Frontex deploys an additional 100 border guards at the Greek land border with Turkey as part of a rapid border intervention requested by Greece one week earlier. On 3rd April the deployment is extended. At that date, 624 officers are deployed by Frontex at Greek sea and land external borders. Critics argue that this deployment “lacks legal basis”, because the suspension of asylum and the widespread violence documented at the border fail to meet the required Fundamental Rights standards. Among others, Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), Amnesty and HRW report extensively on the situation at the Evros border. HRW testimonies “describe 38 deportation incidents involving almost 4,000 people, although some of these could be double counts.”
March 2: A Danish vessel, deployed in the Aegean within Frontex’s operation Poseidon, refuses an order received by Hellenic Coast Guard Liaison Officer at Frontex HQ, to push back to Turkish waters 33 people they had just rescued in Greek waters. Through the efforts of individuals, NGOs and other organisations it is discovered that no Serious Incident Report was filed and that Frontex HQ requested more information about the events only following media coverage, as shown by an internal chain of emails. In less than four hours from the first email the incident was considered ‘isolated’ and the case was closed.
March 1: Greece introduces emergency measures in response to increasing pressure at its land border, among them the “temporary suspension, for one month from of this Decision, of the lodging of asylum by those entering the country illegally”.
February 27: Following statements from the Turkish authorities that the country’s borders with the EU would be opened, thousands of people rush to the border region with Greece.
February 20: The signing of the Status Agreement between the EU and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would allow Frontex to be deployed in the country, is halted by Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the state presidency of the country. As media report:
At the last session of the three-member Bosnian presidency, Dodik voted against all decisions that were on the agenda. One was the proposal of the Minister of Security, Fahrudin Radoncic, to accept an “Status Agreement between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union on Actions Executed by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
January 31: Frontex requests two freedom of information activists of the German platform Frag Der Staat (Ask the State), Luisa Izuzquiza and Arne Semsrott, to pay €23,700 in legal costs, after the Agency won a case at the General Court of the European Union, in which the two activists were seeking access to information related to Joint Operation Triton in 2017. | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-special-frontex-and-human-rights-how-did-we-arrive-here-part-3-2020-present-706438d8e29 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2020-12-26 16:10:33.598000+00:00 | ['European Union', 'Special', 'Frontex', 'Pushback', 'Human Rights'] |
The Neuroscience of Behavior Change | Helping patients change behaviors by understanding the brain
As patients with diabetes participate in a new activity, they are training their brains to create a new neural pathway. When the activity is repeated, the pathway gets stronger until the behavior is the new normal.
I find it fascinating that our brains can change. I was raised with the belief that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” However, I have always questioned this and, not too long ago, neuroscientists discovered that creating new behaviors can be done by rewiring the brain.
Diabetes is a chronic disease that requires lifestyle behavior changes. As clinicians, it is very useful to provide information and education about diabetes to our patients. But in order to elicit positive behavior change, it is important to understand the science behind it.
I have been able to personally achieve my health goals and professionally empower my patients to reach their health goals by understanding the neuroscience of behavior change.
What does behavior change look like in the brain?
Neural pathways, comprised of neurons connected by dendrites, are created in the brain based on our habits and behaviors. The number of dendrites increases with the frequency a behavior is performed. I picture these neural pathways as deep grooves or roads in our brain. Our brain cells communicate with each other via a process called “neuronal firing.”
Psychologist Deann Ware, Ph.D., explains that when brain cells communicate frequently, the connection between them strengthens and “the messages that travel the same pathway in the brain over and over begin to transmit faster and faster.” With enough repetition, these behaviors become automatic. Reading, driving, and riding a bike are examples of complicated behaviors that we do automatically because neural pathways have formed.
Just because patients have formed neural pathways does not mean that they are stuck with those habits forever. As patients participate in new activities, they are training their brains to create new neural pathways. The pathways get stronger with repetition until the behavior is the new normal.
The importance of repetition
In terms of repetition, it is estimated that it takes 10,000 repetitions to master a skill and develop the associated neural pathway. As clinicians, we can encourage and support repetition when our patients are working to achieve their health goals.
It is estimated that it takes 3–6 months for a new behavior to become a habit, though this estimate varies by person. As clinicians, we can encourage patients that, with time, their repetition will pay off when their behavior becomes natural. As coaches, we can continue to provide strategies for overcoming barriers, help to create back-up plans, and provide support while our patients take on new goals towards better health.
Every brain is different
It is important to understand that every brain is different. Each person has their own unique experiences that have shaped their brain and continue to shape it throughout their lives. Therefore, it really is important to listen to the patient individually to understand their unique experiences and values in order to help them develop a clear plan for achieving their health goals.
Developing new neural pathways
Connecting a new behavior to as many areas of the brain as possible helps to develop new neural pathways. By tapping into all five senses, we can create “stickiness” that helps form neural pathways.
We all have experiences that changed us. We can recall the sensations: the images, smells, how we felt, etc. When working with patients consider having patients connect their successes or health goals to as many senses as possible.
Visualization can be a very powerful sense that can help patients build new neural pathways toward behavior change. For example, ask patients to visualize what their optimal health looks like, feels like, and what they would be doing if their diabetes was managed.
Another example is to ask patients to recall a positive experience with diabetes. Have them elaborate on as many emotions and senses as possible. Ask what they learned about themselves and how they can apply those learnings to achieve their desired health goals.
Modifying the brain to stay positive
In Dr. Rick Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness, the neuropsychologist explains that our brains are wired toward the negative. For example, if we have ten experiences during the day, five neutral everyday experiences, four positive experiences, and one negative experience, we are probably going to think about that one negative experience before going to bed that night.
Knowing this tendency, how can we change our brains to focus on the good experiences? Hardwiring Happiness gives practical advice for maintaining the positive. One strategy is to focus on the good for 10–20 seconds, really absorbing and storing the experience in our long-term memory.
Personally, after reading his book and practicing his four suggested steps, I am convinced that I have developed strong neural pathways from “taking in the good” and that my life has changed for the better. I practice mindfulness of good experiences and spend 20–30 seconds really absorbing the good — not just in my mind, but in my body by focusing on sensations and emotions.
For example, when I see a rainbow or the wildflowers on the side of the highway, I used to simply notice, then say, “Wow, how beautiful,” and move on. Now, I stop, spend 20–30 seconds taking in the beauty and absorbing it so that the experience lands in my long-term memory.
According to Barbara Frederickson of the University of North Carolina, people are much more likely to make changes when new behaviors are associated with positive emotions. We like positive reinforcement, which enables us to be creative and open to trying new things.
Helping patients develop SMART goals with small action steps can encourage positive emotions that lead to success. “Taking in the good” with our patients by celebrating with them when they are successful with their SMART goals helps reinforce positive emotions.
Any change can be unsettling, even a desired one. It is essential to understand the patient’s vision of success in order to set SMART goals. Throughout the process of behavior change and neural rewiring, it helps to encourage hard work and celebrate success, so that patients can obtain sustainable progress towards their health goals.
By Julie Hani, RN, BSN, BA, CDE
Fit4D Certified Diabetes Educator
To learn more about Fit4D, visit www.fit4d.com | https://healthtransformer.co/the-neuroscience-of-behavior-change-bcb567fa83c1 | [] | 2017-08-08 15:24:20.995000+00:00 | ['Learning', 'Insights', 'Healthcare', 'Diabetes', 'Diabetes Solutions'] |
Let’s Hear It — An Anecdote. I am proud to be deaf. It is not… | Playing head games with a stranger is one way to get to know them, an awkward strategy, if you must. Another is maintaining a position on the left side of your friend as you walk down the street, just to keep up the conversation. And in a bar it’s easy to strike up a chat, when you have a glass of wine armed with a cheesy one-liner. You’re good to go.
But hearing them? Now that’s a whole different ball-game. The idea of moving your head side to side, back and forth, and instinctively moving around a person, is not a good way to maintain a conversation. It’s tiring and to the other person, they might seem weirded out by your inability to stay put. Yet that is the daily life of a D/deaf person, or at least, that’s what I argue.
I was eighteen-months-old when my parents took me to the doctor’s clinic for a routine check-up, where they discovered their daughter was deaf. Profoundly deaf in the left ear, mild sensorineural loss in the right. Life as my family knew it had changed. Parenthood had to be navigated differently to what they were used to because having twins is one thing, but having a child with a disability is another.
The reason why I am deaf is still unknown, I mean I have cells missing, but they don’t know why. I like to think I’m unique that way. D/deafness does not run in my family nor were there any issues during the pregnancy or birth which could’ve caused it, at least that’s what I know. It’s a life-long mystery the audiologists and I still confuse ourselves with.
Because of my rare and unusual deafness, standard hearing aids; cochlear implants and other hearing devices are of no use to me. That being said, I am often mistaken for having no disability at all, because there are no aids in sight and the fact that I have ‘no speech impediment’, which is a common stereotype among the deaf.
“You don’t sound deaf,” and my favourite, “You don’t look deaf.”
— —
It’s not a tragedy like many people think. I don’t need to be pitied, when being deaf gives me many humorous and bittersweet memories. A fond one of my family is when [toddler-Sophie] tried to repeat the alphabet after my dad. In this moment, I would get the first few letters right, before I began to mix up his words and start counting numbers instead — completely going off topic. I’m pretty sure there is a video of me somewhere doing this.
Another perk is the absolute bliss of silence when I go to sleep. As soon as my hearing ear hits the pillow, I can block out almost everything. I remember being amazed by this trick when I laid down on my sofa and stared at the TV. It was on. I knew there was sound, but as I watched the people interact on the screen, I found a sense of placidity in the quiet. And if I closed my eyes, it was as if everything in the world was still. It was a different kind of peace.
Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash
In times like this, it’s good to have positive memories of being deaf, but it doesn’t negate the struggles the D/deaf community go through. From our own inner battles to the barriers constructed by our world, we face a lot.
Identity and belonging was something I struggled with immensely growing up, and still to this day I have difficulties in knowing where I belong. As a person who fits into both the hearing world and the D/deaf community, it’s hard to find a place where I can stand and say, “This is me. I belong here.”
With my deafness, I’m not solely merged into the hearing community. You see, I can’t communicate in certain settings, I rely on subtitles for Netflix and I won’t hear you call for me from a distance. Yet, without being profoundly Deaf, CODA [Child of Deaf Adults] or using hearing aids, I don’t fit into the bracket of being wholly D/deaf either. I believe that having an identity is so important — it defines who we are and how we present ourselves to the world. We may identify as LGBTQ+, an ethnic minority, or even a religious identity, all of which helps to bring us a sense of belonging. Shared understanding and common knowledge is something that solidifies our confidence to be ourselves and support one another. These social or cultural identities shapes the person we become today, as we can also feel accepted in our identity where other members of society deem to reject us.
Furthermore, there are many different opinions in the D/deaf community. Some say those who are not profoundly Deaf should never use the term deaf, instead, they should coin the term ‘hard of hearing’. Personally, I identify myself as a deaf person. It’s my decision and I will stand by my term. And from working in a customer-facing role I realised that by directly using this term, people understood I have hearing loss.
Years ago, I used to wear a badges which said ‘hearing impaired’ or ‘hard of hearing’ — quickly, I gathered that customers only read the word ‘hearing’ and made their own conclusions. To be clear, they concluded I was hearing. In their minds, any other term would not be recognised and that being deaf simply wasn’t the truth.
But oh, we do love retail and the wondrous people we face. One afternoon, after a few months at my first ever job, my manager pulled me aside informing me I had customer complaints. These customers assumed I was ignoring them whenever they called me for help. Instead of tapping my back or confronting me themselves, they turned to the managers. But I was not neglecting them, I simply could not hear them call. I must say at that time I was so, so embarrassed and ashamed that my hearing was not good enough. I became sad and frustrated. All of a sudden, I felt an immense pressure to be more aware of my surroundings, to master a supernatural sense of when someone wants to talk to me. I couldn’t relax.
Of course you may ask what my employer’s response was. Well, they understood and were sympathetic. No telling off, here! Alas, with my type of hearing loss and the environment in which I worked, I couldn’t be accommodated any further. My work was in a large warehouse, which contained rows and rows of unusual and vintage items for sale. The ceilings were high, and the radio was constantly on at full volume, which counteracted the low volume on the phones. Every time a customer rang, I had to leave the till to speak to them. Realistically, I had every right to demand changes as part of the Equality Act 2010, but I didn’t. My role was only temporary and I didn’t feel important enough to request proper accessibility. That said, please do ask for accommodations. It is your right.
The same applies to my current job, again — retail. I would love to learn sign language and incorporate this into my working environment, because having my coworkers shout across the room to ‘hop on a till,’ or ‘grab a parcel’ in a roaring environment of chatter and moving cages isn’t feasible. I also imagine it wouldn’t be cost efficient for my employer to train people on British Sign Language [BSL] for the needs of one employee, unless a marketing strategy or some company benefit could be implemented.
Instead, I opted to wear a badge [again] which I would clip to my shirt on every shift. But even this failed. “Please be patient, I am deaf” — it said. Unlike my previous job, this had the opposite effect. Customers argued with me that i wasn’t deaf. Their reasons? I could hear them without lip-reading. [Current pandemic timings, so mask-wearing is essential for my role. Unless medically exempt.] Or, if we flip the coin. I am confronted with eye rolls, loud scoffs and also, complaints to the manager. A more common response is to avoid all conversation with me and find someone else to serve them.
Photo by Dennis Siqueira on Unsplash
With experiences like this, it shows how overlooked this disability is and how unintentionally ignorant society is towards the D/deaf community. Yes, it’s a hidden disability but it makes me wonder how people with other disabilities/chronic illnesses — visible or not, cope with every day or working environments, where there is little to no support, awareness or understanding available.
I know this is becoming a slightly negative anecdote, but I feel like there is so much to address about being deaf and the experiences that come with it. It isn’t always sunny-side up. My own struggles didn’t start when I became a working adult, it stayed with me from the day I was diagnosed. In school, I was often excluded from conversations because no one had the patience to keep me in the loop.
I can imagine that D/deaf people are very familiar with these three phrases. ‘Never-mind.’
‘Don’t worry!’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
If you don’t know, these words are massive pet peeves amongst the D/deaf community. It’s no longer surprising when someone you know says these things and sadly, family and friends are not the exception. I know people may be doing it unintentionally, often ‘forgetting’ that we are deaf. But it feels so belittling and no one realises how hurtful these comments are towards us.
To create a picture; imagine you are sitting at a circular table in a noisy environment with a group of friends. You are all drinking coffee, tea — maybe even alcohol, and someone comes up with a joke that sends you all into fits of laughter. Except you.
You are lost. You don’t know what the joke was. You need someone to tell you, but when you ask, what do they say? “Don’t worry about it, I’ll tell you later.”
Everyone keeps laughing, talking about how they said it, maybe even cracking one more that triggers another round of hysterics. Again, not you. You just sit there in silence, not laughing and feeling excluded. You don’t want your drink anymore and you don’t want to be involved, you just want to go home. There may be times where you do have the energy to pick up contextual clues, catching a few phrases here and there before piecing it all together. But by the time you get the joke, the conversation has likely moved on. You don’t even want to ask them to repeat things, in case you receive heavy sighs and grunts of annoyance.
My words of advice: Tell. Us.
It takes two seconds and you open ourselves up to a happier, inclusive and more trusting environment.
— —
Although there are negative [environmental/societal??] aspects to being deaf, these experiences have strengthened my character. But, I must acknowledge the beginning of my personal growth, back in 2010.
In 2010, my parents discovered a charity for children and young adults called; Dorset Deaf Children’s Society (DDCS). This charity was set up to organise events and activities for those with hearing loss. Over the course of five years, I would say they were best years of my life. Through this charity, I became brave and I got to meet so many young people who were so different in terms of their hearing losses, but all the same with their experiences in the world.
I can remember my first ever event with DDCS. It was a residential trip away from home to a PGL activity centre at Osmington Bay in Weymouth. It was a weekend where we could be free, to an extent, with no parents to watch over us. This was also the first time I went on a trip without my friends or family, which was a little bit scary because I knew absolutely no one. It was also the first time I had ever met a fellow D/deaf person. It felt nice to be able to connect with those of a similar background to me, and not feel awkward about asking them to repeat themselves. [Funnily enough, this event was the reason I got my first mobile phone. Shout out to to my little, pink flip-phone Nokia!]
Some of the activities included going on a giant [seatless] swing, abseiling and quad-biking. I attended this trip every two years and I got to bond with so many people because of the team-working nature and our mutual characteristic — hearing loss. As young kids, we promised each other to return until we were too old for it.
On the very last trip I went on with them [I think I was 16], I realised how large the gap of communication between the Deaf and the hearing world really was. It was late at night and all the older teenagers were gathered in a spare bedroom at the end of the accommodation block, while the younger ones were sent to sleep. As usual we all joked, played games and received warnings from the adults to keep our voices down — when I noticed one of the girls who sat with us didn’t contribute to the conversation. She was silent.
This was because her main form of communication was British Sign Language, which no one in the room was fluent in. I felt bad sitting there, laughing and enjoying my time when someone right next to me couldn’t experience the same thing, because she had no idea what was going on. We all communicated through speech. Eventually, she left the room and found some other girls who knew sign language. But I’ll never forget that moment, of what may have seemed like total isolation for her. In that time, I wished I instantly knew how to sign with her instead of just knowing my ABC’s.
Although my hearing loss was completely different to hers, I felt I could somewhat relate to what it was like to be in that moment. When involving myself in extremely loud situations such as; restaurants, cafes and parties, it sometimes means I can’t hear one person at all. No matter how hard I try to decipher their words, the sound coming out of their mouths is just a jumbled, incomprehensible mess that I have no energy to figure out.
It can be hard to write positive memories about being deaf, except for my funny, hearing mishaps and beautiful moments with my D/deaf peers. But over the years, I can say that being with these people and being in this community helped build my confidence so much and made me be more assertive.
I am proud to be deaf. It is not something I will ever want to ‘fix.’
And I am so grateful for all the charities out there, local and worldwide, who work together to connect people with all types of disabilities so they know they’re not alone in this world. I am happy for all the parents who get to meet each other, to receive support on how to care for their children with disabilities on a daily basis. To advise on how to give them the best experiences and opportunities in life, with better and wider accessibility, just like every other child.
If you’re reading this and you are D/deaf/Hard of Hearing, please be proud of who you are. Fight the barriers that prevent us from succeeding and we will show the world all the wonderful things we can contribute.
As a message to my younger self, it’s ok to ask what’s going on. It’s ok to ask people to speak up or to repeat themselves, and it’s ok to call out on those who try to make you feel inferior, just because you are not the same as them. I want to reassure my younger self that her voice isn’t too loud because she is wearing hearing aids, and to not feel ashamed to say; ‘I am deaf’. I want her to feel glad that she is able to experience a world in a different light to others.
As an end note, it is truly amazing and an honour to meet people who are so different in terms of their disabilities, but all the same with their experiences in the world. The way they experience day-to-day life while remaining positive and compassionate is empowering. Because of this, I wouldn’t change mine for the world.
So, let’s hear it for the D/deaf.
Links to resources:
NDCS — National Deaf Children’s Society
BDA — British Deaf Association
RNID — Royal National Institute for Deaf People
British Sign
Sense — Sign Language
BSL Zone
Your Local Cinema
Bullying Support
Legal Rights
Deaf-Friendly Tips | https://medium.com/@sophterry17/lets-hear-it-an-anecdote-12d629c8089f | ['Sophie Terry'] | 2021-07-07 17:55:22.745000+00:00 | ['Schools', 'Deaf', 'Work', 'Bullying', 'Memoir'] |
How to Buy NFT on Rivernity | The popularity of NFT as a digital asset has increased in recent years. NFT is one of the most popular digital art buying and selling trends in 2021. The total NFT sales from 2020 to 2021 have increased by 55 percent, from US$250 million to US$389 million. NFT collectors are even willing to spend millions of dollars on a range of collectibles that includes artwork, video clips, music, and so on in digital format.
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs for short, are digital assets such as artwork, paintings, music, in-game items, and other types of work that can be collected and considered valuable. NFTs are like any other physical collector’s item. NFTs are traded online and use cryptocurrencies during the transaction process. The price of NFT that is traded is determined by the artist or content creator selling it.
How to Buy NFT on Rivernity?
If you intend to collect unique NFT assets for fun purposes or make a profit by selling them at a higher price, you can do it easily on Rivernity. Although relatively new, Rivernity has full features and lots of interesting offers. On Rivernity, NFT purchases can be made using Vex coin (VEX).
Here’s how to buy NFT on Rivernity that you can do easily.
1. Create a Vex Wallet
Before buying NFT, you must first have a Vex Wallet and connect it to Rivernity’s NFT marketplace platform.
2. Search NFT Collection
To view the available NFT collections, you can click the “Market” menu to browse the images or objects offered at Rivernity.
3. Take Benefit of The Listing Menu
On Rivernity, there is also a menu listing available. With the “Listing” feature, you can set options for selecting the object you want to search for. You can choose the latest artwork or based on the price category offered.
4. Buy NFT
Getting NFT on Rivernity is the same as on other NFT marketplaces. After you click the “Buy” button and follow the required steps, you will get NFT immediately after paying a certain amount of crypto for the asset. In addition, you can also click the “Make Offer” button if the NFT price is too high and you want to make an offer to the seller to sell the NFT at a lower price.
Suppose you have done the four steps above, congratulations! You have successfully obtained NFT. Not complicated, right? To view the NFT you have purchased, go to your profile menu and select the “In Wallet” menu. Well, that’s how to buy and get NFT on Rivernity. So are you ready to have your first NFT? | https://medium.com/@rivernityofficial/how-to-buy-nft-on-rivernity-4ed607d32a64 | ['Rivernity Official'] | 2022-01-04 12:30:50.296000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Blockchain', 'Crypto', 'Nft'] |
Black Ecology: | Black Ecology:
THE PROBLEM
A paradigm shift in communication of visuals can save us from mass extinction. One of the hardest parts of attempting to communicate about ecological topics is that they are inherently hard to see. Unlike the previous generations I grew up hearing Al Gore and a vast array of other unnamed “climate specialists” explain the unfortunate current trajectory of our species in relation to our environment, but even with this information how far has the needle been moved? Furthermore, where is the needle, and where is it going? If there’s overwhelming evidence and support what’s the hold up. How far has 20 years of “fighting” climate change got us? Well, here’s a recent headline from a popular online news website I frequent: “Researchers Argue That Earth Is In The Midst Of A Modern, Human-Made, Sixth Extinction”1.
As 2020, a year filled with revolutionary civil unrest, unprecedented labor abuse, and a global pandemic closes out, it’s easy to overmine these events into some grand conspiracy narrative or undermine them into simple scientific coincidences. Either way the unfortunate light most people are hoping for at the end of this tunnel isn’t the warming embrace of the sun’s beaming rays full of Vitamin D, it’s the blinding beam emitted from 75 volts of power running through a locomotive headlight. This headlight is powered by roaring wildfires and patches of the Ozone across the world, but just in the year of 2020 the United States spent enough money on businesses during the coronavirus to build infrastructure to settle our future as a country to fight the climate change crisis, and put pressure on other countries to follow. Like many other modern wars, the participants seem content to use it as a neverending revenue stream around the apparatus in which the problem itself is being fixed. An endless series of calcified institutions around the fight and denying of climate change itself. This institutional buildup creates additional degrees of freedom between the communication of: the problem and the solution, the subject and background, and the perceived and actual threat. This inability to perceive the threat is at no fault of the perceiver individually. Specifically, seeing a moment in time for the collective species for a problem that takes place over multiple generations globally is an impossible task for any single person or apparatus to bare. The current framework that the communication of information around ecological topics is taking place within doesn’t seem to be able to compensate for our biological handicap of not being able to register hyperobjects(2), and leads to furthering our materialistic hypocrisy. The largest of these being that we are aware of the problem but are never able to move towards solving it. Which is where there’s an opportunity for ingenuity. We need to develop a new meta way of discussing what now is climate change but will be only the first of an endless barrage of hyperobjects we will be forced to come to terms with as a species. We will be forced to confront the parameters of reality in an unguilty manner. The problem of climate change is just too large for one person to consume, so we fall back into a Climato-quietism2: which is a practical climato-scepticisme(3) different from the cognitive one.
The closer we keep getting to the problem, the less people take it seriously and the less dramatic changes everyone feels willing to make because of the overfamiliarity to the problem and the perception that a solution has already begun taking place, and is on its way from problem to solution. It’s going from here to there; point A to point B. I believe this is the fault of not having engineered a creative enough solution to communicate clearly when the opposition’s goal is to cause miscommunication. The more assumptions the viewer must make the more potential for confusion. The viewer isn’t stupid, but the system of communication can cause that appearance. The best summary I’ve found of the strategy behind climate change skeptics was in 2003 by Frank Luntz in the NYTimes stating “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.”. This use of unclarity to postpone the judgement on an issue is frequently used by many contemporary leaders of all affiliation and region. The strategy has stayed the same, but what has changed in the 17 years since that statement is the variety of mediums in which people consume information. What started as only a few of our species being able to read, has transformed into peaking to hundreds of real-time generated “realities” within the palms of our hands. So many mediums are available to the public for bad actors to create deliberate misinformation within that the term “firehosing” has been coined for the phenomenon. Also known as the object named the “Firehose of Falsehood” this propaganda technique involves broadcasting rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over a vast number of mediums (such as search results, social media, billboards, images on mugs, hats, etc etc etc). Every medium is at risk to a degree.
This confusion is made easier by the phenomenon that when being communicated to about climate change it feels like you’re being talked down upon and scolded. Not just even in person, but just generally the way the information is being presented. The information chooses to manifest itself as a brutal assault of factoids and doomsday scenarios used as ideological doctrine where one’s confused where to even find the doctrine itself. The average ecological conversations or calls to action comes to a close with the viewer feeling diminished and ineffective. This is the essence of bad marketing. Everyone “believes in science” now, but how that comes to reality isn’t being addressed. I suspect this is because that’s as far as most of us have gotten. We’re lazy in that this is the response the market has given us to communicate our intentions and we use it without questioning the medium of the message. Most discussions of any nuance within the subject are quickly aborted mostly on account of discordant variations of fact, or a misalignment between the participants preferred measures of systematic adaptation. Even when the viewpoints align close enough to agree there is no ground to be made on account the lack of executable information. On account of this phenomenon, overtime the issue is treated as a sensitive topic that people end up engaging with less because of the perceptively wide valley in between the two, but this is just a byproduct of the inherent inability to communicate information between each individual themselves and any hyperobject.
Without waiting for the ending, my guess is this will be as effective as the United States’ implementation of the “war on drugs”. It’s near impossible to deeply care about drug abuse globally or even across a nation unless it directly affects the individual, or has the perceived potential to through the communication of fear. It is impossible for a single person to comprehend the exponential effects across generations within a whole nation or globally, so it is impossible to move accordingly. Because of this, the medium in which the communication behind the topic of drugs as a whole takes place within is the real culprit. In a similar way to climate change, it is impossible to understand the nuanced complexities that led to certain drugs being pharmaceutically acceptable, and certain drugs not worth being researched at all for no justifiable pharmaceutical or ethical reason. To have effective conversation around such a complex topic requires us to start moving multiple selections of the mental model at once in our head based on rules instead of specific positions. Instead of thinking how we can move an object from here to here, we are forced to think how the system itself decides to place those models there. This is done in the hopes that we can back engineer the system to never have to move the objects in the first place; the system will just produce them within the desired order. The paradox in which many cannot get past is that this still takes place within a potentially flawed system itself.
“I think we’ve passed kneeling. I think it’s time to go into actionable items. I think everyone knows what the issue is, and we’re done with that.”
Shawn Carter was speaking on his rationale for putting into place consciously imperfect apparatuses to take steps towards tackling a known problem. In this instance, he was referring specifically to the problem of the disproportionate use of lethal force towards minorities by police officers in the United States, but I think the lesson is universal. Examine that closely, he spoke strategically when he chose to say “I think everyone knows what the issue is”. He did not choose to say “I think everyone agrees on the issue”.
SOLUTION
“We need to find a combination of state apparatus which can even be formally less democratic, more… technocratic. Why not, but which somehow directly interacts with popular opinion.“4
While Zizek was reacting specifically to the globally falling polling for confidence in democracy among Millennials, I think this concept holds true for all interactions between our perception and environment as a species. The degrees of freedom that come with increasing levels of “Checks and balances” offer proportionately increasing opportunities for energy to be lost or redirected. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for checks and balances, and checks that balance. Furthermore, I love getting checks and seeing my balance go up just like everyone else. My point is I think it’s important to be conscious of the quantity and burden that accompanies each individual layer of check and balance. Just think about it for a second, how does the “and” happen? What assessment of beauty is being made at this layer, and in turn, what does that imply is not beautiful? Who’s the one making this judgement?
This leaves the painters of meaning within a generation, with an opportunity to develop a new way of communicating with our environment about potential problems in a more efficient way. There’s an inherent trait of systems to not be able to compensate for what it doesn’t know. The framework relies on the system never reaching zero, or there would be nothing to write a check from or to. If too much energy is lost along the process then it becomes non functional, and is when we lose the ability to adapt it and it loses the ability to adapt to us. This is the potential hazard when a system is detached by so many degrees of freedom. More things going, the more things can go wrong, but what if we were able to speed up the connection in which our apparatuses communicate the problem to us? Then we would be forced to update our metaphysical version as fast as perspectively possible, and culturally aim in a specific direction. This requires connecting our apparatus to the mediums themselves in as simple and efficient a way as possible to decrease the degrees of freedom in which information could be lost. While running the risk of being a cliché from the generation I inhabit, I think this gap of communication can be bridged with technological solutions like: open sourced and decentralized technologies visualized virtually through Augmented5, and Virtual Reality6. Conceptually the goal is to use the virtual7 to blur the manifest8 and scientific images9 together virtually. So what does this actually look like? More or less it looks like a Manhattan Project within the ecological space that allows us to change how we perceive the environment to create a corresponding change in behavior.
In a previous essay I discussed the unique role the corporation has in the global public because of its ability to move internationally and distribute ethical responsibilities from any one individual person; thus, the only medium their message was limited to was the medium of the specific corporate structure, and capital itself. This is where distributed ledger technologies have the ability to innovate. Distributed Ledger Technology, more commonly known as the blockchain technology, is all about the idea of a ‘“decentralized” network against the conventional “centralized” mechanism. It has been deemed to have far-reaching implications on sectors and entities that have long relied upon a “trusted third-party.” The obvious ecological downside to this decentralization is that it requires a higher amount of energy to run all the pieces. While the market forces have started to adapt and produce a product like Ecocoin, which are earned through sustainable actions, it’s far from the perfect solution. While we could go into the exact current numbers of terawatt hours of energy used by Bitcoin versus the traditional banking industry and then contrast that with the functionality given between the two and estimated energy that it would take to compensate, I think this is a useless battle. I think the only inherent problem behind high energy consumption is the coal burning power plants in which many of the virtual mining farms draw their energy from. It makes sense as a culture to spend resources on commerce, so how is that choice of beauty within the allocation of those resources being made? It’s up to the public, obviously. I believe Distributed Ledger Technology, and decentralized technologies and general will continue to give the public the power of the desire that inherently lies within all apparatuses. What inherent desire you might ask?
If we are the message within the medium this is the medium within every message. The ghost in every machine. Maxwell’s demon!10 I’m going to spare you the physics, and interpretations as a metaphor, and the subsequent reinterpretations, because this is where I want us to consciously steer clear of the overly literal or metaphysical and bring it back down to the medium itself, and the present moment in space. What’s more real to our current lives than the digital? Not the information on it, but its existence.
Even speaking in terms of linguistics the very operating system within the computers we collectively base our reality off of have been molded by Maxwell’s thought experiment. Within the system a Daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. In a world of Daemons, the beauty of Distributed Ledger Technologies in this regard is that they let the user act as autonomously as possible, and by letting the users directly program the system it allows them to create their own desires and Daemons. This is done in an environment in which the overall systems Daemon is decentralized out to all the active users. Maximum individualism within a system that knows it can’t get out of the motivation of the system so it compensates. Obviously perfection isn’t attainable, but it is worth aiming for with the consequences of falling short keenly in mind while compensating accordingly in real time. Collectively we need a separation between the apparatus of the public from the ideology. If we could engineer it perfectly it seems like we’d want an autonomous power structure that allows and shows us how to regulate ourselves. This would require us to keep in mind the biases of the suggestion of the system itself. Enough anarchy to not let the machine run us; an off switch if it goes nuclear or dark. Politely phrased, a healthy dose of skepticism. This eject switch is important because we’re always within a system of some sort, so that system’s Daemons will always affect us. There’s always a universal outside of the self, a box you cannot think outside of. In practicality there’s no getting out of a containing system altogether. Even pure anarchy itself is a system. Being present in this moment in time comes with the obvious responsibilities of the space we inhabit. So it comes down to what will help us do that better.
Daemons are the price of autonomy, but by decentralizing the control similar to that of a Cooperatives2 it’s possible to make the individual Daemons within the system as autonomous as possible. Bitcoin and other decentralized platforms allow us to create a scenario where you have to convince less people to make change. Similar to the introduction of the printing press, this will allow people to assemble, and form a new dimension of the public realm. The same concept as kickstarter, but without the intermediary of the monetary medium itself. Similar to the transition from the page to the screen, the effect of no longer having the overhead of the material medium itself once inside the digital universe allows as efficient of transferring of information as possible. As a public we’re already being forced to use money as speech, so this just takes some of the potential for corruption/loss of information out of the process. Daemons, corruption, speaking money? I thought you promised virtual goggles and saving the rainforest?
I try my best not to lie, so here’s something to put on your face. I think one of the biggest leaps forward in rethinking how we interact with our environment visually will be the democratization of mixed reality technology via “smart glasses”. This will cause corresponding psychological and inherent physical actions in accordance with whatever patterns of organization the system inhabits. This will be the next step in the public’s symbiosis with the “smartphone” that started with the IWatches and its competitors, but dates back to the effects of overlaying hierarchical moveable type within our environment via signage. The difference between signage and this new real-time virtual image is the increased subjectivity; meaning, everyone can see a different sign. This has the potential to fragment the public into different versions of reality similar to the phenomenon of “echo chambers” within the public spaces created by social media platforms. Similar to social media, companies, Apple’s upcoming ‘Apple Glass’ appears poised to become increasingly interested in how we work and live as a public. This will unlock a new conversation around the virtual image the public constructs of its environment and thus, itself. What is allowed and isn’t allowed to be displayed and what are the degrees of separation between this version of reality and the participatory public.
In that, I mean the public will be affected by it whether consciously participating or not. Functioning similar to contemporary social media and politics in that we do not have to be signed up for an account on Twitter for what happens on the platform to affect us. This is where I think it will be possible to metaphorically weld in a visual scoreboard containing the projected apocalypse timer. A visual representation of the Doomsday Clock, or more sinisterly phrased as ecological propaganda created by the educated. As a public, not having access to such an apparatus of real time communication with our environment feels like setting the goal of losing weight, but not being able to weigh one’s self with an at home scale. Furthermore, it actually feels like trying to lose weight, and when you go to the doctor to get a checkup she/he doesn’t give you the results, instead the information is delivered via the following day’s front page article on The New York Times with the title “You’re Getting Fat: The Story of Death”.
So, what does an ethical apocalypse timer look like? I think it looks like a Los Angeles, California resident sitting bored in traffic for hours having the ability to look up in the sky and see a visual representation of the ozone health, pollution levels, or any other data a semi autonomous group decides they would like to give the public the ability to display that the user finds important(Gamma light, ULTRAviolet light, air quality, etc etc etc). The public will soon have the ability to Visually Sample11 any piece of data in any manner. In other words, we will interact with Data visualization on a higher frequency of occasions and have more opportunities to deploy and to organize the subcomponents of this process.
There could easily be a future where such public displays of data could be viewed as potential misinformation if not run through a corporatized bureaucratic structure, or political apparatus. Similar to the church with the printing press and the film industry with the screen, the early adopters of this new public virtual will set the rules. These rules will directly shape the way we understand our environment, thus, how we understand our own perception of beauty. This new mixed reality gives us the perception of possessing the ability to heighten our senses, but what will be drastically different will be that there will be a process function within everything we perceive visually. Adding this process function adds a minimum of one more degree of freedom within the system; this causes there to be an intermediary between our environment and our perception as a public. Which bears to question, where does the data come from that pilots these sensors? What message is in this medium?
The development of this assemblage that is the public virtual image will depend on the autonomy and knowledge of the sub-systems in which this data is produced. Data quality is a measure of the condition of data based on factors such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, reliability and whether it’s up to date. Why is data important? As data processing has become more intricately linked with business operations and organizations increasingly use data analytics to help drive business decisions, there will undoubtedly be attempts to manipulate the data which powers these decisions instead of the decisions themselves. The use of bad data causes bad analysis, which causes the designers and creators to create bad processes. Who needs to lie to someone if you can make them not believe the truth when you tell them. This is most apparent in the manipulation that has taken place around research data as a result of financial incentives. Furthermore, bad data can destroy the user’s confidence in the system itself. This manipulation of data has drastically negatively affected the public’s opinion of scientific research itself. Although it’s generally recommended to possess a small dose of skepticism, this engulfment within the medium itself will require an increased amount of distrust of the containing system. One of the most repeated cultural truisms in contemporary culture is “don’t believe everything you read”. This has taken on a whole new level of cultural relevance during our contemporary Post-Truth time. Thanks to phenomena like “fake” news, there has been an increased awareness about the process functions within the mediums that create the messages of “news”. How does one spot fake news? A lot like bad data we look at the process that gave us that information. The healthy distrust of the containing system requires an understanding of the system itself. Landauer’s principle holds that “any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment”. Another way of phrasing Landauer’s principle is that if an observer loses information about a physical system, the observer loses the ability to extract work from that system. Extracting work, or any “truth” from a system requires knowledge of how the system operates. This forced responsibility will cause us to adapt, becoming more conscious about the quality of data that travels inside of our brains. Speaking of inside our brains, one of the most impactful technological innovations in the development of this virtual public image is happening in Neuralink’s development of a brain-chip interface. Brain implants themselves are not new — research and development have been going on, tested, and used since the 1970s. It’s just that previously, brain implants have not been considered enhancements, but a medical procedure aimed at reaching some desired functioning version of mental homeostasis. In an attempt at not getting lost down the what ifs and predictions, we’ll just leave that to mull over individually at a later date.
If Gutenberg’s Galaxy is what we may regard today as the accumulated body of recorded Manifest and Scientific images, then I believe ecological awareness has the potential to be the gateway into a galaxy of mixed realities which consist of the aforementioned realities combined virtually. In short, the public, aware or unaware, will have developed a virtual meta language. It will change how we perceive ourselves, which I believe is one of the stimuli that will force us as a species to renegotiate the relationship between our ideology and reality. Ideologically speaking people have been trained to have an overwhelming amount of skepticism and casting away of any grand narrative, or any drop of universalism. Residing within a pessimistic generation, I didn’t see many hopes of such a universally free system, but I believe the recent COVID-19 global pandemic was the re-awakening of collective responsibility since the great nap we’ve experienced since World War II, and now everyone has a healthy dose of skepticism. Not in the existence of a grand narrative, oh contraire, I believe we are now skeptical of the ability to get outside such grand narratives. I believe it has reignited the public realization that there is one and that we participate voluntarily or involuntarily. Inevitably some users still won’t care, and everything is just one long blackout. Which only leaves to question, what is humanity’s role on this planet? Without sidestepping the question, I believe it is all autonomous acts of “informing matter with meaning, and expressing meaning with matter”12, and the responsibility that these acts bare.
The practical effects of this blackout of ecology is the hypocritical ignorance of ignoring the undeniable shifts in way of life for a massive amount of people around the world including: the rising temperature in Antarctica causing the ice caps to melt faster, the hole in the Ozone layer over Australia which is causing higher rates of skin cancer, the building water crisis in Egypt, etc. etc. etc… Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think visualization will cure these things in itself, but I do think it will spark the brains that subconsciously move us to, as a public, better understand our environment and our current place within it. The global ecology crisis will continue to be treated like it has been so far, being fought tooth and nail over every inch. As the generation burdened with dislodging these objects the only option available is to engineer solutions to efficiently loosen the objects, while simultaneously beginning to find new teeth and nails, all while contemplating why we even have these objects to begin with. Okay, maybe this isn’t the only option, but I think it is the option that has the highest probability of success as a public. An ecological Manhattan project, but the ecological Gadget will aim to let the public create instead of destroy in an architecturally aware manner through all aspects of being. The power is being slowly given to create everything we perceive in a hyper, but self-aware manner. Everything’s for sale, all that’s left is to negotiate the price.
Notes:
1 ) Paul Bledsoe, The New York Times: Going Nowhere Fast on Climate, Year After Year
2 ) Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Hyperobject are things that are massively distributed throughout time and space relative to humans
3 ) Bruno LaTour, War and peace in an age of ecological conflicts, 2014
4 ) Slavoj Zizek, RT: Why have millennials lost faith in democracy?, 2020
5 ) Augmented Reality is overlaying the virtual on top of what you’re perceptually seeing and has been around for a long time at this point, but thanks to advancements in machine learning has become highly more effective in recent time.
6 ) Virtual Reality is an immersive artificial environment which is experienced through sensory stimuli (such as sights and sounds) provided by a computer and in which one’s actions partially determine what happens in the environment. This became open to the public
7 ) The virtual refers to an aspect of reality that is ideal, but nonetheless real. A virtual memory is “real but not actual, ideal but not abstract” — Marcel Proust
8 ) The Manifest Image is the understanding of itself and the world that humankind has developed throughout history, and which is deeply ingrained in both folk conceptions and philosophical traditions.
9 ) The Scientific Image is the understanding of the world that has arisen through new techniques of inquiry and through the modern revolutions in science through technology.
10 ) Maxwell’s demon is a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 in which he suggested how the second law of thermodynamics might hypothetically be violated. In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small door between two compartments of gas. As individual gas molecules approach the door, the demon quickly opens and shuts the door so that only fast molecules are passed into one of the chambers, while only slow molecules are passed into the other. Because faster molecules are hotter, the demon’s behavior causes one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down, thereby decreasing entropy and violating the second law of thermodynamics. This thought experiment has provoked debate and theoretical work on the relation between thermodynamics and information theory extending to the present day, with a number of scientists arguing that theoretical considerations rule out any practical device violating the second law in this way.
11 ) Visual Sample: A component used to change the way an object is viewed
12 ) Matthieu Pageau, The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, 2020 | https://medium.com/@zacounts/black-ecology-4c03afa3cee5 | [] | 2020-12-18 20:37:26.058000+00:00 | ['Ecology', 'Aesthetics', 'Virtual Reality', 'Augmented Reality', 'Contemporary Art'] |
The Rome Tale | {Based on the Rome Entry by @Zidakalu and @EbunAdedeji on Twitter}
As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon — don’t be afraid of them: Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy
The first time my father struck me, I was a child, just learning to walk. The first time he touched me, I was much older.
He was lying in front of me. His eyes were closed, his skin was paper, his breath was dust. Servants came in and brought wine, medicine from the aged woman two homes over. We had prayed to Apollo, sacrificed our cows, but my father must have known he was going to die. The gods must have known, and so the servants. I knew, and that was why I stayed; so I could see it with my own eyes.
I was the only child my father had legitimately, my mother had run away several years ago, and there was the issue of inheritance. He was a rich man, who didn’t know the name of Sestilius through the town? And who hadn’t stared at his daughter, Aurelia as I walked across the market, my eyes hard, my fists clenched?
I held his hand as held mine and there was something he was saying. Something he was aching to breathe out.
“Ithaka,” he muttered, straining against god and man to speak, “find…it. Ithaka. Your inheritance.”
The funeral rites were performed and I was on my way crossing the boundaries of Ostia, my home, entering the wilderness. The air was heavy as I began my journey, thick with melancholy. A man had been crucified days ago, a Jew. Some said he was the son of god; some said he was a charlatan. But all agreed that something was amiss the day that he died. Something not completely natural.
As I walked through the outskirts of the town, the crosses of criminals were still erected and some of the men, I assume, were still alive and they were casting dark shadows on the path I walked. Their eyes pleaded me as I walked. I did not look back.
My journey was long, and it was hard. Ithaka sounded Greek, maybe it was a man, I thought, and so, I sailed to Greece. The winds were treacherous and the waters were cruel. We begged Neptune to give us safe travel and we sacrificed three men to him. He did not calm down until the fourth was thrown over the port.
I arrived at Athens and looked for the man called Ithaka. I asked passersby and children. But none had heard the name. I asked an old woman with one eye and she smiled and pointed to a merchant who sold jewels. “Go to him,” she said. “Ithaka is there.”
I walked to the merchant, and I asked him, “You,” I said, “are you Ithaka?”
He said he had never heard the name before. But he had a nice smile, I thought. He carried himself in a way I found tender.
In a year and two, we were wed.
As we lay in bed one night, he said to me, “What if Ithaka is a place and not a man? What if your father wanted you to find it? ”
And so, we began our travels.
We sailed to every colony conquered by Caesar and those that were not. We saw men and women of all colours and creeds. We encountered phoenician traders and european braggards. But we did not find Ithaka. It was something the old seemed to know of and smile, pointing us in unknown directions and that made the young mutter and scratch their heads, saying they had never heard such before.
There were days that we had no place to sleep or eat. Days when we had encountered monsters of all sorts, men and otherwise, but we found happiness in the journey, peace in each other.
By the time I had reached Ostia, with thanks to the goddess Juno, I had a child in my womb. And once she was born, I named her Valeria.
One day, she asked me if I ever did find Ithaka. I looked at her as her father walked in with his profits from the market, as he grabbed her and she squealed, as I looked at him and our eyes locked, each aflame with lives that had been lived well, and then, I told her the truth.
I had found Ithaka.
I had found it for a while. | https://medium.com/the-world-tales/the-rome-tale-8486188516a0 | ['Anthony Azekwoh'] | 2019-06-29 19:38:20.713000+00:00 | ['Rome', 'Story', 'Short Fiction', 'Fiction', 'Short Story'] |
Scott Smith on How to Care for Your Koi Pond | An elaborate outdoor habitat, koi ponds provide both color and vibrancy to a backyard setting. Although koi fish are extremely resilient, they also require certain environmental conditions to thrive. Currently residing in Saratoga Springs, New York, Scott Smith is a successful businessmen and entrepreneur who enjoys tending to his personal koi pond in his spare time. He discusses his tips for properly caring for a koi pond.
1. Be Sure to Clean Your Pond Regularly
Implementing a proper pump and filtration system will ensure pond water flows smoothly without the build-up of debris. Take the time to read the manufacturers instructions to be sure the system will work with your pond’s specifications. Scott Smith stresses the importance of regularly cleaning your pond, and suggests that every time you pass by, to remove any surface debris which can lead to decay.
2. Regulate Your Pond’s Water Temperature
It is important to regulate your pond’s temperature, especially during summer months where oxygen levels may suffer if the water goes above 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Scott recommends keeping the water cool with various aquatic plants that can provide an extensive amount of shade.
Additionally, it is important that your pond does not freeze during the winter season. A de-icer will prevent this from happening and will ensure the fish receive a sufficient supply of oxygen all year round.
3. Change the Pond Water Weekly
Evaporation causes water levels to decrease, leaving behind various substances that may lower the quality of the water. Due to this, it is highly recommended to remove roughly 10–15 percent of remaining pond water each week and refill it with fresh water. Individuals should also consider changing out the plants during the summer months.
Likewise, it is important that the pH of the water be between 7 and 8.6 — you can regularly perform tests by using a water kit.
4. Avoid Overfeeding Your Fish
According to Scott Smith, overfeeding is a common beginner mistake when it comes to maintaining a koi pond. Overfeeding can result in poor water quality which can initiate a wide range of issues including parasites and various diseases. Likewise, it is essential to maintain a healthy fish population as an excessive amount of waste can lead to an imbalance of pond water.
5. Control the Amount of Algae
Algae growth is a common problem and can deprive koi fish of the oxygen they require. Scott Smith claims that algaecides can help control growth, but it is important to research the proper amount beforehand.
Koi ponds are a terrific addition to any backyard setting and can be a source of rejuvenation and relaxation. Scott Smith of Saratoga Springs recommends those thinking of building a pond to first perform the necessary research to ensure you have the resources to care for the fish year-round.
Ensuring Proper Care
A koi pond can be a relaxing and meditative experience, but it is important to ensure the proper annual maintenance to ensure the longevity of your outdoor oasis. | https://medium.com/scott-a-smith/how-to-care-for-your-koi-pond-7056ab7ddf2 | ['Scott Smith'] | 2019-06-10 16:36:31.227000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'New York', 'Nature', 'DIY', 'How To'] |
AWS — Deploying React With NodeJS App On ECS | AWS — Deploying React With NodeJS App On ECS
A step by step guide with an example project
Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash
AWS provides more than 100 services and it’s very important to know which service you should select for your needs. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS lets you launch and stop container-based applications with simple API calls, allows you to get the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features.
In this post, we are going to deploy React application with nodejs environment. First, we dockerize our app and push that image to Amazon ECR and run that app on Amazon ECS.
Example Project
Prerequisites
Dockerize the Project
Pushing Docker Image To ECR
Deploying On AWS ECS
Accessing Webapp in the Browser
Cleaning Up
Summary
Conclusion
Example Project
This is a simple project which demonstrates developing and running React application with NodeJS. We have a simple app in which we can add users, count, and display them at the side, and retrieve them whenever you want.
Example Project
If you want to practice your own here is a Github link to this project. You can clone it and run it on your machine as well. | https://medium.com/bb-tutorials-and-thoughts/aws-deploying-react-with-nodejs-app-on-ecs-6847ca470c09 | ['Bhargav Bachina'] | 2020-06-22 00:35:40.969000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Programming', 'AWS', 'Web Development', 'Docker'] |
Disney: Is This Entertainment Giant Too Big to Fail? | Disney is a cultural icon, hosting well loved historical and contemporary products that hold an important place in our cultural zeitgeist. From the animated Disney classics to their modern live action reimaginings, Disney is cemented in popular culture from an early age. Now with recent acquisitions of Lucas Films, Marvel and 21st Century Fox, Disney has added some of the most popular franchises of the day to their collection. Finally, with Disney+, Disney is hoping to enter into the competitive online streaming market to compete with giants like Netflix.
Even as a cultural and commercial giant, Disney still faces risks that need to be mitigated as it enters into new markets, navigates challenges due to COVID-19, and interacts with audiences who have changing tastes in the media they consume.
Identifying Problems
Netflix was the first major player on the scene of on-demand video streaming, offering a comparatively good deal on movie rentals and a large selection of offerings compared to brick and mortar video rental services. Netflix commands a large slice of the market share, and the remaining availability is already being fought over by other platforms like Hulu, Crave and Amazon Prime. Disney is showing up late to the party with Disney+, and many consumers are already loyal to their current video streaming platforms. With Disney+, Disney is primarily betting on consumers valuing them as the exclusive offerer of their existing vault of classic content, which includes both historical Disney classics and the recent offerings of all of the Disney acquisitions (such as from Marvel, Lucas Films and 21st Century Fox). While there is certainly a market for this content, a major driver for consumers is access to new exclusive content.
Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash
Disney+ has already released The Mandalorian, and has plans for television entries into the Marvel universe, but are these projects enough to keep up with other streaming platforms? With current and recently announced offerings, Disney+ either hosts content that viewers have seen before, or at least content that takes place with familiar characters in familiar places, told through familiar voices targeting familiar demographics. At the end of the day, Disney+ may be offering content that is new, it doesn’t seem to be offering content that is novel.
One successful recent acquisition by Disney is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which recently released it’s culminating entry in the self defined twenty three movie “Infinity Saga” with Avengers: Endgame. While Avengers: Endgame boasts the top box office sales of any movie ever, the ending of the Infinity Saga presents a risk for Disney and one of their flagship properties. Will consumers accept the ending of the story as told by the existing movies, and not subscribe to future entries? Will the appetite for superhero movies go the way of westerns and kung-fu films, resigned to classic movies and niche audiences? Disney has bet the success of Disney+ partially on Marvel fans looking to continue the stories of familiar characters through TV series like WandaVision, Loki and Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but audiences latching on to these offerings is certainly not a guarantee.
In addition, Disney has struggled with underwhelming public reception of some of its recent productions, such as live action remake of past animated properties and new entries into existing universes. For example, live action remakes of “Dumbo” earned just $116 million in its global debut, which is disappointing considering its massive expenses of a $170 million budget before marketing. Another example is the divisive public reaction to the three most recent entries into the Star Wars franchise, in Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Solo: a Star Wars Story (2018) and Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). While the Episodes remained commercially successful despite their ratings, Solo: a Star Wars story failed to capture audiences critically or commercially.
The commercial success of Star Wars toys, games and other axillary products, as well as Star Wars themed theme parks is a closely guarded secret, but will most likely more than make up for any losses in film, yet the lack of trust between long time fans and Disney in the handling of the recent film entry remains prevalent.
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
Discussion of Alternatives and Recommendation
COVID-19 took the world by storm causing several interruptions to the entertainment sector in 2020. Importantly, the closing of movie theatres pushed back the release of major films, and social distancing protocols reduced the capacity of theme parks. In addition, high job loss numbers reduced the amount of discretionary spending on toys and games.
One sector that has maintained consistent strength is home streaming, and luckily, Disney released Disney+ just in time to compete for that demand. As such, I anticipate that Disney+ will be Disney’s main source of revenue for 2020, or at least make up a disproportionately significant amount. Disney strategically priced Disney+ to best compete with other video streaming services, especially during the pandemic. By pricing the service at $6.99 per month, compared with Netflix at $12.99 per month, Crave at $9.99 per month, and Amazon Prime at $7.99 per month, Disney+ positioned itself as the best value for consumers who may be especially price conscious due to COVID-19.
The extensive and exclusive offerings from Disney’s wide repertoire is one more reason Disney+ is an alluring offering for consumers. These factors have contributed to initial success for the Disney+ platform as the Disney streaming service reached the 50 million-subscriber level in early April 2020, a milestone Disney predicted it would not hit until 2023. As Disney looks to continue to grow their subscriber base, it should also be conscious of keeping its current subscribers engaged. | https://medium.com/swlh/disney-is-this-entertainment-giant-too-big-to-fail-92458cb24231 | ['Justin Draper'] | 2020-08-05 09:26:14.755000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Disney', 'Pop Culture', 'Streaming', 'Culture'] |
Exploring Jamal Murray’s Inconsistencies | Jamal Murray is coming off a historic run during last seasons NBA playoffs which featured him scoring 50 points twice and his Denver Nuggets taking down the highly anticipated Western Conference Champions, Los Angeles Clippers. Murray’s play was underscored even more given his unpredictable game to game performances during the regular season. I decided to search through Murray’s numbers to gain a better insight into his inconsistent play.
Murray’s basic stat line is deceiving on a cursory look. 18.5 points per game on 45.5% from the field and 35% from deep. But if one were to look at his game logs, namely, at his FG%, another picture comes to light.
Given the strangeness of Murray’s high variance FG%, the types of shots he took must have lead to this wildly inefficient game to game FG%.
This is Jamal Murray’s shot chart from the 2019–2020 season. What stuck out immediately was that he took more midrange jumpers than shots at the rim. Why? His expected value at the rim was significantly higher. An intuitive answer would lead one to think that since there was a center clogging the lane, getting to the rim was harder. But that answer doesn’t work here because Jokic is not a “traditional” center who plants himself in the paint. On the contrary! The lane should have been more open than usual.
The underlying question becomes, when Murray shot poorly, was he missing those midrange jump shots and/or was he not at the rim enough?
For comparison, I looked at Damian Lillard’s shot chart who has a similar usage rate and style of play. Maybe taking a lot of midrange jumpers isn’t as abnormal as I thought.
Lillard’s shot chart is much more efficient. More threes, more shots at the rim, and significantly less midrange jumpers. (Granted, Lillard attempted 5 more shots per game on average). Lillard had less variance in his game to game FG% compared to Murray and a F-test confirmed that the variances were statistically different.
Chris Paul and Kevin Durant, who take a high frequency of midrange jump shots like Murray, both shoot better than him in the long and short midrange per PBPStats.com. If one is going to take a high frequency of midrange jumpers, the respective FG% needs be upwards of 50% like Paul and Durant to make the shot “worth it.”
Less efficient does not necessarily equal more inconsistent. One could have a very high average with a high variance or a very low average with basically no variance. But that isn’t the case with Murray. He has a below league average FG% and eFG%. Per NBA.com, Murray is only shooting 41% on two point pull-ups (which is how many of his midrange shots are created) and is in the top 10 in the league for shots between 15–19 feet. His less efficient shots are intertwined in his variance and ultimately his inconsistent play.
Here is a chart that plots game-to-game FG% standard deviation against percentage of shots at the rim for 22 comparable players. Murray’s point is indicated by the arrow. There is a clear trend that for more shots at the rim, the lower the respective variance. Thus, if Murray were to attempt more shots at the rim and limit his midrange jumpers, one would expect his variance to shrink.
Yet, I needed to gain some more context into Murray’s shot selection.
The Nuggets run a good amount of pick and roll and dribble hand offs, mainly with Jokic and Murray. Often, Murray got a switch or “semi-switch” but he settled for a pull-up, step back, or running jump shot instead of going hard to the rim.
This play begins with a Jokic-Murray dribble hand off and Vucevic switches on to Murray. This scenario is exactly what Denver wants. But why doesn’t Murray attack Vucevic on the switch and go to the hoop? If Gordon helps, Milsap would be open for a dunk.
This play is a simple Jokic-Murray pick and roll. Saric hedges and Murray, seeing the entire right side of the floor open, wisely, rejects the screen and starts his drive to the basket. But instead of going hard to the rim, Murray steps back for a 15 foot jumper when he could have beaten Saric to the hoop.
There are times when a midrange jumper is a quality shot. The opposing team’s center will drop back on the pick and roll (in this case Meyers Leonard) and Murray will walk into an open jumper, but he will miss. Yet, this pick should come further away from the basket so he can walk into a three, not a long two (which we will see with Lillard).
Other times, teammates are open or will be open if he continues his drive to the basket instead of pulling up. We saw that in the Vucevic clip and here too.
This play starts as another Jokic-Murray pick and roll and Capela switches on to Murray. If Murray keeps his drive alive, Craig will be open for a corner three as Harden has shaded into the paint, Jokic (who is already open), will be under the basket for an easy layup and Grant will be open on the baseline as Tucker is already coming over to help.
On the other hand, Murray is not afraid to go to the rim on a switch or “semi-switch” which makes this overarching question more interesting.
Here, the Jokic-Murray pick and roll forces Baynes to switch on to Murray and Murray goes hard to the rim.
In this play, Murray breaks free with a pump fake and Towns switches on to Murray and Murray drives to the hoop.
In both of these plays, Murray could have pulled up or stepped back for a jumper but instead made the right play and drove to the hoop.
The film begs the question: How is Jokic effecting Murray’s shot selection?
Per nbashotcharts.com, Murray attempts more shots in the midrange when Jokic is off the floor. Since Jokic demands so much attention on the perimeter because of his elite playmaking ability, driving lanes are more open than when Mason Plumlee is playing center.
I watched some film of Lillard for comparison. The pick and roll is the bread and butter of the Blazers offense. A big difference I spotted is that the pick is set much higher for Lillard giving him more room to operate and make decisions.
Look how high the pick comes for Lillard. Jokic doesn’t want to come all the way up to contest given Lillard’s quickness and speed. But Jokic can’t let him walk into a three, which is exactly what happens.
Here, again, the pick is beyond the three point line. The defense blitzes the pick and roll but it’s not a problem for Lillard. He can blow by or split the defense with a clear path to rim and he doesn’t settle for a jump shot.
I watched 25 random pick and rolls for Murray and Lillard. The ball screen is regularly set for Lillard 3 to 5 feet behind the three point line whereas for Murray, it is usually set at the three point line or just beyond.
Why is Jokic (or Plumlee) setting screens for Murray at the three-point line? These screens should be set a few feet back thereby causing more pressure on the defense and giving Murray more room to operate and make decisions like the Blazers do with Lillard. Additionally, giving Jokic more room to roll to the hoop and allowing him to carve out the defense with his elite passing abilities is another added benefit. From watching the film, it appears that a lot of Murray’s midrange jumpers are “circumstantial.”
But even so, look at these two similar plays. Both start as a pick and roll. Lillard-Whiteside and Jokic-Murray. Jokic switches on to Lillard and Okafor swithces on to Murray. However, while Lillard chooses to go the rim, Murray settles for a fade-away.
It seems to be that when Murray shoots poorly, much can be explained from his midrange jump shots. If Murray attacks the rim more often, his game to game FG% and overall play would be more consistent. Additionally, those open midrange jump shots can transform into threes or open driving lanes to the rim if Jokic sets higher screens for Murray. Murray is a solid three point shooter where defenses would not welcome him stepping into an open three. It would be prudent for the Nuggets to take a closer look at Murray’s shot selection and the underlying causes behind them in order to optimize their chances at winning. | https://medium.com/@mosheschwartz10/explaining-jamal-murrays-inconsistencies-c46c4d89d128 | ['Moshe Schwartz'] | 2020-12-28 15:23:20.377000+00:00 | ['NBA', 'Basketball', 'Nuggets', 'Jamal Murray'] |
Learning Big O Notation with Swift | Congratulations! As someone reading this series, you’re probably familiar with the basics of Swift/iOS Development and may be in the process of writing your next app. When building software, a question we often ask ourselves is what should be our definition of done. As an individual contributor working on a large project, features in your application may be determined by business stakeholders or a project lead. However, it takes more than requirements to build software users will love. Great systems combine detailed analysis, stellar features and performance.
As we start our journey understanding algorithms and data structures, an idea that unites each concept is the theme of Asymptotic Analysis. Often viewed as a complex topic, asymptotics is the process of describing the efficiency of algorithms as their input size grows. The notion of tracking algorithmic performance can reveal much about a solution’s effectiveness. Ironically, this area of study was primarily developed before the introduction of modern computing. Today, this provides an advantage when testing new ideas and communicating with other developers. In computer science, asymptotics is expressed in a standard format known as Big O Notation.
LINEAR TIME
Even though we sometimes think of algorithms as complex systems, in essence, they are merely recipes for completing a series of operations. For example, a simple algorithm shared across all programming languages is a loop. In Swift, this can be written using a straightforward technique called fast enumeration. As such, we can write a simple algorithm to find a specific number in a sequence:
let sequence : Array<Int> = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] //linear time - O(n)
func linearSearch(for value: Int, list: Array<Int>) -> Bool {
//check all possible values
for number in list {
if number == value {
return true
}
}
return false
} //execute search
let isFound: Bool = linearSearch(for: 8, list: sequence)
When evaluating this function we say that it works in linear time — O(n) because the effectiveness of its main action (e.g., search) is directly related to the size of its input (e.g., sequence). As a result, we can conclude that it would take longer for the function to find the value of 10 than 2 or 3. To summarize, the algorithm will have to iterate through the complete set of values when searching for a non-present value like 16. In most cases, linear time operations are referred to as being “brute force” because little effort goes into how they could run more efficiently. However, linear-based activities still provide value when prototyping complex systems in a technical interview or real-world setting.
CONSTANT TIME
When evaluating algorithms, it’s often ideal to code a solution where the size of the data input has no direct relationship on performance. Consider successful search algorithms like Google or machine learning solutions used on websites like Netflix and Amazon. These systems run in constant time and are represented with the symbol O(1). A significant difference between a linear and constant operation is logic. In the case of Google, many hardware and software complexities are put in place to ensure things work as quickly as possible. However, not all constant time operations need to be complicated. Consider the following:
//constant time operations - O(1) class Stack<T> {
var store : [T] = [] func peek() -> T? {
return store.last
} func push(_ value: T) {
store.append(value)
} func pop() -> T? {
return store.isEmpty ? nil : store.removeLast()
}
}
Known as a Stack data structure, this implementation is a favorite among hiring managers when conducting technical interviews. The reason? A Stack combines ideas found in native iOS Development (e.g., UINavigationController) along with specific language syntax (e.g., collections and generics) coupled with knowledge of Big O Notation. As shown, what makes a Stack useful is how it performs. For example, all actions can be executed without having to search through or analyze previously added items.
THE INTERVIEW PROCESS
Even though we’ve reviewed two specific examples, we shouldn’t think of algorithms and data structures as something to memorize to get through the technical interview process. As a developer, one can think of concepts like Big O Notation as a tool to evaluate one’s code for completeness as well as effectiveness. For example, much of Apple’s owns technical SDK documentation explains its frameworks with this commonly used terminology.
However, if you are indeed preparing for a technical interview, other regularly seen algorithmic running times include logarithmic time — O(log n), O(n log n) and O(n2). Plotted on a graph, we can see how these compare: | https://medium.com/swift-algorithms-data-structures/learn-big-o-notation-with-swift-4ab83195859e | ['Wayne Bishop'] | 2020-12-07 18:29:33.342000+00:00 | ['Xcode', 'Interview Questions', 'Algorithms', 'Swift', 'iOS App Development'] |
Let Me Tell You About My Father | When I was a kid, my relatives used to refer to my father as my attorney. But he’s not a lawyer; he didn’t even take any law-related courses during college. What he did actually take was marine engineering, but unfortunately, he wasn’t able to complete his degree because he and our mother had my brother. My father is a tricycle driver, a housekeeper — together with my mother, he became a traffic enforcer in our municipality and now a barangay tanod.
But they used to call my father my attorney because he’s the first person I always run to whenever I get upset with other people teasing me or making fun of me, he’s always the first one to the rescue. He would always take my side when my brother and I are fighting (to be fair, I think it’s my mother to my brother and youngest sister). He’s the first person who would stop my mother from scolding me. Most of all, I think he’s always the first one who will make me stop crying whenever he felt that they have scolded me too much.
They call my father my attorney because they think I am his favorite. But I could not agree with them because when I was a kid, all I can see was his side who’s always mad at me, who’s always strict, and who’s always scary. Although I usually hear from my friends, whenever they meet or get to talk to my father, that my father is really nice. But I could not see him the way they see him because, for me, my father was actually scary. He was so strict (even until now) that I think me and my siblings became so conscious of our actions because we were so afraid to make mistakes or say anything that would displease him. I think most kids experienced this, too. Well, the tendency for me, I had hidden secrets from him and my mother. Because I was so afraid for them to hate me or I was so afraid to disappoint them, but that’s what will make them hate you most; secrets and lies.
I was so afraid to disappoint my father because he had high hopes in me, I think he expected so much from me. I used to be a student with good grades in elementary, and when I was just starting to soar high, my wings were cut and I didn’t even dare to try to fly again. Because I had been sick, and I used that as an excuse not to try my best.
But when I have decided to try again, be one of those cream of the crop students, I couldn’t keep up with the pressure of so much expectations from him. I rebelled against the idea of being the best because I thought my father would never accept any of my failures and he would never see that I am trying my best. He wanted me to excel, to be the best, to be good with what I do, to have good grades. I thought he was pressuring me all along because he wanted to have the best daughter, then I realized, he just wanted what’s best for me.
Maybe if I had realized this soon enough, I could have made it to the top. I could have made him and my mother prouder with all the achievements I could have gotten. But the thing is that most lessons come from experience, and we will never learn if we had things easy for us because the greatest lessons are learned the hardest ways.
If our lives had been a little different and if things had been quite easy for us, I might not have realized the value of even the smallest things he’s doing for us. Because as we look at a bigger picture, we tend to miss the value of the smallest things within it.
As I go back to my childhood days, I have remembered how many times our father said no to our requests, how many times he said he couldn’t buy us what we want. But at the end of the day, he would give us what we have requested anyway. I used to hate it whenever he said no to me because I always felt that I have always been rejected. But I didn’t realize before that my father was doing his best to give us what we want and what we need, no matter how hard it could be for him.
Imagine the frustration that you have when you can’t buy something for yourself? It’s somehow the same frustration for our parents but to a greater extent. They always put their children first and they have almost always forgotten about themselves because they want us to live better lives. Because all they want is for us to be happy. That made me realize one more thing. Our parents’ hearts are the ones that break the most when ours got broken because for sure they think that they fail to be our parent; they think that they fail to protect us.
We were busy hating our parents for not being who we want them to be, but then I realized, as much as they want to be the perfect parents in the world, they can’t. Because everyone commits mistakes, and we are all far from being perfect, even our parents. But that doesn’t mean they’re not trying their best to be good parents. Who knows how to be the perfect parent, anyway? No one.
Most of the time, we give less credit to our parents because they can’t be the parents we want them to be. Because we were blinded by the envy that we feel towards the other kids that we thought have better parents, we often disregard the fact that our parents are trying their best. We often give them less appreciation than what they deserve.
So allow me to tell you what I love about my father. He’s scary and strict, yes, but he’s hardworking. He’s always supportive. He’s always proud of us that he would always want to show us off; for example, whenever there’s a videoke in every gathering, he wants my sister and I to sing (OMG I hated this when I was a kid and now I’m just laughing about this).
He would always be the first one who gets worried when my sister and I are crying, and he gets paranoid when one of us is sick or when we do not update them on our whereabouts or if I finally got home from work (especially when I was in Manila). He always makes sure that we are fine, and we are not exhausting ourselves. And whenever he feels that we need to take a break, he would be the first one to remind us that we also need some rest. Beneath a strict façade, there lies his caring personality with a soft heart, most especially for his two daughters.
And the most important lesson he taught us? Help people whenever you can. If you can’t, then find a way to help even in the smallest way possible. The important thing is that you helped. This made a great impact on my life that I want to spend my life helping people because that’s what you taught us. We met a lot of good people in our lives who helped us, too, and I love how you value them and want to be of help to other people as well. I love how you taught us to help those who are in need.
I don’t know where this is going, actually. I have just written my thoughts about my father. There are a lot to know about him, a lot of stories to share so let’s just keep it this way for now so I won’t run out of stories every year. You’re just 50, and you will still go a long, long way. There would be even more stories about you that would be worth sharing.
P.S. I still can’t forget how you have forgotten to pick me up from school because you were drunk. That’s still one of the funniest stories we have! | https://medium.com/@carmelabajarmatibag/let-me-tell-you-about-my-father-c9c94c48e914 | ['Carmela Matibag'] | 2020-12-01 02:04:29.907000+00:00 | ['Birthday', 'Best Dad Ever', 'Father And Daughter', 'Letter To My Father', 'Tribute'] |
No one’s saving you and signs you need to get into the passenger seat of your life. | You allow the opinions of others to influence your everyday endeavors :
Now nothing wrong with asking for advice when it comes to crucial matters you’re not educated on but there’s a fine line between lacking trust in yourself and not being knowledgeable on certain topics, because we certainly can’t know it all but many a times we ask for others opinion or even worse blindly follow others unsolicited opinions due to a deep lack of trust in ourselves, ask yourself, are you following others opinions because you genuinely agree with them or are you following their opinions due to fear and lack of trust in your otherwise competent abilities?
Your emotions are a reflection of others emotions :
As humans we are inherently empathetic except for the few psychopaths amidst us, where people pleasing comes in and healthy human attachments leave is when we feel the need to mimic others emotions and take them on as our own, an example of this would be a significant other experiencing a minor misfortune whatever it may be and instead of consoling them and showing them our support in whatever way we decide and moving on with our own day we spend our time catastrophising and or being crippled by their issues as though their burdens are ours to bear and maybe even to the point of feeling guilty if we don’t do so, enmeshment is heavily romanticized but in the end when you do take on others emotions so heavily you’re doing them a disservice as you’re not reaching out to them from a clearer state of mind to truly aid them in whatever way they may need.
Often times you deny obvious truths in an attempt to trick yourself :
What’s in the dark will always come to light, in a world full of harsh realities and adversities we developed many coping mechanisms which include denial, It stems from a lack of trust in oneself, and it’s tricky to identify, and often we deny deep truths that take years on years to bring to light which hinder us in many ways until we finally accept, release and soon after we realize the many mental hoops we didn’t need to traverse and the wasted time we could’ve saved if we had just been honest with ourselves and allowed ourselves to feel the initial shock of the truth.
You don’t allow yourself to feel certain emotions :
Our emotions serve an inherent purpose of warning us of dangers and alerting us of certain needs and so on and so forth, So it’s not up to us to control what emotions we feel and what emotions we bottle up, because as you restrict yourself from feeling your emotions more and more the either of two things can occur, you either eventually get triggered by a certain event which launches you into an outburst or continuously disconnect from your emotions and numb them all out until you allow yourself to feel your repressed emotion. Dealing with our feelings is intimidating but it doesn’t always have to be you must remember that every emotion serves a purpose and is there to guide you , so listen to how you’re feeling and proceed accordingly, definitely don’t wallow in your emotions and allow them to consume you but definitely listen to yourself and meet your emotional and bodily needs.
The end goal is building trust and honesty within yourself so you can identify what it is you truly want :
Every day we’re bombarded with media telling us how and when we should live our lives, certain lifestyles might work for some and some won’t work for you which is why it’s important to build trust and honesty within yourself in order tune out the outside distractions and tune into yourself and start making decisions which are true to you so you can get into the passenger seat of your life and enjoy the ride. | https://medium.com/@alzaeme/no-ones-saving-you-and-signs-you-need-to-get-into-the-passenger-seat-of-your-life-177bd2a2538f | ['Mathew . B'] | 2020-12-27 23:35:30.699000+00:00 | ['Radical Self Acceptance', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Self Actualization', 'Self Help'] |
Laboring Bodies: Interview with Evren Savc ı | Members of Kirmizi Semsiye, a Turkish sex worker’s NGO, at an International Women’s Rights Day protest (Credit: nswp.org)
Evren Savcı is an assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department. Savcı’s interest is in transnational sexualities, and she roots her work in feminist and queer theory as well as ethnographic methodology. Her past work has explored the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion, and she is currently finishing her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Interview by Rachel Koh, SM ’20.
RK: Can you tell me about how sex work features in your area of scholarship?
ES: I’m not a scholar of sex work per se… but trans sex workers intersected with my research for my first book, which is about queer social movements in contemporary Turkey, as they’ve been critical in LGBT organizing, historically and contemporarily in Turkey. […] I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to trans sex workers’ relationships to public space, neoliberal urban redevelopment, changing political economy, the law and the police, and security regimes and the growing authoritarian state. So even though I don’t consider myself a scholar of sex work, I have written about sex workers, specifically about trans sex workers, who do end up having a very different place both in the national imaginary and in the way police treats them versus cis women who engage in sex work.
[…]I think a lot of progress that feminist work has done is in positioning [sex work] as a question of labour and not of morals, and also to think about the larger frameworks within which sex work can be discussed, with “trafficking” being one of the most current iterations of that.
RK: Can you explain a bit more about the particular experience of trans women sex workers in Turkey?
ES: […]The imaginaries of trans women as sex workers has a lot to do with the way the media has historically represented them as monstrous figures who are out to trick innocent men on the highway and attack the innocent male public body with switchblades and things like that. There was a big discourse about the so-called “transvestite terror” that was being unleashed. And this is in the context where a lot of trans women were being murdered by men, often times clients or potential clients. That representation, as well as the fact that they have little access to higher education and other forms of labour, means that they do find themselves structurally in a position where sex work is the most available form of labour. […] Trans women equals sex work in the eyes of the state, the police, the random average citizen. Their presence in public space spells out sex work. […] Even if [they] are not sex workers. Even if they’re going to the grocery store. There was a law passed [in Turkey] in 2005 that gives the police a lot of liberty to determine who is engaged in “unlawful occupation of public space,” that sometimes just means they can chase street vendors away. But they also use that law to give fines to trans women even when they are walking to the grocery store, or the bus stop, or to their friend’s house. Because it’s never imagined that they’re not soliciting when they’re in public space. Sex worker becomes a master status for trans women. That really affects how they live, what they’re able to do, their access to public space and their relationship vis-à-vis the police.
RK: What do you think are the main myths that people have about sex work, and how do they come up against the realities of sex work based on your experience and study?
ES: […] There are particular representations of sex work, such as the ’90s moment of movies like Pretty Woman, that show the undeserving, actually innocent, pretty, well-meaning, funny, smart woman who’s doing it to save money to go to college. It’s the angel-esque stereotype. Scholars point out the connection this has to narratives about sex trafficking, which operate on the back of the idea that there are bad actual prostitutes and then there are the good innocent women who wouldn’t do it if they could, or are doing it because they are trafficked. […] A lot of people enjoy sex and they don’t see a problem with doing it for money, the way that we don’t see a problem with selling other forms of labour for money — we are all doing it. So there’s an imagined binary between the deserving and undeserving sex workers: the kind that men will fantasize about marrying and saving, and the kind that is unsaveable.
RK: Do you think that there is an ideal policy regime that states should take towards sex work? For example, the Nordic model where you criminalize the purchase of sex but not the selling or sex, or total decriminalization.
ES: Looking at the model in Turkey, where sex work is not criminalized but legal and regulated by the state, I totally see the downfall. First of all, I don’t believe in any form of criminalization regarding sex work. I don’t believe in punishing sellers or buyers. But I would like to see protections of the laborers as laborers, the way you protect people who do other kinds of physical bodily labour. It’s not okay for people to be injured on a construction site. Similarly, there should be protections in place and ideally unionizing, so that people can have structures in place that protect them as workers.
But there also should not be state regulation. In Turkey, for example, the state decides how many brothels and therefore how many sex workers are allowed in the entire country. And if you heard the numbers, you would laugh. They’re ridiculously low. The work hours are nine to five, like you’re going to a state office, and you can’t choose your clients, the way most workers who work for the state don’t get to choose. You serve whoever comes for service. It’s really poor pay. […] It’s legal work, you do get a paycheck and you even get retirement and other benefits that come with a state job, but it’s really unappealing work conditions. This also means, and this has been historically true in a lot of places, the moment you legalize but make it state-regulated, you are opening an entire can of worms about illegal prostitution. So the same way that there’s a production of victims versus bad subjects, there’s now legal prostitutes versus illegal, clandestine sex work. […] Scholars in Turkey have written about how police have used that to harass women. This research is from the late ’90s but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still going on. […] So moral expectations play out in the strange legal liminal zone where anybody who’s not registered as a sex worker could be an illegal sex worker. So that gives a lot of powers to the police and to the state to harass people.
RK: How do you think issues surrounding sex work are employed in North American discourse, particularly in relation to countries and peoples who are perceived as less developed?
ES: There’s been great work on the discourse on sex trafficking, and how it creates a world order, basically, of more righteous and less righteous countries. East Asian countries, especially, have been pegged as countries that don’t do a good enough job preventing sex trafficking. […] It’s coming from the U.S. hegemonic power that has created a hierarchy between morally upright and morally failed nations based on how well they are doing in fighting sex trafficking. It happened rather fast — within ten years. Before that there was no such concern and then suddenly sex trafficking arose as a huge global concern.
And it seems a bit devoid of actual knowledge. […] There are a lot of women who engage in sex work but are not trafficked. And they treat [sex-trafficking] as different from other forms of labour trafficking. The problem with other forms of labour trafficking is that you don’t get paid. The problem with sex trafficking is that you do get paid for the labour. So it’s already a quite questionable construct. […] My class, Transnational Approaches to Gender and Sexuality, is asking these larger questions of how seemingly simple human rights issues are implicated in the larger global political economy, and how these particular and very specific supposed measures around “human rights violations” are used to discipline certain nations into behaving according to U.S. standards. This also produces a very racialized understanding of victims, villains, and heroes.
RK: What areas of sex work do you think are currently understudied and less understood as they can be?
ES: […] I would like to see more studies on the role sex trafficking is made to play in the neoliberal economy, and how it becomes — Elizabeth Bernstein has written eloquently about this, but I’d like to see more beyond a U.S.-centric perspective — how does sex trafficking become a moral flag that different corporations are waving to engage in a type of redemptive capitalism? It becomes a do-good project for a lot of corporations that are doing a lot of evil, and have been historically, so it would be interesting to see what that looks like in other locations and how that’s perceived. If, let’s say, Google is engaging in these projects — which it is — what does that do to Google’s relationship with Venezuela or China, which are put in the hot seat for their “failure”? I think these types of transnational political economy questions can be asked. The other thing is: […] sex trafficking is not at all a discourse in Turkey, and neither is it in most countries in the Middle East. Now that there’s a huge Syrian refugee population in the Turkey, I think questions of forced sexual labour are becoming more urgent […] But I think there’s a way in which the Middle East gets off the hot seat of the United States when it comes to sex trafficking because Muslims are seen as already “prudish” and “repressed” and “conservative” when it comes to sex. Obviously there is sex work everywhere in the world, including Muslim-majority countries. But it’s interesting to see what moral sticks East and Southeast Asia get beat up with, and which moral sticks the Middle East gets beat up with — which is mostly alleged homophobia, and patriarchy. So it would be interesting to look at these larger stories as well: not just sex trafficking in and of itself, but the disciplining and hierarchizing mechanisms of the moral map of the world. | https://yaleherald.com/laboring-bodies-interview-with-evren-savc%C4%B1-b1666ca240 | ['The Yale Herald'] | 2019-02-21 20:16:35.306000+00:00 | ['Features', 'Sex Work', 'Transgender'] |
Zoom Boom: Power-Up Your Website with Zoom API | Originally published at onix-systems.com.
Many people working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic have probably used Zoom, a cloud-based video conferencing service that enables users to ‘meet’ virtually. Schools are using it widely to teach lessons online. The high demand for video conferencing with colleagues or students has made Zoom nearly the most usable app in the world with over 300 million meetings daily in April 2020. It has become an essential tool for small and large teams to keep in touch and support workflows when in-person meetings are not possible. According to Forbes, over half of the 500 largest U.S. companies used one of Zoom’s paid plans, and several of them have signed large contracts.
Zoom is not only a mobile app. For example, it’s also possible to embed Zoom on a website and use it seamlessly as part of the website experience.
Zoom as a Cloud Video Conferencing Solution
Zoom allows users to attend virtual meetings that can be video- or audio-based accompanied by a built-in live chat. Users can record conferences to re-watch later.
The service combines the perks of cloud computing and video conferencing. As a result, a less hardware-demanding solution is born. When all the capabilities of such services are stored in the cloud, users don’t need in-house servers that can be difficult to maintain and expensive. Zoom still requires a computer or smartphone, headphones, and microphone, but a cloud-based solution provides much more streamlined conferencing that can be quickly used in emergency cases with little complication. The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent quarantine measures showed that the service can be a life (or job) saver.
Notable Perks of Using Zoom
Zoom’s wonderful usability derives from the fact that the service was created with non-tech users in mind. It has a simple interface, quick registration, and sign-in, and doesn’t require much user information to start. Other perks of the service include, but are not limited to:
1. Management made simple. When you keep all your tasks in the cloud, it is easier to keep up with them. Frequent reports are also useful for business since you can confirm how successful your video conferencing is.
2. Hardware & software compatibility. Cloud-based services are built in a way that doesn’t require a specific device or software to connect users. Zoom allows users to join a meeting through a mobile app or even a WordPress page where you can embed your Zoom meeting. Zoom works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS.
3. Affordability. Besides savings on servers, ‘all-in-one’ solutions like Zoom require no additional purchases, reduce the possibility of network damages, and minimize expensive repairs.
4. Convenient meetings. A user that creates a meeting has a few options to choose from, starting from the possibility to create an instant meeting or schedule it to a specific time and day. Upon creating a scheduled meeting, a host will receive a Meeting ID to share with the other attendees. The host also has the option of muting attendees and recording the meeting. Even if muted, attendees can virtually ‘raise their hands’ when they want to speak to others or ask a question.
5. Safety. Zoom uses such encryptions as AES 256-bits and Secure Socket Layer (SSL).
6. The free version is enough for small businesses. Zoom’s free version grants access to an unlimited number of sessions for up to 100 attendees, although the meetings can’t be recorded and each group session is limited to 40 minutes.
Additionally, Zoom offers:
1. Microsoft Outlook plugin. This plugin provides a Zoom user with an option to schedule and start instant Zoom meetings in Microsoft Outlook.
2. Chrome extension. It can schedule or start an instant meeting. It connects to Google Calendar through which all the attendees receive an invitation and enables users to join a meeting by clicking just one button.
3. Zoom Wordpress Plugin. The management of attendees, webinars, meetings, and reports from the Wordpress dashboard is supported in this plugin. Joining a meeting doesn’t require using the Zoom app now: it is possible to join right through a browser. The limitations of this plugin include the lack of support for webinars, and that it only has features of the web version of Zoom.
Paid Plans for Enhancing Video Conferencing
Zoom’s paid plans remove the restrictions present in the free version of the service.
1. Zoom Pro. The cheapest plan costs $15 per month. In addition to all the benefits of the free version, group sessions can be 24-hours long, and a host can manage attendees and has limited admin console access. A host can record a session and save it in the cloud (up to 1GB). Pro also has reports and statistics on the number of sessions, when they were taken, how long they lasted, and how many attendees joined the meetings. Developers get access to Zoom API.
2. Zoom Business. All the benefits of Zoom Pro are enriched with your company branding for all Zoom meetings, apps, and invitations for up to 300 attendees. The Business plan also offers a personalized URL, admin dashboard access, and dedicated customer support.
3. Zoom Enterprise. All the benefits of a Business plan are combined with unlimited cloud storage. This plan is most beneficial for large enterprises where there are over 100 attendees at any meeting. For this plan, Zoom provides a dedicated support manager and executive business review (ROI, roadmap, and analytics).
Zoom also offers a variety of subscriptions. Zoom Room brings the Zoom App to a larger scale by integrating with A/V hardware in a conference room of any size and supports a connection to an interactive whiteboard. Zoom Phone is another paid cloud-hosted phone-as-a-service that allows companies to offload the phone systems and server room space. Another service worth mentioning is Zoom Webinars. It allows for creating a meeting with up to 100 attendees and up to 10,000 view-only attendees, which makes it a great choice for media events or education.
Two Clever Zoom API Tips to Enrich Zoom Experiences
Another major reason for Zoom’s popularity is its flexibility. Zoom is succeeding by meeting almost everyone’s needs. You can use a desktop or mobile application and here is a plugin for Outlook and extensions for browsers. Now, we will look at what we can do using Webhooks and Web SDK.
Webhooks
Webhooks are useful if you want to keep your systems synchronized with everything that happens in Zoom. It can notify you whenever somebody enters or leaves meetings or any other events that are happening. For example, if it is a virtual lesson, this notification system will enable teachers to see who is in and who is out, so there is no need for a roll call. Or, if you have a huge meeting, it will be easy to count the attendees.
It works like this; When a specific event takes place in Zoom, it will try to send a notification to the endpoint you chose. To turn on notifications for attendees joining the meeting or leaving it, you need to set up an app as Webhook Only.
Then, enter the name of your app:
Fill in the information on your app:
Add a new event subscription. You need to add attendee names and an endpoint to which Zoom will send data on your service.
Choose the events that will trigger notifications:
Now, notifications are enabled.
How to Embed Zoom on a Website with Web SDK
Zoom meetings through web pages are even more convenient than meeting via Zoom app since attendees need not download or install anything. They will surely appreciate the ability to find and join your meeting right on your website, using any device that has access to a browser (e.g., Chromebook). It is possible to embed Zoom webinar on your website, so let’s see how it is done.
If you own a Wordpress website, you need not know HTML or CSS to embed Zoom on it. First, you will need to install the Zoom Wordpress plugin. If you are familiar with Java, Javascript, HTML, and CSS, you can do it with other HTML environments.
You will need your Zoom API to proceed. You can find it at Marketplace; the Zoom Pro pricing plan should be purchased. Then proceed to ‘Develop,’ ‘Create An App,’ and ‘JWT.’
Now you will receive API Key and API Secret for setting up the SDK.
Now you can also add Event Subscriptions:
Now, the Wordpress plugin for Zoom will connect to your Zoom API, and you will see the list of recent meetings.
In the case of a non-Wordpress site, you will also need to connect Zoom to your site using SDK.
That’s it! Now you can embed Zoom video to a web server.
The Takeaway
During the pandemic, Zoom has helped many businesses and individuals all over the world stay safe WHILE staying connected. The use of the service has quickly become ubiquitous, indispensable, and quite natural.
Zoom is simple to use even for those who don’t consider themselves technical. Still, it is worth exploring other features beyond the basics. The opportunities range from changing one’s virtual background to using the Zoom Wordpress plugin.
Onix has two decades of experience in helping startups and enterprises hone their web presence to perfection. Why not consider enriching your web presence with the opportunities offered by Zoom?
Thanks to Andrii Dabich, Onix’s full-stack developer, for assistance with this article!
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 ! | https://medium.com/@onix-systems/zoom-boom-power-up-your-website-with-zoom-api-272392e2385a | [] | 2020-07-07 07:38:16.428000+00:00 | ['Website', 'Zoom Api', 'Zoom'] |
This Concession Ticket Grants Me the Right to Fight Forever | As the greatest President in the history of the United States, I preen before you today, not to say goodbye but till next time, beautiful people!!!!!!!!
I’ve made this country great again. (MAGA animus.)
We proved we can manage on our own — pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris Climate Accord, withheld funding from the WHO — what the fuck do they know about anything?
My amazing successes include the settlement of the Arab/Israeli conflict. Arab countries now recognize Israel. Suppressive regimes like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and now Morocco have climbed aboard.
My expertise in real estate really paid off.
What about the Palestinians?
They should go back where they came from.
Jeez, that’s what they’ve been trying to do.
If you continue interrupting, I’ll have you removed. (Turns to acolyte -who let that CNN prick in?)
Devotees, we’ve achieved so much. Divided the country, created racial tension, exposed the China virus as a hoax, defeated ISIS.
What about the Islamic extremists now occupying northern Mozambique?
Where’s that?
In Africa.
Oh, that shit hole. (Turns to another acolyte — who let that bitch from Al Jazeera in?)
We’re winning on all fronts!!!!!
You lost the election.
Get that loser out of here — fucking fake news!!
Our wonderful fracking industry is thriving. Our great fossil-fuel industry is now investing in plastic production, which will double by 2040. More profit to turn my billionaire buddies into trillionaires!!!!!!!
Isn’t it terrific I created a Covid vaccine in less than a year?
I get the job done!!!!!!
Run a country like a business. Hire them, and when they don’t follow your instructions or dare to disagree — fire them. Always aim for high turnover.
Now you know I’m smart, I’m tough, and I never lose.
But my appointees at the Supreme Court have betrayed the country by refusing to reform a voting system which is out of control. They’ve let you down, folks.
This is dangerous. This is really bad. I checked with Rudi, who says I can’t fire them — Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life.
I may call in the military to enforce my election challenges. The veterans love me — they’ll support me.
Those Deep State and left-wing phonies have conspired to rig the elections in their favor.
The Electoral College is weak and stupid; plans to endorse the Biden/Harris camp tonight.
You’ll remember at the start of my term of office (and not the last) I said,
“Let’s make America great again and bring professionalism and the basic qualities of respect back into politics.”
We’ve done a tremendous job in making that a reality.
If you’re queuing outside my White House for your Presidential Pardon, patience please–I’ve got a lot to get through.
Remember the deadline is January 20, 2021. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/this-concession-ticket-grants-me-the-right-to-fight-forever-93daaf57d7c2 | ['Caroline De Braganza'] | 2020-12-15 13:03:01.913000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'The Bad Influence', 'Humor', 'Satire', 'Election 2020'] |
Wishing For Dollars | Wishing For Dollars
I wish I had a dollar for every time
I wished I had a dollar when I was
a kid. And if my wishes had come
true, and I had saved and invested
all those dollars, I could have paid
for lots of stuff when I grew up —
like my entire college education! | https://medium.com/flicker-and-flight/wishing-for-dollars-6530b82aa6f9 | ['Terry Mansfield'] | 2021-02-18 10:17:55.473000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Money', 'Money Management', 'Poetry', 'Humor'] |
6 Steps to Make Glassmorphic Card | There are some design trends that cannot be ignored. Digital glass material is not a completely new thing in UI Design. However, it was recently discovered again. Michal Malewicz calls the trend “Glassmorphism”.
Let me show you how to create a glass card with this effect, so you may use it in your designs. Just 6 steps to achieve remarkable results. You may also find video tutorials for Sketch and Figma at the end of the article.
Grab the mug of your favorite coffee, and let’s start!
1. Draw a shape
To create a card, you need to create a basic shape first. You may want to imitate physical credit card proportions. To do this, create a rectangle with the following dimensions: 640×400, plus a 40pt corner radius.
2. Apply Gradient Fill
It is time to fill the shape. However, let’s try to use something more subtle than just a solid color. In the tutorial, we will use a gradient. Both gradient colors will be pure white (#FFFFFF), but they will differ with opacity. Set the first one to 40%, and the second to 10% opacity.
3. Turn on Background Blur — imitate the glass
It is the blur that imitates the glass. Set blur value to around 20 to see how the surface of the material is changing. Obviously, you may play with your settings.
4. Add Border
The elegant border adds additional polish to the element. It also helps to establish visual hierarchy when the glass surfaces overlap.
If you want to create the illusion of directional light in your design, you may want to use a gradient for the border. I made my card this way, so it looks even more “physical”.
Settings for card border diagonal gradient:
Border: 3px
Color 1: #FFFFFF (opacity 50%)
Color 2: #FFFFFF (opacity 0%)
Color 3: #FF48DB (opacity 0%)
Color 3: #FF48DB (opacity 50%)
This simple set creates a nice illusion of interference with the environment:
5. Apply Drop Shadow
The subtle shadow effect helps to strengthen the visual hierarchy. Thanks to the shadow, it will be much easier to distinguish all layers.
In this example, I used dark color with 24 Blur value. I also decreased Spread to -1.
Note: I have made a tutorial for nice looking shadows. One of the mentioned techniques will not work here — the one about creating a shadow with a separate layer. This time you will achieve the best results by adding shadow style property to shape with the glass surface.
6. Fill with Content
Time to add some content. Fill it with necessary logos & text. To create an illusion of the imprinted layer, fill your content with white color, and decrease the opacity to 50%. You may also play with layer blending — try Overlay to get interesting results.
Extra Tip! Frosty Texture ❄️
Your glass card is done. However, you may go even further to add some premium texture to it!
To add an elegant noise, add an image fill with noise. Decrease opacity to 20% and set the blending mode of the fill to Overlay.
See how gorgeous it looks now:
One more thing! 😎
If you prefer to watch UI Design tutorials, I have prepared something for you!
Now on my YouTube channel you may see how to make the glass card in Sketch & Figma! Check it out now! Don’t forget to subscribe the channel to see upcoming tutorials.
Step by step tutorial for Figma:
And the same tutorial in Sketch:
To conclude
Glass is getting more and more popular. You may not like the trend. However, if your client will ask for it — you have to know how to achieve the best results! This 6 simple steps shows that the effect may be done quickly.
If you found the tutorial useful, share it to let your friends know how to make their UI better! Feel free to 👉 discover more tutorials like this!
This article was originally published on my blog✍️, which has its origin in the Instagram tutorial 📷.
Thanks for reading! | https://blog.prototypr.io/6-steps-to-make-glassmorphic-card-dc64653a9ece | [] | 2021-01-18 15:36:57.129000+00:00 | ['Glassmorphism', 'UX Design', 'Sketch', 'Ui Design Trends', 'Figma'] |
GETTING IN | Iapplied to college one evening, after dinner, in the fall of my senior year in high school. College applicants in Ontario, in those days, were given a single sheet of paper which listed all the universities in the province. It was my job to rank them in order of preference. Then I had to mail the sheet of paper to a central college-admissions office. The whole process probably took ten minutes. My school sent in my grades separately. I vaguely remember filling out a supplementary two-page form listing my interests and activities. There were no S.A.T. scores to worry about, because in Canada we didn’t have to take the S.A.T.s. I don’t know whether anyone wrote me a recommendation. I certainly never asked anyone to. Why would I? It wasn’t as if I were applying to a private club.
I put the University of Toronto first on my list, the University of Western Ontario second, and Queen’s University third. I was working off a set of brochures that I’d sent away for. My parents’ contribution consisted of my father’s agreeing to drive me one afternoon to the University of Toronto campus, where we visited the residential college I was most interested in. I walked around. My father poked his head into the admissions office, chatted with the admissions director, and — I imagine — either said a few short words about the talents of his son or (knowing my father) remarked on the loveliness of the delphiniums in the college flower beds. Then we had ice cream. I got in.
Am I a better or more successful person for having been accepted at the University of Toronto, as opposed to my second or third choice? It strikes me as a curious question. In Ontario, there wasn’t a strict hierarchy of colleges. There were several good ones and several better ones and a number of programs — like computer science at the University of Waterloo — that were world-class. But since all colleges were part of the same public system and tuition everywhere was the same (about a thousand dollars a year, in those days), and a B average in high school pretty much guaranteed you a spot in college, there wasn’t a sense that anything great was at stake in the choice of which college we attended. The issue was whether we attended college, and — most important — how seriously we took the experience once we got there. I thought everyone felt this way. You can imagine my confusion, then, when I first met someone who had gone to Harvard.
There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all — a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge. “Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. Don’t define me by my school, they seemed to be saying, which implied that their school actually could define them. And, of course, it did. Wherever there was one Harvard graduate, another lurked not far behind, ready to swap tales of late nights at the Hasty Pudding, or recount the intricacies of the college-application essay, or wonder out loud about the whereabouts of Prince So-and-So, who lived down the hall and whose family had a place in the South of France that you would not believe. In the novels they were writing, the precocious and sensitive protagonist always went to Harvard; if he was troubled, he dropped out of Harvard; in the end, he returned to Harvard to complete his senior thesis. Once, I attended a wedding of a Harvard alum in his fifties, at which the best man spoke of his college days with the groom as if neither could have accomplished anything of greater importance in the intervening thirty years. By the end, I half expected him to take off his shirt and proudly display the large crimson “H” tattooed on his chest. What is this “Harvard” of which you Americans speak so reverently?
In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.
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https://paiza.io/projects/aWC8u0AYCbEvZrvBjxVSxA
https://steemit.com/articles/@pamelagabriel221/getting-in
As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea — a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body — was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell — and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton — realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. “Starting in the fall of 1922,” Karabel writes, “applicants were required to answer questions on ‘Race and Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birthplace of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ ”
At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.
If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it.
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Starting in 1953, Arthur Howe, Jr., spent a decade as the chair of admissions at Yale, and Karabel describes what happened under his guidance:
The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being “mediocre in comparison with many others,” was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, “we just thought he was more of a guy.” So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more.
At Harvard, the key figure in that same period was Wilbur Bender, who, as the dean of admissions, had a preference for “the boy with some athletic interests and abilities, the boy with physical vigor and coordination and grace.” Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard continued to suffer on the football field it would contribute to the school’s reputation as a place with “no college spirit, few good fellows, and no vigorous, healthy social life,” not to mention a “surfeit of ‘pansies,’ ‘decadent esthetes’ and ‘precious sophisticates.’ ” Bender concentrated on improving Harvard’s techniques for evaluating “intangibles” and, in particular, its “ability to detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems.”
By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard’s admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover, another for the eight Rocky Mountain states.) Information from interviews, references, and student essays was then used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not between dockets, so there was no way for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to shut out the graduates of Andover and Exeter. More important, academic achievement was just one of four dimensions, further diluting the value of pure intellectual accomplishment. Athletic ability, rather than falling under “extracurriculars,” got a category all to itself, which explains why, even now, recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower. And the most important category? That mysterious index of “personal” qualities. According to Harvard’s own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating. Those with a rank of 4 or worse on the personal scale had, in the nineteen-sixties, a rejection rate of ninety-eight per cent. Those with a personal rating of 1 had a rejection rate of 2.5 per cent. When the Office of Civil Rights at the federal education department investigated Harvard in the nineteen-eighties, they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files. “This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness,” read one. Another comment reads, “Seems a tad frothy.” One application — and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile — was notated, “Short with big ears.”
Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful.
At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training — that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road.
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The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps, and, sure enough, the studies based on those two apparently equivalent students turn out to be flawed. How do we know that two students who have the same S.A.T. scores and grades really are equivalent? It’s quite possible that the student who goes to Harvard is more ambitious and energetic and personable than the student who wasn’t let in, and that those same intangibles are what account for his better career success. To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears.
“As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between,” Krueger said. “One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let’s look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn’t seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don’t.”
Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you’ll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school. You’ll make good contacts at Penn. But Penn State is big enough and diverse enough that you can make good contacts there, too. Having Penn on your résumé opens doors. But if you were good enough to get into Penn you’re good enough that those doors will open for you anyway. “I can see why families are really concerned about this,” Krueger went on. “The average graduate from a top school is making nearly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, the average graduate from a moderately selective school is making ninety thousand dollars. That’s an enormous difference, and I can see why parents would fight to get their kids into the better school. But I think they are just assigning to the school a lot of what the student is bringing with him to the school.”
Bender was succeeded as the dean of admissions at Harvard by Fred Glimp, who, Karabel tells us, had a particular concern with academic underperformers. “Any class, no matter how able, will always have a bottom quarter,” Glimp once wrote. “What are the effects of the psychology of feeling average, even in a very able group? Are there identifiable types with the psychological or what-not tolerance to be ‘happy’ or to make the most of education while in the bottom quarter?” Glimp thought it was critical that the students who populated the lower rungs of every Harvard class weren’t so driven and ambitious that they would be disturbed by their status. “Thus the renowned (some would say notorious) Harvard admission practice known as the ‘happy-bottom-quarter’ policy was born,” Karabel writes.
It’s unclear whether or not Glimp found any students who fit that particular description. (He wondered, in a marvellously honest moment, whether the answer was “Harvard sons.”) But Glimp had the realism of the modelling scout. Glimp believed implicitly what Krueger and Dale later confirmed: that the character and performance of an academic class is determined, to a significant extent, at the point of admission; that if you want to graduate winners you have to admit winners; that if you want the bottom quarter of your class to succeed you have to find people capable of succeeding in the bottom quarter. Karabel is quite right, then, to see the events of the nineteen-twenties as the defining moment of the modern Ivy League. You are whom you admit in the élite-education business, and when Harvard changed whom it admitted, it changed Harvard. Was that change for the better or for the worse?
In the wake of the Jewish crisis, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the “best graduates” approach to admissions. France’s École Normale Supérieure, Japan’s University of Tokyo, and most of the world’s other élite schools define their task as looking for the best students — that is, the applicants who will have the greatest academic success during their time in college. The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). “Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550–600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.”
It’s easy to find fault with the best-graduates approach. We tend to think that intellectual achievement is the fairest and highest standard of merit. The Ivy League process, quite apart from its dubious origins, seems subjective and opaque. Why should personality and athletic ability matter so much? The notion that “the ability to throw, kick, or hit a ball is a legitimate criterion in determining who should be admitted to our greatest research universities,” Karabel writes, is “a proposition that would be considered laughable in most of the world’s countries.” At the same time that Harvard was constructing its byzantine admissions system, Hunter College Elementary School, in New York, required simply that applicants take an exam, and if they scored in the top fifty they got in. It’s hard to imagine a more objective and transparent procedure.
But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960. [The results were published in 1993 as “Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up,” by Rena Subotnik, Lee Kassan, Ellen Summers, and Alan Wasser.] This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157 — three and a half standard deviations above the mean — who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. “Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments,” the authors conclude, “there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names.” The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors — like motivation and social skills — probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.” It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough.
Most élite law schools, to cite another example, follow a best-students model. That’s why they rely so heavily on the L.S.A.T. Yet there’s no reason to believe that a person’s L.S.A.T. scores have much relation to how good a lawyer he will be. In a recent research project funded by the Law School Admission Council, the Berkeley researchers Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie Shultz identified twenty-six “competencies” that they think effective lawyering demands — among them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal-research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so on — and the L.S.A.T. picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldn’t we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students?
This search for good lawyers, furthermore, is necessarily going to be subjective, because things like passion and engagement can’t be measured as precisely as academic proficiency. Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want. The first black captain of the Yale football team was a man named Levi Jackson, who graduated in 1950. Jackson was a hugely popular figure on campus. He went on to be a top executive at Ford, and is credited with persuading the company to hire thousands of African-Americans after the 1967 riots. When Jackson was tapped for the exclusive secret society Skull and Bones, he joked, “If my name had been reversed, I never would have made it.” He had a point. The strategy of discretion that Yale had once used to exclude Jews was soon being used to include people like Levi Jackson.
In the 2001 book “The Game of Life,” James L. Shulman and William Bowen (a former president of Princeton) conducted an enormous statistical analysis on an issue that has become one of the most contentious in admissions: the special preferences given to recruited athletes at selective universities. Athletes, Shulman and Bowen demonstrate, have a large and growing advantage in admission over everyone else. At the same time, they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped, and they tend to segregate themselves in an “athletic culture” different from the culture of the rest of the college. Shulman and Bowen think the preference given to athletes by the Ivy League is shameful.
Halfway through the book, however, Shulman and Bowen present what they call a “surprising” finding. Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup. In what can only be described as a textbook example of burying the lead, Bowen and Shulman write:
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One of these characteristics can be thought of as drive — a strong desire to succeed and unswerving determination to reach a goal, whether it be winning the next game or closing a sale. Similarly, athletes tend to be more energetic than the average person, which translates into an ability to work hard over long periods of time — to meet, for example, the workload demands placed on young people by an investment bank in the throes of analyzing a transaction. In addition, athletes are more likely than others to be highly competitive, gregarious and confident of their ability to work well in groups (on teams).
Shulman and Bowen would like to argue that the attitudes of selective colleges toward athletes are a perversion of the ideals of American élite education, but that’s because they misrepresent the actual ideals of American élite education. The Ivy League is perfectly happy to accept, among others, the kind of student who makes a lot of money after graduation. As the old saying goes, the definition of a well-rounded Yale graduate is someone who can roll all the way from New Haven to Wall Street.
Ionce had a conversation with someone who worked for an advertising agency that represented one of the big luxury automobile brands. He said that he was worried that his client’s new lower-priced line was being bought disproportionately by black women. He insisted that he did not mean this in a racist way. It was just a fact, he said. Black women would destroy the brand’s cachet. It was his job to protect his client from the attentions of the socially undesirable.
This is, in no small part, what Ivy League admissions directors do. They are in the luxury-brand-management business, and “The Chosen,” in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years. In the nineteentwenties, when Harvard tried to figure out how many Jews they had on campus, the admissions office scoured student records and assigned each suspected Jew the designation j1 (for someone who was “conclusively Jewish”), j2 (where the “preponderance of evidence” pointed to Jewishness), or j3 (where Jewishness was a “possibility”). In the branding world, this is called customer segmentation. In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Jewish applicants. As Karabel writes, “In the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.” No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. The admissions directors at Harvard have always, similarly, been diligent about rewarding the children of graduates, or, as they are quaintly called, “legacies.” In the 1985–92 period, for instance, Harvard admitted children of alumni at a rate more than twice that of non-athlete, non-legacy applicants, despite the fact that, on virtually every one of the school’s magical ratings scales, legacies significantly lagged behind their peers. Karabel calls the practice “unmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst,” but rewarding customer loyalty is what luxury brands do. Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them. Aren’t the tremendous resources provided to Harvard by its alumni part of the reason so many people want to go to Harvard in the first place? The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in — that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience — an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite — and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.
In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense | https://medium.com/@jessicafowm-s13-19-92/getting-in-fa5b5cb8bc78 | ['Jessicafowm S'] | 2020-12-15 09:29:15.792000+00:00 | ['Articles', 'Business', 'Social Media', 'Authors', 'Books'] |
Investments and Bitcoin in Nigeria — Buysellbitcoin.website | Investments are assets or items acquired with expectations
that such asset would increase in value. if you are looking
for ways to grow wealth you can opt in for low risk investments,
and bitcoin in Nigeria as this can be highly rewarding on a long run.
But most investors who are skeptical about the stock market tend to turn towards other form of investments, and bitcoin in Nigeria is a notable form of investment even With the cryptocurrency ban in Nigeria by the Central Bank of Nigeria, hindering the direct purchase from individual bank accounts Nigerians resolved to alternative method of peer to peer buying and selling of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
One may ask is cryptocurrency investments, and bitcoin in Nigeria profitable, why should i invest in bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency?
Once upon a time bitcoin had little to no value and was written off as “too Volatile” refusing to recognize it as an asset. However, today it is a notable form of investment though the future of bitcoin in Nigeria is not certain with
the ban on cryptocurrency by Central Bank of Nigeria.
Related Post; what’s the best platform for bitcoin exchange in Nigeria?
Nevertheless, most forms of investment do carry an amount of risk and bitcoin is no exception. However, with a sound knowledge of investments and bitcoin, in Nigeria one should be able to make the right decision regarding when to invest in bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.
Hence, it is pertinent that one should make deliberate effort to learn more about investing in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies before taking further steps. | https://medium.com/@buysellbitcoin555/investments-and-bitcoin-in-nigeria-buysellbitcoin-website-25d5d1372705 | ['Kola Kunle'] | 2021-04-08 09:28:27.820000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin In Nigeria', 'Bitcoin Wallet', 'Buy Bitcoins', 'Bitcoin'] |
Can I fit in? | The marks, the bumps, the scars…can I really fit in? The hip-dips, the dark knees…can I really fit in?
“What is beauty?” the teacher’s deep, raspy voice snatched my thoughts back into reality. I scanned the whiteboard. The word ‘Beauty’ rested upon the flat surface, written in bold letters.
Beauty? I thought to myself, while the teacher waited upon a student to answer his question.
I’m not beauti—
“Alisa, what do you think beauty is?” The teacher pointed at me with his whiteboard pen, eyes gleaming.
“I-I…uh..” I stuttered.
Across the classroom, a familiar voice sounded;
“Ha, how would she know what beauty is? Have you seen her?” Jay announced, mockingly.
Jay — the school bully. Well, he’s not exactly a bully…he just specifically picks on me. I’ve known Jay since I was a child solely because of the fact that he’s my neighbour. Unfortunately, his dad and my dad both work at the same firm.
The class burst out laughing. I dug myself into my chair slowly, adjusting my hood to cover majority of my face.
“Okay, class. Quiet down.” the teacher pleaded.
The class slowly diverted their focus back to the teacher, and as the most unluckiest girl in this world…I became the centre of attention once again.
“Alisa, I asked you a question. Please answer my question.” the teacher instructed me, this time politely.
I gulped. My body began heating up. The hair on my body stood up straight as my ‘Fight or Flight’ mode activated. My palms became sweaty and my vision blurred slightly.
Alisa! Come on! Just answer the question. It can’t be that difficult. Alisa you have to answer the question. Perhaps this way, you can make a platform for yourself. You can do this, Alisa.
My thoughts were all over the place. I couldn’t comprehend what to do.
That’s when I realised…I didn’t fit in.
“I don’t know.” I spoke, feeling destroyed and weak.
The teacher stood at the front of the class quietly, staring at me with disappointment in his golden-brown eyes. He walked towards the whiteboard, grabbed the eraser and vigorously rubbed out ‘Beauty’. He turned towards us and stood silently, but he wasn’t silent. It was as if his silence had words.
Listen to silence, it has a lot to say.
“It’s sad…” He began.
“It’s heart-quenching to see a world where we allocate people into two words — ‘beautiful’ and ugly’.” He continued.
“Beauty is undefinable. It is a concept created by man to feel all-powerful. Beauty cannot be categorised into separate sections which are ranked differently.” He spoke, his voice slightly increasing by every word.
“You’re all beautiful, with scars. You’re all beautiful, with heterochromia. You’re all beautiful, with varying heights. You’re all beautiful, with varying hair colour…” He took a pause.
“From hip dips to chubby cheeks, from short hair to long hair, from huge biceps to skinny arms…YOU ARE ALL BEAUTIFUL.” He was practically shouting this time.
The class was silent, amazed at the shouting capabilities of their teacher. The teacher let out a sigh of relief, simultaneously the bell rang. | https://medium.com/@alvishaamir/can-i-fit-in-db1c840a0710 | ['Alvish Aamir'] | 2020-12-18 13:42:41.670000+00:00 | ['Society', 'First Post', 'Beauty', 'Teenagers'] |
How to Create a Cross-Platform Mobile (iOS and Android) Plugin For Unity | Unity is a great platform for developing VR and AR applications. When developing a cross-platform application there are often native mobile plugins that need to be leveraged or developed.
Unity’s documentation around this is limited. This article will serve as an entry point to your native cross-platform mobile plugin’s development.
This tutorial uses a new project from Unity Version 2018.4.19f1, but will also work with newer versions.
Example Plugin Layout
This plugin will demonstrate three important concepts:
Sync call to native Async call to native Call from native to Unity
To do this, we will be passing a rectangle’s height and width both sync and async to native. Native will calculate the rectangle’s diagonal, perimeter, and area passing these values back to Unity.
Required Unity Build Support Modules
Open your Unity Hub → Click Installs → Click the Three Dots → Add Modules.
Adding Modules to your Unity Installation
Make sure Android Build Support and iOS Build Support are checked. Click Done to add if not already added the build supports.
Adding Android and iOS Build Support to Unity
Required Tools for Android
Download and Install Android Studio. It is not required for Unity, but it will make building the plugin a whole lot easier.
However, Unity requires Command line tools so at the bottom of the download page make sure you download Command line tools only for your proper platform. Extract the zip and place the tools folder inside of the sdk folder created by Android Studio.
Make sure the Android SDK is set in Unity by going to File → Preferences → External Tools → Android SDK.
External Tools Preferences
Question: How do I fix this error?
Invalid Android SDK directory error
Solution: Make sure the tools folder is inside the selected Android SDK directory and is spelled properly. The command line tools folder name was changed to build-tools in newer versions of Android Studio and Unity does not recognize this new folder name.
Required Tools for iOS
Mac OS XCode If your plugin package requires capabilities not able to run on a simulator, you will need to have an Apple developer account to run on an iOS device.
Folder Structure
Create a folder inside Assets called Plugins . Inside Plugins create two folders: Android and iOS .
How to Create a Folder in Assets
The directory structure recognized by Unity for native plugins
Files that are added in the Android and iOS folders will automatically be attached to the build.
Bridging Script
Right click the Plugins folder or inside of the Plugins folder right click the empty space and create a C# script named PluginBridge . This script will be called from external scripts to send and receive data from native scripts.
How to Create a C# Script
NOTE: There must be at least one game object attached to a script to initialize this plugin. This is usually taken care of by the calling script, which we will add an example the next section.
First we will set up the plugin bridge class:
Setting up the static class to bridge native code
Quick notes:
We are using a static class to allow for easy to use calls from Unity. Make sure you take note of the Java object name as it will be used in creating the plugin. iOS requires the native methods used to be explicitly defined. The #if and #endif are required around the DllImport so Android will not throw an error and can use the same class. PlatformNotSupportedException is just used for easy debugging when implementing the plugin.
Second, we will add the game object to receive messages from native as well as initiate the Java class:
Setting up game object in static constructor
Quick notes:
The game object is added for calls from native to Unity can be received. Creating a new game object just for this plugin makes it easy to not have to create an external game object when adding the plugin. Android needs to instantiate the object. Every argument after the second argument in new AndroidJavaObject() gets passed to the Java object constructor. HandleException callback is used internally by native code to notify Unity of any exceptions. The callback handlers can only receive strings as native can only send back strings through its messaging protocol. We will be sending json and then deserializing it into our CalculationResults object.
Finally, we will add the interface methods:
Quick notes:
We are saving the callback locally to be called once we received a message from Native. This works well when there is only one callback set at a time. If multiple callbacks are needed they should be handled externally through the single passed callback.
Calling Example Script
Create a new folder under Assets called Scripts . Inside scripts create the script: CallingExample .
Example calling script for our plugin’s methods
Now we will create a game object in the scene to attach to the CallingExample script.
Right click inside the SampleScene and click Create Empty.
How to Create a new Game Object
Right click, rename GameObject to Calling Example . When left clicking it check out the Inspector tab on the right side. Click Add Component and type in CallingExample in the search box. Select the script to add it.
How to Attach a Script to a Game Object
Android
Create a new Android Project.
Android Project Template for Android Plugin
Select Empty Activity .
Android Project Configuration for Android Plugin
Fill in the configuration details. Make sure you take note of the Save location as it will be used later. Also make sure the save location does not have a space in it as it may cause problems with the NDK tools. NDK tools may be needed when compiling low level externally connected devices.
For this example we will place the Android Plugin in a neighbor folder to the Unity Project folder.
Creating the Android Library
Android studio will automatically create an app folder, but we will not be using it. We will need to create a new Android Library:
File → New Module:
Creating a new Module
Selecting Android Library
Selecting Android Library
Configuring Android Library
Make sure you use the same Package Name as used in NativeCalculations.cs . The Minimum SDK depends on the capabilities of the package you are going to build. It can be changed later so API 16 is sufficient.
After clicking Finish there will be a new Android library folder in the directory structure.
Android Dependencies
Because this library is going to be used inside of Unity, there are specific dependencies that need to be set for proper compilation and runtime.
Open the build.gradle for the library and edit the dependencies section as shown below.
New Android Library’s build.gradle
Some questions you may be having:
Why can I not find the Unity classes jar location?
You may not have the Android Build Support Module. To add this check out the first section of the article. This jar is required to send messages back to Unity.
2. Why is 'androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.1.0' set as api instead of implementation ?
The appcompat library is used for dealing with activities, among many things. A common use case would be requesting permissions. The Unity build will error out during runtime saying appcompat does not exist. Changing it to api will allow this library to be shared during runtime of Unity. This example will not go into how to request permissions, but it will be useful to keep this in mind when debugging runtime errors. For more explanation on the different types of dependencies. For official information on different types of dependencies.
3. Why can’t I just use implementation 'com.google.code.gson:gson:2.8.6' ?
Unity will error out with:
UnityEngine.AndroidJavaException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Failed resolution of Lcom/google/gson/Gson;
The library must be including in the aar. An easy way is to just include it in libs.
Android Library Class
We can now add our implementation. Open up java, right click com.example.nativecalculations → New → Java Class. We will name it NativeCalculationsPlugin .
Creating a new Java Class
Quick notes:
UnityPlayer.UnitySendMessage requires the same game object name as well as the method name inside NativeCalculations.cs . Unity called methods can return basic types (like int, float, boolean), but not class types. Java class types are easiest sent by stringifying into json and then parsing back into a C# class.
Android Library Build
We will also be adding some code at the bottom of build.gradle to automatically copy the built Android Library into the Unity Android Plugin folder.
To build the Android Library go to Build → Make Module ‘nativecalculations’.
Android Unity Build
File → Build Settings. Click on Android and click Switch Platform if you have not do so already. Click on Player Settings. Make sure the Package Name is properly set as well as the minimum API level depending on your Android code. For this example API level 16 is sufficient.
Other Settings in Player Settings for Android
You can either click Build or Build and Run . You may get a notification that your Android SDK is outdated. In actuality it is newer than expected by Unity. This is fine however for most plugins. Just clicking Use Highest Installed will allow building.
Android SDK is outdated
Viewing Android Logs
After the build is complete and the application is running, click Logcat at the bottom. In the search bar you can filter by Regex. Type in Unity .
Android Logcat results for example
iOS
Unlike Android where we will create a library in Android Studio and built the filt to be compiled by Unity, iOS requires building/modifying an XCode project. Each subsequent build will override some of the previously edited files in XCode. Therefore any permanent edits to XCode have to be done inside Unity (unless you use my custom script in build post processor).
iOS Unity Build
File → Build Settings. Click on iOS and click Switch Platform if you have not do so already. Check Development Build to be able to see the logs.
Click on Player Settings.
2. Make sure your Target SDK is set properly. For this demo we will use the Simulator SDK.
Other Settings Target
3. Make sure the Package Name is properly set (as well as the Signing Team ID if your target SDK is the device SDK).
Other Settings Identification
Build post processor
Inside the iOS folder create a new folder called Editor . Inside Editor create a new Script called BuildPostProcessor.cs . The Editor folder is a reserved folder in Unity that will run specific scripts and this script must be inside there for the imports to work as well as the script to be executed properly.
Adding BuildPostProcessor.cs
Quick Notes:
Foundation.framework added below is not necessary for the example but a demonstration of how to add system frameworks Add specific build properties and flags
We will now add a custom script that will automatically copy back edited files in XCode to the source files in Unity.
Why? Any time a project is rebuilt, the Unity project files will override the edited changes in XCode even if the XCode changes are newer. This is prone to errors as many of the editing will take place in XCode because of its IDE capabilities. This shell script will ensure edited files in XCode will be reflected in the Unity source files once a successful run takes place.
NOTE: If there was no successful run and you want to save your changes, you will need to manually copy the changes back to the original file.
Now we can add our native plugin script. Inside of Plugins/iOS add NativeCalculationsPlugin.mm .
Quick Notes:
extern "C" are the interface methods called from Unity. These functions need to return C types and not Objective C classes. Note we are returning a const char * from copying the NSString with a helper function. The Objective C class is a singleton. The init helper method is used for initialization code similar to the constructor in Java. When sending JSON it is easiest to make dictionaries and use the utility function to stringify the dictionary.
Viewing iOS Logs
After the build is complete and the application is running, you can view the logs in XCode.
iOS log results
Check out the full code and be sure to subscribe for more programming intricacies. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-create-a-cross-platform-mobile-ios-and-android-plugin-for-unity-847b532615cc | ['Matthew Bajorek'] | 2020-06-12 19:11:34.080000+00:00 | ['Unity', 'Android', 'Plugins', 'iOS'] |
My Sexuality No Longer Fits Into This Box | My Sexuality No Longer Fits Into This Box
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels
It finally happened. I found a sexual ASMR video. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but for me, it is.
I’m an ASMR addict. I regularly get lost in ASMR rabbit holes on YouTube when I’m lying in bed because I love that exquisite feeling of being so tired and comfortable that you keep nodding off, but not wanting to fully surrender to sleep because you are watching something so incredibly relaxing…
As I’ve shared my addiction with more and more people, I’ve encountered many who think ASMR videos are expressions of sexual kinks and fetishes. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this, since I knew that a few years ago, PayPal suspended the accounts of several “ASMRtists” who have huge followings on YouTube because the payment platform considered these completely non-sexual videos to be against their anti-sex work policies.
It seems rather ridiculous to me. I’ve seen hundreds of these videos, and while some of them are sexy and some definitely skirt the line, I’d hardly call them sexual and absolutely would not consider them sexual entertainment.
However…I’ve always acknowledged that there are probably some sexual ASMR videos out there. Somewhere. The ASMR platform lends itself perfectly to a more sexualized experience, so no doubt there are people out there doing just that.
I’ve never gone searching for one — I have no need. My draw to ASMR is simply the benefits of relaxation. There are endless other outlets for getting my sexual jollies.
But then…it happened. YouTube recommended a new channel for me, hosted by an incredibly beautiful Russian woman. The first video that popped up on my feed featured her dressed in some kind of crazy-hot costume that barely contains her breasts, while she fiddles with pinecones, dried leaves, and stuffs random objects into a phallic-shaped decanter, bosom heaving in the background.
I was mesmerized. I was falling into one of the best states of relaxation I’ve ever experienced, while also being crazy turned on.
And then the next video popped up and…there it was. The ultimate sex-ASMR fusion.
It’s called ASMR for Men and of course, I had to know what that was about. I’ve never seen anyone label a video by gender before, so my curiosity was piqued. And of course, the moment I saw her stroking those two super long microphones, each one adorned with a little pussy cat ornament, I knew exactly where that video was going.
What surprised me was how much I liked it. I like women, too, so that’s no shock, but it surprised me how much her efforts to stimulate a heterosexual male actually worked on me. I swear to God, I grew a sympathetic dick while watching that video.
“Thank you for giving it to me,” she whispers at some point, and I felt this testosterone-like thrill surge through me at her words.
Near the end of the video, she leans into the mics over and over again, opening her mouth just a bit here and there, making you think she’s about to deepthroat them and all I could think was, “Yes! Suck that mic!” I mean, I’m laughing as I write this, but I’m also dead serious.
That video made me feel like a man and I loved it. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/my-sexuality-no-longer-fits-into-this-box-cd3426e0c7c5 | ['Yael Wolfe'] | 2020-12-01 03:52:14.005000+00:00 | ['Gender Identity', 'Gender', 'Women', 'Sexuality', 'Self'] |
How to Get Google Analytics Report Data as Pandas DataFrame? | How to Get Google Analytics Report Data as Pandas DataFrame?
Google Analytics tracks and reports website traffic which helps to understand customers as well as website’s performance.
Google Analytics report data can be fetched through Google Analytics Reporting API V4 using python with few lines of code. I will explain whole process in 4 steps.
1. Set up the project in Google Developer Console and get client token and secret
In order to access Google APIs, user need a project on Google Cloud Platform and a service account. Follow the steps written below to set up project and service account in Google Developer Console.
I. Create a project here https://console.cloud.google.com/ II. Create a service account and save credentials (.json file). Read more about service account here. III. Enable Google Analytics Reporting API here https://console.developers.google.com/apis/dashboard?
If you face any issue with this step , watch Google Cloud Platform’s video guide on their YouTube Channel.
Note: This is one time setup.
2. Authentication
Once you have clients secrets (credentials file), you can access Google Analytics Reporting API by authentication using OAuth 2.0. We will use oauth2client and httplib2 python libraries for authentication.
Google Analytics Authentication code
ga_auth = authenticate_ga_api()
Note: When you run authenticate_ga_api() for the first time , it will redirect to authentication link in default browser. Choose/enter gmail id registered with Google project and click on allow button. This will create and save authentication credential file “ analyticsreporting.dat” for Google Analytics Reporting API. See sample authentication credentials file below.
Authentication credentials sample
Note: The authentication access token expires in 1 hour, we have to rerun authenticat_ga_api function to refresh access_token .
3. Request submission
In this step we define requests and execute them using reports.batchget
method in the Google API Client.
Request must be a dictionary object. A request usually includes viewId , dateRanges , dimensions , and metrics .
View Id : View id can be found in Google Analytics under view tab. Date Ranges: start date and end date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Dimensions: Variables which are used to group metrics (secondary variables). example: user type, data type : string Metrics : Secondary variables, example: users, datatype: numeric
Explore all dimensions and metrics combinations at https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/dimensions-metrics-explorer/ .
Report request sample
Execute requests to get data. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/how-to-get-google-analytics-report-data-as-pandas-dataframe-e3930831fba | ['Dayal Chand Aichara'] | 2019-11-20 03:57:20.526000+00:00 | ['Google Api', 'Google Analytics', 'Pandas', 'Python', 'Pandas Dataframe'] |
Thank you for all the amazing work and growth that you provided to the Self Driving-Cars Nanodegree… | Thank you for all the amazing work and growth that you provided to the Self Driving-Cars Nanodegree and School of Autonomous Vehicles during all these years. Best wishes for your next endeavor. We’ll miss you David! | https://medium.com/@luis.a.vivero/thank-you-for-all-the-amazing-work-and-growth-that-you-provided-to-the-self-driving-cars-nanodegree-ce1dea0a37f7 | ['Luis Vivero'] | 2020-12-12 21:42:52.108000+00:00 | ['Schoolautonomousvehicles', 'Udacity', 'Selfdrivingcars'] |
預告：聖誕特別篇《黑心公司工作的我去了異世界當魔法師》鯧鯧動森劇場 | 讀心理學，鐘意科技同效率相關題材。A Psychology student is hooked on technologies and productivity. #地鐵迷 #非火車迷 #科幻 #電子化 #硬筆書法#手寫 #metro #digital #handwritten #calligraphy | https://medium.com/@fishsunsun/%E9%A0%90%E5%91%8A-%E8%81%96%E8%AA%95%E7%89%B9%E5%88%A5%E7%AF%87-%E9%BB%91%E5%BF%83%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E5%B7%A5%E4%BD%9C%E7%9A%84%E6%88%91%E5%8E%BB%E4%BA%86%E7%95%B0%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E7%95%B6%E9%AD%94%E6%B3%95%E5%B8%AB-%E9%AF%A7%E9%AF%A7%E5%8B%95%E6%A3%AE%E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4-cdea281760cc | ['Curtis Chan Fishsunsun'] | 2020-12-18 04:54:21.229000+00:00 | ['Animal Crossing', '微電影', 'Hong Kong', '動物森友會', '香港'] |
4 effective Pay Per Click Advertising Strategies | When attempting to draw in professional traffic to your internet site, there are multiple approaches a business can take. You can concentrate on a lasting SEO approach to generate organic web traffic. You can invest in paid advertisements to see immediate outcomes. Or, you can do a mix of the two.
One major advantage of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising over Organic Search Engine Optimization methods is that Pay Per Click gives you much more control over the search questions you appear for as well as the target markets you get to.
” Pay Per Click supplies a media network to capitalize on search need,” claims Elder Look Strategist Nick Basham. “It’s kind of like an electronic variation of the yellow web pages. Individuals are available looking for these terms.
Pay Per Click advertising allows you to show ads to individuals that are currently searching for things you offer, as well as it allows you to tailor your messaging to them.”
Here are four PPC strategies you can use to bring top quality visitors to your site
Well-known Campaigns
Branded projects are a type of paid search advertisement that targets well-known terms, like your firm name or trademarked terms. As an example, a top-quality campaign for New Breed would bid on the key phrases “New Type” and also “New Breed Advertising And Marketing.”
” Top quality campaigns are easily one of the most effective Pay Per Click Services to start with,” Nick claims. “They’re definitely a foundation or fundamental piece of your Pay Per Click technique, despite the industry. They’re actually a good way of making sure that you are catching all the demand in the market for your well-known terms.”
Ideally, you should already be ranking well for these search phrases naturally, but by placing some paid initiatives into them also, you can guarantee you have the greatest possible visibility in the SERPS.
” Having the ability to reveal an ad above the organic listings as well as take up all the property that’s offered there through customizing the ad copy, utilizing the 90 personalities that are permitted to you through the 3 headings and afterward the 180 characters that are allowed to you with the summaries, that takes up a great deal of space and permits you to customize your messaging which is actually essential to branding,” Nick states.
The disadvantage of branded projects is that you might end up paying for website traffic you would have gotten anyways organically since if a searcher is looking for your branded terms they most likely have some intent to involve with your web content currently.
Nonetheless, a research study from Google has actually discovered that 89% of search ad web traffic is incremental and would not be changed by organic clicks if those advertisements aren’t being run. With branded terms likewise normally having an affordable per click, the prospective rewards surpass the dangers for these sorts of campaigns.
Solutions Campaigns
Solutions projects are paid search ads focused on the particular remedies you use on the market.
” They’re commonly tactically developed around discomfort factors that individuals may be attempting to solve for,” Nick claims.
So the advertisements themselves direct audiences to information concerning the products or services your business markets, but they might make use of language and terms from your client’s viewpoint.
For example, if a top-quality management software application is targeting call facility managers who are having trouble tracking representative efficiency, they could bid for the terms “call center software” or “call center management option” rather than “top quality management software application.”
By targeting topics associated with the discomfort factors potential customers have and also the services they’re seeking, you can get to consideration stage customers.
” These projects enable you to offer an ad that’s created toward converting for somebody who has a high propensity to acquire and is searching for the solution to repair their issue,” Nick says.
Check out Our Ultimate Paid Search Checklist to Create a Paid Marketing Method and also Enhance Your Pay Per Click Ad Invest.
Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting projects can consist of both searches as well as display advertisements. They target audiences who have actually visited your internet site or involved with your brand name in an effort to get them to return as well as advance further in the purchaser’s trip.
” I always think about paid search and retargeting as a one-two strike,” Nick claims. “You’re offering an ad with Google search results with paid search, somebody hangs around on your web site on a specific web page and afterward you’re able to a cookie that user and also follow them with their trip on the web, keeping your product and also brand top of mind as well as offering that extra chance to convert.”
Relying on the material you’re providing and the target market you’re targeting, retargeting advertisements will certainly vary. As an example, a top-of-the-funnel campaign might concentrate on attempting to get internet site visitors to transform on a downloadable web content offer pertaining to the pages they were surfing. A bottom-of-the-funnel campaign may target visitors that went to certain services or product web pages as well as attempt to get them to register for a trial.
With retargeting campaigns, it is necessary to set your frequency levels as well as targeting duration properly to ensure that you don’t overwhelm a possibility with your advertisements or spend excessive time serving advertisements to a person who will certainly never ever convert. You also keep up today regarding the privacy laws regulating cookies.
Conquest Campaigns
Conquest projects are search advertisements that target the top quality regards to your competitors in an initiative to draw away traffic far from their websites and also to your very own.
” A conquest project is more of a sophisticated paid method,” Nick claims. “It’s made to drive incremental website traffic to your website from people who may already be dedicated to another brand name.”
For instance, in the picture above SEMrush and Conductor both are running pursuit projects around Moz’s name.
These campaigns can be very pricey since you’re targeting branded advocates another business. Additionally, they often tend to have reduced conversion prices than various other PPC projects because you are trying to gain prospects that have various search intent.
” You understand that person’s searching for a specific brand,” Nick says.
“If you’re showing them your advertisement, they may be interested, they may have a look, but based upon where they are in the customer’s journey, their brand commitment, it may be a tougher sell.”
However, if you already have actually a solid paid advertising method extending across the various other project kinds, occupation projects enable you to prolong your reach to target markets who might not have located you otherwise and also go neck and neck with competitors.
The Takeaway
As you’re running these projects, it’s important to consistently examine the traffic that’s being generated and just how they’re behaving once they’re on your site.
Are your advertisements drawing in the best kind of website traffic to your website? Are the ideal ads getting to the right audiences? What are site visitors from paid doing on the pages your advertisements lead them to? Do you have a healthy conversion price? Are you seeing ROI?
” A huge piece of a successful paid method is making sure that the type of website traffic you’re creating matters and is of high grade,” Nick claims. “Take note of the inquiries that are matching to your keywords technique and afterward execute any type of needed actions to remediate any irrelevant traffic via an adverse keyword phrase approach.”
PPC campaigns will certainly require some trial and error. However, over time as you continue to optimize your ads based on what you have actually picked up from analytics, you’ll have the ability to successfully create a growing number of high-grade leads as well as clients. | https://medium.com/@aspirationworx55/when-attempting-to-draw-in-professional-traffic-to-your-internet-site-there-are-multiple-e576171102dd | ['Aspiration Worx'] | 2021-10-28 05:11:07.725000+00:00 | ['Seo Agency', 'Digital Marketing', 'Digital', 'Seo Services', 'PPC Marketing'] |
Analyzing multigraphs in Neo4j Graph data science library | Analyzing multigraphs in Neo4j Graph data science library
When times are tough, I think it is essential to focus on our relationships. Some of us concentrate more on social interactions. Others like to play around with neurons, while some just want to look at cute animals. No matter your network preference, I would like to help you reflect on those relationships and find more (positive) insights about them. To do that, we will put on our data science hat and examine a simple network to learn how does the Neo4j Graph data science library deal with multigraphs and how to analyze them. I have to warn you that this will be a longer blog post and focused more on the technical details.
What is a multigraph anyway? Let’s look at the Wikipedia definition:
In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a multigraph is a graph which is permitted to have multiple edges (also called parallel edges), that is, edges that have the same end nodes. Thus two vertices may be connected by more than one edge. There are two distinct notions of multiple edges: - Edges without own identity: The identity of an edge is defined solely by the two nodes it connects. In this case, the term “multiple edges” means that the same edge can occur several times between these two nodes. - Edges with own identity: Edges are primitive entities just like nodes. When multiple edges connect two nodes, these are different edges.
To summarize the definition, the multigraph allows multiple relationships between a given pair of nodes. In other words, it means that we can have many connections of the same type between a pair of nodes like:
Or connections with different types between a pair of nodes like:
For example, in a knowledge graph, we might run into a combination of both.
Visualization created with Neo4j Browser
We will use the above example graph to demonstrate how the GDS library handles projecting multigraphs, what to look for, and what to expect. I have added weights to relationships as we will need them to demonstrate property aggregations, but more on that later.
Import the graph
CREATE (t:Entity{name:'Tomaz'}),
(n:Entity{name:'Neo4j'})
CREATE (t)-[:LIKES{weight:1}]->(n),
(t)-[:LOVES{weight:2}]->(n),
(t)-[:PRESENTED_FOR{weight:0.5}]->(n),
(t)-[:PRESENTED_FOR{weight:1.5}]->(n);
You can expect a deep dive into GDS multigraph projections, and little to no focus on the actual graph algorithms. We will use only the Degree centrality to examine the projected graphs.
Relationships without own identity
In the context of the GDS library, relationships without their own identity imply that we ignore the type of relationships in the process of projecting the graph.
Native projection
We will start with native projection examples. If we use the wildcard operator * to define the relationships we want to project, we ignore their type and bundle them all together. This can be understood as losing their own identity (type in the context of Neo4j).
Default aggregation strategy
In the first example, we will observe the default behavior of the graph projection process.
CALL gds.graph.create('default_agg','*','*',
{relationshipProperties: ['weight']})
The default aggregation strategy doesn’t perform any aggregations and projects all the relationships from the stored graph to memory without any transformations. If we check the relationshipCount , we observe that four relationships have been projected. We can also take a look at the relationshipProjection :
{
"*": {
"orientation": "NATURAL",
"aggregation": "DEFAULT",
"type": "*",
"properties": {
"weight": {
"property": "weight",
"defaultValue": null,
"aggregation": "DEFAULT"
}
}
}
}
Anytime you see a type:'*' , you can be sure that all relationships have lost their type in the projection process. This also means that we can't perform additional filtering when executing the algorithms. To double-check the projected graph, we can use the degree centrality.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('default_agg')
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS degree
ORDER BY degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════╗
║ name ║ degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 4.0 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════╝
As we expected, all four relationships have been projected. To have a reference for the future, let’s also calculate the weighted degree centrality. By adding the relationshipWeightProperty parameter, we indicate we want to use the weighted variant of the algorithm.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('default_agg',
{relationshipWeightProperty:'weight'})
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS weighted_degree
ORDER BY weighted_degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════════════╗
║ name ║ weighted_degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 4.0 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════════════╝
The result is the sum of weights of all the considered relationships. We have no use of this projected graph anymore, so remember to release it from memory.
CALL gds.graph.drop('default_agg');
Single-graph strategy
Depending on the use case, we might want to reduce our multigraph to a single graph during the projection process. This can be easily achieved with the aggregation parameter. We have to use the configuration map variant for the relationship definition.
CALL gds.graph.create('single_rel_strategy','*',
{TYPE:{type:'*', aggregation:'SINGLE'}})
We notice by looking at the relationshipCount , that only a single relationship has been projected. If we want, we can double-check the results with the degree centrality.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('single_rel_strategy')
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS degree
ORDER BY degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════╗
║ name ║ degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 1.0 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════╝
Don’t forget to drop the projected graph once we are done.
CALL gds.graph.drop('single_rel_strategy');
Property aggregation strategies
We have looked at the unweighted multigraph so far. Now it is time to look at what happens when we are dealing with a weighted multigraph, and we want to reduce it to a single graph. There are three different strategies we can pick for property aggregation strategy:
MIN: minimum value of all weights is projected
MAX: maximum value of all weights is projected
SUM: the sum of all weights is projected
In our next example, we will use the MIN property aggregation strategy to reduce a weighted multigraph to a single graph. By providing the property aggregation parameter, we indicate we want to reduce the stored graph to a single graph in the projection process.
CALL gds.graph.create('min_aggregation','*','*',
{relationshipProperties: {weight: {property: 'weight',
aggregation: 'MIN'}}})
We can observe that the relationshipCount is 1, which means our multigraph has been successfully reduced to a single graph. Let's examine the relationshipProjection .
{
"*": {
"orientation": "NATURAL",
"aggregation": "DEFAULT",
"type": "*",
"properties": {
"weight": {
"property": "weight",
"defaultValue": null,
"aggregation": "MIN"
}
}
}
}
Here we can observe that there are two aggregation configuration options, one on the relationship level and one on the property level. As far as I can tell, you should use the relationships level aggregation when dealing with unweighted networks and property level aggregation when dealing with weighted ones. We will again double-check the results with the degree centrality.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('min_aggregation')
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS degree
ORDER BY degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════╗
║ name ║ degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 1.0 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════╝
To validate the MIN property aggregation, let's also calculate the weighted degree centrality.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('min_aggregation',
{relationshipWeightProperty:'weight'})
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS weighted_degree
ORDER BY weighted_degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════════════╗
║ name ║ weighted_degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 0.5 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════════════╝
As we expected with the MIN property aggregation strategy, the single reduced weight has the minimum value of considered weights. Again, as we finished with the example, don't forget to drop the projected graph.
CALL gds.graph.drop('min_aggregation');
Cypher projection
Let’s recreate the above examples with cypher projection. To lose the identity of the relationships and bundle them all together, we avoid providing the type column in the return of the relationship statement.
Default aggregation strategy
Similarly to native projection, the default setting in cypher projection is to project all the relationships without any transformation during the projection process.
CALL gds.graph.create.cypher(
'cypher_default_strategy',
'MATCH (n:Entity) RETURN id(n) AS id',
'MATCH (n:Entity)-[r]->(m:Entity)
RETURN id(n) AS source, id(m) AS target'
)
By looking at the relationshipCount , we observe that all four relationships have been projected as intended. Let's also take a close look at the relationshipProjection .
{
"*": {
"orientation": "NATURAL",
"aggregation": "DEFAULT",
"type": "*",
"properties": {
}
}
}
Remember, before we said that the type:"*" indicates that relationships lose their identity (type) during the projection process. The same applies to cypher projection. To verify the projected graph, we run the degree centrality.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('cypher_default_strategy')
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS degree
ORDER BY degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════╗
║ name ║ degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 4.0 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════╝
Single relationship strategy
With cypher projection, we don’t have access to relationship level aggregation strategies. This is no problem at all, as it is very straightforward to reduce the multigraph to a single graph using only the cypher query language. We simply add the DISTINCT clause in the return of the relationship statement, and it should be good to go. If you need more help with cypher, I suggest you take a look at Neo4j Graph Academy.
CALL gds.graph.create.cypher(
'cypher_single_strategy',
'MATCH (n:Entity) RETURN id(n) AS id',
'MATCH (n:Entity)-[r]->(m:Entity)
RETURN DISTINCT id(n) AS source, id(m) AS target'
)
The relationship count is 1, which means we have successfully reduced the multigraph. Remember to drop the projected graph.
CALL gds.graph.drop('cypher_single_strategy')
Property aggregation strategies
On the other hand, with cypher projection, we do have access to property level aggregation strategies. We don’t really “need” them as we can accomplish all the transformation using only cypher. To show you what I mean by that, we can apply the minimum property strategy aggregation using plain cypher like:
CALL gds.graph.create.cypher(
'cypher_min_strategy',
'MATCH (n:Entity) RETURN id(n) AS id',
'MATCH (n:Entity)-[r]->(m:Entity)
RETURN id(n) AS source, id(m) AS target, min(r.weight) as weight'
)
However, if we look at the official documentation:
One drawback of that approach is that we put more pressure on the Cypher execution engine and the query result consumes additional memory. An alternative approach is to use relationshipProperties as part of the optional configuration map. The syntax is identical to the property mappings used in the native projection.
So, to conserve memory, we can use the property level aggregation strategies in the configuration map.
CALL gds.graph.create.cypher(
'cypher_min_improved',
'MATCH (n:Entity) RETURN id(n) AS id',
'MATCH (n:Entity)-[r]->(m:Entity)
RETURN id(n) AS source, id(m) AS target, r.weight as weight',
{relationshipProperties: {minWeight: {property: 'weight',
aggregation: 'MIN'}}})
The relationshipCount is 1, which confirms our successful multigraph reduction. Just to make sure, we can run the weighted centrality and validate results.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('cypher_min_improved',
{relationshipWeightProperty:'minWeight'})
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS weighted_degree
ORDER BY weighted_degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════════════╗
║ name ║ weighted_degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 0.5 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════════════╝
With everything in order, we can release both projected graphs from memory.
CALL gds.graph.drop('cypher_min_improved');
CALL gds.graph.drop('cypher_min_strategy);
Relationships with own identity
We also have the option to retain the type of relationships during the projection process. Among other things, this allows us to perform additional filtering when executing graph algorithms. However, we have to be careful, as projecting relationships with a preserved type is a bit different in the context of multigraphs.
Native projection
With the native projection, it is simple to declare that we want to preserve the type of relationships. All we have to do is specify which relationship types we want to consider, and the GDS engine will automatically bundle relationships under the specific relationship type. Let’s take a look at some examples to gain a better understanding.
Default aggregation strategy
From previous examples we already know that the default aggregation strategy does not perform any transformations. By defining the relationship types, we indicate to the GDS library that we want to retain their type after the projection process.
CALL gds.graph.create('type_default','*',
['PRESENTED_FOR','LIKES','LOVES'])
As expected, the relationshipsCount is 4. Let's take a closer look at the relationshipProjection .
{
"LIKES": {
"orientation": "NATURAL",
"aggregation": "DEFAULT",
"type": "LIKES",
"properties": { }
},
"LOVES": {
"orientation": "NATURAL",
"aggregation": "DEFAULT",
"type": "LOVES",
"properties": { }
},
"PRESENTED_FOR": {
"orientation": "NATURAL",
"aggregation": "DEFAULT",
"type": "PRESENTED_FOR",
"properties": { }
}
}
We can see that we have three different bundles or groups of relationships. Each bundle composes of a single relationship type, which is defined with the type parameter. It is handy to look at relationshipProjection to validate what kind of graph we have projected and if the relationship types have been retained. Not much else to do with this in-memory graph.
CALL gds.graph.drop('type_default');
Single relationship strategy
Like before, we can reduce our unweighted multigraph to a single graph with the relationship level aggregation parameter. We have to provide the aggregation parameter for each relationship type separately.
CALL gds.graph.create('type_single','*',
{LIKES:{type:'LIKES',aggregation:'SINGLE'},
LOVES:{type:'LOVES',aggregation:'SINGLE'},
PRESENTED_FOR:{type:'PRESENTED_FOR',aggregation:'SINGLE'}})
Ok, so we reduced to a single graph, but the relationshipCount is 3. Why is it so? The multigraph reduction process works on the relationship type level, and because we have three distinct relationship types, a single relationship for each type has been projected. Let's calculate the degree centrality on the whole in-memory graph.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('type_single')
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS degree
ORDER BY degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════╗
║ name ║ degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 3.0 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════╝
As we explained, even though we have reduced each relationship type separately, we are still dealing with a multigraph on the whole. When running graph algorithms, you have to pay close attention to whether you are dealing with a multigraph or not, have you projected multiple relationship types and have you performed any transformations during projection, as all of this will affect the algorithm results.
We can now drop this graph.
CALL gds.graph.drop('type_single');
Property aggregation strategies
Property aggregation strategies are very similar to before when we were dealing with relationships without identity. The only change is that now the aggregations are grouped by the relationship type.
CALL gds.graph.create('type_min','*',
['PRESENTED_FOR','LIKES','LOVES'],
{relationshipProperties: {weight: {property: 'weight',
aggregation: 'MIN'}}})
We get 3 relationships projected as we have learned that the aggregations happen on the relationship type level. We will double-check the results with the weighted degree.
CALL gds.alpha.degree.stream('type_min',
{relationshipWeightProperty:'weight'})
YIELD nodeId, score
RETURN gds.util.asNode(nodeId).name AS name,
score AS weighted_degree
ORDER BY weighted_degree DESC
Results
╔═══════════╦════════════════════╗
║ name ║ weighted_degree ║
╠═══════════╬════════════════════║
║ Tomaz ║ 3.5 ║
║ Neo4j ║ 0.0 ║
╚═══════════╩════════════════════╝
I feel like a broken record by now, but don’t forget to drop the graph :)
CALL gds.graph.drop('type-min');
Conclusion
I skipped the examples for cypher projection with preserved relationship types to shorten this blog post a bit. Basically, all you have to do is to add the column type in the relationship statement, and it should behave identically to the native projection examples. I hope you got a better understanding of what is going on under the hood of the Neo4j Graph Data Science library during the projection process, which will hopefully help you find more and better insights. To sum it up, all aggregations either on relationship level or property level are grouped by the relationship type.
Thanks for reading, and as always, the code is available on GitHub. | https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-multigraphs-in-neo4j-graph-data-science-library-35c9b6d20099 | ['Tomaz Bratanic'] | 2020-03-31 15:22:59.516000+00:00 | ['Graph', 'Algorithms', 'Data Science', 'Neo4j', 'Network'] |
Saul’s Early Efforts | Acts 9:19–31
Overview
This passage presents us with “Luke’s succinct remarks about the earliest stages of Saul’s missionary career, followed by another summary statement in 9:31. The latter is related to what proceeds it by the fact that one of the contributing causes of the ‘peace’ that depended upon the church and various parts of the Holy Land was first the conversion of Saul, who had spearheaded the persecution of the church, and secondly the removal of the always controversial Saul from the premise of the Holy Land. As B. R. Gaventa points out, Saul is portrayed as an overthrown enemy in the conversion accounts, a portrayal in part based on the fact that even some of his newfound Christian friends appear to have had certain suspicions about Saul, perhaps due to the suddenness of his volte-face.” (Witherington & Gaventa)
People
Barnabas — In the book of Acts, we find a Levite from Cyprus named Joses (Acts 4:36), whom the apostles called Barnabas. That nickname, translated “Son of Encouragement” (Acts 4:36–37) or “Son of Exhortation” was probably given to him because of his inclination to serve others (Acts 4:36–37, 9:27) and his willingness to do whatever church leaders needed (Acts 11:25–31). He is referred to as a “good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith.” Through his ministry, “a great number of people were brought to the Lord” (Acts 11:24). Paul uses Barnabas as an example of one with a proper perspective on money and property. When he sold his land, he brought the proceeds to the apostles and laid it at their feet (Acts 4:36–37). (gotquestions.org)
Background
Damascus — This was one of the most ancient and most important of the cities of Syria. It is situated 130 miles northeast of Jerusalem, in a plain of vast size and of extreme fertility, on the edge of the desert. This fertile plain, which is nearly circular and about 30 miles in diameter. Here the apostle Paul was converted and preached the gospel. Acts 9:1–25 Damascus has always been a great center for trade. Its present population is from 100,000 to 150,000. It has a delightful climate. Certain localities are shown as the site of those scriptural events which especially interest us in its history. Queen’s Street, which runs straight through the city from east to west, may be the street called Straight referenced earlier in Acts 9:11. The house of Judas and that of Ananias are shown, but little confidence can be placed in any of these traditions. (Smith’s)
picture from Glo Bible
This is the wall Paul would have been lowered down in an escape out of Damascus.
Bible Places, Glo Bible
Christianity spread quickly into Damascus due to the centrality of the city and the trade routes running through it.
Key Ideas
Causing havoc — This word means to have laid waste, destroy, ravage, and/or harass.
Stir up — This Greek word comes from 2 words: sýn, “identified with” andxeō, “to pour.” Properly, pour out together, i.e. in combination. Basically, it means to bewilder, stir up, throw into confusion.
Son of God — This is the only mention in Acts of someone proclaiming Jesus as the “Son of God” (but cf. 13:33). This fact reflects the clear understanding of Jesus that Saul had — even so shortly after his conversion. As used in the Old Testament, this title referred to Israel (Exod. 4:22; Hos. 11:1), Israel’s anointed king (2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 89:26), and the Messiah (Ps. 2:7). Saul recognized that Jesus was the Son of God predicted there. He used this title for Jesus frequently in his epistles (Rom. 1:3–4, 9; 5:10; 8:3, 29, 32; 1 Cor. 1:9; 15:28; 2 Cor. 1:19; Gal. 1:16; 2:20; 4:4, 6; 1 Thess. 1:10). (Constable)
Peace — The word means peace, peace of mind; the invocation of peace is a common Jewish farewell, in the Hebraistic sense of the health (welfare) of an individual. It comes from 2 Greek words: eirō, “to join, tie together into a whole”) — properly, wholeness, when all essential parts are joined together;peace(God’s gift of wholeness).
Built Up — This is to erect a building, build; figurative of the building up of character: build up, edify, encourage. This word is from 2 Greek words: oíkos, “a house” and domeō, “to build” — properly, to build a house (home, edifice). Figuratively, the word means to edify. Literally, it means to “build someone up,” helping them to stand, to be strong or sturdy.
Comfort — This is the act of exhortation, entreaty, encouragement, comfort. Properly, this is a call (urging), done by someone “close beside,” (i.e. apersonal exhortation that delivers the “evidence that stands up in God’s court.”)
Summary — This statement is Luke’s third major progress report on the state of the church (cf. 2:47; 6:7; 12:24; 16:5; 19:20; 28:30–31). It closes this section dealing with the church’s expansion in Judea and Samaria (6:8–9:31). The Lord had added about 3,000 believers to the core group of disciples (2:41). Then He added more who became Christians day by day (2:47). Shortly after that, He added multitudes of new believers (5:14). Then we read the number of disciples increased greatly (6:7). Now we read that the church “. . . continued to increase” (9:31). (Constable)
Quotes
“No one persecutes a man who is ineffective and who obviously does not matter. George Bernard Shaw once said that the biggest compliment you can pay an author is to burn his books. Someone has said, ‘A wolf will never attack a painted sheep.’ Counterfeit Christianity is always safe. Real Christianity is always in peril. To suffer persecution is to be paid the greatest of compliments because it is the certain proof that men think we really matter.” -Barclay
“Saul’s plans for persecuting Christians in Damascus took a strange turn; he had entered the city blind and left in a basket! Ironically he became the object of persecution.” -Toussaint
“Imagine how difficult it must have been for those Christians who had relatives whom Saul had persecuted to sit down with him in church meetings and share the Lord’s Supper.” -Constable
References
2 Corinthians 11:32–33 — “In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me. But I was lowered in a basket from a window in the wall and slipped through his hands.”
Possible Discussion Points
One of the most compelling arguments to win people over for Jesus can be a transformed life. Paul’s conversion proved “that Jesus was the Messiah.” Where do you see transformation in your life that would fill others with wonder? What areas of your life do you still need to lay before Jesus and trust in his power for transformation?
When was the last time you took someone into your community, home, or even your life who didn’t seem trustworthy? Do you allow your communion with the Holy Spirit to surpass your fear or lack of trust with people? It isn’t that every person should take in everyone they encounter, but are we listening to Jesus and allowing our faith to be bigger than our desire for security?
Theological Note
Many commentators spend pages upon pages reconciling the differences of Paul’s timeline between Galatians and Acts. Paul tells his story differently depending on the audience, purpose, and genre. As a result, we tend to have differing accounts of Paul’s early life. This guide isn’t meant to serve as an extended explanation of this harmony, however I will provide this image which serves as a broad overview, giving some explanation. | https://medium.com/acts-study-guide/saul-s-early-efforts-1bd8c1029933 | ['Underground Network'] | 2017-03-17 19:37:14.742000+00:00 | ['Bible', 'Christianity'] |
Apple | Apple
It was never known what started it. All that we found was that it started with the colorful fleshy fruit. You might know it. It was said to keep the doctors away; however, on May the 22nd that saying would change. Mrs. Park, my homeroom teacher, was one of the first of the infected. She took a bite and then another, but the second bite was not of the apple. Rather, it was Delilah. My best friend. After that people were eating eat other like animals. Primal instinct took over and all the infected knew was to eat. What might have seemed like a zombie apocalypse turned into something worse. These... things, were intelligent. They could speak walk and talk with no trouble. The only way to tell they’re infected is to shine a light in their eye. That’s the only way to see it. Body stealing parasites who had taken over our friends and family. Why apples? That is a question I plan to solve. I only pray I don’t become a snack before I can. | https://medium.com/@brooklyn.tibbs/apple-124ccb99b3d7 | ['Pusheen Plush'] | 2020-12-18 04:25:20.824000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Random', 'Apocalypse', 'Fiction Writing', 'Short Story'] |
Deeper Look Into ItalyGate (#ItalyDidIt) and Alfio D’Urso | A few days ago, hashtags #ItalyDidIt and #ItalyGate started trending on Twitter. The reason is a few people claimed that an “IT Expert” testified in an Italian court that he and others rigged machines to switch votes from Trump to Biden.
With this claim, a picture of an affidavit was spread all around social media as evidence.
I have researched the whole thing and wrote this article I shared on both Medium and my Twitter account (@0xMohd). Link to the article here.
This time, we will be taking a deeper look into who Prof. Alfio D’Urso really is and investigating the affidavit and claims Arturo D’Elia presented in the sworn statement even further.
This article came to being after I was sent the video of Prof. Alfio D’Urso reading the affidavit on camera.
Here is a link to the video on YouTube.
According to people sharing the video, he is the Supreme Court of Italy legal counsel and is testifying under oath about Italy’s interference in the 2020 US presidential election.
To keep this short, it’s false. Here’s why.
First, let us take a deeper look into who Alfio D’Urso is.
Prof. Alfio D’Urso
As mentioned in my previous article (“”Italy Did It”: Did They?”), Alfio D’Urso’s a lawyer and is listed as a professor in the University of Catanzaro.
Link to the webpage here
We can also find Prof. Alfio D’Urso’s details by searching for his name on this registry of Italian lawyers.
You know what’s interesting?
When looking up D’Urso’s details on official registries of Italian lawyers, we find the street number mentioned in his office’s address.
However; on the “official” affidavit listing extremely serious accusations, we cannot find the street number. | https://medium.com/@0xmohd/deeper-look-into-italygate-and-alfio-durso-f8fbcef9bdef | ['Mohammad Ali'] | 2021-01-11 02:23:06.783000+00:00 | ['Conspiracy Theories', 'Italy', 'Elections', 'USA', 'Politics'] |
10 Mistakes Photographers Make Their First Year In Business | 10 Mistakes Photographers Make Their First Year In Business Visualmodo Follow Dec 12 · 4 min read
Every business commits mistakes as they grow. While errors may impact your business financially, they can serve as learning opportunities to do better. By sharing the common mistakes photographers make their first year in business, you can hopefully avoid them to keep your business thriving.
10 Mistakes Photographers Make Their First Year In Business
Not having a contract, price list, business plan, and marketing strategy can hurt your first year in the photography industry. Poor customer service, inefficient workflow, unnecessary spending, and being impatient in growing can also negatively impact your business. Hence, it’s essential that you understand how you can prevent these from happening.
Underestimating the Power of Contracts
A contract saves you from wasting resources, time, and effort. Without a legal agreement, clients can exploit your services or terms, making you work beyond what they initially expected from you.
Besides, a contract builds healthy and professional relationships with customers. This is why it’s vital to create a contract for every client that details important information such as inclusions, limitations, expectations, and deadlines. As a result, big mistakes on photographers business.
Failing to Have a Business Plan
Writing a business plan may be one of the most challenging things you would do. However, setting goals and financial terms serve as a guide to know what’s crucial to your business. These factors can help measure your progress and identify what to improve.
Not Setting an Efficient Workflow
Being a photographer isn’t all about capturing beautiful images. Efficiency in following a timeline and meeting deadlines is a crucial aspect of managing a business.
Some photographers make the mistake of not setting a workflow system, leading them to procrastinate post-production, finance tasks, client communication needs, and other logistical and administrative work.
Forgetting to Develop a Price List Mistakes on Photographers Business
Skipping this part can tremendously hurt the future of your business. Some photographers new in the industry don’t spend time thinking about how much to charge to achieve the desired income after taxes and expenses.
If you do this, you may end up raising rates significantly and regularly in the first few years, causing you to lose clients in the process. Having an accurate and well-thought price list helps retain clients and makes your business profitable.
Undervaluing Marketing Strategies
There are clients or job opportunities that won’t come to you on a silver platter, especially during your first year as a photographer. You must be proactive in developing a marketing strategy to give you the best ways to reach target clients and secure bookings.
Building your brand through a website, social media campaigns, and email marketing are all part of engaging with an audience, driving sales, and managing a profitable business.
Splurging On Unnecessary Equipment Without Clients
It can be thrilling purchasing office equipment and shooting gear. However, they would end up collecting dust if there are no client shoots to return the investment. Even if you don’t have the most high-tech tools yet, you can make it work by using the right gear for your skills.
Poor Client Response Mistakes on Photographers Business
From answering simple queries to sending quotations, clients appreciate feeling valued and special. About 66% of adults feel that valuing time is an essential thing in providing good customer service.
Some photographers fail in client communication because they don’t show enthusiasm, not unless the message is regarding a secured booking. Whatever message a client sends, make it a habit to respond respectfully and right away.
Being Impatient in Growing as a Creative Professional
It’s normal to assume that you need generic shots as the market demands these commercial purposes and beyond. While you may get inspiration from other photographers, don’t forget to create your own craft. Strive to improve your shooting techniques, post-processing methods, and even marketing strategies so that your style can stand out among the rest. As a result, big mistakes on photographers business.
Refraining from Collaborating
Other professionals in the photography world can be among the most significant influences in your business. Whether they are new or seasoned creatives, you would learn a lot from them while establishing professional relationships. In some cases, you may get referrals from other photographers, makeup artists, or event coordinators.
Always Saying Yes
Free shoot? Discounted rate after a reduced rate? Unpaid revisions or extended hours? It’s tough to say no, especially if you are new to the business and underbooked. However, overly demanding clients and not getting paid enough can also cause you to sacrifice time and money.
Mistakes on Photographers Business Conclusion
While you may experience or discover other problems, we hope these photography business mistakes serve as lessons to make your first year in the industry successful. | https://medium.com/visualmodo/10-mistakes-photographers-make-their-first-year-in-business-9c57ebe1e746 | [] | 2020-12-12 11:09:04.297000+00:00 | ['Photography', 'Business', 'Photos', 'Mistakes', 'First Year'] |
Pricing Transparency — Not for Consumers | For starters, the chargemaster format is not standardized. While most provider tie charges to individual procedures (called a “fee-for-service” contract), the published chargemasters typically do not distinctly identify those procedures by CPT code, revenue code, or equivalent. This makes comparing prices at the procedure level nigh impossible.
Even though many of these line-items have decipherable descriptions, which a motivated patient or third-party could tie back to a CPT code, this still fails to address nuances which commonly affect costs — procedure modifiers, location, unit type (per day, per number of images, etc.), and other important cost factors. This skews prices and leaves the reported price questionable at best.
Finally, the chargemasters — as they are currently published — do not reflect the costs that most patients will experience. The current chargemasters only include Medicare contracted rates, whereas most patients will experience contracted rates negotiated by their health insurance or employer. While there is sure to be a correlation between Medicare costs and commercial insurance contracts, this will virtually never represent the costs to the consumer on a per-procedure basis.
DRG Costs Don’t Apply to Most Patients
Median Total Cost (in thousands) for Revision of Knee or Hip Replacement (Without Complications or Comorbidity)
Median total cost of DRGs, on the other hand, are much more standardized in their representation. CMS laid out specific guidelines for which DRGs needed to be included, and how to calculate the total costs. As a result, it is easier to compare DRG costs than chargemaster prices across hospitals. Unfortunately, the data still fails to serve consumers in a meaningful manner.
For starters, the total cost to Medicare for any DRG is hardly representative of the contracted rates for insured patients, and even less so for patients’ total out-of-pocket costs. While two hospitals may have drastically different prices for the same condition or treatment, the end result to the patient will largely depend on whether the hospital is in network, how their policy covers their treatment, and whether or not they meet their deductible along the way.
In the data I looked at, some hospitals cost more than twice their competitors in the same city for the same DRGs. As seen in the chart above, a joint replacement revision at Brigham and Women’s hospital costs more than twice that of Beth Israel Deaconess, despite both hospitals being located in Boston. However, most patients in the area wouldn’t feel the difference in their wallets, as they would reach their out-of-pocket maximum and insurance would cover the rest.
DRG Costs Lack Important Context | https://medium.com/@cloudcray/pricing-transparency-not-for-consumers-828e1cfd1daa | ['Cloud Cray'] | 2019-01-21 19:52:19.240000+00:00 | ['Hospital', 'Medical', 'Doctors', 'Transparency', 'Healthcare'] |
Case Study: Udaan’s Business Model | Udaan.com
Wherever there is synergy, we work together
Udaan is a Bangalore based B2C marketplace which is owned and operated by Hiveloop. It was founded by former Flipkart employees Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar, and Vaibhav Gupta. Udaan connects the manufacturers and wholesalers with the retailers online. According to reports, the marketplace has been the fastest Indian start-up to reach in merely 26 months to reach a valuation of 1 billion dollars. As of now, the categories that are available in the marketplace are fashion and electronics.
Vaibhav Gupta
Vaibhav Gupta graduated from IIT Delhi and has also attended the Darden School of Business. He was the SVP(Senior Vice President) of business finance and Analytics at Flipkart. Before jumping into Flipkart, he has worked as an Engagement Manager in McKinsey and Company and as a Senior Consultant in Trilogy E-Business & Co.
The SVP is responsible for helping a company to achieve financial goals and objectives and increase operating performance. He/She prepares budgets, creates businesses plans, and solves internal issues as they arise.
He knew that if Udaan wants to connect with 50 million small businesses across the country, it will only be possible through the technology of smartphones. He also coined the name ‘Udaan’ which refers to India, meaning ‘The rise’. As long as the right product is built, the adoption rate of it will also be bigger like that of the case of Whatsapp.
Sujeet Kumar
Sujeet Kumar has also graduated from IIT Delhi. The charming and calm founder is originally from Kaimur, Bihar, India. He became the President of Operations in Flipkart and worked on it for almost four years. His talent and work showed his dedication and made him a successful co-founder of Udaan. It was 8 years of his hard work before he entered Udaan and gave it a Unicorn status in just 26 months. When he was assigned the role of President of Operations in Flipkart, he noticed that Flipkart provides logistics to 500+ cities but his small hometown was not one of them. This gave him the spark to start a platform which was accessible by everyone whether it was a customer or retailer
All events and things that occur in life have some reason behind them. The viewer’s perspective on it decides whether he can carefully observe it and execute it or just fail to ignore the importance of it.
At the 9th edition of Techsparks event, Sujeet was questioned about the reason he entered the startup business though he had his best role in Flipkart which he had quit. Sujeet said :
It is not about money, it is about wanting to make more money.
Amod Malviya
Amod Malviya is the person who built the backbone of Flipkart by working as the CTO till July 2015 and making Udaan the fastest-growing trade network. He and his co-founders’ are worth 1000 crore each. He has given chance to more than 200 employees to be a part of Udaan. He feels that the similarity between B2B and B2C systems is just 40 to 50 percent.
A chief technology officer (CTO) is the executive in charge of an organization's technological needs as well as its research and development (R&D). He or she develops policies and procedures and uses technology to enhance products and services that focus on external customers. The CTO also develops strategies to increase revenue and performs a cost-benefit analysis and return-on-investment analysis.
He completed his education at IIT Kharagpur. He feels that technology and the birth of smartphones have completely changed the way we interact with people. His team impressed other investors to invest in Udaan, even before its launch.
Tech is a tool, not a master — Amod Malviya
What is its goal
The goal of Udaan is to cut the middlemen between the customer and the factory product so that the customer gets the product at the best prices. Usually, most of the firms have to go through two to three layers like exclusive wholesalers and distributors.
Udaan wants to solve credit underwriting problem, B2B logistics, payment and sales and marketing.The ultimate goal will be to benefit the both customer and the retailer.
A milestone
One of the major milestones that Udaan achieved was when it entered the unicorn club.
A unicorn is a privately-held start-up valued at $1 billion or more.
Udaan was the fastest company to achieve this milestone and mark its victory in just 26 months. Similar, companies such as Swiggy, Hike, InMobi took four years to become one of the unicorns.
Udaan showed its individuality by becoming a unicorn with the capital infusion of around $225 million from its existing investors — DST Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
How is it different from the rest of the websites
Small and medium-sized sellers could use the platform to build their own brands, something which is difficult when done on consumer-based portals such as Amazon and Flipkart.
Udaan not only acts as a market place for the sellers and buyers but also takes care of the logistics and payments. These two factors are crucial and should be taken care of if the business trade has to be successful between the two vendors.
Challenges faced on initial stages
Several things must be taken care of when B2B e-commerce is being started from scratch. The firms need to take care of integrating technology, put in place complex logistics fulfilment processes and convince businesses on the go online.
They had to design the supply chain systems and processes. Also, the execution of the operations will always be a challenge for Udaan which is to be dealt as it grows bigger.
The complexity of executing certain things increases as the firm grows. And if it fails to handle the complexity carefully, the company will face the worst scenario. The sooner they realize their mistake, the faster their recovery will be.
Why is it successful
Amod in a discussion with the media stated that the company was successful because they eliminated the tech productivity killers and allowed the engineers to thrive in their creativity. For more than a year and a half, Udaan did logistics on subsidized rate and it helped them to gain significant exposure within the community.
Another secret sauce for the success of Udaan was the strong founders' team. They were best at what they did in Flipkart and were appreciated for it. When other Flipkart employees got to know about the birth of the startup, they also quit their jobs and extended their support with the founders’ trio. So on Day 1 the work productivity, was at its best which most of the companies lack due to experience in the field. But they already knew the execution, the only thing to be done was the workflow of executing it in smaller towns.
The important thing is that you’ve got a strong foundation before you start to try to save the world or help other people.
The story Udaan solves is of the small retailer who belongs to a small town usually going to the bigger cities and purchasing and selling goods in bulk even though there are bigger competitors than him. And ultimately he risks his capital, business and ends up shutting down in most of the cases. Udaan solves this huge problem of the common retailer who belongs to the core part of India’s public i.e the middle class.
Future Plans of Udaan
Udaan always welcomes the idea of merging with the partners and startups who are interested to collaborate with it as they don’t build everything in-house and even investing in them.
Understanding its business model
Udaan funds the capital for its buyers and charges interest on it. In simple words, the customer can buy directly from the marketplace, and further sell it in their local stores or have it for personal use.
Key Partners
Key partners are the relationships that you have with other business, governmental, or non-consumer entities that help your business model work. These can be the relationships that your company has with your suppliers, your manufacturers, business partners, etc. In the case of Udaan, manufacturers and the customers are the key partners.
Key Activities
Key activities consist of the activities that lead the company towards their goal with ease. The key activities include the building of a proper supply chain and operations. ‘Predictability’ is also necessary as it is a crucial factor in a B2B business.
Key Resources
Key Resources act as a building block describing the most important assets needed to make a business model work. The experience of the founders of Udaan who were ex-employees at Flipkart, helped Udaan to grow at a rapid scale.
Value Propositions
Value Propositions are the services or features or their innovations that make their product look attractive to the customers. The value propositions of Udaan are taking care of the logistics, payment between the supplier and the retailer/customer. Udaan also gives credit to the suppliers/retailers ranging from 10000 INR to 200000 INR.
Customer Relationships
Customer Relationships describe the ways that a company will engage with its customers to improve the customer experience. Udaan has a strong customer support which creates the difference among the marketplace and its competitors.
Customer Segments
The customer segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups of individuals that are similar in specific ways. Customers, retailers fall under the customer segments of Udaan’s Business Model.
Channels
Channels are through which the company provides its service to the customers. The internet, mobile application, website are Udaan’s channels.
Cost Structure
Cost structure refers to the types and relative proportions of fixed and variable costs that a business incurs. The cost structure of Udaan includes fixed and variable costs, technical development costs, fundraising costs.
Revenue Streams
A revenue stream is a source of revenue of a company or organization. In business, a revenue stream is generally made up of either recurring revenue, transaction-based revenue, project revenue, or service revenue. Udaan’s revenue works on the 15% — 18% commission that it charges from the buyers for funding their purchase.
Catch the whole experience of the trio on Udaan below with an interview with YourStory: | https://medium.com/@kapilkhanwani/case-study-udaans-business-model-ff1b9227d804 | ['Kapil Khanwani'] | 2019-09-11 16:17:57.057000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Market', 'Startup', 'Ecommerce', 'B2B'] |
Research Ethics: Differentiating Manipulation from Persuasion | How do we know when we are being manipulated rather than persuaded? When asked this question, most people will say that they will instinctively know when someone is using underhanded methods to get what they want. Manipulation in general life can come in many different forms: blackmail, flattery, lying, guilt-tripping, etc. but can we recognise manipulation within a marketing or market research situation? A lot of the time, the answer is no.
Persuasion vs. Manipulation: Situation and Ethical Importance
Market research is regarded as one of the most ethically challenging industries today, with government laws and codes of conduct created to combat the unsettling prospect of data misuse and human mistreatment. However, even with these rules in place, data is still continuously vulnerable to mistreatment and used for the purposes of public manipulation by recipient organisations.
Cambridge Analytica’s scandal is a real-life example of how research can be used to “[change] people’s minds not through persuasion but through ‘informational dominance’, a set of techniques that includes rumour, disinformation and fake news.” The ethical issues surrounding the harvesting of data, and the psychological profiling of each individual Facebook user through this data, were numerous, but for Cambridge Analytica to then use this profiling for the purposes of electoral manipulation was the worst unethical event.
The most prolific ethical conundrums result from the blurred boundary between persuasion and manipulation. How far can we attempt to persuade and still be able to call it persuasion? The appearance of the blurred boundary occurs due to the rampant subjectivity that encompasses the two terms when faced with real-life situations. It’s all well and good to recognise the manipulation of others in the news; however, what people may perceive as persuasion in-the-moment might actually be very subtle manipulation. The wording of the questions asked within a research task for example, might actually subtly manipulate participants to say what the organisation wants them to say and thus they gather false data to present and justify their next manipulative action. Market researchers have an obligation to conduct research objectively; it is then usually the organisations that use the data who are the ones responsible for the resulting manipulation.
So how do we tell the difference between the two techniques in action, and stop ourselves from falling into the trap of manipulation?
Identifying Linguistic Manipulation
First, we need to learn to identify each term within both our own perceived definition and the dictionary definition. This inevitable difference will lead us to correct our view of each term and more easily identify which tactic is being deployed within a given situation.
Persuasion, according to the Business Dictionary, is the “process aimed at changing a person’s (or group’s) attitude or behaviour towards some event, idea, object, or other person(s), by using written or spoken works to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or a combination of them.”
Manipulation, according to the Cambridge Dictionary is “controlling someone or something to your own advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly”.
So with these definitions in mind, the next move is linguistic identification. Linguistics is the study of language, how it is formed and perceived through individual subjectivity. Through this study, we can learn to identify basic linguistic manipulation techniques within both marketing and market research through the written or spoken word.
One basic linguistic manipulation technique that everyone will be familiar with is the leading question. Researchers want participants to give as much detail as they can in order to provide accurate insight that informs important decisions within a business, but this information cannot be accurate if the question leads participants towards certain answers. We are all experienced with obviously leading questions; however some questions might not be obviously leading and so researchers must be extra vigilant when creating questionnaires.
For example, if the question starts with “How far do you agree…” then the implication is that all participants should agree with the subsequent statement to some extent. This is a popular question starter that a lot of people will be familiar with from a young age due to the popularity of the question within compulsory education examinations. This isn’t widely recognised as a leading question, only one that should spark debate, however, it is within linguistic parameters. A better question starter that can be used to persuade participants to potentially think outside of their own opinions is: “What have you heard about/is your perception of xyz?” This leaves it open for the participants to write down carefully thought out answers accurately detailing their untampered thoughts.
Another manipulation tactic is based on the notion of inclusivity. Inclusive statements used within advertisements such as “Everyone knows xyz” is a subtle comparison between individual person and the rest of society; this is a subtle psychological manipulation tactic that plays on everyone’s fear of not fitting in with everyone else. The resulting awareness of the difference between the individual and the group sparks fears that they are being left behind and so the effect is that they will do what they can to fit in, even if it goes against their core beliefs. The use of this tactic in market research can usually be found within a short introductory paragraph which provides context before the question is asked so participants are required to keep it in mind when providing their answer. When including these introductory paragraphs, researchers should be mindful of using inclusive phrases if they want to obtain truthful insight from individual participants.
Once suitably familiarised with simple identification techniques such as these, identification of manipulation tactics should be easier.
Data Manipulation: Real-Life Examples
Once organisations have got their data from market research they can apply it to their marketing strategies. It is important that insight professionals learn to recognise the difference between manipulation and persuasion for the purpose of spotting manipulative tactics and correcting them to avoid coming into conflict with anti-consumer regulation and uphold ethical values.
As Robin Dreeke states, “the difference between persuasion and manipulation is intent” and one example of intentional manipulation through misused data is the Brexit Leave Campaign. The Leave Party manipulated their audience by providing false facts which they stated were derived from real researched statistics to manipulate people to believe in their cause. The sentiment they then attached to all of their marketing is that the UK was a victim of the EU based on these so-called insights.
There is a secondary manipulative tactic which links the Brexit referendum to the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Leave Party reportedly paid Cambridge Analytica to implement targeted political propaganda on psychologically profiled UK citizens through Facebook, further adding to the ‘market research-based’ manipulation during Brexit. This blatant misuse of data breaks many of the ethical codes of conduct set out by many market research societies, and even infringes heavily on the Data Protection Act of 1998.
Sugging (selling under the guise of research), is a manipulative process is unfortunately legal, however unethical it may be. It is used primarily by telemarketing companies that state a ‘research purpose’ for their call which eventually devolves into a targeted sales pitch. This marketing technique is being used globally and agencies such as the Market Research Society in the UK have pledged to investigate any incidences that are reported to them. To keep upholding ethical values, researchers and insight professionals should be wary of organisations trying to promote products through research tasks and report any incidences of sugging that occur.
Conclusion
It is important that researchers and insight professionals learn how to identify incidences of manipulation over persuasion in order to avoid or correct them as the case may be. While market research organisations are pledged against the practice of consumer manipulation, their reputations are still being hurt through the continual manipulation of collated data to either produce false insights or produce accurate insights then used for underhanded purposes. Linguistic knowledge and identifying large-scale manipulations such as in political campaigns or commercial calls would be invaluable to minimising the occurrences and restoring the reputation of the insights industry.
The original version of this article appeared on the FlexMR Insight Blog and can be accessed here. | https://flexmr.medium.com/research-ethics-differentiating-manipulation-from-persuasion-3c53bea8d5e9 | [] | 2019-04-17 09:50:30.819000+00:00 | ['Market Research', 'Insights', 'Cx', 'Linguistics'] |
5 Reasons why Blink Community is the best CoWorking space in Tokyo | We are not saying that, our members are! We have only been around for 2 years and we have been able to build a community of like minded people here in Tokyo. Our main focus has been to offer a workspace that provides effective resources and connect professionals to help them create new business opportunities and also grow their network.
What makes us different from our competitors?
#1 International Workspace:
We are the only International CoWorking space in Tokyo and we have a vibrant community. Tokyo, unlike most cities does not have an international vibe or culture when it comes to office spaces. However, we have International minded entrepreneurs, over 75 companies from 20 different industries, more than 26 nationalities working under the same roof who speak 14 different languages. We don’t just work here, we make friends and memories!!
Premium Business Registration Address:
We are based in the heart of Roppongi (you know where that is we are assuming), about 8 mins walking from Roppongi Station and 15 mins from Nogizaka Station.
Office address matters a lot in Tokyo and a location like Roppongi is considered premium and fancy. Fortunately, we are situated in a dynamic area with multiple retail shops, restaurants, bars and convenient stores.
We are equipped with state of the art European designed furniture so you and your guests can feel like they are in a cosy place.
Oh, also, we offer a clean and open air workspace too! Yes, we have a beautiful terrace where you can grab a coffee, work in peace and soak in some winter sun.
Amazing event hub:
We love human interactions and we certainly enjoy hosting events.
We do a LOT of events!! To give you a number, on an average, we host over 200+ events every year with roughly 300 participants coming in every month.
What kind of events you ask?
Well, we do events on multiple topics, such as Tech/Programming, Business/Entrepreneurship, Art/Creative,
Media/Communication, Lifestyle/Culture, Social Mixer, etc.
In fact, if you intend to host an event or are just looking for a space to shoot/host a party, reach out to us. We have the best deals in this location.
360 solutions for international businesses:
We understand that entering a new market can be difficult when you are planning a new venture especially when English is not the business language here. Well, guess what? We even offer solutions to that. We offer Corporate Services ranging from back office solutions to immigration assistance.
We offer Multiple membership options — Virtual office, Cafe lounge, Hot Desk, WorkStation and Private offices. We offer flexible terms so you don’t have to lock in for a couple of years without experiencing our services. We offer professional facilities (equipped meeting rooms, printers, event spaces AV systems, high-speed mesh WIFI) and a fully secured access space. We basically take care of all the nitty-gritties while you are simply expected to come, work and have a great day.
Multilingual Team:
And to top it all, we have an amazing on-site Community Team that speaks fluent English and some 14 other languages! We have a friendly, helpful and International staff who love our members and vice versa.
Would you like to join the family? Don’t hesitate, simply click on that “Join us” button or add us on line (barcode is all the way down)!
Also, our motto is, “Happy to come on Monday” cos monday’s should not be considered boring right?
More about us here: https://www.blinkcommunity.com/ | https://medium.com/@blinkcommunity/5-reasons-why-blink-community-is-the-best-coworking-space-in-tokyo-7e955093bd77 | ['Blink Community'] | 2020-12-10 02:37:32.248000+00:00 | ['Coworking', 'Tokyo', 'Community', 'Expat', 'International'] |
Fresh Grief | Fresh Grief
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
You are LOVED unconditionally
And without limit.
You are LOVED more deeply than your soul can reach the stars.
You are LOVED in all the dark and scary places of your mind.
You are LOVED in all the brilliance of the sun and moon and stars and galaxies combined.
You are LOVED by those who hate you.
You are LOVED by those who know you.
You are LOVED by those you cannot know.
You need to hear and know that RIGHT NOW
YOU ARE LOVED.
It is okay to be in darkness.
It is okay to feel pain.
It is okay to feel isolation.
You are perfect right now.
YOU ARE LOVED.
Crack the window to your soul.
Let in a little light.
YOU ARE LOVED.
Shine a tiny spark — it will reach us.
Shine a tiny spark — it will add its light to the world.
Shine a tiny spark — it will call in the light of the universe.
It will lift you and support you.
YOU ARE LOVED.
When you cannot control the dark — you are loved.
When you choose to leave this place — you are loved.
When you are left behind by another — you are loved.
When your world feels over — you are loved.
When you cannot shine your light — you are loved.
When the distance is real for you — you are loved.
YOU ARE LOVED.
When the sun comes up — you are loved.
When the moon goes down — you are loved.
When the sun goes down — you are loved.
When the moon comes up — you are loved.
YOU ARE LOVED.
You are loved across the oceans.
You are loved beyond the mountains.
You are loved.
You are loved.
You are loved.
I LOVE YOU UNCONDITIONALLY. | https://medium.com/@precioussoma/fresh-grief-71f03a2658da | ['Precious Soma'] | 2020-12-13 16:48:15.979000+00:00 | ['Grief', 'Suicide', 'Grief And Loss', 'Death', 'Hope'] |
Creating empathy with Visualization | We spend hours and hours writing the code, cleaning the data and applying the best visual principles to communicate our stories with data but sometimes the best stories come with minimal code and yet making a deep emotional impact. Last week, I came across this visual “When Children Lack Nutrition” from Alberto Lucas Lopez published in National Geographic and gave me goosebumps. Here Alberto has done the infographic on Childhood Malnutrition and the size(circumference) of the pictures below actually depict the mid-upper arm circumference(MUAC) of kids in the respective regions. For example, you see the East Ghouta region in Syria the MUAC is just 8.7 cm and the circle circumference shown in the infographic is created that size of 8.7cm. While this in itself invokes lots of thinking and emotions what makes it more compelling is the scale on the right border.
Further, the below GIF makes it more real and does a great job in creating empathy for the topic touched here. Deservingly, It also won the Best of Show award in Malofiej27 Infographic Summit held recently.
Here’s another great visualization (created by some unknown artist) on the massacre that happened in Christchurch wherein around 50 people died when a gunmen killed while they were worshipping in a mosque. As you could see below, the graphic shows 50 men & women standing in worship and shown as a Fern Leaf which is represented as the symbol of New Zealand. It amazes me how you could create such a powerful story with a single image without any word — any annotation.
Mona Chalebi of The Guardian Newspaper is another great artist/Data Analyst who does these very creative projects — mostly with pen and paper and yet convey the issue in a very powerful way. Here, very creatively she has done the visual showing the pay gap for different races by using a dollar bill. Imagine how would have this looked like if this was a bar chart instead of these dollar bills. It would have been the same data but these dollar bills adds in creating the empathy for the subject.
I feel working day in and day out with the big data, churning millions of records and creating all those complicated visuals using R, Python, Power BI, excel and what not sometimes it’s good to take a break and take some inspiration from these acclaimed artists and their heart touching creations.
What would you create next? 😊 | https://medium.com/@deargulrez/creating-empathy-with-visualization-823cfabb3ebd | ['Gulrez Khan'] | 2019-04-06 16:58:22.380000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Dataviz', 'Visualization', 'Empathy'] |
Bikes + Gears: Lezyne Stuff Caddy (Review) | We get to test this week a nice bottle holder from Lezyne, which turns out to be more than just a bottle holder — the Lezyne Stuff Caddy.
The Lezyne Stuff Caddy allows you to bring along on your bike commutes a bottle holder like the one that I use, a 20 oz 592 ml Klean Kanteen insulated bottle. And items other than a bottle.
It has three velcro straps that help to easily and securely mount the Stuff Caddy to any part of your bike, e.g., handlebars, frame, fork, etc.
It has reflective linings that gives you added visibility while pedalling.
The Stuff Caddy likewise has an integrated draw cord to tightly hold your bottle, in this case.
And the design gives you flexibility to put in different sizes of bottles, for instance.
Overall, it is one solid bike gear that will surely help in your bike commute. And it works for folding bikes because you can quickly mount and take off the Stuff Caddy from the bike when you need to.
#MNLRides #Lezyne #BikeGears #ActiveTransport #CyclingIsTransport #UrbanMobility #BetterByBicycle #MNLMoves | https://medium.com/@mnlmoves/bikes-culture-lezyne-stuff-caddy-review-3a5bc0bbf46 | ['Mnl Moves'] | 2021-01-28 12:10:58.768000+00:00 | ['Cycling'] |
Winter Waltz | Winter Waltz
Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash
Day barely managed
to rouse from her sleep,
bedhead frizzy, icy fog,
feet hitting frosted flora
with a why bother shrug,
grimly, dimly, less inclined
to rise with each passing day.
Soon, her day will come
when black ice barely buckles
beneath her shuffle
as she’ll greet her shortest stint
sporting overcast jammies.
Some point along shadowed bend,
when nightfall overreaches,
lingers, and prepares
to lumber south again,
fate will realign
her eyes with mine and
we’ll share weary laughs.
“Once more then?” she’ll ask,
already knowing.
Inhale. Exhale. Step-ball-change.
We embrace the cycle,
leaning into the curve.
Once more then, we waltz. | https://medium.com/scrittura/winter-waltz-ae55a5c2e2ac | ['Barry Dawson Iv'] | 2020-12-09 04:08:07.533000+00:00 | ['Prompt', 'Saturday Poetry Prompt', 'Seasonal Depression', 'Scrittura', 'Poetry'] |
The Question You Come Across on Most Job Applications | Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
As college students finish exams, the internship hunting season enters it’s busiest phase. Over the course of the winter break, college students have upwards of a month’s worth of free time to catch up on some well needed sleep and get a good mental reset after a first-of-it’s-kind semester of online education. However, it is also a great time research companies, network with industry professionals, learn about career prospects, work on some personal projects and most importantly; apply to internships. And during some part of the application process (or the interview process), the most common question that’s asked by most companies is…
So why do you want to work here?
Rewind to 2013. I was finishing my second year in engineering and started applying to internships and I’ll be honest; each time I saw this question my first thought was always, “It’s not me that wants to work here, my student debt and my bills want me to”. I was still 19. At that age, all that was important to me was getting a girlfriend and what the best jungle pathing was in League of Legends (don’t worry if you don’t understand this one). I had no clue what I wanted to do in my life and career. I was still a kid and a lot has changed since then. Currently, I am studying computer science and I am now halfway through my second year. When I apply to jobs now, I have genuine reasons as to why I am applying there.
Before doing my computer science degree. I worked as a technical recruiter at a company that worked with tech startups; my job revolved around talking to people about their jobs and this was the best job I could have had before going into the tech industry myself. It gave me a bird’s point of view of the tech ecosystem and its potential jobs. I started to develop genuine answers to “why do you want to work here?”.
My advice to students applying to their first jobs…
Take your time doing research on a company before you apply. Reach out to current or past employees of that company. If you don’t find anything about the job that interests you, then maybe this job isn’t a great fit for you. However, if you do find something that piques your interest, then that’s your answer! | https://medium.com/@suprun-anton6/the-question-you-come-across-on-most-job-applications-1779abfe90fa | ['Anton Suprun'] | 2020-12-17 01:23:02.831000+00:00 | ['Jobs', 'Work', 'Internships', 'Job Hunting'] |
New Zealand: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Declares Climate Emergency | Nina Rosner reports as New Zealand’s PM joins 32 countries making emergency announcements, but the real work is yet to be done.
Photo by Casey Horner
Two months after a landslide election victory, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has officially declared a climate emergency.
Quoting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in her speech presenting the motion, she acknowledged the severity of the situation and the threats posed not just to New Zealanders, but humanity as a whole. For Ardern, this declaration represents New Zealand’s “intent as a nation” to act with urgency.
Urgent Announcements
Along with New Zealand, thirty-three countries have passed a binding motion declaring a climate emergency so far, including Australia, Canada, France, Japan, and Germany. For many, this declaration can be considered an important step towards tackling the climate crisis; according to , governments must “tell the truth… to communicate the urgency for change.”
On the other hand, what constitutes an emergency response remains unclear, and many activists and writers are stressing the importance of concrete action alongside symbolic legislative changes. Despite good intentions and this acknowledgement of the climate crisis, Jacinda Ardern’s government has been criticised for its failure to take serious environmental action. Following the Prime Minister’s declaration, Greta Thunberg shared on Twitter highlighting the government’s lack of concrete policies to meet their climate goals.
New Zealand is one of a minority of countries whose rather than decreased between 1990 and 2018. And indeed, according to Climate Action Tracker , the country’s “short-term policies cannot yet keep up” with their ambitions, such as those stated in their Zero Carbon Act passed in November 2019.
The Zero Carbon Act, pledging that New Zealand will be carbon neutral by 2050, passed with an overwhelming majority. Yet this bold move for excluding methane, emitted primarily from livestock, from its list of greenhouse gases to be reduced. In a country where methane accounts for over 43% of emissions, this exclusion is critical and will need to be addressed in any meaningful attempt to tackle climate change.
Big Changes Required
When Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government was elected in 2017, it promised to be a leader in the environmental realm. After her first term ended, Greenpeace made an analysis of Ardern’s work on climate, noting that her biggest achievements so far were her ban on issuing new offshore oil and gas exploration permits, as well as a limit on the use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser in agriculture. However, the same report criticised the government for failing to tackle the bigger issue of agricultural pollution which has been detrimental to the soil, , and wildlife, not forgetting the hefty methane emissions.
In terms of carbon dioxide alone, is New Zealand’s main culprit, making up 47% of emissions, largely thanks to “one of the oldest passenger vehicle fleets in the developed world, and no emissions standards .” In August 2019, the government pulled back on its pledge to fully electrify its own vehicle fleet by 2025, now claiming this would only apply to new vehicles entering the government fleet.
Faced with our current environmental crisis, declaring a climate emergency can be praised as a step in the right direction for all nations, including New Zealand. However, it’s clear that good intentions are not enough, and that Jacinda Ardern’s statement must be reinforced with real climate policies, particularly ones that address the country’s damaging agricultural industry.
You may also like: New Zealand Leads in Animal Welfare Reform. Europe Follows
We are a not for profit socio-ethical impact initiative advocating for topics that matter, whilst supporting wider planetary change and acknowledgement. Support our journalism by considering becoming an advocate from just £1. | https://medium.com/@wearetru/new-zealand-prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-declares-climate-emergency-58fc2a217f8d | [] | 2020-12-26 13:25:37.139000+00:00 | ['Climate Action', 'Environmental Issues', 'Environment', 'Climate', 'Climate Change'] |
Designing your eCommerce Website this Christmas Season | Long-awaited time of the year — Christmas cheer is around the corner!
Time to hang a wreath at your front door, and take out those Christmas decorations from the attic.
Speaking of tinsel and trinkets, whenever you walk into a store during the holiday season, your face lights up with Christmas joy, stunning tree decorations… sales, discounts, and special holiday offers. All welcoming the Christmas spirit with open arms.
Houses and malls are not the only places that need fairy light decorating, your eCommerce store also needs some garlands and nutcrackers.
On one hand, this Pandemic has affected our physical Christmas shopping experience. On the other, online stores are preparing to give the best experience with stunning Christmas-themed landing pages and festive designs.
There is no doubt that the holiday season is actually an online shopping season.There are 2.05 billion online shoppers in 2020, and eCommerce sales are predicted to hit $6.5 trillion by 2023. Exciting!
Crazy Christmas Shoppers — Giphy
Every year families visit their favorite stores to buy Christmas presents, this year might be a little different. How? It’s time online stores have become an ideal destination for gift shopping.
Therefore — to all eCommerce stores- put in some effort and glitter your digital stores to welcome those crazy shoppers! Because over 60% of US consumers prefer to buy their holiday gifts online.
In this blog, I will share some genuinely amazing ideas about how you can transform your eCommerce web design this Christmas to enhance the customer experience.
So, ho ho ho, let’s take a peek.
Tweak your web design to give it a nice Christmas-y touch.
During the holiday season, don’t be scared to modify your eCommerce web design according to the Christmas theme. Make it look more attractive for potential customers to visit and make a purchase.
The world becomes brighter around Christmas and so should your online platform and when it comes to choosing gifts, your eCommerce web solution should standout.
Change font styles and colors, add elements such as jingle bells, Santa hats, gifts, snowflakes, etc. to match the festive atmosphere. Offer special holiday collections and detailed product catalogs to boost the shopping experience. Few things you can do with your website:
Newsletter subscription popup, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year
You can add animations of Santa Claus on a sleigh with Dascher
Change color palette according to the theme — the redder the better
Rearrange your product catalog — popular items around Christmas should be on the top
To make things easier, you can find free christmas website templates on shopify, themeforest etc.
Recommended: How to build eCommerce websites in 10 simple steps?
Add festivity to your product images.
Product images are the most important part of your eCommerce development. Here Target or Macys’ have more advantage over your online store since people can touch and feel items. They can observe every little detail. Whereas, adding an emotional feel to the products can be very challenging for online sellers.
Source — Freepik
Your products should be able to recreate that feeling people feel in physical stores. However, choosing just the right type of visuals can fill the gap and create in-person shopping experiences online. To connect with customers, upload Christmas themed product images.
Add a little weight to your promotional campaign with infographics, 360-degree visuals, and videos, GIFs, holiday content, design, and special effects. Include some Christmas elements to your photography but try not to overdo it, because the last thing you want is to look cheesy.
But ensure that your visuals are responsive and don’t take forever to load.
CTA buttons are important, make them shine.
If you do not want to do too much with your website, only adding a little tinsel here and there can do the trick. Make your CTA buttons stand out. Decorate them using minimalist design elements while maintaining your overall business look.
Making only subtle changes can add to holiday cheer. Use cute gift icons or bells or snowflakes to give your CTAs a celebratory look or better yet animations can always help. Additionally, jazz up the content on your CTA button; replacing the simple ‘Add to wishlist’ with ‘Add to Santa’s nice list’ can sound much merrier.
Some brands strictly follow their design guidelines — changing aesthetics can be blasphemous for them. But still having little fun with the buttons can help pay just the right amount of homage to Christmas.
Highlighting special offers and discounts on the top of the page.
Source — Giphy
This is that time of the year again where you are supposed to be bragging about your special discounts and 2 for 1 offers. Use illustrations to add excitement to your discount offers. Feature them where they are prominently displayed. Use homepage sliders, because they are back in business, baby. They let customers focus on key messages.
This way you can display more than one discount offer using stunning imagery. Using sliders can save the hassle of searching for offers, also header sliders are a great way to highlight discounts accompanied by a CTA (That’s a plus).
Revamp the Logo to fit the theme.
Many companies are trying to align themselves with the merriment of Christmas by modifying their branding activities accordingly. So jump on the bandwagon and design an amazing holiday version of your logo.
You don’t have to do much to add joy-ness to the brand.
Design your 301 And 404 error pages.
This may seem less important but trust me, it is not. Excessive load on the website can slow it down, and also you never know of any uninvited irregularities. So it’s better to plan ahead!
If your website during the peak season is not functioning properly, it is bound to frustrate online shoppers. Make it interesting to secure your chance of having returning customers.
Source — Google Images
Customize the design of your error pages. Give ‘404’ a little Santa’s hat, draw a special custom illustration, or add a ‘dancing elf’ animation to it followed by an error message, such as: ‘Ho, ho, ho… Santa’s sleigh stuck in the snow, you finish that egg-nog, while Santa’s little helpers, help him unstuck’.
No one likes errors, not even me. But seeing this message will surely entice your customers. Humor always helps! That’s given.
Some additional tips for eCommerce Christmas cheer.
Responsive design
Your website design should be responsive. Are you sure it is? Check it one more time. According to Statista, 177.4 million buyers in the US will buy products online using their smartphones. It’ll be a bummer if your website did not respond as it should.
Use chatbots.
Use Christmas AI-driven chatbots to personalize the entire experience. Chatbots are available round the clock, with little chance of missing on any customer interaction, which as a result increases conversion and retention rates.
Recommended: Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce — How can you integrate it?
Test your website.
Run quality assurance tests of your website regularly. According to Kissmetrics stats, 47% of online customers expect web pages to load within 2 seconds. With all the shopping haul, you don’t want your customer stuck on loading, now do you?
Mobile commerce is trending.
According to big commerce, mobile eCommerce sales are expected to account for 54% of total eCommerce sales by 2020. Optimize your website accordingly. You know what to do.
Play around with Virtual Reality.
77.24% of shoppers abandon their carts before completing a purchase. Therefore introducing VR to your eCommerce is a step in the right direction.
Up your SEO game.
Use Google’s keyword planner to extract the right keywords for your content. Boost your content marketing strategy.
The merrier the Christmas, the better.
The holidays bring quite festive web designs for eCommerce stores. You can do plenty. All online stores are looking to generate as many sales as possible. Christmas follows a gift-giving tradition, which is ideal for online sellers. Therefore, your eCommerce web design has to be unique.
If you want to make your eCommerce store bag more cash next holiday season, feel free to contact Invozone — one of Canada’s leading IT companies.
Stay safe and stay home for the holidays.
Key Takeaways
Use Christmas themed color palette
Highlight discounts and special offers using illustrations
Use customised images to get in touch with customer’s emotions
Mention links to your social platforms and blog content
Modify your website design, make it more festive
Use subtle design elements and icons to add a little joy
Bonus: Offer free shipping and gift packaging
Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year! | https://medium.com/@sadia-mehmood/design-your-ecommerce-website-this-christmas-season-fbd656b6b837 | ['Sadia Mehmood'] | 2020-12-30 07:15:30.284000+00:00 | ['Ecommerce Web Development', 'Development', 'Christmas', 'Website', 'Ecommerce'] |
Ways to use the Reduce method in Javascript | Photo by Emile Perron on Unsplash
Until recently, I only knew how to use reduce for its most common purpose — to sum up all elements in an array. I knew it was capable of more, but only dove into its many uses when I started preparing for technical interviews.
It’s worth understanding the intricacies to use it to not only sum values, but to flatten arrays, sum the values in an array of objects, and even reverse a string.
Reduce, like map and filter, is a higher order function. A higher order function is a function that receives a function as an argument or returns the function as output. While map and filter are both fairly straightforward and intuitive, reduce is a little more complex. Every iteration is impacted by every previous iteration’s return value, and keeping track of the iterations in your head may take some practice — sort of like recursion.
How it works
The reduce method accepts two parameters: the reducer function (which is a callback) and an optional initial value. The reducer is executed on each member of the calling array, which results in a single output value.
To demonstrate this, let’s look at how to reduce without using the ‘reduce’ higher order function. It’s important to note that the reducer function that is passed in as a callback accepts 4 parameters: accumulator, currentValue, currentIndex, sourceArray. Below, the accumulator starts at its initial value (0) and is continually incremented by the element at each index.
let arr = [1,2,3,4,4,5]; //sourceArray let sum = 0; //initialValue, used to start accumulation for(let elem of arr){
sum = sum + elem; //accumulator + currentIndex (elem of array)
//0 + 1 - initial value plus elem
//1 + 2 - sum of previous iteration plus next elem in array
//3 + 3
//6 + 4
//10 + 4
//14 + 5
//19 - returns after last elem
} console.log(sum) //prints 19
Now understanding how the reducer callback works, we can simplify the process by using the reduce function. Here, we pass through an array and accumulate the same way, but a little bit cleaner. Here is another very cool animation that demos it out.
let sum = (arr) => {
return arr.reduce((accumulator, currentValue) => accumulator + currentValue, 0 //optional initialValue, defaults 0) //accumulator + currentValue (each elem of array)
//0 + 1 - initial value plus elem
//1 + 2 - sum of previous round plus next elem in array
//3 + 3
//6 + 4
//10 + 4
//14 + 5
//19 - returns after last elem } console.log(sum([1,2,3,4,4,5])) //prints 19
Other scenarios and uses
While reduce seems to be most commonly used to sum up the values in an array, it’s worth understanding in depth to use it in a variety of scenarios. Below are just a few examples of other ways to use reduce.
Create Objects
Counting the frequency of an element in an array is an important concept that comes up in a lot of algorithmic problems. While a ‘for loop’ is a perfectly fine brute force option, reduce could be a more elegant and potentially more efficient way of solving it.
Below, I use both a loop and reduce to count the frequency of letters in a string. This would also work with an array.
As a loop:
let str = 'banana';
let obj = {};
for (let char of str){
obj[char] ? obj[char] += 1 : obj[char] = 1
//if the key exists, increment its value by one; otherwise initiate key with a value of 1
} console.log(obj) // { b: 1, a: 3, n: 2 }
As reduce:
let str = 'banana';
const sumByChar = str.split('').reduce((acc, char) => ({
//use split to convert string to array of characters
...acc,
//using the spread operator on the accumulator will
give us access to all the properties in the object [char]: (acc[char] || 0) + 1,
// creating the element as a key - initializing to 1
if it does not exist, incrementing by 1 if it does }), {});
//initial value is an empty object console.log(sumByChar) // { b: 1, a: 3, n: 2 }
Reverse a string or array with reduce
The first time I was asked to reverse a string after bootcamp, I thought using the built-in reverse function was the obvious answer. I quickly learned that interviewers would likely not accept this as an answer. A loop seemed like the next obvious solution, and I soon learned that using reduce would be a more elegant option.
As a loop:
let str = '' for(let char of str){
str = char + str
//starts as empty string and accumulates one by one
//'' = h + ''
//h = e + h
//eh = l + eh
//leh = l + leh
//lleh = o + lleh
//olleh
} console.log('hello') // prints olleh
As reduce:
let reversed = (str) => str.split('').reduce((acc,char) => char + acc)
//accumulator starts empty and adds on one by one. if string, use .split('') to convert to array.
//'' = h + ''
//h = e + h
//eh = l + eh
//leh = l + leh
//lleh = o + lleh
//olleh console.log(reversed('hello')) // prints olleh
Flatten an array
When you have an arrays within an array for whatever reason, you may want to combine them into one ‘flattened’ array. Again, while there is the built in ‘flat’ method you can usually use, in an interview you may not be able to use that built in function. Reduce can solve this with recursion. This one was a bit of a doozy for me, but I promise it’s good practice for both reduce and recursion!
let flattenArray = (arr) => {
return arr.reduce((total, curr) => {
return total.concat(Array.isArray(curr) ? flattenArray(curr) : curr);
//if the value is an array, the recursively call reduce until next nested array
//if the value is not an array, then just concatenate the value to the flattened array.
//total [] curr 2
//total [ 2 ] curr 1
//total [ 2, 1 ] curr [ 3, 10, [ 12 ] ]
//total [] curr 3
//total [ 3 ] curr 10
//total [ 3, 10 ] curr [ 12 ]
//total [] curr 12
//returns [ 2, 1, 3, 10, 12 ] }, []);
//initial value is an empty array } console.log(flattenArray([2, 1, [3, 10, [12]]]))
// returns [2, 1, 3, 10, 12]
I hope that these breakdowns and examples help you understand how reduce works and how to implement it beyond summing up values!
Resources
https://eloquentjavascript.net/05_higher_order.html
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/Reduce
https://blog.bitsrc.io/understanding-higher-order-functions-in-javascript-75461803bad
https://blog.khanacademy.org/lets-reduce-a-gentle-introduction-to-javascripts-reduce-method/
https://medium.com/@vmarchesin/using-array-prototype-reduce-in-objects-using-javascript-dfcdae538fc8
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/js-finally-understand-reduce#flattening-an-array-using-reduce | https://catd825.medium.com/ways-to-use-the-reduce-method-in-javascript-f3d0f309c9e0 | ['Cathy D'] | 2020-11-30 16:46:32.090000+00:00 | ['Recursion', 'JavaScript', 'Reduce', 'Higher Order Function', 'Reducer'] |
7 Best Courses to learn Salesforce Development in 2021 | 7 Best Courses to learn Salesforce Development in 2021
If you want to become a Salesforce developer in 2021 then these are the best online course for Salesforce Developer certification for beginners in 2021. javinpaul Follow Jan 17 · 9 min read
image_credit — Edureka
Hello folks, if you want to become a Salesforce developer in 2021 and looking for the best online training courses then you have come to the right place. Earlier, I have shared the best courses to learn Cloud Computing and today, I am going to share the best online courses to learn Salesforce in 2021.
Salesforce is not only that customer relationship management that used by companies to organize their works and keep the workflow up, but it is also a vast platform where developers can use to create apps, develop them, customize them and deploy them on a server.
For these purposes, Salesforce has launched many certification programs that allow you to learn how this platform work and how to use it, such as the Salesforce Platform App Builder and the Salesforce Administrator, and the Salesforce Development Training, which is required to become a Salesforce developer.
Salesforce Development Training is a certification that teaches you how to program salesforce apps with a programming language called Apex, which is too similar to Java to create the backed of the software and visual-force to create the front-end of the software.
This means any business requirement can’t be done with simple built-in features; the developer will code that specific requirement. This skill has an average annual salary of $95,423, and one of the top highest paid jobs in IT or Software development in general.
There are many Salesforce online training courses out there available to teach you this salesforce development skill, but not all of them are worthy of your time and money, and getting stuck on a wrong course can hamper your progress and that’s where this article will help you.
In the past, I have shared free courses to learn Salesforce, and today, I am going to share the best online courses you can join to become a Salesforce Developer and today we will discuss some of the best Salesforce development training courses in this article where it will help you master these specific professions and get a job in this industry.
7 Best Online Courses to become a Salesforce Developer
Here is a list of online Salesforce training courses you can take to start your career with the Salesforce cloud and open the door for immense opportunities. These courses are chosen based upon expert recommendations and you can join this course on popular online training platforms like Udemy and Pluralsight.
This is a great introductory course to learn Salesforce forms scratch. If you have no idea about what is salesforce then you should start with this Udemy course.
Created by Francis Pindar, a Salesforce certified Architect and 7 times Salesforce MVP, this Udemy course is for anyone new to Salesforce and wanting to understand what it is and the products Salesforce sells.
By the end of the course you will understand the Salesforce cloud services, the Salaries you could achieve working in Salesforce, as well as the certifications available to you and which ones you may wish to start with based on your background.
The course also provides a short history of Salesforce to show how it all began and evolved over the years. If you don’t have any previous experience with Salesforce then I strongly suggest you start with this course.
here is the link to join this best Salesforce course — Salesforce 101: Introduction to Salesforce | https://medium.com/javarevisited/7-best-courses-to-learn-salesforce-development-in-2021-1f861a0c2fff | [] | 2021-01-17 11:07:35.632000+00:00 | ['Cloud Computing', 'Salesforce', 'Certification', 'Programming', 'Software Development'] |
Tensorflow Pipelines on the Cloud with Streamsets and Snowflake | Machine learning, machine learning, machine learning. It seems as though data science blog posts talk about little else these days. But one crucial—often neglected — aspect of ML is what to do once a model has actually been built: how can we regularly feed new data to the model? Where should the model predictions be sent? And where should all of this data plumbing actually live?
In this post we’ll explore how a Tensorflow classification pipeline can be deployed on the cloud, making use of Streamsets Data Collector to orchestrate the ingestion, cleaning, and classification of Iris flower data. We’ll make use of the pre-trained TF model provided by Streamsets to demonstrate how an end-to-end ML solution can be deployed in under an hour.
An Introduction to Streamsets Data Collector
Streamsets Data Collector is a lightweight, drag & drop pipeline management tool, available free and open-source under an Apache 2.0 licence. Out of the box, Streamsets comes equipped with a vast array of pre-built connectors and processing tools, enabling users to build powerful, production-ready data pipelines in minutes. Data science stacks are particularly well supported, with pre-built processors for easily integrating Databricks and Tensorflow models into your workflow.
Streamsets’ lightweight UI makes pipeline construction easy and efficient.
Before we get started, you’ll need to install Streamsets to an instance running on the cloud computing provider of your choice (or locally, if you’re just looking to test this out for the first time).
We’ll also be making use of our favorite cloud data warehouse, Snowflake, as a final destination for our classified data. Once we have our data in Snowflake, it can be easily pulled into a multitude of other tools and services for further analysis, including Tableau and Excel.
Building out the Pipeline
The basic architecture of our classification pipeline.
Once you have Streamsets installed, fire up an instance and create a new pipeline. After giving your pipeline an appropriate name, you’ll be presented with an empty canvas like so:
The first thing we need to configure is the pipeline’s origin: the location of our raw, unclassified data. In our case, we have our data stored as JSON in an Azure blob, but unfortunately Streamsets lacks a pre-built connector for Azure blob storage, so we’ll need to configure our own custom connector. Select the Hadoop FS Standalone — HDP 2.6.2.1–1 option from the drop-down list, and enter the connection details of your cloud storage instance. In the case of Azure blob storage, we need to fill out the following:
Hadoop FS URI:
wasb[s]://<BlobStorageContainerName>@<StorageAccountName>.blob.core.windows.net/<path> Hadoop FS Configuration: s.azure.account.key.<storage_account_name>.blob.core.windows.net = <your storage account key> fs.azure.account.keyprovider.<storage_account_name>.blob.core.windows.net = org.apache.hadoop.fs.azure.SimpleKeyProvider Files Directory: <Blob Storage path for the iris file> File Name Pattern: *
For more on ingesting data from Azure, check out the official tutorial from Streamsets.
The iris data set has four features, all of which are numeric: petal length, petal width, sepal length, and sepal width. Let’s take a look at a sample row of JSON data (you can find a link at the end of the article):
{
"petalLength": 1,
"petalWidth": 0.2,
"sepalLength": 4.6,
"sepalWidth": 3.6
}
Note that we have a mix of integers and floats, so we’ll need to carry out a transformation on the data before we can feed it into the classifier. The TF model needs to receive all input data in the form of floats, which we can easily orchestrate with the Field Type Converter processor block. Go ahead and drag the block onto the canvas, connect it up to your data source, and configure the Conversions tab as follows, leaving the General tab as is.
Now that out input data has been converted to a form that the Tensorflow model can understand, we can add a Tensorflow Evaluator processor to our pipeline and configure it to serve our model. This section of the tutorial is based on the official Tensorflow tutorial from Streamsets, so check that out if you run into issues. If you haven’t already, download the pre-trained iris model provided by Streamsets here, then point the Saved Model Path field to a folder containing the .pb model file. You’ll then need to configure the rest of the evaluator as shown below, which specifies the properties of the input and output from the model.
Our outputs are going to be dnn/head/predictions/ExpandDims and dnn/head/predictions/probabilities, which give the predicted class label (0, 1, or 2 for each species) and its associated probability.
We’re almost there! One final thing we need to do before we pass our data into Snowflake is convert the numerically-encoded class predictions to the corresponding species string: 0 to Iris Setosa, 1 to Iris Versicolor, and 2 to Iris Virginica.
There’s a couple of different ways we could go about doing this, but the most straightforward is with the Expression Evaluator processor. This block provides the functionality to create new, conditionally-defined columns using the Streamsets expression language. Drag the processor onto the canvas and connect it up to the TensorFlow evaluator, as below.
We only need to change two fields here, both of which are under the expressions tab. In Output Field we’re going to define a new column called /predictedSpecies, which is going to contain the species classification as a string. We then need to configure the expression defining the logic behind how the predictedSpecies column gets populated; this is essentially just an else/if statement:
if predicted_class == 0:
predictedSpecies = 'Iris setosa'
if predicted_class == 1:
predictedSpecies = 'Iris versicolor'
else:
predictedSpecies = 'Iris virginica'
In Streamsets expression language this can be formulated as
${record:value("/output/'dnn/head/predictions/ExpandDims_0'[0]")=='0'?'Iris setosa':(record:value("/output/'dnn/head/predictions/ExpandDims_0'[0]")=='1'?'Iris versicolor':'Iris virginica')
Pushing data to Snowflake
Now we’re ready to load our newly-classified data into Snowflake. Drag a Snowflake destination block onto the canvas and connect it up to the expression evaluator like so:
The ‘General’ tab can be left as-is, but you’ll need to enter your Snowflake account details under ‘Snowflake Connection Info’. Under the ‘Snowflake’ tab, define the virtual warehouse, database, and schema you would like to utilize — note that you will need to create these manually (via the Snowflake UI) if they don’t already exist. Go ahead and enter the name of the table where the classified data is going to be stored (we’ve gone for IRIS_CLASS), and make sure the Table Auto Create box is checked — this enables Streamsets to automatically create the required tables if they don’t already exist in the given schema.
We’ll also need to tell Streamsets where to stage the incoming data. Under the ‘Staging’ tab, enter the details of the external Snowflake stage you want to use (S3 or Azure); note that Streamsets lacks the capability to automatically create external stages, so you’ll have to define these manually first (more on staging data here).
Now we’re ready to test out the pipeline. Streamsets includes a handy preview feature, which allows you to push a given number of records through the pipeline without requiring the job to be deployed in full. Click the ‘ 👁’ button above the canvas, and make sure ‘ Write to Destinations and Executors’ is checked. Hit ‘run preview’, and after a few seconds you should have a fully populated table in Snowflake! Let’s take a look:
And there we have it. We’ve built a fully cloud-based ML pipeline — with little-to-no hand-coding — in under an hour. From Snowflake, it’s quick and easy to pull data into whatever application we want for further analysis, such as Tableau, Excel, or Jupyter.
If you’re interested in learning more about ML, data engineering, or how Cervello can help build productionize your machine learning pipeline, please reach out!
Resources
Download Streamsets Data Collector here.
More on the Streamsets Snowflake connector here.
The unlabeled JSON data file.
Documentation for the Streamsets Tensorflow Evaulator.
More about Cervello, an A.T. Kearney Company | https://medium.com/cervello-an-a-t-kearney-company/tensorflow-pipelines-on-the-cloud-with-streamsets-and-snowflake-78f16b8676d0 | ['Isaac Langley'] | 2019-08-23 15:04:45.583000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Engineering', 'Data Science', 'Big Data', 'TensorFlow'] |
I Spent 60 Minutes With A Billionaire Yesterday, Here’s What I Learned | Yesterday, I sat down with Graham Weston, the co-founder of Rackspace, a company which recently went public in 2008, and in 2016 was purchased and taken private by Apollo Global Management LLC. I was introduced to Weston by super-connector, Joe Polish, who is the founder of Genius Network.
Selling Rackspace made Weston a billionaire.
Since stepping away from Rackspace a few years ago, Weston has focused his energy and attention on the city of San Antonio, where he lives.
He’s created a start-up incubator called Geekdom, where people pay $50/month to have access to the co-working space and community. Weston has personally invested hundreds of millions of dollars into San Antonio to re-energize the city and make it more of an innovation and technology-driven city.
San Antonio IS Weston’s start-up now.
While other people are trying to start a company, Weston is trying to scale the entire city of San Antonio.
This is a different level of thinking.
So how did he do this?
Belonging
First, he understands that human beings have an innate need to belong. Maslow put belonging as essential on his hierarchy of needs.
But people don’t simply want to belong anywhere.
Yes, they need to belong. They need to feel needed and valued.
But ultimately, people want to belong to a “winning” team. If you feel that the “team” you’re on isn’t moving forward, then that has a negative impact on your entire identity and perspective.
From Weston’s perspective, the purpose of work and the best way to energize a group of people is:
help them feel like a VALUED MEMBER
of a WINNING TEAM
on an INSPIRING MISSION
Weston is, for sure, a capitalist. But he’s not motivated by money. He’s motivated by purpose. Hence, the “inspiring mission.”
“You can get people really excited to work when they feel they’re a part of something important and inspiring,” Weston said.
The Power of 2
Weston loves a particular book — Powers of Two. The book is about the innovative pair of working in two’s. Consider the examples of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, or Marie and Pierre Curie, or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Working in two’s is more powerful than working solo — no matter how “introverted” or “creative” you are.
The best creative work is collaborative. Even people you think work solo have scores of advisors and people who help them make their work happen.
Weston applies this principle to EVERY area of his life. He has “advisors” or collaborators in everything he does.
Billionaires think in terms of WHO, rather than HOW.
Rather than trying to do everything themselves, billionaires find experts and specialists who are brilliant at what they do and get immediate help.
This is a very different mindset than we’re taught in public school and in society in general. People are generally taught to “figure things out,” rather than collaborate and innovate.
An Upgraded Mindset
The human brain is highly adaptive and always changing. When you change your behavior, you change your personality. Over time, your brain develops new neural connections and networks, and you have a new brain. You also have new memories of the past, since your past is always reconstructed based on your present circumstances and brain and perspective.
When you begin surrounding yourself with billionaires, and people who think much bigger than the typical person — you start to have many of your core assumptions of life and possibility peeled-away like layers of an onion.
Your subconscious doesn’t really know how to handle what it’s grappling with, because what you’re learning is forcing you to un-learn everything you’ve been conditioned to think and do.
People who grow in success often become highly skilled thinkers and strategists — as well as visionaries and leaders who can inspire and motivate others to build. This doesn’t mean they don’t have brilliant technical ability.
In fact, they likely have a higher degree of technical ability than their counterparts, the experts and specialists they begin hiring and partnering with.
However, they literally have a new and different brain — one wherein they have a much harder time getting caught in the weeds of technical creation. They think much differently, broadly, and at scale.
They have the eye and ability to do the technical work, which allows them to determine if the work being done is good.
But they stop doing it themselves.
Their time is worth 100 or 1,000X if they don’t do the technical work anymore. As a result, they build several partnerships — small teams of two or so in several different areas of their life.
This allows them to get their brilliance — their ideas and thinking — into a collaborative synergy and their partner creates it. Over time they get good at creating the right partnerships with true experts who are the best in the world at what they do. They can make a much bigger impact and do far more by partnering, over and over.
The Fear
The thing is — most people don’t have this skill nor do they have this confidence.
Who are you to get other people to do your work for you?
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Again, people want to be valued members of winning teams on inspiring missions. You shouldn’t assume that people hold the same values as you. As long as people are doing work they personally love where they have freedom and autonomy, as well as a high degree of responsibility — they will love what they are doing.
In fact, they’ll feel stoked and honored to be a part of the project.
We live in the “GIG” -economy. Jobs shouldn’t be viewed as jobs, but projects. Even Weston, who is spending hundreds of millions and decades re-building and transforming the city of San Antonio views it as a project, not a job. And there are several different projects within the project.
There are tons of different projects.
How are you doing at building partnerships?
Are you maximizing your strengths and superpowers, or burning yourself out trying to do everything?
Conclusion
Without question, billionaires think differently than the masses. Weston and others are literally trying to improve cities.
They think in terms of partnerships.
They understand what makes people tick — and it’s clearly not carrots and sticks. It’s being a valued member of a winning team on an inspiring mission.
This is the essence of “transformational leadership” — inspiring individuals to buy-into a powerful future and feeling valued and supported and excited to be involved. | https://medium.com/swlh/i-spent-60-minutes-with-a-billionaire-yesterday-heres-what-i-learned-56f1802105e3 | ['Benjamin Hardy'] | 2020-09-21 14:44:04.882000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life', 'Business', 'Leadership'] |
Try a Resolution-free New Year in 2021 | Try a Resolution-free New Year in 2021
Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash
Are you one of those people who set new goals, join a gym, start a diet, and promise to become a better version of yourself on January 1 of every new year?
Do you swear every year that this year will be different, that this time you will stick to your plan to become a better, stronger, skinnier, healthier, and wealthier version of yourself?
I used to go through the “New Year, New You” ritual, too. I would dutifully make my self-improvement list, and never question why I submitted to the practice. I would fall in line and earnestly approach the new-year ritual with an open heart, a determined mind, and a certainty that I could pull off my plans.
Every year the same promises, and ultimately, the same result.
But this year, you can count me out. I’m no longer feeling that vibe.
After the year of the collective anxiety we’ve suffered, I think what we really need in 2021 is a respite from self improvement.
We need to recover with time and space to unravel the knots.
Martha Postlethwaite’s poem, “Clearing,” is a perfect reminder of what we all need to do right now. She urges us to “create/a clearing/in the dense forest/of your life/and wait there, patiently/until the song/that is yours alone to sing/falls into your open cupped hands/and you recognize and greet it.”
I read those lines and whispered, “Yes.” The thought of skipping resolutions and instead, clearing out a wide, open space to wait patiently feels like a cool drink of water.
For me, clearing means relaxing and inviting potential and possibility in, rather than cluttering my energy and mind with forced intentions, resolutions, shoulds, and rules. Clearing means unfurling my heart like a frond of a fern and opening myself up to be free of the social rules and simply be me.
If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that the best laid plans can go awry in single breath. One day you are living your life and doing all the right things, and the next day you are stuck in your house for 9 months in your pajamas, existing on auto-pilot, and wondering when you can safely hang out with other people and be normal again.
This year we discovered that certainty is a fairytale. Underneath what appears to be a solid, reliable plan is roiling unpredictability.
My forced sabbatical from my life before Covid gave me hours of quiet contemplation time to rethink old habits that no longer serve me. And now, I can no longer remember why I burned up so much energy working so hard to make lists that were intended to make myself better than I was the year before. I can’t recall why I was compelled to judge and criticize myself into finding, fixing, and figuring myself out. Why did I care so much about who I was supposed to be?
My old resolutions were shackles I wore to keep my authentic self in check because I didn’t accept my reflection in the mirror. I was too eager to fix the woman with wrinkles, curves, thick thighs, and grey hair. I didn’t want to admit that I’m an imperfect woman who can hold a grudge indefinitely; who is messy and scattered; who picks dessert over brussel sprouts; who leaves clean laundry unfolded in the basket; who and goes to bed with a sink full of dirty dishes.
Yeah, I’m all of those things; I’m finally ready to own it.
I’m tired of holding up all a false pretense for everyone else. Those lists of resolutions I once wrote were like a corset tied up too tightly, squeezing and reshaping me to make me appear to be something I am not.
2021 is the year I rip off that constricting girdle for good. I want to take a deep breath, spread my arms wide, and just be me. To hell with resolutions. The space I take up in this world is mine to fully inhabit. I refuse to apologize for it.
Resolutions are supposed to help us become better than we were the previous year. But here’s the truth: Resolutions don’t work. Every year, millions of people write lists and set intentions that fade to memory in a couple months. In fact, according to U.S. News, 80 percent of resolutions fail by February. Nothing ever really changes. Most people inevitably end up back at square one on day one of the next New Year.
So why bother when none of it makes any difference? According to Psychology Today, “Most of our resolutions aren’t things we actually want to do deep down in our hearts but things we feel we ought to do.”
What would happen if this year you decided to toss out the old rules? What if you release those unrealistic expectations and finally decide to be comfortable in your skin, just as you are, right now? No more New Year’s promises. No more feeling you never measure up. No more regrets about unresolved promises to yourself.
This year, be bold; refuse to fall in line. Create something new and “give yourself to the world so worthy of rescue.”
Clearing by Martha Postlethwaite | https://medium.com/glad-doggett/no-more-new-years-resolutions-2c82c32d9a63 | ['Glad Doggett'] | 2021-01-02 18:29:52.244000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Self Love', 'Acceptance', 'Personal Development'] |
2016 — Day 26 | We Write
Taz Ahmed
When we write poems together, she holds one hand to her chest, hovering over her left breast where her heart should be. It’s like she is silencing it, trying to calm the fire radiating from her heart. It is bright, you know, the light seeping out of the cracks of her chest, like steel spikes of a Mexican sacred heart piercing through her ribs.
When we write poems together, her fingers touch the raw of her scar breaking her skin. Her other hand puts ink to paper, words to reality, prayers indenting in pages. We don’t talk about it, not directly, about the maybe toxicity growing in her, the maybe tough times coming, the maybe precariousness of life. It will take days for the experts to come back with results, so for the moment, we are drifting in the maybes, our fingers rippling at waves.
When we write poems together, she conspires with me about a solidarity filled future, and how she reimagines a love immersed world. We believe that our poetry has the power to shift paradigms in the universe. We are humbled that poetry is a tiny drop in the toxic inertia revolving around our universe. Our poetry is about the life we want to live when life is too short, without saying verbalizing that life is too short. It is too soon for that.
Our poetry is everything, our poetry is nothing. We are powerful and we are powerless. When we write poems together our fingers dance on the steel spikes of our hearts till we can’t write poems any more. | https://medium.com/poetry-a-day-for-ramadan/2016-day-26-4fec9cf650eb | ['Taz Ahmed'] | 2016-07-18 18:26:21.827000+00:00 | ['Islam', 'Poetry', 'Poem', 'Ramadan', 'Muslim'] |
Why is the Normal Distribution so Normal? | Why is the Normal Distribution so Normal?
Beyond the Central Limit Theorem
The Normal Distribution (or a Gaussian) shows up widely in statistics as a result of the Central Limit Theorem. Specifically, the Central Limit Theorem says that (in most common scenarios besides the stock market) anytime “a bunch of things are added up,” a normal distribution is going to result.
But why? Why that distribution? Why is it special? Why not some other distribution? Are there other statistical distributions where this happens?
Teaser: the answer is yes, there are other distributions that are special in the same way as the Normal distribution. The Normal distribution is still the most special because:
It requires the least math
It is the most common in real-world situations with the notable exception of the stock market
If you’re intrigued, read on! I’ll give an intuitive sketch of the Central Limit Theorem and a quick proof-sketch before diving into the Normal distribution’s oft-forgotten cousins.
The Central Limit Theorem
Here is a quick official statement:
Suppose you have n random variables X₁, X₂, … etc. representing a sample of size n from some population with population mean μ and finite variance σ². The population could follow any distribution at all.
We are interested in their mean X, which itself a random variable. (It is random because each time we take a sample of size n, we get a different result).
We already know that the mean X will have mean μ and variance σ²/n (this is true by the independence assumption and is a general property of random variables).
The central limit theorem says that when n is large (usually 40+ is close enough in real life) the mean X follows a normal distribution, no matter what the distribution of underlying population is.
Formally,
Formal statement of the Central Limit Theorem
Where Φ represents the normal distribution with mean and variance as given. (You may be used to seeing the equivalent standard deviation σ/√n instead). The “in distribution” is a technical bit about how the convergence works. We’ll ignore such technicalities from here on out.
Why the Central Limit Theorem Shows Up
The Central Limit Theorem shows up in all sorts of places in real-world situations. For example, it’s a pretty reasonable assumption that your height can be expressed as the sum of a bunch of factors related to, among others:
How much milk you drank every day when you were 8 years old How many X and/or Y chromosomes you have Which variant of the GH1 gene you have A whole bunch of other genes Whether you slept in a Procrustean bed as a child
Take a whole bunch of factors, each of which makes a small difference in your final (adult) height, and, presto, you end up with a (roughly) normal distribution for human heights!
Note that I cheated slightly – the variables here aren’t i.i.d. But the independence assumption is a reasonable approximation, and there are stronger versions of the central limit theorem that relax the identical-distribution hypothesis. We did choose to leave out the cases of extreme genetic conditions that affect height however.
So in sum, any time something you measure is made up of a whole bunch of contributions from smaller parts being added up, you are likely to end up with a normal distribution.
A Quick Proof
This proof is necessarily a sketch because, well, if you want a full proof with all of the analysis and probability theory involved, go read a textbook. The main point I want to get across is that there is a reason Euler’s constant e shows up.
First of all, we will need one high-powered mathematical tool. To every reasonable random variable X there is a characteristic function φ which is, in essence, the Fourier Transform of the Probability-Density Function (PDF) of X.
Characteristic Function of a Random Variable X
Why did we take our perfectly good, real-valued, random variable and start throwing in complex numbers and just generally making it more complicated? Well, for some reason no one has ever satisfactorily explained to me, things in math tend to come with two ways of looking at them (“duality”). In physics too: space/momentum, time/frequency. And for whatever reason, it is sometimes much simpler to look at the other side.
The Characteristic Function has two nice properties we will need. Suppose A and B are independent random variables and c is a scalar constant. Then we want to know the characteristic function for the sum variable A +B and the product cA. You should be able to derive these with a pencil and paper pretty quickly from the definition:
Convenient properties of the Characteristic Function
The derivatives of φ at t=0 also encode valuable information. After we set t=0, the exponential parts go away and we get a simple enough expression to evaluate. (Again, I promise you you can do this yourself in 2 minutes with pencil and paper. Just use the definition and do what seems right).
Derivatives of the Characteristic Function at 0 assuming finite mean and variance
Now we are ready to get started. Recall our X₁, X₂, … etc., iid random variables each with mean μ and finite variance σ². Lets shift them so we get
and define
Please convince yourself that if we show that the sum Y is normally distributed with mean 0 and variance σ², then we have shown that the mean X is normally distributed with mean μ and variance σ²/n, which is what we want.
Now we just need to compute the characteristic function
Characteristic Function for the Sum Y
where we have used the characteristic-function properties for the sum and scalar multiple of a random variable from above. The Y’s are iid so they all have the same characteristic function: repeated multiplication turns into exponentiation.
Now we Taylor expand φ to second order
Taylor expansion of φ
Take the limit as n → ∞. You know this one! It’s the compound interest formula (Pert!) with the interest rate r = –σ²t²/2
The Compound Interest Formula
The result we have arrived at is in fact the characteristic function for a normal distribution with mean 0 and variance σ². By the Lévy Continuity Theorem, we are done. And we can see why that sneaky Euler’s constant e shows up!
Beyond the Central Limit Theorem
Okay, the whole point of this was to find out why the Normal distribution is so normal. All we’ve done is prove the Central Limit Theorem without really getting a deeper explanation for why the Normal distribution is the result. Time for the payoff.
We saw that the Central Limit Theorem is so common because it tells us what happens when we sum/average a bunch of stuff. So it is natural to ask, what distributions can arise as the sum/average of a bunch of stuff? Let’s think of these distributions as “cousins” of the Normal (Gaussian) distribution.
Infinitely Divisible Distributions
A distribution Y is infinitely divisible if it can be expressed as the sum of arbitrarily many iid distributions X. Formally, for every n, we can find a distribution X such that:
The Poisson distribution, Student’s t-distribution, and the Gamma distribution are infinitely divisible – as are Gaussians and the distributions we will see below.
Stable Distributions
We want to ask for a stronger condition however, before we deem a distribution a “cousin” of the Normal distribution. Suppose we have a distribution X and iid copies of it X₁ and X₂. We take a linear combination of those copies and see if we end up with the same thing we started with except possible scaled by a constant c and shifted by a constant d. If we can always do this, we say X is stable.
In the context of infinitely divisible distributions above, this means that we can write Y as the sum of n copies of itself (suitably scaled and/or shifted). Roughly speaking, with an unstable distribution like the Poisson distribution, adding more and more of them will get you closer and closer to a stable distribution. So it is the stable distributions that we will be interested in.
The Levy α-Stable Distributions
The α-stable distributions are the only stable distributions. They were studied by the Frenchman Paul Lévy as early as the 1920s. Their description is the heart of the Generalized Central Limit Theorem given by the Russians Gnedenko and Kolmogorov in the 1950s. In turn they provide the proper perspective on the nature of the Normal Distribution.
Each α-stable distribution is characterized by 4 parameters. This is a lot of parameters.¹
Location (in essence the mean) Scale c (related to the standard deviation) Tail Size, α. Between 0 and 2 including 2 but not 0. Left/right Tail Ratio, β. Between -1 and 1 inclusive.
The first two parameters are pretty reasonable: location and scale. In the context of the normal distribution, the location is the mean μ and the scale may be taken to be the standard deviation σ.
Comparison of different tail sizes (Wikipedia). α=2 is the Normal distribution.
The third parameter, α (hence the name of the family of distributions) controls the size of the tails. The smallest tails belong to the Normal distribution with kurtosis 3 (and excess kurtosis 0). For all the other stable distributions, the tails are fatter (“leptokurtic”) with kurtosis at least 9. You are familiar with the idea of “fat tails” from books like The Black Swan. In short, if you think things are normally distributed but they in fact have larger tails that you think, you will see a surprising number of “freak” occurrences like stock-market crashes (which, of course, are quite common). We will return to this parameter in a minute.
Comparison of Different “skewness” settings (Wikipedia)
The last parameter is a bit boring. It controls the ratio of the size of the right tail to the left tails (intuitively, the skew). In the diagram you can see that for β=1 the distribution is only supported for non-negative numbers.
In a sense I have given the parameters out of order. They control the 1st (location), 2nd (scale), 3rd (“skewness”), and 4th (“kurtosis”) moments. Hopefully this gives you an intuitive feel for each of them. To conclude, we are going to look at the all-important 4th parameter, α.
The Pareto Distribution
In order to understand tail size, we should look at the Pareto distributions. The Pareto distribution has a PDF that is non-zero only for x≥1 and comes with a parameter α > 0 which plays the same role as in the Lévy distributions.
PDF for the Pareto Distribution, with α > 0
The Pareto distribution was first studied by the Economist Italian Vilfredo Pareto in the context of the distribution of wealth in the late 1800s. It is the genesis of the 80/20 rule (20% of the population has 80% of the wealth²; 20% of the work accomplishes 80% of the result). This was also, apparently, an inspiration for the Fascism of Mussolini, who attended his lectures.
Some crucial points to note
For α = 0 (or less), the distribution wouldn’t be normalized: the total probability wouldn’t add up to 1 (it would add up to ∞). Hence the constraint on α.
For α ≤ 1, the distribution doesn’t even have a finite mean! Its expected value E(X) is ∞.
For α ≤ 2, the distribution doesn’t have finite variance! Its variance is ∞.
The Pareto distribution always has fatter tails than the normal distribution, as measured by the kurtosis. In the limit α→∞, the kurtosis is 6 more than the Normal distribution’s.
As α gets bigger, the tails get smaller (but stay larger than a Gaussian). If the tails are too large, the distribution can have infinite mean and variance!
Okay? If you understand that the Pareto distribution is the prototypical “fat tailed” distribution with a single parameter controlling the “largeness” of the tails, then you understand the role of α in the Lévy α-stable distributions.
Relationship between Pareto and Lévy distributions
To put everything together, you may have noticed that I sneakily haven’t yet explicitly said why the Central Limit Theorem doesn’t apply to the α-stable distributions.
In fact, the Central Limit Theorem requires our distribution have finite variance σ². But for distributions with infinite variance, the Central Limit Theorem won’t apply. Instead, if you average a bunch of samples, you will get an α-stable distribution with α < 2. We’ll give some example below.
This is also why I talked about “location” and “scale” parameters. Your intuition for what the mean and variance do apply perfectly well, but not all of our distributions actually have a well-defined mean or variance.
To recap/clarify, suppose we have an underlying distribution X and we sample with size n and take the mean. We are wondering what distribution the sample mean will follow in the limit where n is large.
If the distribution‘s tails looks like a Pareto distribution α < 2 after we go far enough, we will get an α-stable distribution with the same α. If the left tail and right tail have different α-parameters, the largest one wins and the smallest one dies: we end up with an α-stable distribution that only has a left or right tail (β = ±1). Otherwise β just sets the ratio between the two tails.
If the distribution’s tails look like a Pareto distribution with α > 2 or else they fall off faster than any polynomial (like, say exponentially fast as in a Gaussian), then you will end up with a Normal distribution.
The case α = 2 is special. Even though the underlying distribution has infinite variance, the resulting distribution will still be a Gaussian. For this reason, the Lévy distribution with α=2 is the Normal (Gaussian) distribution.
The case α=2 is also special because the Normal distribution can’t have any Skewness (so β=0) and the tail size is fixed (kurtosis = 3). For this reason, there are no α-stable distributions with α > 2. All such hypothetical distributions are instead “captured” by the Central Limit Theorem and turned into Gaussians when we sample and average.
The α-stable distributions are important because they provide the version of the Central Limit Theorem in the case of “fat” tails. As alluded to above, stock-market returns are believed to follow an α-stable distribution with α≠2, providing a real-life example of a situation where you can lose your shirt by making the assumption something is normally distributed.
Conclusion
Interestingly, a closed form probability-density function (PDF) isn’t known except for a few special cases. It is only possible to write down the characteristic function φ in general. It is quite ugly, so I’m not going to bother. However, it is possible to sample from and numerically compute the pdfs, and you’ll find an implementation in any good statistical package (like scipy).
Let’s close with an example. If you generate standard random normal variables A and B and consider their ratio A/B, you will get a Cauchy Distribution with α=1. As an exercise, you can generate n numbers with n large and fit both a normal distribution and a Lévy-stable distribution to the resulting distribution of sample means. You should see that the Normal distribution doesn’t fit (the tails are too fat) and the Lévy distribution fits with α close to 1. What happens if you change the means and standard deviations of A and B? | https://towardsdatascience.com/why-is-the-normal-distribution-so-normal-e644b0a50587 | ['Ravi Charan'] | 2020-06-14 19:55:13.187000+00:00 | ['Mathematics', 'Central Limit Theorem', 'Towards Data Science', 'Data Science', 'Statistics'] |
Getting Started Experience for Virtual Reality headset – Oculus Go | An attempt to design an onboarding experience for Oculus Go for school students.
Nothing will compel a visitor to do something more than the inner desires of the visitor, and if we can speak more to those desires, the better we’ll understand how to craft experiences. To understand not just the ‘whats’, but the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’. And this is where it really starts to get interesting. — ‘In the Blink of a Mind — Attention’ by Jessica Billhart
Project Overview
This is an Academic Project for the course DD534 — Human Computer Interactions in Virtual Reality at Department of Design, IIT Guwahati.
Photo by Marc Mueller on Unsplash
Assignment Brief
To design a Getting Started Experience for Oculus Go for the students visiting the VR Zone of Guwahati Planetarium, Assam, India. | https://uxplanet.org/getting-started-experience-for-oculus-go-18e06fa854bb | ['Ankita Khante'] | 2020-05-24 10:56:28.762000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Virtual Reality', 'UX', 'VR', 'Augmented Reality'] |
Fact versus Fear. Science versus Folklore. | Facts are principles and values which are known or can be proven. Fears have no basis in facts. Scientists gather facts. Space travel is now a fact, but what if everything you’ve ever known about yourself was not based on facts? If you learned that your legacy, your ancestry, and your very existence was all based on myth. A myth is a widely held but FALSE idea or belief. Would you rather hold onto the lie you have been taught?
The systemic racism we find in America’s education and housing did not happen by coincidence or accident. However, for a large number of the white majority, this was the first time they had seen the death of a Black man in a way that shook them to the core. 2020 has been the first year where white Americans faced the facts of their ancestral inheritance and the myths of racism.
The perfect American dream of raising 2.5 children and living in a just and civil society is a myth. The myth first came into question when the viral video of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery’s murder was released to the public on May 5th. Ahmaud was shot and killed on Feb. 23, but because one of Ahmaud’s assailants, Gregory McMichael, was a retired police officer he and his son Travis were not charged with a crime until the video was released. Recorded for their enjoyment, the McMichael’s and friend, William “Roddie” Bryan, told police they suspected Arbery had committed a series of break-ins. Although rumor has it, the video was already in police possession before being posted to social media. Fact: The rights and privileges of police brutality extend to retired, plain clothes, and off-duty police officers. | https://medium.com/@11Steps/facts-versus-fears-science-over-forklore-cbc1736c7417 | ['Brooke Sinclair'] | 2020-11-14 15:52:35.604000+00:00 | ['Mythology', 'Facts', 'Science', 'Civil Rights'] |
3 Cybersecurity Terms Non-Techies Can Use to Impress a Techy Date | GLOSSARY
We don’t blame you if you’d feel lost whenever friends or strangers drop tech terms that you scarcely know anything about. It’s natural to pretend you do (while praying no one asks you questions), especially if an attractive member of the opposite (or same) sex is present, but for how long can you keep it up?
Technology is going to get more and more complicated, and it’s better to start getting familiar with the buzzwords so you can hold your own in any conversation. Not only can it raise your profile, it could also impress your crush.
Well, I am here specifically to help out those who are struggling with tech lingo by explaining it to them in simple terms. Let’s start with these three, shall we?
Term 1: Computer Worm
A real worm is that cold and squirmy thing that does its business beneath the soil, right? So what is a computer worm then? Well, this one was coined to play upon that burrowing analogy. But this time, it’s infesting a computer, hiding inside its operating system, and doing all sorts of bad stuff like stealing data, slowing bandwidth, and even wrecking its functions.
In reality, a computer worm is what is called malware, which is short for malicious software. It’s created by hackers and spread through email attachments or infected website links that you click on unsuspectingly. Once a computer worm gets inside your computer, you’ll start noticing that something’s wrong because the monitor could turn on or off unexpectedly, startup is very slow, or certain functions are disabled.
Term 2: Ethical Hacking
First off, how can hacking be ethical? Hackers are bad people that do all sorts of weird stuff to other people’s computers. So how can any of it be ethical? Well, for starters, there are bad hackers, and there are good hackers.
The latter are those hackers who use their skills not to victimize but to help companies defend their networks. They do so by deliberately hacking into your system in order to test its defenses or identify its weak spots and exploitable vulnerabilities.
Ethical hacking is undertaken for the purpose of knowing the problems so that necessary steps can then be made to find their solutions before the issues cause damage. So, when next time someone asks you what is ethical hacking, you’ll definitely know what to say.
Term 3: Pharming
If you’ve been in a situation where, while driving, you were tricked into taking a diversion and subsequently taken advantage of by bad elements waiting in ambush along the way, you have the answer to the question of what is pharming?
In other words, it’s a scheme hatched by cybercriminals who redirect you to a fake website which they control and, once there, they steal your important information like bank account and credit card numbers, user names, passwords, etc. They do so by corrupting the entry to a legitimate site so that when you input its URL, you are automatically sent to the bogus site where you are helplessly at their mercy.
— -
Understanding cybersecurity definitions can be frustrating if you don’t know where to look for answers. They might be tough, yes, but they’re cool once you get to know, and people — including your techy dates — will be impressed once you start explaining it to them. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/3-cybersecurity-terms-non-techies-can-use-to-impress-a-techy-date-275b89e2fd02 | ['Alexandre François'] | 2019-07-10 16:22:07.229000+00:00 | ['Cyber Security Awareness', 'Technology', 'Cybercrime', 'Tech', 'Cybersecurity'] |
AI for Trading Series №7: Stocks, Indices and Funds | AI for Trading Series №7: Stocks, Indices and Funds
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
Index/Indices
Overview
Indices refer to an aggregated value of a group of stocks as a single number. For example, we have S&P500 and DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average) for USA, NIKKEI and HANG SENG for Asia and FTSE, EURO STOXX for Europe. These are all example of indices.
Indices are created by financial research and credit rating companies such as Standard and Poor’s, Dow Jones and Financial Times. They are published by stock exchanges such as Nasdaq or the London Stock Exchange.
Business news may refer to whether the index went up or down.
They are virtual profiles and are not actual funds that people invest in.
Indices track subgroups of the market, and may be designed specifically to track stocks in the same stock exchange, same country, or same sector.
Indices give investors a measure of the market’s status.
Professional investment managers may use indices as benchmarks against which they can evaluate their own fund’s performance.
Market Captialization
Consider a scenario where we want to to track only smaller companies or what if we just want to track only high-growth companies? Having a more specific index would definitely help if our investment research is focused on companies with similar characteristics.
The creators of index often make indices that group stocks by Market Capitalization defined as large-cap, mid-cap and small-cap.
Market Capitalization or “Market Cap” refers to the total dollar market value of a company’s outstanding shares of stock. It is calculated by multiplying the total number of a company’s outstanding shares by the current market price of one share.
For example, the S&P divides a list of stocks into the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400 and the S&P SmallCap 600. The S&P 500 contains large-cap stocks such as Lockheed Martin, an aerospace company. The S&P MidCap 400 contains stocks such as Delphi, an automotive technology company. The S&P SmallCap 600 contains a small-cap stocks such as The New York Times. Now, within each of these indices, the stocks are then ranked as more growth or more value stocks.
Growth Stock v/s Value Stock
Indices can also include stocks based on whether companies are considered growth or value stocks.
Growth stock tends to have high growth is sales or earnings and have potential for future growth. For example, if a company creates new ways for people to commute from one place to another, it might be considered a growth stock due to its potential for increased future sales.
Values stock tends to be a matured company that has stable sales, revenue and earnings. So for example, a company that sells bathroom products will have a stable flow of earnings. But this company will have fewer expectations for a future rapid growth.
Continuing our S&P example as explained above, from the S&P SmallCap 600 list, stocks are selected for the S&P SmallCap 600 Growth Index or the S&P SmallCap 600 Value Index.
Ratios
In order to decide whether a particular company is growth or value we can look at valuation metrics such as price to earnings ratio, price to sales ratio and price to book ratio. Then, within a list of companies in an index, we can rank these stocks by these metrics and say that stock is more on one end of the spectrum relative to the other stocks.
Price to earnings ratio : the stock price divided by the company’s earnings per share over the past four quarters.
Price to sales ratio : the the stock price divided by the sales per share over the past four quarters.
Price to book ratio : the stock price divided by the book value per share. The book value is the company’s accounting value, which is assets minus liabilities.
Growth stocks tend to have high price to earnings, price to sales, and price to book ratios. Value stocks tend to have lower price to earnings, price to sales, and price to book ratios.
For example, in general, software and biotechnology stocks tend to have higher PE ratios, while agriculture and construction companies tend to have lower PE ratio.
Price Weighting and Market Cap Weighting
Consider the index NIKKEI 225, which tracks the price movements of 225 stocks. Now, in order to get a single index number, we can simply add up all the single share price of all the 225 stocks. This is called Price Weighting or Equal Weighting. Dow Jones Index is also price-weighted index.
We can also take weighted average of the stocks so that all the stocks are not treated the same. For example, we can give more weight to stocks of bigger companies rather than smaller companies because the movement of a larger company’s price will have more effect on the overall change in the stock market. This is called Market Cap Weighting. Major indices that follow market-capitalization weighting are the S&P500, Hang Seng, MERVAL, FTSE and EURO STOXX.
Adding or Removing Companies from an Index
In June 2018, Monsanto, a U.S. based agriculture company was acquired by Bayer, a German-based pharmaceutical company. Monsanto was listed in the S&P500, but after the acquisition, S&P500 removed Monsanto from the S&P500, which is called an index delete. S&P500 also added Twitter, which is called an index add.
Prior to its replacement, Monsanto was worth about $50 billion and Twitter was worth about $30 billion. Now, lets consider an imaginary company, X, that serves as a placeholder for Monsanto before change and Twitter after the change. Next, we calculate the percentage change in X’s market cap from $50 billion to $30 billion and apply that to the previous index to get current day’s index. | https://medium.com/@purvasingh/stocks-indices-and-funds-2c2595e2e50f | ['Purva Singh'] | 2020-12-17 03:03:55.987000+00:00 | ['Index', 'Stocks', 'Investment Funds', 'Ai For Trading', 'Finance'] |
GM’s Strategic Pivot | GM’s Strategic Pivot
Last week, General Motors’ Chairman and CEO Mary Barra increased the company’s commitment to electric vehicles from $20 billion to $27 billion by 2025 and announced the company’s plan for an all-electric future. More than half of GM’s product development resources are focused on electric vehicles, a significant tipping point from the company’s deep heritage in gas-powered internal combustion engine cars and trucks.
“We are resolved as a management team to move even faster to expedite the transition to EVs. The all-electric future we are building integrates all the things we do better than anybody else — so we can put everyone in an EV, generate profitable growth and create shareholder value.”
This week General Motors sent another significant signal of this pivot by withdrawing from the Trump administration-led litigation against California’s tough fuel economy and emissions regulations.
Startups often pivot multiple times before settling on a winning business model. What GM is doing is much trickier.
In 1886, 25-year old high school dropout Billy Durant rode in a friend’s new spring-suspension horse drawn carriage and was so impressed that he tracked down the developer, bought the patent and manufacturing rights, and formed the Flint Road-Car Company. By 1900 the company (renamed Durant-Dort Carriage Company) was the leading manufacturer of horse-drawn carriages selling 50,000 per year.
At first, Billy was skeptical of the new horseless carriages, but in 1908 he formed General Motors as a holding company and acquired Buick Motor Company. Durant’s holding company rapidly completed twenty more acquisitions including Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland (later renamed Pontiac), and Rapid Motor Vehicle Company (later renamed GMC). In 1910, the company tried to buy Ford, but the deal fell through and the next year Durant was forced out of the company. He co-founded Chevrolet and in 1918 Chevrolet acquired a controlling ownership in General Motors, putting Durant back in charge of an even bigger company.
GM passed Ford in sales in the late 1920s and was the world leader in car sales into the 1980s. Today, the most valuable automakers in the world include Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Honda, BMW. GM has fallen to number seven. Tesla is the highest valued American car maker.
All industries follow similar lifecycles. There’s a startup phase when the industry starts small and as awareness and demand grow, so do sales. Then comes the growth phase when everyone seems to want what the industry produces. Then finally, the industry matures. Growth slows and sales eventually begin to decline. This is often represented using the Sigmoid mathematical function as shown below, although it’s usually simply called the S-curve.
The auto industry has been a mature industry for quite some time. When industries approach the end of their life, smart companies try to “jump” to another S-curve still in the startup phase.
That’s what GM (and every other automaker) is trying to do. Even though GM introduced an electric concept car in 1990 and its first mass-produced electric vehicle in 1996, the company remained fully committed to gas powered cars, even going so far as prohibiting consumers from buying that first car at the end of their lease, and destroying all the reclaimed cars.
Making an S-curve jump is hard.
The auto industry is heavily impacted by regulations. Regulatory decisions can have huge impacts on the profitability of car makers, so those companies invest heavily in trying to influence regulatory outcomes. Often, regulatory decisions that favor electric vehicles hurt the sales of gas powered cars and vice versa, so a company like GM has to choose which side they want to favor. Until now, that side has been gas powered cars.
But obviously, that’s changing. Why?
Some of it is obviously politics. The Trump administration was openly opposed to many of the fuel efficiency and emissions regulations that hurt gas powered car makers. The Biden administration is expected to largely support even stricter regulations, explicitly pushing consumers towards electric vehicles.
Some of it is economics. Electric cars have cost more to make than gas powered cars. Government tax credits, exemptions, and rebates have helped close that gap so that consumers can afford to choose an electric vehicle over a gas powered one.
Some of it is technology. Perhaps the biggest impediment to broad adoption of electric cars has been battery technology. Battery costs are the biggest driver of the cost disadvantage EVs face. Battery range and recharging times make electric vehicles a challenge for long road trips. And news reports of exploding batteries create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of consumers. But battery technology is rapidly improving on all those fronts.
General Motors is investing heavily in battery technology. The first generation of the company’s Ultium batteries are 40% less expensive than those used in the Chevy Bolt and the second generation is expected to improve that by another 50%.
But the switch isn’t going to be easy. Big mature companies are complex. GM customers, employees, and dealers are all heavily invested in the company’s gas-powered legacy. The company’s business model and economic engine are fine tuned for the way GM has always operated.
While it might seem that logically GM has a strong starting point for the transition, with solid supply chain, manufacturing facilities, distribution, and customer service for a product that is largely the same, the investment that the company needs to make to transition to electric vehicles may be greater than for a pure-play startup like Tesla. General Motors also has everything at stake. Their existing revenue streams and loyalties can easily be lost if the company stumbles in this transition.
Billy Durant successfully led his companies through the S-curve jump from horseless carriages to automobiles. Can Mary Barra do the same as GM tries to jump from gas-powered to electric-powered vehicles? We will have to wait and see. | https://clearpurpose.media/gms-strategic-pivot-ed4a4bb55767 | ['Russell Mcguire'] | 2020-11-25 17:53:50.778000+00:00 | ['Electric Vehicles', 'Pivot', 'General Motors', 'Strategy Tales', 'S Curve Of Business'] |
What the Heck Is the RSA Algorithm? | Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
ICE BREAKER:-
RSA algorithm is one of the profoundly discussed topics in the crypto field. There are several articles and videos that one could easily find related to it. My main motive to write this article is not just to explain the steps of the RSA algorithm but also to explain the underlying mathematics or logic in an intuitive way so that no one has to memorize the steps anymore.
So, let’s begin with a formal introduction of the RSA algorithm. RSA is an asymmetric cryptography technique that uses public/private keys to encrypt and decrypt data (We will see soon how they are generated). As the name suggests, the public key is shared publicly with everyone whereas the private key is always kept private and safe. As it is asymmetric cryptography so a document encrypted via a public key can only be unlocked via a private key and vice versa. RSA algorithm is named after its inventors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman.
Now let’s dive into the RSA algorithm and understand the steps involved and the mathematics/logic backing those steps.
UNDERSTANDING THE STEPS INVOLVED:-
1> Selecting two large prime numbers.
The first step in the RSA algorithm is to choose two large prime numbers. The strength of the algorithm directly depends upon the size of the prime numbers used. The bigger the primes chosen, the stronger is our crypto.
Now let us simply break it and understand the need of choosing two large primes. So basically the whole idea of an asymmetric algorithm works on a trapdoor function. Let us understand it via an example.
Say, p and q are the two large primes chosen. We can calculate another variable n = p*q (also called the modulo). So how is this a trapdoor function?
Calculating the value of n is pretty straight forward if you know the two primes. But, if you know the value of ‘n’, can you calculate the value of the two primes used? If we use large prime numbers, then n will only have two factors (other than 1 and itself ) that are p and q. So it will be very difficult to break n into its factors as there are only two factors which are very very large numbers. So brute-forcing it would be computationally costly and that is how it acts as a trapdoor, as it is easier from one end to calculate the value ’n’ but very difficult to reverse engineer it. And that is the secret power of the RSA algorithm. Moreover, that is the reason why it is always recommended to choose large primes.
2> Calculating ϕ(n), the Euler Totient function of n.
ϕ(n) simply means the count of all the numbers ≤ n which are coprime to n. So for example, if we assume n to be prime, then ϕ(n) would simply be n-1 (as all the numbers from 1 to n-1 would be coprime to n).
Now we face two questions, firstly how to find the value and why to find it. How is it useful? Now both of them could be answered using different Euler’s theorems. To calculate the value we use:-
The formula used to calculate the Euler totient function.
In the above-mentioned formula, p is nothing but the prime factors of n. So in our case n has only two prime factors, p, and q.
ϕ(n) = n*(1–1/p)*(1–1/q), now using n = p*q, we can easily prove ϕ(n) = (p-1)*(q-1).
Now, how is it relevant? To answer this, we need to know about another Euler’s theorem
m^ϕ(n) ≡ 1 (mod n) where m is any integer.
This formula will later be used to solve the final equation we have for encrypting and decrypting messages. Also, Fermat Little Theorem is a special case of this theorem. As if we take n as a prime number then ϕ(n) will be equal to n-1. And the above theorem reduces to Fermat Little Theorem.
3> Calculating the primary key ‘e’.
Finally, now we are in a position to calculate our primary key ‘e’. So our primary key should satisfy two conditions.
1 < e < ϕ(n)
gcd(e, ϕ(n)) = 1 (That is e must be a coprime to ϕ(n)).
Now we can pick any value that satisfies this condition and that will be our primary key.
4> Calculating the private key ‘d’.
So once we have our primary key, we can now find our private key. Our private key should also satisfy one condition, that is,
(e*d) ≡ 1 mod(ϕ(n)), and this is the reason why we have gcd(e, ϕ(n)) = 1 in our previous step. We will get a ‘d’ only if gcd(e, ϕ(n)) = 1, else there won’t be any such ‘d’ possible (modulo inverse concept).
Now if e*d mod (ϕ(n)) = 1, then we can simplify it as e*d = k*ϕ(n) + 1 where k is some integer. Now we will choose a k value s.t. we get an Integer value for ‘d’ (our secret private key).
5> Finally it is time, to encrypt and decrypt!!
Now when we have our public key ‘e’ and private key ‘d’, we can encrypt and decrypt data. Let’s use ‘c’ for the ciphertext and ‘m’ for the original message. Therefore,
To encrypt our plain text, we use c= (m^e)mod(n). To decrypt our cipher text, we use m= (c^d)mod(n).
For all the maths geeks who are interested to know how the above-mentioned formula works, I would strongly recommend them to visit https://brilliant.org/wiki/rsa-encryption/.
I hope this article didn’t get too complex. I tried my best to keep things simple and logical.
References | https://medium.com/swlh/what-the-heck-is-the-rsa-algorithm-18d96eb81e73 | ['Shivansh Sinha'] | 2020-12-04 23:44:02.189000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Computer Science', 'Computer Networking', 'Computer Security', 'Cryptography'] |
7 Tips for How to Be Successful on News Break | If you’re a frequent writer on Medium, you’ve likely already heard about News Break, the news app which is now catering to content creators.
Their incentives are attractive:
a guaranteed minimum monthly income,
ad revenue share,
referral bonuses for getting readers to download the News Break app and bringing on new content creators,
and other cash awards.
There are, of course, requirements for reaching that guaranteed minimum monthly income.
The number of articles you publish, when you publish those articles, and your page views and follower counts may factor in whether you reach that guaranteed minimum or not.
I can’t share the specific details of my contract (confidentiality agreement), but I can say that once you apply and receive a contract, it’ll be clear what you need to do to reach those minimums.
Screenshot by the author
I reached all of my contract requirements in order to make the guaranteed monthly minimum payment in four days.
Here’s how:
1. Clickbait is your friend.
Unlike Medium, you can go nuts with your titles on News Break. It actually was difficult for me at first to come up with clickbait headlines for articles because I was so used to avoiding them altogether.
While clickbait is often about overpromising and underdelivering, you can get around this by working on the emotional value of your headline. Pack your headlines with power words. Be specific (A list of tips? HOW MANY tips? HOW was that incident life-changing?). Use “This/These.” Make them think, “Whaaa?” so they click click click.
Here are some of my articles that have done well:
“It Was Only a Matter of Time Before I Cheated on My Husband” (91k page views)
“4 Ways to Make a Girl Crazy for You” (37k page views)
“5 Things Science Says Guys Don’t Find Attractive in Girls” (29k page views)
Here are some articles from other writers that have done incredibly well:
“How a Teenage Girl Became the First Survivor of the Deadliest Virus Known to Man”
“What It’s Like to Date As a Demisexual”
“How I Got Proof of Life After Death as My Husband’s Final Gift”
If clickbait headlines are tough for you to come up with, try these helpful generators: Sumo headline generator, Phrase Generator, or Title Generator.
Pro tip: If an article doesn’t do well at first, try changing its title! One writer told me she changed one SIX times before it finally started gaining traction.
2. Add the follow widget to the bottom of all of your articles.
News Break isn’t as intuitive about getting your fans to follow you.
When you are drafting an article to publish, the button on the top right under the Title bar says “widget” when you hover over it and then “follow” when you click it.
Make sure to add that to ALL of your articles, so it’s easy for your fans to click to follow you.
Here’s what it looks like:
Screenshot by the author.
3. Know your audience.
While I’d consider Medium’s audience rather educated, liberal, and worldly, News Break’s readers are American, politically conservative, and primarily male.
I quickly discovered this just by reading the comments on some of the first articles I published. Be aware that the comments can be very unfiltered and…mean. It’s recommended that you don’t read them unless you’re wanting a better sense of your audience.
In my talk with the creators of the platform, it also seems like many live in the American south.
Articles that do well cater to and/or upset that particular audience. This audience particularly responds to emotional hooks and stories.
Therefore, the following article topics do well:
personal essays on a range of topics (family, parenting, friendships, death, etc.)
being for or against masks, President Trump/President Elect Biden, or the Republican/Democratic Party or its platform
relationship/dating advice for men
gender/sexual identities
relationship/dating problems
Tips:
Keep your paragraphs short.
Make your writing easy to skim (lists, subheadings, etc.).
Check your grammar and spelling (using something like Grammarly).
Consider keeping your writing level to a 7th to 8th grade level, which is the reading level that newspapers in the U.S. cater to. You can use this analyzer. Shoot for a Fry Readability Grade Level (shown on the right) of 7 or 8.
4. Pay attention to your keywords.
Unlike Medium where you can tag your own articles, News Break automatically pulls keywords from your article.
Here are the keywords that appear on the bottom of this article:
Screenshot by the author.
Some of these can be very relevant (like “relationship advice” and “infidelity”), but some of these can also be very irrelevant (like “Europe” and “circumstance.”).
If you want an article to appear under a certain tag, make sure you’re using valid and similar keywords. Instead of, for example, using the word “cat” multiple times in an article, also use the words, “feline,” “kitten,” “pet,” etc.
5. Publish.
You’ll never learn if you don’t try, so publish maybe four articles on four different topics.
Pay attention to what does and doesn’t do well.
If none of them do, try another four, or try writing an article that is in the vein of something on the list I mentioned above.
The important thing is not to give up. You may be surprised by what takes off.
Note: Profanity and ANY sexual references are not allowed (even using the word “sex” or “sexy” can get a story flagged, so you’re better off just not using them). It can be annoying (I literally have to ctrl+F each of my stories for naughty words because I’m a potty-mouth), but the more you get used to writing “cleanly,” the better.
6. Stick with the winners.
Like any platform, even one in its early stages like News Break, you have to find the “winners” and learn from them.
Follow as many fellow creators as you can, and pay attention particularly to those that already have over 1k followers and 200k+ views. Those are writers who are doing something right.
You’re welcome to follow me. Also check out the pages of the following even more successful writers:
Shannon Ashley
Matt Lillywhite
Tracey Folly
Kerry Kerr McAvoy
Elle Silver
Joe Donan
When you find a “winner, ” scroll through all of their articles. Since you won’t be able to see how many pages views a particular article has, look for the ones with the highest number of likes/comments.
Read those “winning” articles. Pay attention to their headlines. The topics. How the writer structured or formatted the story. LEARN why it did well, and see if it inspires you to write your own.
7. Learn from your successes, not your failures.
Just like on Medium, an article can totally flop. Even one you think might do really well.
When it does, don’t try publishing another article in that same style/type/subject. Don’t try to repeat your failure.
I published a parenting article, for example, that has so far gotten all of three page views. THREE.
Am I going to publish another 20 parenting articles? God no. I’m going to mess with the title to see if that’ll improve things and then look back at my successful articles and see if there’s another way I can write a post on the same topic, from a different angle, etc.
While News Break is still in its infancy, it’s a great place to try out new things, introduce your work to new readers, and get some extra money too. These tips aren’t guarantees, but these are the tactics I and the other successful writers on the platform have employed. We got followers quickly once we began putting out content News Break’s audience wanted to read. | https://medium.com/inspired-writer/the-real-truth-about-how-to-do-well-on-news-break-b1e785711827 | ['Tara Blair Ball'] | 2020-12-16 13:03:49.233000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Writing Tips', 'Blogging Tips', 'Blogging', 'Writing'] |
Pointing out Hypocrisy is Pointless; Fascists must be Fought | Pointing out Hypocrisy is Pointless; Fascists must be Fought
We need to stop pointing out Republican hypocrisies, and start putting them in jail, seizing all their wealth and property and redistributing it amongst the people they’ve spent their careers lying to and stealing from. There’s no purpose in continuing to point out that they are nothing but hypocrites, liars and thieves. From the first minutes following the announcement of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Republican ghouls have been celebrating and announcing their intention to fill her Supreme Court vacancy with one of their readymade inbred test-tube homunculi. And just as quickly, Democrats have been shouting (mostly in text form) about the self-serving depravity, the despicable hypocrisy of those intentions.
Mitch McConnell has been the primary target. Rightfully. As Senate majority leader, McConnell stole Barack Obama’s right to nominate a replacement for the mercifully dead degenerate, Antonin Scalia. Neil Gorsuch was later slipped right onto the bench with only a few harumphs from the ineffectual Democratic leadership, and the episode has been nearly forgotten, in the sense that people should be screaming themselves hoarse every day over the fact that that asshole has no legitimacy or right to be there. Then Brett Kavanaugh screamed and cried like an ornery bitch at the very suggestion that he be held accountable for his drunken-groping past and might not sail smoothly into a cushy lifetime appointment on the country’s highest court, ignoring the fact that Merrick Garland hadn’t even been given the opportunity to be publicly asked potentially embarrassing questions.
McConnell orchestrated a coup, stole a Supreme Court seat, filled it, then did it again, and he’s about to do it a third time. Critics are right in pointing out that McConnell’s justification for violating the Constitution and abandoning any pretense of law or sense of decency was that it was an election year and the next president should fill the vacancy, as if there was ever precedent for preventing a president from doing his job for the fourth quarter of his term, was complete bullshit and that he was a disgusting hypocrite. But they are wrong in believing that it matters that he is a disgusting hypocrite. “Matters,” in the sense that he’s gotten away with it, and is getting away with it, and no one has done or is doing anything to stop the mumble-mouthed sentient scrotum from continuing to get away with it. He knows he’s a liar and a piece of shit. Everyone does. He’s fine with that and so is the genocidal cabal he serves. He’s packing the Supreme Court and every other federal court (the SC seat wasn’t the only one he stole from Obama and the spineless Democrats) he can and there have been no consequences.
The Democrats, the majority of them, following the party’s weak, inept, and corrupt leadership, have done nothing to actually stop the Republican coup that has been playing out for years now. They make inconsequential statements of condemnation, call out the cheating but then keep on playing the game. They’ll point out the hypocrisies and lies, they might on rare occasions come right out and say that the Republicans are lying and cheating, but it’s all hollow, because they don’t actually do shit about it.
Politics used to be hardcore in this country. Politicians used to get into fistfights, beat one another with canes, even shoot each other to death in public duels. How far we’ve come since then, or rather, how far we’ve fallen. It’s amazing, that for all the advances in media and pop culture, everything being live-streamed and preserved on video, that our politics have become such a dull parade of pedantry and lame pageantry. All the fake respectability, the cloying niceness, is a disgrace. If our politicians want to continue leading this country and “fighting” for us, then they need to get off their asses and really fight. They should be literally fighting.
Imagine if someone like McConnell worked at your job. Not even a boss or a supervisor, higher ranking maybe, but a colleague, just another schmuck. Would you go in every day allowing them to fuck over everybody, changing rules as he goes, acting like a bitchy little despot? Would you and your coworkers not hit a breaking point where you shout down and stand up to that piece of shit? If he kept it up, smug as a shit-eating cracker on Friday, would you not be driven to the point of slashing his tires, putting a dead fish in his desk, or maybe waiting with your other balaclava-clad coworkers to catch him after work and crack his kneecaps like hardboiled eggs with aluminum softball bats? Of course you would. You and your coworkers would assault your intolerable colleague like anyone else would. It is shameful that no senators have yet shattered McConnell’s knees.
Failing actual criminal assault, there are “respectable” parliamentary things they could do. They could strike, refuse to show up for votes, denying the Republicans a quorum and thus invalidating any legitimacy of the proceedings. They could block the halls of the Senate, barring the way so that no shams or shenanigans can take place. They could shout and stomp their feet so loudly, make such a ruckus, that the barely intelligible droning of scum like McConnell is completely drowned out. It is shameful that Democrats have done none of this, that they whine and complain a little bit about unfairness and lawbreaking and pretend that’s enough, that they’re doing their jobs.
It is also shameful for us as citizens to tolerate weakness and ineffectiveness from “our” party, or corruption and hypocrisy from theirs. It’s shameful that so many of us believe the lie our politicians tell us, that the most important and powerful thing we can do is vote. The idea that we’re supposed to just vote and then that’s enough is nonsense. We need to fight. Not just point out injustice and hypocrisy, but fight them. And if voting is truly important, if that’s really how we’re going to get things done, we’ve got to rid the party of the weak who refuse to fight, and vote in some aggressive, shouting, bat-swinging, kneecap-cracking motherfuckers. The Republicans will never play fair. They are fascists. They have no shame and will do anything to win. Lindsay Graham doesn’t give a fuck that he literally said that his words should be used against him, regarding the prospect of replacing a Supreme Court justice near the end of Trump’s term. McConnell gives even less of a fuck. You don’t defeat lying fascists by pointing out that they’re lying fascists. Fascists do not care about anything more than maintaining their own power. All they understand is power. Power is the only way that you beat them. Our leaders need to step up, meet the enemy at their level, and beat them down. If they fail, as they’re so practiced at doing, then we need to do it ourselves.
Note that none of this is advocating violence. Much like Trump and every other fascist and liar who endorses violent rhetoric: “I’m joking.” | https://medium.com/@karlamazov/pointing-out-hypocrisy-is-pointless-fascists-must-be-fought-17bfdba899c3 | ['Karla Mazov'] | 2020-09-21 14:45:21.005000+00:00 | ['Republicans', 'Mitch Mcconnell', 'Fascism', 'Ruth Bader Ginsburg', 'Politics'] |
Empower a Lightweight Python Data Structure: From Tuples to Namedtuples | Tuple
When it comes to dealing with related data elements, one of the most commonly used data types is the tuple. As an immutable data type, tuples are sequences of data with a fixed size. They’re useful to group related data with different data types. Consider the following trivial example.
>>> employee0 = ('John Smith', 45, 'M', 160083)
In the above code snippet, we define a tuple called employee0 , which stores an employee’s personal data, including name, age, gender, and employee ID number. If we need to use some elements of the tuple, we can unpack it or use subscript, and their usages are shown below.
>>> # Use unpacking
>>> name, age, gender, employee_id = employee0
>>> print(f"Employee Name: {name}")
Employee Name: John Smith
>>>
>>> # Use subscript
>>> print(f"Employee Age: {employee0[1]}")
Employee Age: 45
>>> print(f"Employee ID #: {employee0[-1]}")
Employee ID #: 160083
How about we need to deal with another employee in the same module? We’ll have to do something like below.
>>> # Create a tuple for storing another employee data
>>> employee1 = ('Jennifer Brown', 38, 'F', 150384)
>>>
>>> # Access data
>>> name1, age1, gender1, employee_id1 = employee1
>>> print(f"Employee Name: {employee1[0]}")
Employee Name: Jennifer Brown
>>> print(f"Employee Age: {age1}")
Employee Age: 38
>>> print(f"Employee ID #: {employee_id1}")
Employee ID #: 150384
In essence, we have to repeat the above steps, and access individual elements using either unpacking or subscripts, which certainly is not the most pleasant thing to do. Actually, it can be error-prone because you have to remember the exact order of these data. | https://medium.com/swlh/empower-a-lightweight-python-data-structure-from-tuples-to-namedtuples-ca4abddd8ef6 | ['Yong Cui'] | 2020-05-02 11:01:01.048000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Technology'] |
Leap 1: Desi Perkins | For as long as I can remember I have always watched youtubers ranging in different varieties. From singing artists, to comedians, to makeup artists, I was a fan of it all. Now as I grow older, I’m becoming more aware of who I am, what I like and dislike in terms of media and a lot of it has filtered out over the years. No longer am I watching the comedy or the cringey stuff as I see it now but rather videos that gain my interest or help me learn something useful.
One influencer I had found on this journey of discovering myself is Desi Perkins, she is a beauty, fashion, and lifestyle influencer who I’ve been following for years now. Not only is it her style that I love but the content she puts out with her family. The spending time with her aunts and siblings to the gardening and even traveling the world. It reminds me of my own life, but it also drives me to want to be more creative and do more.
Most digital authors aren’t as raw and transparent on real issues going on and just show the happy side of who they are or their industry. Desi however shows it all and displays it with little hesitation. This is one of the many things I admire about her.
When I began re-watching a lot of her videos for the assignment, I found it difficult to write and record. I had written over and over things I could say, and it didn’t seem to flow together at all. When it came to finding clips to put in that go along with what I’m saying it was difficult and re-filming myself speak was also getting difficult. However, cutting down the clips whenever I felt myself getting tongue tied and working my way around certain problems helped.
One video that truly helped was re-watching her fertility journey, it brought back my awareness on the topic at hand and also reminded me of what she kept saying in each of her videos. Being thankful, forgiving, and pushing through. I took a small break and refocused finding it to be much simpler to find what I wanted to speak on. Looking on her media pages as well as through her YouTube helped with finding clips for the video.
Desi Perkins is one digital author I admire so re-watching her clips not only gave me another point of view and helped me learn something new; It also reminded me why she is one of my favorites. I think a lot of times when we watch someone on the internet it’s hard to separate the fake from reality and realizing that they have gone through a lot of what we have. Desi came from humble beginnings with nothing along with her husband and they both worked extremely hard to get where they are today. It shows that if I work as hard and put my all into it my dream can come true as well. | https://medium.com/digital-media-literacy/desi-perkins-dd048f6f3f97 | ['Ariel Goncalves Tavares'] | 2021-03-08 22:42:56.395000+00:00 | ['Desiperkins', 'Com250', 'Mother', 'Leap 1', 'Fertility'] |
The fastest way to create a stunning responsive website using Overlay, Nuxt.js and Prismic | I have been a developer for 3 years, with a special passion for front end topics and great interfaces. I have always been sceptical about low-code tools and their ability to generate clean code.
But during this post-Covid month of August 2020, I helped the Hublo team ship their brand new website, and tested a new workflow, that changed my mind.
At Hublo, the leader in human resources management in health care., there were two groups of stakeholders involved in the project :
The marketing team, whose goal was to be autonomous on content edition on the new website
And the core tech team, whose goal was to be able to easily maintain and reuse the code.
And the main focus : make a great new UI and branding 💎
We (me and Côme, the designer) decided to use to use the following stack :
During this project, we tested a new workflow to automate front end component creation. I decided to share it here step by step since I am deeply convinced this is the fastest way to make a fast, well ranked and scalable website. | https://medium.com/overlay-blog/the-fastest-way-to-create-a-stunning-responsive-website-using-overlay-nuxt-js-and-prismic-17fa2eac3ba1 | ['Baptiste Jan'] | 2020-12-28 11:26:00.407000+00:00 | ['Nuxtjs', 'Headless Cms', 'Sketch', 'Low Code', 'Figma'] |
Augmenting the past and seeing the future | When the present is augmented by the past, you can get a sense of not only where you’ve been, but perhaps where you need to go. As deep connections are made between various points in time and space, your perception of reality will shift.
Life will take on new meaning as additional layers of information are readily available to be analyzed, experienced, or discovered. Access to multiple perspectives at once will enable people to gain a deeper understanding of what’s happening now. This is the potential of augmented reality.
Pokemon Go brought augmented reality into mainstream public awareness and it seems that Super Mario Brothers is the next major game to get this treatment. I’m not a gamer necessarily, but I did try Pokemon Go for a period of time and I was struck by how absorbing it could be. Although the interface felt clumsy at times, I found the idea of layering information in digital space on top of what our eyes can see to be intriguing.
Today, I came across the Virtual Time Machine Project for Venice and the power of augmented reality came into focus. This machine-learning project will take 1,000 years of maps and manuscripts and transform them into a “living” history of the city. Documents such as maps, sheet music, monographs, and manuscripts will be digitized and turned into a searchable format.
Linkages would be made between historical events, personalities, or developments. This would allow students and researchers alike to go deep into the connections between people, places, and things that may or not appear to be related. Exposing the ties that bind together people and historical events is at the heart of developing a deeper understanding of how we evolved.
Even as these technologies are being developed and refined, the Venice Time Machine is already demonstrating how it can help to reshape scholars’ understanding of the past. The narratives that fill history textbooks are usually built around famous people, because so much more is known about them. Yet the time machine will bulge with the sort of mundane records that state administrators everywhere routinely gather to keep track of their populations. This will enable historians to reconstruct the lives of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, artisans and shopkeepers, envoys and traders, and build much more rounded historical narratives.
— Alison Abbott, Nature
Imagine walking through Venice and being able to access any and all information about what is being presented in your virtual or augmented reality-enabled device’s viewfinder. Yes, you would likely be able to filter what is presented, just as you are able to do with digital maps used for navigation through a city. A traveler would have access to a virtual encyclopedia of social, political, cultural, or economic information that would be able to present itself instantly.
It’s not easy to span space and time, and up until now it has been hard to conceive how exactly that might be done. I’m not sure what the future may hold for the Virtual Time Machine Project in Venice, but it’s a step in the right direction to create an understanding of what ties humanity together — connections with others. Being able to see these connections will help break down barriers between people that may have been separated over time by economic, ideological, cultural, or social barriers.
—
Originally published at scottjancy.com
Subscribe to The Jancy Report, a hand-curated newsletter compiled weekly that focuses on emerging ideas and trends
Please let me know what you think by clicking “like” or leave me a comment | https://artplusmarketing.com/augmenting-the-past-and-seeing-the-future-14f7204ba8a5 | ['Scott Jancy'] | 2017-06-23 20:50:09.404000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Growth', 'Creativity', 'Augmented Reality', 'Entrepreneur'] |
Introducing HttpMate | Nobody wants to write bad code. Nobody starts the application development with the thought “I’m going to create the most entangled and unreadable code and make sure it’s not extendable and hard to modify or navigate through”. One starts with good intentions, probably even having all the Clean Code and SOLID principals in mind. However, compromises start creeping in fast and multiply, usually based on the number of external dependencies involved.
We, at envimate, for one, did not find any framework that would allow us to develop a web application and claim in good conscience that its business logic does not depend on the underlying HTTP server, persistence layer or (de)serialization mechanism (also referred to as “infrastructure code” in DDD).
If you also feel you no longer develop your application, but rather keep “integrating” and “integrating” the framework, fighting its demons and never having time for the actual business logic. If you are also tired of endless refactoring just because a new version of the framework has been released. If you are not sure which annotation to use anymore, and frankly tired of the invasiveness of the HTTP framework you are using, then HttpMate is for you.
It’s non-invasive, flexible and ultra-extendable. HttpMate offers you 3 modes of handling HTTP requests — UseCase-driven, low-level HTTP and event-driven request handling as well as mixing those modes to get the most out of the feature-rich framework.
Without further adieu, let’s see some code examples.
Low-level HTTP request handling
final HttpMate httpMate = HttpMate.aLowLevelHttpMate()
.get("/api/hello", (httpRequest, httpResponse) -> {
final Optional<String> name = httpRequest.queryParameters().getQueryParameter("name");
httpResponse.setBody("Hello " + name.orElse("World"));
httpResponse.setStatus(OK);
})
.build();
This piece uses the low-level HTTP builder of HttpMate, and it just scratches the surface of possibilities.
You can easily register handlers for any path/http method combination. In the handler lambda you have the request and response objects at your disposal and the handler can get as complicated as you need.
Checkout the examples section of the repository for more information about the low level API.
You’ve probably seen every other HTTP framework providing an easy way of writing little request handlers, and while this is a great way to give an intro to the framework’s syntax and is a great marketing tool, any real-life challenge includes more than “just handling the request with a function call”. The world desperately needs an HTTP framework that would provide a proper abstraction layer between request handling and business logic, and allow you to not compromise on things that matter — clean architecture and extendability.
UseCase example
HttpMate allows you to “just publish your business logic as an HTTP endpoint”. Let’s explore the UseCase of sending an email to demonstrate that.
We don’t know yet how the HTTP endpoint will look like, but we do know we need an Email object representing the details of the email:
Sender
Receiver
Subject
Body
and we would need to return, let’s say a Receipt for every email sent:
TrackingNumber
Date
and we would have a class responsible for sending the email, that would look something like:
public class SendEmailUseCase {
...
public Receipt sendEmail(final Email email) { ...}
...
}
Now you can use the HttpMate builder to publish that Use Case — given that you’ve decided which URL and which HTTP methods are going to be responsible for serving this UseCase to the user:
final HttpMate useCaseDrivenHttpMate = HttpMate.anHttpMateConfiguredAs(UseCaseDrivenBuilder.USE_CASE_DRIVEN)
.post("/api/sendEmail", SendEmailUseCase.class)
.mappingRequestsAndResponsesUsing(
mapMate()
...
)
.build();
The first part is quite self-explanatory: invoke the SendEmailUseCase upon POST to “/api/sendEmail”.
And “How come, the SendEmailUseCase gets a valid instance of Email?” the bright minded reader might ask.
That is a valid question indeed, it’s the most complicated technical detail of this example and where the devil is hiding. To keep this article focused on HttpMate and an easy read, we asked another mate to fight off that devil. We will talk about that brave mate in another post.
By default, HttpMate uses the empty default constructor of the UseCase class to initialize it. That said, HttpMate can be easily configured to use any dependency injection mechanism by adding a call to the builder; the following example demonstrates that using Google Guice:
final HttpMate useCaseDrivenHttpMate = HttpMate.anHttpMateConfiguredAs(UseCaseDrivenBuilder.USE_CASE_DRIVEN)
.post("/api/sendEmail", SendEmailUseCase.class)
.mappingRequestsAndResponsesUsing(
mapMate()
)
.configured(toCreateUseCaseInstancesUsing(INJECTOR::getInstance))
.build();
Checkout this github repo for more elaborate example of the SendEmailUseCase.
Final Words
There are a lot of frameworks out there, providing HTTP endpoint configuration, however, most of the time the nice and shiny demo does not survive the hardships of reality. We wanted to create something that while easy and intuitive to configure can support you in your application development, provide you with the tools to accomplish clean code and architecture and be a good foundation for your Use Cases.
And that’s not all! Remember how I told you this just scratches the surface of possibilities? HttpMate, together with other “mates” we are working on has more to offer: websockets, event-driven approach to HTTP, multipart done right, handling request and response validated serialization and deserialization, etc. Stay tuned for more articles about the Mate family!
We will be happy to hear your feedback and receive your contributions, so checkout out GitHub repo for HttpMate and Happy Coding! | https://medium.com/@nisabek/introducing-httpmate-996e03af9d6 | ['Nune Isabekyan'] | 2019-06-10 16:11:18.345000+00:00 | ['Http Request', 'Java', 'Framework', 'Rest', 'Software Development'] |
A Place of Hope for Displaced Afghan Women | The number of forcibly displaced persons has rushed over 80 million in 2021 — the largest number in the history of our world and almost double the number of just a decade ago. Imagine that. One percent of the human population of the world — one in every 97 people — is now uprooted and at the mercy of circumstances they cannot control. It is unrelenting and overwhelming in its upward climb.
The numbers of refugees, those moving across country borders, is a staggering 26.3 million of the 80 million forcibly displaced worldwide. These are the people we see on the news, the ones who have made it out of their home countries. Afghanistan ranks third among this number at 2.7 million people. Developing countries — those least able to bear the burden of refugees — host 86 per cent of the world’s refugees displaced abroad. The least developed countries provide asylum to 28 per cent of the total. This represents a critical threat to peace and stability everywhere.
But what of the rest of the forcibly displaced? Internally displaced people, those who are hidden in the shadows of their own countries and most likely to become refugees in neighbor countries, represent an astounding 45.7 million people. These are the people at the lowest rungs of support from fragile and insecure governments and far from the focused attention of the media. They are the most vulnerable, huddled in makeshift camps and thrown-together communities. Neighbors may speak a different language or dialect. Each comes with the suspicions born of deprivation, violence, poverty, abuse, and disrupted lives.
In Afghanistan, there are more than 4 million internally displaced people. Most of these are women and children. Women face the added challenges of discrimination, few employment opportunities, lack of education, and other debilitating obstacles to self-sufficiency. The normal societal safety nets of extended family and community support are absent when living in the unfamiliar displacement camps. In spite of these almost insurmountable challenges, women find ways to adapt. Their real modern-day heroism is in their capacity to survive in the inhospitable environment they find themselves.
There is a place where displaced Afghan women are given an opportunity to build a better life for themselves and for their families. In and around Herat, Afghanistan, there are over 19,600 displaced women, children, and men in at least five displacement camps. The women and children in these camps are the focus of a primary partnership between the Afghan women-founded nonprofit Women Education for Better Tomorrow and veteran-founded Karadah Project International. It is a partnership focused on providing the means for displaced Afghan women to become self-sufficient.
Imagine a place where committed Afghan women dedicate their energies and efforts to improving the lives of displaced women, who’ve only known the bitterness of war, violence, poverty, and disruption. Women receive marketable skills, business training, literacy instruction, gender-specific legal resources, post-training support, and the association and support of other women. Given resources and education, these heroic women will be the catalyst for economic growth and increased opportunities for their children.
“Women’s economic participation and their ownership and control of productive assets speeds up development, helps overcome poverty, reduces inequalities and improves children’s nutrition, health, and school attendance. Women typically invest a higher proportion of their earnings in their families and communities than men.” (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)
We continue to expand our programs to further support the self-sufficiency hopes of the women with whom we work. Food vouchers provided through our partnership with the World Food Program allow the women to focus on gaining skills without the worry of feeding their families. We provide child care for their little ones. The critical importance of pre-primary education has inspired us to create a kindergarten for their children and a mentoring process to integrate these children into the public school system.
In a world where complex and tangled problems seem intractable and insurmountable, where the millions of displaced people are too much to even contemplate, there’s a place where we can change the world for women with names and families and hopes for a better future. In their own words, hear the impact a small investment can make in the lives of women and imagine what a generational difference it will make in the lives of their children.
“From the first day I enrolled in the course, I learned so many things in the carpet weaving class. I now have an income and can weave from home and support my family. Thank you all for helping us to learn these skills. I really appreciate it…I have suffered a really hard life. My dream is to have a home and start a business with my carpet-weaving skills.” “I began participating because my husband is addicted to drugs and I must care for my four little boys. I learned many things from the carpet weaving classes. I now know how to weave the carpet and it helps me to not have to leave my children to go clean homes. I am coming to these classes to learn skills so that I can help my family.”
“We now have an income to buy rice and oils. We learn these skills and get food vouchers. These skills enable us to stay and work at home where we can care for our children. Before the program, we worked in the houses as cleaners and earned very little money. After joining these classes, we can now help our children and save. Thank you for bringing a change in my life!”
“If their husbands are jobless, these women can support their families. Step by step the society can improve. I am an example of an Afghan woman who works. I am a widow and I have seven children. If I don’t work, who will support my family? My children go to school now because of my income.” “After attending these classes and spending time with the other women and teachers, I noticed psychological improvement. I can share my problems with the other women and get some help from them…These classes help me to feel strong by being able to work. These classes have empowered me.”
I spent almost a decade in and out of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as a US Army officer. I carry with me memories of great need and devastation, but also of friendships with people of courage and commitment to making their countries better. I founded Karadah Project to honor those brave Iraqi and Afghan friends, some of whom have been killed and many who continue to risk their lives in the pursuit of peace and stability. I am inspired every day by their courage, commitment, and dedication to making their communities safer and more prosperous.
Please join us in providing hope to displaced Afghan women and a better future for their children.
Click. Contribute. Change the World.
www.karadahproject.com
LTC (retired) Rick Burns is founder and president of Karadah Project International, an Iowa nonprofit corporation focused on Afghanistan and Iraq. | https://medium.com/@karadahproject/a-place-of-hope-for-displaced-afghan-women-c9ca3f08dad8 | ['Karadah Project International'] | 2021-04-25 12:10:44.999000+00:00 | ['Afghanistan', 'Afghan Women', 'Economic Development', 'Humanitarian Aid', 'Internally Displaced'] |
The Declining Middle Tier of ICO Fundraising | The median fundraise in initial coin offerings (ICOs) has been on a steady march downward since its peak in the heady days of the second quarter. In the fourth quarter, even the high-profile Science Blockchain (12.2 million USD) failed to come near its hard cap. Chatter at cryptocurrency conferences points to a more cautious investor base. But the truth is, crypto is starting to resemble the world wage economy: tokens that can command large fundraises are rolling in on bigger and bigger waves of money, while the bottom tier bounces along and the middle tier gets squeezed.
We took the list of ICOs that opened in each quarter, established fundraise amounts for the ones that had closed, and ranked them into three tiers by the amount raised. In Q4 so far, the gap has only gotten wider between top projects by fundraise, like Polkadot (USD 142.4 million) and Liquid (USD 105 million, and projects in the middle, like Dragonchain (USD 13.7 million) and AirSwap (USD 12.6 million).
Meanwhile, the number of projects calling it quits is ballooning. We’re now seeing new projects list at a rate of about five to seven per day. Most of those make it to ICO open, but a growing number of them are shutting down websites and social media, without a successful close. At the end of Q3, we counted 15 canceled out of 241 ICOs opened in the quarter. Since then, 35 more have canceled and 15 of those opened so far in Q4 are already canceled.
Of course, it’s not wise to measure projects’ success by the amount they raise. And in Q4, we’ve already seen a few high-profile projects, like Simple Token (21.6 million USD), come to market with modest fundraising goals. That hasn’t slowed the overall pace: So far this quarter, 133 projects have raised 1.38 billion USD, by our preliminary mid-quarter count, on pace to easily surpass the 1.74 billion USD raised by 133 projects in all of Q3. | https://medium.com/tokenreport/the-declining-middle-tier-of-ico-fundraising-725767586f6b | ['Galen Moore'] | 2017-12-05 16:48:43.484000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'ICO', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
Blockchain.io Launch Party | Dear community,
We are delighted to share photos from Blockchain.io launch party, on November 28 in Paris, where our CEO Pierre Noizat shared his dreams, ambitions, and objectives for Blockchain.io, but also for the whole crypto industry.
We’ve recently announced the release of our Mainnet Platform and we wanted to acknowledge this big achievement. Last Wednesday, on November 28, we celebrated the upcoming launch of Blockchain.io exchange. We brought together friends, fellow workers, investors, advisors, and members of our community.
All the invited guests were welcomed with wine, savory appetizers, and sweets. The event was followed by a thrilling jazz concert performed by The Horny Tonky Experience.
Pierre Noizat’s Speech
Pierre Noizat, the CEO of Paymium and Blockchain.io, gave an inspiring speech on the development of cryptocurrencies and what part Blockchain.io had to play in assisting the consumer adoption.
For all those who could not be present, you can watch Pierre’s speech below.
“We are committed to making things easier with Blockchain.io… The best way for us to facilitate the adoption of new technologies is to suggest people try it out. We are the witnesses and the actors of what is happening now.”
More meetups and events are on the horizon, stay tuned for further updates and news of where you could possibly meet the Blockchain.io team!
Trade on,
The Blockchain.io Team | https://medium.com/blockchainio/blockchainio-launch-party-1f8cfc41cdaf | [] | 2018-12-04 16:56:55.912000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
[LeetCode]#1773. Count Items Matching a Rule | Environment: Python 3.8
Key technique: if
You are given an array items, where each items[i] = [typei, colori, namei] describes the type, color, and name of the ith item. You are also given a rule represented by two strings, ruleKey and ruleValue.
The ith item is said to match the rule if one of the following is true:
ruleKey == “type” and ruleValue == typei.
ruleKey == “color” and ruleValue == colori.
ruleKey == “name” and ruleValue == namei.
Return the number of items that match the given rule.
Example 1:
Input: items = [[“phone”,”blue”,”pixel”],[“computer”,”silver”,”lenovo”],[“phone”,”gold”,”iphone”]], ruleKey = “color”, ruleValue = “silver”
Output: 1
Explanation: There is only one item matching the given rule, which is [“computer”,”silver”,”lenovo”].
Analysis:
Input ruleKey and ruleValue. Check items. We can see item2 color matches ruleValue. Count =count+1.
Solution:
class Solution:
def countMatches(self, items, ruleKey, ruleValue):
count=0
for i in items:
if (ruleKey == "type" and i[0] == ruleValue):
count+=1
elif (ruleKey == "color" and i[1] == ruleValue):
count+=1
elif(ruleKey == "name" and i[2] == ruleValue):
count+= 1
return count
Submissions:
Reference:
https://leetcode.com/problems/count-items-matching-a-rule/discuss/1099333/Python-100-100 | https://medium.com/@donic0211/leetcode-1773-count-items-matching-a-rule-fd40d38c3b89 | ['Fatboy Slim'] | 2021-03-09 06:19:14.435000+00:00 | ['Python3', 'Leetcode', 'Python', 'Leetcode Easy'] |
Développeur·se Backend API | 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://labs.tabmo.io/d%C3%A9veloppeur-se-backend-api-dae10ddf807c | ['Annabel Vincent'] | 2021-03-08 15:28:50.911000+00:00 | ['Hiring', 'Backend Developer', 'Scala', 'Join Us'] |
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