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The 5 Key Factors That Make Up Your Patascore Credit Rating | Patascore analyses an individual’s finances in order to give a holistic credit rating. As such, the Patascore system analyses mobile money data and other types of third party data to provide an accurate credit rating to an individual. It is important for individuals to understand the elements of their credit ratings in order to make wise financial decisions that will have a positive impact on their future ratings.
Credit rating initially considered an individual’s credit history to be the biggest tell-tale of their future credit behaviour. However, alternative credit rating takes more data sets into account in order to give lenders a thorough understanding of an individual’s ability and willingness to repay a loan before extending credit facilities to them. As such, the Patascore credit rating process takes 5 major factors into account.
Cash flows
Cash flows refer to the amount of money that an individual receives from external sources (inflows) and the money the individual sends out (outflows).
Cash outflows refer to the amount of money that an individual uses on various factors such as a paying bills, airtime purchase, repaying loans, gambling activities, savings, and leisure activities. Cash inflows refer to the amount of money that an individual receives from external sources aside from their own direct deposits.
An individual with a good credit rating has higher cash inflows than outflows because this situation shows that the individual has good and responsible spending habits that could also mean income to them.
An individual with good spending habits spends money on needs such as paying bills and saving regularly with a clear saving pattern. Such an individual spends minimal money on wants such as leisure activities hence their credit score grows to a higher one over time.
An individual with poor spending habits spends more money on wants such as leisure activities and gambling. This individual has poor saving habits and makes late payments on necessary bills, which leads to a poor credit score and lower credit limit over time.
2. Payment history
Payment history pertains to an individual’s previous loan repayment habits. A good payment history entails timely loan repayments and no loan defaults, which show that an individual is a responsible borrower and not over indebted. Payment history is a forecasting tool that predicts an individual’s future credit behaviour by analysing their past credit behaviour. This gives a lender insight on an individual’s loan repayment habits before offering credit to them.
3. Length of credit
Length of credit refers to the amount of time that an individual has held credit before. It gives information on an individual’s credit behaviour by analysing previous credit in terms of the loan amount taken, the repayment period, and the repayment patterns.
Contrary to popular belief, a person who has never taken credit before does not have a perfect credit history. In truth, such a person may actually have a low credit score because the lender lacks information about their previous credit habits hence they do not have solid proof of the individual’s credit behaviour. A longer credit history gives more information about an individual’s credit behaviour hence lenders may find it easier to make lending decisions in such a case.
Individuals with no credit history should start building it with Patascore by simply registering and updating their accurate personal and mobile data information to then receive personalised tips on wise borrowing before they decide to take credit from the affordable option pool recommended to them by Patascore.
4. Number of MFIs borrowed from
The Patascore credit rating process seeks to give an in-depth view into an individual’s financial status hence it accounts for the number of loans that an individual has taken from different financial institutions.
With Kenya currently having more than 200 digital lending platforms, the lending space is noticing that many borrowers have a loan stacking habit with as many as 1 in 3 borrowers reporting to have borrowed from more than one lender at the same time. Loan stacking is an irresponsible borrowing habit, which often leads to over-indebtedness because the several loan repayments tend to overwhelm an individual. Loan stacking also signifies financial trouble whereby an individual is borrowing from several avenues in order to salvage a troubling situation.
Loan stacking has a negative effect on an individual’s credit rating and lenders should be wary of lending to someone with several standing loans.
5. Debt weight
Debt weight refers to the impact that debt has on an individual’s cash inflow. Debt weight invokes the thought of literal weight that pushes down your credit score. The higher your debt weight, the lower your score and vice versa.
Debt weight accounts for the loan amount that an individual has carried in the past and is currently carrying in order to show previous and current debt weight.
It is ideal for individuals to maintain low debt weight in order to show that they can handle debt responsibly because responsible borrowing entails borrowing loans for the right reasons, repaying loans diligently, and avoiding over-indebtedness.
The above 5 attributes are only among the few out of 100+ that Patascore analyses for each individual customer in order to come up with a holistic credit score. Our approach is iterative with strategic 3rd party data providers partners to ensure robustness over time. Join us in this movement of providing a holistic credit score for anyone at anytime.
Download the Patascore app from Play store today at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.patascore.app to find out your credit rating and understand the elements of your credit rating as we walk with you in the journey of building a strong credit score that upgrades you up the financial ladder with higher credit limits at lower interest rates,. | https://medium.com/@hello_54610/the-5-key-factors-that-make-up-your-patascore-credit-rating-b0f48f97b59d | ['Patascore Ltd'] | 2019-05-06 07:37:37.279000+00:00 | ['Financial Services', 'Financial Education', 'Credit Score', 'Fintech', 'Credit Rating'] |
Renewed ongoing partnership with Coval (Circuits of Value) for another 3-week duration in our pools/vaults | Renewed ongoing partnership with Coval (Circuits of Value) for another 3-week duration in our pools/vaults cordfinance Jan 21·2 min read
Token pairs may differ from those in screenshot
We are very pleased to announce that we have renewed our ongoing partnership with Coval (Circuits of Value) for yet another 3-week duration in our liquidity locking pools (vaults)! The four active pools will remain the same as currently:
CORD -> VACC
CORD-VACC-LP -> VACC
CORD-ETH-LP -> COVAL-ETH-LP
COVAL-ETH-LP -> VACC
The current pools will end in 3 1/2 days (~1 AM Pacific time Saturday the 9th). We will wait ~72 hours after they end before starting the next round in order to allow investors to unlock their stakes if they wish. Pools may restart as early as ~1 AM Pacific time Tuesday the 12th.
Details:
- Once we restart a pool you will not be able to unlock your stake in that pool until the next pool completion in 3 weeks (you can always withdraw unlocked liquidity whether a pool is dormant or running). Therefore if you plan to unlock your liquidity in one of the vaults we are restarting, do not miss the 72 hour window beginning ~1 AM Pacific time Saturday the 9th!
- Secondly, note per the footnotes below the pools that 3 weeks after a pool ends (unless the pool is restarted), any unclaimed rewards may be recycled and no longer claimable by the staker. This does not apply to staked funds, only rewards.
- Finally, if you plan to leave your funds staked, no action is required on your part, you may leave the stakes and rewards alone through the reset.
Our pools can be accessed at https://pool.cord.finance/
- The CORD Team | https://medium.com/@cordfinance/renewed-ongoing-partnership-with-coval-circuits-of-value-for-another-3-week-duration-in-our-80f94b19fd6a | [] | 2021-04-09 23:33:20.644000+00:00 | ['Cord', 'Yield Farming', 'Finance', 'Defi', 'Partnerships'] |
Coldplay Viva La Vida Chords No Capo | [Intro]
C D G Em x2
[Verse 1]
Em C D
I used to rule the world
G Em
Seas would rise when I gave the word
C D
Now in the morning I sleep alone
G Em
Sweep the streets I used to own
[Interlude]
C D G Em x2
[Verse 2]
Em C D
I used to roll the dice
G Em
Feel the fear in my enemy’s eyes
C D
Listen as the crowd would sing:
G Em
“Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!”
Em C D
One minute I held the key
G Em
Next the walls were closed on me
C D
And I discovered that my castles stand
G Em
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand
[Chorus]
C D
I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
G Em
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
C D
Be my mirror, my sword, and shield
G Em
My missionaries in a foreign field
C D
For some reason I can’t explain
G Em C D
Once you go there was never, never an honest word
Bm Em
That was when I ruled the world
[Interlude]
C D G Em x2
[Verse 3]
Em C D
It was the wicked and wild wind
G Em
Blew down the doors to let me in.
C D
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
G Em
People couldn’t believe what I’d become
Em C D
Revolutionaries wait
G Em
For my head on a silver plate
C D
Just a puppet on a lonely string
G Em
Oh who would ever want to be king?
[Chorus]
C D
I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
G Em
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
C D
Be my mirror, my sword, and shield
G Em
My missionaries in a foreign field
C D
For some reason I can’t explain
G Em
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name ,
C D
never an honest word
Bm Em
But that was when I ruled the world
[Interlude]
C Em x3
D x2
C D G Em x2
(Ohhhhh Ohhh Ohhh)
[Chorus]
C D
I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
G Em
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
C D
Be my mirror, my sword, and shield
G Em
My missionaries in a foreign field
C D
For some reason I can’t explain
G Em
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name ,
C D
never an honest word
Bm Em
But that was when I ruled the world
[Outro]
C D Bm Em
Oooooh Oooooh Oooooh x2 | https://medium.com/@anisaaziza22/coldplay-viva-la-vida-chords-no-capo-4c2fec29d684 | [] | 2020-12-16 07:38:10.693000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'News', 'Music', 'Videos', 'Love'] |
Kicking Imposter Syndrome to the Curb. | Ladies and Gentleman, here are 3 tips that I learned to kick I.S. out!
Don’t compare yourself to others
As Theodore Roosevelt quoted, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
As someone who has dealt on this for years. I’ve learned that comparing yourself to others is toxic and that it can control your life. It doesn’t help you or others and just brings on a great deal of misery. What good does comparing yourself do when all it gives you is stress. As for me, I’ve learned to not care and only focus on my own goals and desires. This took me years to realize and I feel much happier than before. Everyone has a unique path and journey in life.
2. Learn to be okay with Failure
Failing doesn’t always mean “failure”. At the Flatiron School, every mod has a code challenge. I’ve failed both code challenges. Does that mean I’m a sh*t programmer now? No. Because I know for sure that I am progressing and I am proud of the progression I’ve made during the weeks. These are accomplishments that I have made. Yes, I didn’t pass the first try, but there is always a second try and that’s okay. I’ve learned to accept the feeling of failure because it will only make me stronger. It’s okay to cry because it’s human and we have emotions. But remember failure helps you succeed. It helps you grow and offers you valuable lessons on the way to achieving your goals.
3. Be Awesome
Do the things you wanna do, code all you want, be a master in your own craft. Because you are the boss. Don’t let that pesky nagging voice tell you-you're not good enough. You’ve worked your a** off to get where you are at. Why stop now? Celebrate your accomplishments, even the little ones. Make imposter syndrome a thing of the past.
And… there’s that! | https://medium.com/@follett.katie/kicking-imposter-syndrome-to-the-curb-6415fcabb512 | ['Kate F.'] | 2019-05-06 02:01:20.083000+00:00 | ['Code Newbie', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Imposter Syndrome'] |
Eat! Drink! Be gluttonous! | The rollercoaster that is loving my body and eating whatever the fuck I want.
A huge obstacle that I found while on the road towards total self love, was body love. More times than not I didn’t find my body attractive unless I was looking at old pictures where I was 20 pounds lighter. My jawline more defined, my tummy tighter, and my arms thin. I write that in the past tense, however, I want you to know that I still have these moments where I am completely sadden by the skin I am in.
I think of the jean imprints on thighs after I peel them off after work. I think of how heavy my stomach bloat makes me look in dresses I once wore with ease.
I think about not eating for only a few days so I can shed off the excess pounds. Just a few days of discomfort and you’ll fit into your favorite pants again. Well, and headaches. And remember, you get nauseous when you get headaches. Also don’t think you’re going to be getting a lot done when you feel like crap. This conversation happens in my head every other week or so. I try reign myself back with ‘You’re beautiful and sexy you idiot wtf are you blind?’ and ‘If ANYONE thinks of you as less than gorgeous they’re actual fuckwats.’ Lmao honestly, I’m so good to myself. I appreciate me.
It’s really fucked how much I hold value to my weight even though I am so openly and blatantly against doing that. It has some hold — I’m not quite sure how to explain it. And I know there are outrageous beauty standards that are outright bullshit. However I still, when in my lowest moments, use those standards as comparisons. I compare myself to what ‘society’ considers beautiful knowing good and well that I will be miserable doing so. Is it years of internalized self loathing because I have not met those standards? Perhaps. All I know is that it’s very harmful.
I recently gained 10 pounds in the last few months. I noticed when these pants I wore alllllll the time just one day wouldn’t button at all. I looked in the mirror and noticed that my face was rounder, my upper arms wider and my tummy pooch grew more into a pouch. My heart sank. I just gained 15 pounds last year! How could this be happening again? I was upset and sad about my body. Think about how fucked up that is for a moment. I was upset and sad with the only thing that has never given up on me.The thing that has literally been around forever for me. The thing that is mine and mine alone. My body is not only my ultimate protector, she’s comfort place. She’s my home.
Whatever I have internalized either consciously or subconsciously, growing up or now has really warped my views about myself. It is these negative and harmful views that I’m trying to breakdown and throw away. The support of friends and family and partners is of course so important. Don’t stop complimenting people! A small compliment, a positive word here will really make someone’s day. Whether they are dealing with a recent weight gain or they have body dysmorphia.
Also, I really really love food? I shouldn’t be ashamed of wanting to eat and enjoying what I eat. Food to me is so many different things. It can be an experience, a place of comfort, and just down right that one thing you’ve been craving all day. Food is such an important part of my life, so why would I try to rid myself of it?
I’ve been trying to work through my feelings about my recent weight gain. I give myself words of validation and affirmation daily. From ‘You’re a fine ass bitch with some nice tits.’ to ‘You’re seriously so funny and genuinely nice like are you kidding me?’ Validating other aspects that I like about myself is very helpful and really makes me feel good. However, validating and accepting and loving parts that I don’t like about myself is even better. That’s the hardest part — looking in a mirror at your imperfections and telling yourself that they’re an important of you, which is perfect.
It’s really a battle with yourself when it shouldn’t be. So screw those standards that make me feel small. Screw them making me feel like I’m on the outside looking in. That I’m detached from something that I should be so close to. I’m going to eat whatever I want and when I want because I deserve it. And I’m going to look good as hell doing it. :-* | https://medium.com/@rxybtr/eat-drink-be-gluttonous-2bcff888ec18 | ['Roxy Bitere'] | 2019-03-13 09:53:30.855000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Body Positive'] |
Black Friday Hulu deal: Get a full year of cord-cutting for $1.99 a month | Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do (Oprah Winfrey) | https://medium.com/@khean30159463/black-friday-hulu-deal-get-a-full-year-of-cord-cutting-for-1-99-a-month-74c4b4cb7b51 | [] | 2020-12-23 20:19:57.739000+00:00 | ['Surveillance'] |
6 Amazing Hobbies for Lonely and Anxious People | Chess
“Chess is life in miniature. Chess is a struggle, chess battles.” — Garry Kasparov
Chess is one of those games that takes 10 minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. Hell, you could spend years just studying classic opening lines.
Whenever I get anxious at night, I will think about chess strategy. If I’m too anxious to focus on an entire game, I’ll just play a few endgame puzzles.
Chess obviously sharpens the mind, but the best part about it is that it can be played as intensely or as casually as you want.
When you learn the rules, you can immediately make an online account and play against the computer, or players of equal rank across the globe. You can even use the chat function to become friends with those you play against.
I love playing either 30 minute games, or 1 day games. The 30 minute games allow me the perfect amount of time to think, but not so much time that I get bored of waiting. The 1 day games allow me to think several moves ahead and implement unique strategies.
If you get tired of playing the game itself, there are thousands of hours of lectures from grandmasters online that can really improve your game.
Running
“I don’t run to add days to my life, I run to add life to my days.” — Ronald Rook
Running is amazing for your mental and physical health, but it can be super time consuming and difficult to get into.
For those who live alone, it can be a great way to add variety to your day. I love waking up, doing a few hours of work, and then going for a run. Somedays, I’ll wake up early and do a fasted run, which has the added benefit of burning more fat.
I used to hate running, but now it is easily the best part of my day. No matter what I’m worried about, running forces me to focus on my breathing. It’s just like meditating for those who can’t sit still.
If you’re like I used to be, you can check out this article on how to stop hating running. Your body will thank you for it:
Newbie runners can find guided runs online, they can also fin workouts on various tracker apps, or they can just make a playlist and start!
Juggling
“Life is a juggling act with your own emotions. The trick is to always keep something in your hand and something in the air.” ― Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
While this might seem like an unconventional way to pass the time, juggling as a hobby has a lot of great benefits. It helps you with hand-eye coordination, it helps you stay active and moving but without tiring you out, and perhaps most importantly: it looks super cool at parties. Trust me, the ladies love it.
It might take you a while to master juggling and to be able to do it for a long time, but that’s what makes it a great skill for those who live alone. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail- no one will see you!
As with chess, this can either be super casual or very intense, depending on how much you like to do it. Once you learn the basic three-ball cascade, there are a million other tricks you can learn, each with varying degrees of difficulty.
You can also make juggling balls absolutely free at home out of materials you have laying around. So the next time you’re bored, give this party trick a try.
Cooking
“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking, you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” – Julia Child
Living alone is the perfect time to get really good at cooking because you can reap 100% of the rewards. If you burn the food, no one will know. And if your cookies are so good that you eat the whole batch- again, no one has to know.
It is also a great hobby because whenever you decide to have people over, you can impress them with this skill you’ve acquired.
Admittedly, I got really into cooking because I was tired of buying the incorrect amount of food and having to either feast or starve. I was also tired of somehow dirty the entire kitchen every time I cooked a meal. So I focused on 30 minute meals and one pan meals for two at first, gradually adding to my repertoire. Now I can cook almost anything- a skill which comes in handy multiple times per day.
Writing
“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott
Whenever you’re feeling bored or anxious throughout your day, writing in a journal can be a great way to alleviate that anxiety.
My favorite part about writing is that there are a million ways to do it. If stream-of-consciousness diary entries help you, go for it.
That kind of writing has never really helped me, so I opt for writing and editing medium posts. The fact that medium posts are public forces me to organize my thoughts and edit them into a coherent fashion. Because I need to focus in order to do that, I don’t fixate on whatever is causing me anxiety.
I’m also a fan of Julia Cameron’s famous morning pages- she writes three pages in her diary each morning in order to get the creative juices flowing.
While she writes in a stream-of-conscious style about whatever is on her mind, I tend to write about one particular topic for three pages, just to see what thoughts I can generate about it. Many of those morning pages thoughts eventually become articles.
Watching Reality TV
“Worth Playing for?” -Jeff Probst
A lot of these hobby lists might include more pretentious versions of this, like watching Sight and Sound’s top rated films. But let’s be honest: those are kind of boring. When you are anxious, lonely, and bored, Yasujiro Ozu isn’t gonna help. It’s hard to focus on classic films, just like it is hard to focus on difficult reading sometimes.
That’s why, when I’m feeling anxious, I turn to good ole reality TV. I’m a big fan of Survivor. I’m an even bigger fan of MTV’s the Challenge. The best part about shows like this, is that they remind you that being alone isn’t so bad. As a matter of fact, it might beat the alternative.
I can live vicariously through the drunken supermodels fighting about nothing on screen from the comfort of my own living room. If I pick a side and yell my opinion at the TV, while learning to juggle or eating an entire pan of my homemade lasagna, it’ll be my little secret. With the help of this article, it can be your little secret, too. | https://medium.com/illumination/6-amazing-hobbies-for-lonely-and-anxious-people-1cbb0d8cbc3c | ['Valerie King'] | 2020-11-28 00:55:10.500000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Motivation', 'Lifestyle', 'Self', 'Health'] |
Pride is Cancelled for 2020, and that’s Great | Pride is Cancelled for 2020, and that’s Great
I’m glad there will be no parades this year
Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash
Cities all over the world are cancelling their planned Pride parades for 2020. In America, June celebrations are off. In Belgium, the May plans are scrapped. In Canada, the June/July marches are quashed. In a fluke, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand managed to sneak in Sydney Mardi Gras and Auckland Pride respectively, back in February 2020 before all of this — but they seem to be the exception. Even in my own state of Western Australia, it’s unknown if we’ll get to hold our usual Pride events in November this year.
Of course, many people are going to miss these celebrations, the coming together of community, the show of support from allies in the crowd. Some countries and cities are being optimistic about hosting Pride later in the year, or holding events online. Belgium, for example, is hoping to shift their march plans to August, if all goes well. The problem is, not much is going well for the world — and that includes LGBT+ people, who have a largely, unheard lament within the unfolding tragedy.
Mismanaged government responses to the deadly COVID-19 virus, as it riddles nations, has brought back horrific memories of the AIDs epidemic for many. And for those of us who didn’t live through that crisis, feeling the utter fear and confusion of an invisible threat is sobering to say the least…filled with grief at its worst. This pandemic is hitting LGBT+ people hard, especially in countries where healthcare and welfare is difficult to access, and homophobic discrimination is rife.
The reality of Pride being cancelled this year has forced me to reflect on the event itself. Clearly, it’s best for all attendee’s safety that Pride has been cancelled in so many cities. Health and safety are paramount. But, in Pride’s absence, all I can think about is: what are we really missing?
Are we missing the councils, local governments, and business spending hoards of money on the parade, the party, but not on us, the queer community? Are we missing the way the police follow the marches to stop them morphing from party into actual protest? Are we missing the price gouging of Pride events that edge out large portions of our community from attending? Are we missing the way capitalistic profit is made off of decades of LGBT+ activism, meanwhile corporations and councils do nothing to support us in the issues surrounding legislation, education, and anti-discrimination that we’re still fighting? I don’t think I’ll miss any of that…
But I am going to miss seeing all the different local, LGBT+ groups in my city hanging out together in one place as they march in the parade. I’m going to miss it being the first year I qualify for Dykes on Bikes, now I have my full motorcycle license. I’m going to miss all the colour, and the excitement in kid’s eyes as they watch the fun and see that being queer is full of cheer. I’m going to miss the smaller events, where the little organisations, who do so much background work for our rainbow collective, get to showcase themselves and their causes. I’m going to miss regional-town Pride’s around my state that aren’t corporatized and mean the world to local people. I’m going to miss the big, borderless family that get’s together once a year without fail.
To presently miss some parts of Pride and to be happy that other parts aren’t happening in 2020, is difficult to contemplate. I’m left feeling that perhaps Pride needed a year off from all the corporate money, from the shallow, rainbow drapes over brand logos online and everywhere else, from the ever-present policing. Maybe, this one year without Pride will act like a reset. Maybe Pride organisers and businesses in 2021 will have had time to remember the need for our protest, remember the fights we still have to face. Maybe this breath will reignite the knowledge that we’re strong because we’re together, because we’re fighting as a family, not because the local banks have put their floats in our parades. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/pride-is-cancelled-for-2020-and-thats-great-53980be78f32 | ['Zoey Milford'] | 2020-01-02 00:00:00 | ['Opinion', 'LGBTQ', 'Equality', 'Pride', 'Queer'] |
Burlington Township Board of Education talks school security | Burlington Township Board of Education talks school security
District will be adding two officers next school year, plans to apply for county money
The Burlington Township Board of Education discussed school security during a 20-minute meeting June 27.
Superintendent Mary Ann Bell said she has received confirmation the district will be adding two new school resource officers, taking the total number of armed police officers in the school system from two to four.
Bell said the additional officers will reduce response time as there will be one for each of the district’s schools.
“That is absolutely phenomenal,” she said. “Obviously, we hope it’s never tested, and we don’t have to get to that point, but that certainly will be a huge deterrent.”
Bell said the officers will be in place by the end of the 2018–2019 school year.
Funding for the increased police presence was included in the budget the board of education approved in April. The township and the district will split the cost.
Bell said June 27 she has heard some names mentioned by officials regarding the new SROs, but she is not sure whether the placements have been finalized.
“It doesn’t matter because anyone we get from the Burlington Township Police Department would do an excellent job as SRO,” Bell said.
She said she plans to meet with the current officers stationed in the schools to map out a plan for when the two new SROs come on board.
“We all need to sit down and come up with some procedures and some standardization,” Bell said.
Bell also said the school district is planning to apply for grant money recently made available by the county to improve security at local high schools.
Last month, Burlington County officials launched the $20 million grant program aimed at enhancing the physical security of high school buildings.
On June 27, the board of education voted to submit documents to the county’s designated architectural firm, USA Architects, which will perform a security evaluation of Burlington Township High School. It’s the first step toward getting a cut of the grant funding.
“We will definitely submit everything,” Bell told board members.
In addition, Bell told board members she and Nicholas Bice, the district’s business administrator, have also recently attended training sessions on school safety.
“We knew a lot going in,” Bell said. “However, it was reinforced.”
Most of the topics covered can’t be disclosed to the public, Bell said. She added she, along with Bice, will be meeting with the senior SRO to discuss some of the initiatives they would like to see going forward. | https://medium.com/the-burlington-township-sun/burlington-township-board-of-education-talks-school-security-b88f6025282a | ['Jack Tomczuk'] | 2018-07-06 16:25:01.106000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Education', 'Schools'] |
Curriculum App Release Notes #009 | Curriculum App Release Notes #009
July 2019’s updates to Curriculum, an app for creating a study plan & tracking your progress through it.
Profile Pics 📸
Even a dedicated learning nerd needs the option to add an artistic visual representation of themselves to their profiles.
Profile Activity Snapshots
You’ll also spot some snapshots of your recent study activity there.
Don’t worry — only public activity shows, and your profile is only public if you want it to be. (Update that setting on the Account Settings page.) | https://medium.com/curriculum/curriculum-app-release-notes-009-5345b5128f66 | ['Louise Swift'] | 2019-07-30 07:34:47.546000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Coding', 'Learning', 'Release Notes', 'App Development'] |
Who Cares if Chris Watts Hates Holidays in Prison? | I wrote an article in October about the Watts family murders because the story became a Netflix documentary that went to #1 the week it was released. I wondered why people were so fascinated with such a horrible crime. What is it that draws us to want to know about hideous acts committed by a family annihilator?
There are many reasons we want to know. It’s not just one. See my article here where I go into detail about our fascination with murder.
After I wrote that article, a few weeks later there was more press about how there were details about the horrific crime that the Netflix documentary left out. They were important details that I felt talked about toxic masculinity in our society. There were red flags with Chris Watts that would have indicated that he was actually seething beneath the surface like a time bomb ready to blow. This crime did not take place “out of the blue” as many thought. He wasn’t this perfect guy that suddenly snapped. I write about it here.
Now, it’s December — two months after I’ve written about Chris Watts. Those articles have been filed away. Suddenly I notice that my “views” in my Medium stats are going up rapidly and I can’t see why — at first.
Then I see it. People are reading my second story on the Chris Watts murders. The story is going viral. But why? Why is it going viral? What did Chris Watts do? Has something happened?
Nope. Here’s what I learned: Chris Watts hates the holidays in prison. Three media outlets are covering this piece of “news” — People Magazine, The New York Post, and Fox News. Who cares about a horrible murderer?
People Magazine’s article entitled, Chris Watts ‘Hates the Holidays’ in Prison, Says Source: ‘He’s in a Hell of His Own Making’ — In the article, writer Steve Helling reports,
“He doesn’t like talking about his life before prison,” says the source, “but he has said that he used to be a huge fan of Christmas: decorating the house, spending time with family. And he knows 100% that it’ll never happen again, and that it’s his own fault. He’s in a hell of his own making.” “The prison has a ‘Christmas dinner,’ but it’s basically bland turkey and potatoes,” the jail source continues. “It’s not exactly the feast you’d imagine for Christmas. In a sense, that’s more depressing, because it reminds the inmates that it’s Christmas and that they’re getting an inferior copy of the holiday.”
Then The New York Post’s article entitled, Convicted family killer Chris Watts ‘hates the holidays’ in prison by Jackie Salo — pretty much repeats information from the same source but adds:
Watts instead will reserve any holiday cheer for his pen pals, the source told the outlet. “He’ll write his penpals this season, and they’re sending him notes, as well,” the source said. “It’s literally all he can do at this point. He hates the holidays.”
Fox also repeated the same primary source information with one difference:
While in prison, Watts has communicated with several women, People reported in October. He also reportedly has photos of his family hanging on his cell wall.
In an effort to understand further why we want to delve into the details of a grisly crime — I dug deeper. I found an article from NPR Book Reviews by author Ilana Masad entitled Why Do We Find True Crime Fascinating? ‘Savage Appetites’ Looks For An Answer.
In the book “Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession,” journalist Rachel Monroe writes: “Most of the explanations I read for why women are drawn to true crime ended up feeling reductive and unsatisfying.”
The book reviewer, Ilana Masad discusses the book further regarding the question of why we want to know crime details:
It doesn’t give us easy answers for why women are the main consumers of true crime narratives, because there aren’t any because women as a category are not monolith and because it’s complicated and nuanced and different for everyone. The book is important also because I suspect there are more than a few of us who, like Monroe herself, feel conflicted about their desire to consume stories of murder and mayhem and wonder what it reflects about the world around us and ourselves.
In Conclusion
There are many reasons why we want to know about what makes murderers tick and why we are so fascinated with their stories. I suppose with the Chris Watts story, the thing that bothers me is that he is getting all of this attention for betraying his family in the worst possible way — as though he’s some celebrity. It makes me a little sick. Why do we care about how he feels at the holidays or if he has a shitty Christmas dinner? He deserves so much worse. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/who-cares-if-chris-watts-hates-holidays-in-prison-916abba50443 | ['Jennifer Friebely'] | 2020-12-28 00:13:34.566000+00:00 | ['True Crime', 'Domestic Violence', 'Murder', 'Family', 'Relationships'] |
Eyes on America | Eyes on America
What will happen next?
The U.S.A. elections, unfortunately, do not only affect the Americans. It affects the world in waves, especially the economy. For a few days Turkey slept with the American election and got up with the election and finally, Joe Biden was elected. Actually, both candidates were worse than the other. I can’t believe how a superpower like America cannot put forward better candidates. Actually, a lot of people waited to see Trump, not Biden. I think Joe Biden elected because of Trump’s haters. Please, close Trump’s Twitter forever for world peace.
Currently, Joe Biden’s election victory, Trump’s election objection, the resignation of our country’s economy minister Berat Albayrak, the dismissal of central bank president Murat Uysal are on the agenda of our country. The dollar depreciated against the Turkish lira on the first Monday after the election but it started to rise. The dollar is expected to rise further with Joe Biden. We use Turkish lira but also we buy almost everything from abroad with the dollar. Life will get more expensive.
Turkey’s relations with America about our real position in the Middle East and the Halk Bank of problems waiting to be solved. We will see Joe Biden’s Middle East strategy. I think he has a lot of plans for Turkey and it scares us. The experts said that a dark winter waiting for Turkey in financial and also political.
Trump also during the presidency of Turkey; He stated that there were important disagreements regarding the fight against terrorist organizations, the S-400, or the fetö. These issues matter what the president will again be on the agenda.
Yeah, what will happen next? | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/eyes-on-america-8bec05de78b3 | [] | 2020-11-10 19:31:24.034000+00:00 | ['Dollar', 'Election 2020', 'Turkey', 'Trump', 'Joe Biden'] |
SciManDan VPN Coupon Code — 82% Off | SciManDan is a famous atheist on Youtube who explores the world of science, logical thinking and promotes the proven natural history of life as we know it, of the earth we live in.
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This VPN also offers fast servers worldwide, so anyone will find what they need and will be able to enjoy fast surfing and HD streaming. Also it offers P2P servers for those who want to use torrents anonymously. Talking about streaming, Surfshark manages to bypass geo-restrictions on such streaming platforms such as Netflix, Youtube TV, Disney+ and many others. And all sorts of other restrictions online like firewalls.
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Get Surfshark with 82% discount here | https://medium.com/@timmycox495/scimandan-vpn-coupon-code-83-off-105d09df11f8 | ['Timmy Cox'] | 2020-09-11 07:53:54.310000+00:00 | ['Coupon', 'Discount', 'Deal', 'Deals And Discounts', 'VPN'] |
Best Organic Baby Products | Best Organic Baby Products
Is it true that you are searching for the best natural organic products in India? Indeed, you are in the perfect place where you will find all the pure organic products for your baby. Yet, before proceeding onward to the products, let me discuss why we should only use completely organic baby products for our baby. Let’s start with the basic and essential needs of daily life.
As we all know that the baby skin is more responsive and sensitive, hence we should use more gentle organic products. Most of the moisturizers contain harmful chemicals that can cause disturbance and can damage baby skin. Natural organic moisturizers are completely free from such kind of chemicals that can cause any kind of harm to baby skin. Mostly organic moisturizers contain natural ingredients that keep your baby skin fresh and healthy.
In the article, we will be discussing the best organic baby products with their features. Go through the below-listed products with their pros and cons.
This super-soft muslin cloth gives your baby comfortable and secure wrap with ideal warmth. Most of the time babies can’t sleep and cry a lot due to irritation, this muslin cloth will give your baby a perfect comfortable sleep. The piece of soft muslin cloth is one of the perfect swaddling cloth for baby. This cloth has multiple benefits, it can be used as a hunger time blanket. Your baby will love the fabric and will feel great comfort in it. It will not only provide complete wrap but also provides good warmth in it with full security. Most importantly it also allows good airflow.
The thin material of the cloth plays an important role to prevent overheating so there is also no risk of overheating inside. This muslin cloth comes in different beautiful designs for both boys and girls. This wonderful soft muslin cloth will surely make your life easy and comfortable. The perfect material of this cloth will never make your baby feel uncomfortable in it. It can also be used as a burping cloth when your baby needs to burp after feeding.
This is one of the best products for today’s mother with less attire. This cloth is easy to carry and has multiple purposes. You can also use this cloth like a diaper bag when you are outside the home and traveling somewhere. This product will surely give your baby comfortable long sleep without disturbing you.
PROS
· This muslin cloth is easy to carry.
· It gives your baby a comfortable sleep.
· It diminishes the excitement level of your child
CONS
· No specific Cons are yet appraised.
Buy It Here:
2. Organic Baby lotion
You should purchase this product for your baby because it is one of the best natural organic daily Lotion for Babies. This lotion will keep your baby completely nourished and soft if you moisturize him daily. This moisturizer is free from chemicals and made up of natural and herbal ingredients that keep your baby’s skin fresh and healthy.
The most significant and important features of this product are that it is made up of natural ingredients and plants. It is completely free from all kinds of chemicals and toxic material that can harm your baby. This product is produced in the USA, it is free from stickiness and heaviness and has been approved by specialists or doctors. This product has Cruelty-free authentication and positive reviews throughout the world. These features make this product include one of the best organic baby skincare products. This product is very good for every type of skin. This product is certified by doctors and experts so it is completely safe to use. When you use this lotion for the first time, it starts restoring and makes skin fresher and softer than before.
The lotion is quite easy to use and the mixture of natural grateful oil and lavender makes the baby skin softer and healthier and makes the baby feel relax and comfortable.
PROS
· It protects your baby’s skin.
· This product is certified by doctors and experts.
· It keeps skin smooth for as long as 24 hours.
· It is completely free from all kinds of chemicals and toxic material.
CONS
· No specific Cons are yet appraised.
Buy It Here:
3. Blue Nectar Baby Oil
It is one of the best organic baby oil which is 100% pure organic and safe. It is the best natural oil for sensitive skin which is made up of natural plants, herbs, and protein. This natural oil contains the goodness of vitamin E and Almond oil. It is completely free from chemicals and it is completely stacked with pure organic ghee which is very useful for the newborn baby skin. These special features of this product include it in the best organic baby skincare products in India. Infant oil is known as oil-based mineral oil. It is got from the crude oil and when it gets through more refinery processes, it can be used as medication so this baby oil worth the money.
It’s a lotion and will provide your baby with a complete shield from dry, unpleasant, and rough skin. It also cures some of the most common skin irritation to the baby like skin burn and diaper rashes. It also protects baby skin from dandruff and makes it healthier.
PROS
· It can be absorbed easily and it is perfect for massage.
· It is completely free from all chemicals and ingredients used for color and fragrance.
· This oil contains almost 13 herbs goodness and it is proven clinically.
· Every new mother prefers this because it provides their baby with complete flexibility and better physical development.
CONS
· It may cause darkness because it probably won’t suit all skin types.
· Try not to utilize this oil in the event if it develops rashes on the skin.
Buy It Here:
4. Tear-free Baby shampoo
Parents should buy this product because the most sensitive organ of the human body is the eyes. Especially for newborn babies, it is very difficult to handle them during bath. This tear-free shampoo is one of the greatest products for newborn babies. Now you don’t need to be worried about the tears during the bath. This shampoo will give your baby the perfect softest and shiniest hair ever. This shampoo is free from all kinds of chemical substances which can harm your baby and contains a lot of organic certified ingredients like Aloe Vera, Almond oil, and many more which combines and makes perfect shampoo for your baby. This shampoo includes India’s best organic baby bath products. Your baby will surely love to take the bath with this organic shampoo. This shampoo will give your baby smooth shiny perfect hair and there is nothing to worry about the tears.
This shampoo is the best shampoo for your baby to take a bath with no tears and its natural ingredients make your baby hair softer and shiny.
PROS
· Your baby will love to take a bath because it is not based on detergent.
· It has a good mild smell and it shrouds the infant’s stench as well!
CONS
· It is more costly as compared to other companies like Johnson’s and Himalaya child items.
· Excess use may cause dryness in hair.
Buy It Here:
5. Omved MRUDU Baby Soap
No one should overlook this product because it has the integrity of Almond Milk, Saffron, and other natural organic ingredients. In the world of Ayurvedic baby soaps, it is known for its first creation. Hydrating your baby’s skin is the fundamental feature of this soap. It additionally precludes the defenselessness of inner dampness. Because of the organic natural ingredients, it gives a gentle impact on the infant’s skin. This soap includes saffron which enhances the completion of baby skin. There is no need of utilizing any moisturizer after using this soap because it has the goodness of vegetable oil.
Consequently, it is a standout amongst other organic baby products in India. This soap also contains Kashmiri Saffron which accomplishes incredibly difficult work in tone improvement. It also contains Calcium and Vitamins A, D, and B2 which is very beneficial for the skin. No one should miss this hydrating soap for their baby.
Aloe Vera is also present in this soap which provides a shield to your newborn baby from harmful germs. Above all, it is suggested for everyday use. This soap is free from all chemicals and includes in the list of best baby soaps of the world.
PROS
· This soap also includes castor oil which is very healthy for baby skin.
· This soap is free from all chemicals.
· It also contains Calcium and Vitamins A, D, and B2 which is very beneficial for the skin.
·. It precludes the defenselessness of inner dampness.
· There is no need of utilizing any moisturizer after using this soap.
CONS
· This soap is antiseptic and rarely harm baby skin.
Buy It Here:
Written by: Azeem Bilal | https://medium.com/@azeembilal77/best-organic-baby-products-3d5b90a21e07 | ['Azeem Bilal'] | 2020-06-17 09:44:15.435000+00:00 | ['Childcare', 'Motherhood', 'Health', 'Baby Care', 'Organic'] |
How To Become A Successful Writer: The 50 Year Plan | Photo: Author
Birth — Age 4
As soon as you’re old enough to hold a writing instrument, start scribbling on your bedroom walls. This is your early-stage stream of consciousness, so don’t let your parents tell you it’s “wrong” or a “mess.” Eat a crayon.
Age 5–9
Advance to writing on yourself — not the alphabet per se, but some kind of secret code. This is another stepping stone towards greatness, and also good practice for a fallback career as a tattoo artist. If you don’t want to write on yourself, write on your sibling. If you don’t have a sibling, write on a friend. If you don’t have a friend, try an imaginary one. If you don’t have an imagination, I hope you’re at least cute or have nice hair because you’re limited to a life of nonfiction or current events.
Age 10–15
Start a secret diary. Complain that no one understands you and that life isn’t fair. This will be the most embarrassing writing of your life and you will most likely burn it before your 18th birthday. Start drinking.
Age 16–20
Keep more detailed, big girl diaries. Chronicle your depression, anxiety, medications, and all obsessive, toxic relationships. Refuse to notice a repetitive pattern in your dysfunctional behaviors. Use alcohol and drugs to numb yourself and avoid reality. Write while you’re drunk and/or high and insist it’s some of your best work. Do not listen to anyone who tells you you’re an alcoholic. Do not seek professional help. There is nothing wrong with you — you’re a brilliant, tortured artist and it’s sexy as fuck.
Age 21
Start calling your diary a journal. You’re an adult now.
Age 22
Start writing complaint letters. Complaining is a cathartic art form and as a struggling writer, you need to get your frustration and anger out somewhere. For example, you might send something like this to your building manager: Hey Maria. Quick question — why the fucking fuck is all I hear are fucking dogs barking? And also, who the fuck lives in apartment 607 because I hear her having sex all the time. This sucks. Thanks.
Age 23
Research your favorite authors, like Marquis de Sade or Kafka, and study their paths to success. If they committed suicide or died a drunk or OD’d, that means they were really good and you have really good taste in writers. Glamorize the lifestyle. Predict your own untimely demise and subsequent posthumous fame.
Age 24
Join a pretentious writing group and immediately start to complain about everyone in it. Realize you hate people and their opinions. Declare Charles Bukowski your idol.
Age 25
Start sending out fan mail to authors you admire. By authors, I mean anyone who has written anything, anywhere, or who is particularly cute. A model I follow on Instagram wrote a poem on a t-shirt and I slid into his DMs. Pro tip: Do not wait for a response.
Age 26
Finish your first “novel” about your descent into insanity via inebriated adventures gallivanting around New York as the outrageous daughter of one of the city's most well-known criminal attorneys. Enjoy hundreds of rejection letters, and a few agents hitting on you. Rewrite the novel three times, only to still be rejected and further tortured and confused. Remember that tons of famous authors were rejected at the beginning. Put novel on the back burner for 10 years. Start a new career making t-shirts for kids because kids need clothes and no one needs your writing.
Age 30–34
Self publish a short humor book called “Girls Are Weird,” that is only understood by introverted freaks. Make $475 and get a stalker who followed you home after a reading you did at a shithole on the Bowery.
Age 35
Write your second novel about how your suicidal alcoholic homeless lover saved your life. Get an agent. Get rejected by publishers. Get dropped by your agent.
Age 40–49
Do some freelance writing. Write perverse stories about the inappropriate men you’re sleeping with and publish them under a pseudonym because you’re not stupid and you know your family thinks you’re a joke and will disinherit you. Simultaneously start a blog called “Depressed Hot Girl,” even though it’s been at least twenty years since you were a girl, despite the fact that you’re still hot and somewhat depressed. Dodge calls from your family asking you to take the blog down after seeing half-naked pictures of you with a fake flamingo on your head. Leave the blog up for 5 years but never update it.
Age 49.5
Take blog down because you’re really not a girl anymore; by this point it’s indisputable.
Age 50
Experience your first pandemic. During the nationwide lockdown, come to the realization that the only thing to do is write. People need you now. Submit to Medium. Make $12 on your first piece. Submit again. Make $3. Take a depression break. A month later write a story about turning 50. Watch it go viral. Tell everyone. Rest on your laurels. You deserve it. | https://medium.com/slackjaw/how-to-become-a-successful-writer-the-50-year-plan-96be785343f3 | ['Pam Gaslow'] | 2020-11-05 02:59:35.950000+00:00 | ['Sarcasm', 'Writing', 'Humor', 'Advice', 'Writing Tips'] |
Mama Whom I love | Every year without fail, January 23rd would be a day of celebration and declaration of love for the woman who gave me life — mama.
Mama was no ordinary woman, she had a gift— the power to love that would cause a change in people.
Being a hard woman on the exterior with yet had a heart so soft it would be comparable to that of a marshmallow. She was always the balance of both. She was the yin and yang factor — mama worked hard and never complained. From being a businesswoman who ran her own companies, to being a full time loving mom who ran home affairs, mama still made sure none of her children lacked — we were guided physically, emotionally, spiritually, and, financially. We had it all and we had it good.
There were days she was soft like a pillar of cloud, floating in the laughter of happiness but there were also days where she boiled like a rising sun. Oh, how I miss both days.
Mama was my first best friend, she knew my secrets yet made no judgments;
Mama was my comfort through sleepless nights;
Mama was my protector, she made my demons go away;
Mama was my first love, from the day she laid eyes on me, love was all she spoke.
For the past 11 years, January 23rd was not the same. There were no secret surprises, no leaving love notes on her bed, no handmade cards for her, no cakes, no birthday song, no more.
My heart longed for mama just as if I longed for a best friend to call me back on the phone anxiously. Except that, the phone hasn’t rung and deep down I know it wouldn’t.
In the book “The Wisdom & Teachings of Stephen Covey”, he asked a mind-boggling question in the final chapter:
“When you die, who would attend your funeral and what would people have to say about you?”
It made me pause and think…. hard. I was searching for memories and experiences in my mind to convince myself that I had done enough to leave my mark in this world. The monologue in my head was intense. Pausing that thought to check my calendar, I saw that it was the 22nd of January — a day before mama’s birthday. Hot burning streaks of tears rolled down my cheeks and there it was — the uncontrollable weeping of a night.
I’m still composing answers on Steven’s question in the book for myself, but I can speak for mama. Today, I choose to honor her and all my memories of her with the telltales of this story.
In her lifetime of existence, mama knew about love and life beyond what is expected and taught. She was selfless, fierce, responsible, dedicated, delightful, beautiful, wise, spiritual, funny, but most of all she was MY mama. I cannot emphasize how proud I am of her for all of her life’s sacrifices. Why? Because in 11 years of her demise, she was never forgotten, there were things so incandescent about her still. People would still talk about her and wear a certain smile when they described her and memories of her. It was always something positive.
My friends would recall her coming to pick me up from school every day in a white car, my brother would remember her praying with us every morning, my neighbors remembered her radiance and gracious offerings, friends in the community remembered her contributions but everyone remembered her presence.
So 11 years later, with a heavy heart but comforted spirit, I dedicate this post to my beloved mama to honor all of her great influence in all the lives of the people she has touched in her walk of life. While she may not be with us physically, the lessons, experiences, journeys, and memories she’s left with us will never fade. And even in her physical absence has she never been more present. That is the true hallmark of leaving an imprint in peoples’ lives changing them forever. That was mama’s gift, mama’s love changed people in ways beyond her imagination.
I love you more today than I did yesterday, mama, happy birthday. | https://medium.com/@jianina29/mama-whom-i-love-200771e8146 | ['Nina J'] | 2019-01-23 03:44:30.033000+00:00 | ['Birthday', 'Love', 'Relationships', 'Mothers And Daughters', 'Family'] |
Top 5 Ways to Invest in Your Child’s Future | Don’t you want to give the best possible future to your child? Here is how you can do that.
You always want the best future for your child no matter how much money you earn. With the growing cost of college education, wedding budgets, and well, bringing up a child, it’s a smart idea to do some financial planning.
This post is suitable for parents of all age; let it be someone with a toddler or even if your child is about to graduate from college. We’re going to discuss:
· Different investment options for your children
· Best accounts for investing
· Mistakes you would want to avoid as parents.
Let’s get started.
What are the best ways to invest in your Child’s future?
Investing in college education of your junior.
Setting your child for a bright future starts by giving them a good education. But, let’s face it; college is expensive. The past couple of years have witnessed a sharp rise in college tuition.
The average cost of college education in the US stands at $9,687 for in-state students at public colleges, $21,184 for out-of-state students at public colleges, and $35,085 for private colleges.
In the UK, fees for undergraduate degrees for home students are close to £9,250 per year and between £10,000 and £26,000 for international students.
With these figures in mind, it makes complete sense to start saving for your child’s college education.
In the US, a qualified tuition plan, 529 plan, is the right vehicle to save money for qualified educational expenses. A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged plan with no income limits, which means high-income earners can contribute just as much as regular contributors. There are no set contribution limits for 529 plans.
Another option is to save money in an Education Savings Account or ESA. You can contribute up to $2,000 per year, but there is a maximum income limit for ESA contributions (couples with joint income below $220,000 or individual filers with income below $110,000).
There are no designated tax-free accounts for college education in the UK, but a Junior ISA will just be fine for most parents. Parents or legal guardians can set up Junior ISAs for their children. The annual contribution limit stands at £9,000 (2020–21), allowing parents to stock up funds quickly.
The child gets control of the junior ISA at the age of 18.
It is important to note that Child Trust Funds (CTFs) have been replaced by Junior ISAs since 2011. The government allows conversion of a CTF into a Junior ISA.
Helping your children through their retirement!
Retirement crisis has become a global phenomenon with most people across the developed as well as developing world worrying about funding their retirement.
A recent study reveals that over 75% of Americans are worried that they will run out of money during retirement. Similarly, 58% of Brits, aged 45–60 years, are not sure whether they’ll be able to maintain their standard of living during retirement.
So it isn’t a surprise if you want to support your child during his or her retirement. We understand that it may appear to be a long-shot but allow us to explain.
The UK government allows parents to establish SIPP for their children with an annual contribution limit of up to £3,600. Since junior’s retirement is decades away, you invested in a low-cost index fund that tracks the FTSE All Share Index.
Let’s assume that you make all 18 contributions for your child and the money stays untouched until retirement. The average annual returns of the FTSE All Share Index for the past 30 years is 9.9%.
Your child will have £171,122 at 18 years of age.
Balance Breakdown
And if these funds are then parked into the same index fund until retirement (55 years) with a conservative rate of return of 6%, your child will have close to £1.48 million at retirement.
Balance Breakdown II
Not only will your child remember you for your generosity, but you’ll become an inspiration for parents across the town, if not city or nation.
In the US, you need to wait a little longer to open a Roth IRA for your child, although there is a catch. You can open a Roth IRA for your child only when he or she has a job, so always motivate them to start taking part-time jobs at a young age.
You can choose between a traditional IRA or Roth IRA. We recommend Roth IRA because of its tax-free structure.
You can also choose other assets, including bonds or gilts, to diversify the retirement fund of your child. The trick is to start as early as possible.
Investing money for daily expenses of your kids.
Now that we have covered the two most important financial aspects of your child’s future, let’s talk about providing financial support for daily expenses.
We found several savings options when it comes to providing consistent financial support to children.
Parents in the UK can purchase NS&I Children’s Bonds for children under the age of 16 years. The good part about NS&I Children’s Bonds is that anyone can purchase them, including grandparents or guardians, for your children. These bonds offer guaranteed returns on your investments.
However, there are penalties for early cashing out, so make sure to satisfy the due maturity period.
The US offers similar saving instruments in the form of UGMA (Uniform Gifts to Minors Act) and UTMA (Uniform Transfers to Minors Act). You can contribute funds under these schemes as the custodian. Your children will get access to these funds once they reach the age of 18 to 21 years.
Also, since these funds will be taxed at your children’s tax bracket, they’ll end up pocketing more of this money. There are no limitations on how your children can use these funds, although we recommend you to train your child to manage finances responsibly.
Top 5 investment options when saving for your child’s future
Now that we have covered various investment vehicles for saving money for your children, it’s time to focus on some popular investment options.
1. Stocks
Historically, stock markets have offered groundbreaking returns in comparison to other asset classes. For parents planning to save for their child’s future, dedicating a portion of your portfolio towards stock markets could repay quite well.
The fact that you have a long investment horizon before your child accesses these funds makes stocks a good investment choice. Parents with limited understanding of the stock markets will be better off seeking expert help in stock investments.
2. ETFs
ETFs or exchange-traded funds are ideal for your junior’s savings portfolio. ETFs carry a basket of different stocks, which makes them suitable for long-term investment periods. Not only will you get ample diversification, but ETFs also come with undeniably low expense ratios.
When choosing ETFs, we recommend you to focus on broad markets and avoid sectoral or thematic offerings.
3. Mutual Funds
Much like ETFs, mutual funds offer an excellent investment opportunity for investors seeking exposure to the stock markets. Considering a longer investment period, you can maintain an aggressive investment strategy during the early years and gradually move towards safer assets.
In the case of mutual funds, you can choose between actively-managed funds or invest in index funds. The former comes with a higher expense ratio but offers consistent monitoring of the portfolio. This could be handy during bear markets.
Index funds, on the other hand, charge only a fraction of what actively-managed funds cost. Over the long-term, index funds offer competitive returns. However, if you are caught in a bear market at the time of maturity, your portfolio could take a significant hit.
4. Bonds
Bonds are among the safest investment options available in the market. You can purchase government bonds (Treasury bonds or Gilds) or highly-rated corporate bonds for consistent returns on your investment.
However, it is critical to keep an eye on the ongoing yield of bonds. You may want to add inflation-protected bonds to your investment portfolio.
5. Term deposits or CDs
Terms deposits and CDs offer consistent income by locking your capital for a fixed period. Your money grows at a pre-determined rate with the benefits of compounding the long-run. These fixed-income instruments provide stability and diversity to your child’s investment portfolio.
3 Mistakes you must avoid when investing for your child’s future
· Do not overpay for stocks in 529 plan or Junior ISA. Always take into account the impact of management fees on net returns. Also, make sure to track the performance of your investment portfolio.
· Do not invest in a single asset class. You should aim to diversify this portfolio by adding different assets. Not only it provides healthy growth, but your portfolio is ready for any adverse movements in any one of the asset classes.
· Do not ignore stocks. When investing for the long-term, stock markets can give outstanding results, so dedicate a portion of your child’s portfolio to stock investments.
Summary
Investing for the future of your child requires a decent understanding of investments, taxation, and financial planning. Do not hesitate to seek professional help if required. The trick is to start investing as early as possible and stay invested for longer durations.
Astro Finance is an investment advisory firm that provides managed investment accounts for your kids, such as Kids ESA and Custodial accounts. Reach out to our customer support team for more information on how you can start building wealth for your kids today, visit Astro Finance to learn more. | https://medium.com/the-capital/top-5-ways-to-invest-in-your-childs-future-7dfd7a1f984c | ['Astro Finance'] | 2021-03-22 02:09:54.580000+00:00 | ['Financial Services', 'Finance', 'Kids Esa', 'Investment', 'Financial Planning'] |
How to Make Better Decisions by Avoiding These Thinking Traps | How to Make Better Decisions by Avoiding These Thinking Traps
3 common biases & how to outsmart them
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash
Every decision we make has an impact on our life. In essence, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.
And to complicate things, there are dozens of cognitive glitches working against us every second of the day. Wikipedia lists nearly 200 of them. And those are just the ones we’ve identified thus far.
Some examples include…
The Bandwagon effect: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain
Confirmation bias: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” — Andrew Lang
It’d be nice if we had to deal with only one such bias at a time. We would open the massive Wikipedia index, find our bias, and take the specific steps needed to fix it. But unfortunately, that’s not how it works…
To make things a little easier for you, here’s a list of three common mental biases you can refer to whenever you’re about to make a tough decision. And because explaining something forces you to learn it twice, I hope that writing this article will help me catch these thinking errors in myself as well.
Outcome Bias: Focus on Decisions, Not Outcomes!
Imagine that you’re about to see the simultaneous flip of a coin and roll of a six-sided die. Before it happens, I offer you a choice between two gambles:
1. Gamble on the coin, ignore the die: get $100 if it’s heads, nothing otherwise.
2. Gamble on the die, ignore the coin: get $100 if it’s a 6, nothing otherwise.
Which one do you pick?
Photo by Thanasis Papazacharias on Pixabay
The better decision appears to be the coin, which has a 1/2 chance of giving you money compared with the 1/6 chance on the die. Right? Right. If you want to win the $100, it’s a no-brainer.
Now the actions happen and we see their outcomes: the coin lands tails up while the die shows a 6. Dang, you should have chosen the die!
No.
No, you shouldn’t have. Definitely not. No matter how you slice it, a 50% chance to win is always a better gamble than 17% for the same prize.
“A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.” — Daniel Kahneman
“Dang, I should’ve chosen the die!” is a prime example of outcome bias and it’s a habit you should kick as soon as you can if you want to be a better decision-maker.
Outcome bias states that we should always evaluate decision quality based only on what was known at the time the decision was made.
This is especially important when we’re evaluating decision-makers in the real world. For instance, if you want to properly evaluate the decision-making skill of a political leader regarding the current corona crisis, ignore outcomes.
Instead, look only at what was known at the time of the decision. In our example, that was a 50% versus 17% chance to win. The decision-maker chose 50%? Good. I hope they’ll choose the same way next time.
Loss Aversion: We Hate Losing More Than We Like Winning
When Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman handed people mugs and told them they were worth $5, he discovered that nobody would sell for less than $10. Behavioral scientists call this the endowment effect. We value things more, simply because we own them.
The endowment effect leads to loss aversion: As soon as we have something, we have something to lose — and losing hurts up to twice more than winning makes us happy.
Research has shown that if someone gives you $50, you’ll experience a small boost in satisfaction, but if you lose $50, you will experience a dramatically higher loss in satisfaction. Although the responses are exactly opposite, they’re not equal in psychological magnitude.
The results of loss aversion? We spend most of our days preserving what we have instead of going after what else we want.
If all else fails, just listen to Yoda.
The Availability Heuristic: Easy ≠ True
We are living in the least violent time in history. More people are living in peace right now than ever before. The rates of homicide, rape, and child abuse are all falling.
Most people are shocked when they hear these statistics. Some even refuse to believe them. “If this is the most peaceful time in history, why are there so many wars going on?” “Why do I hear about rape and murder and crime every day?”
Welcome to the availability heuristic.
The availability heuristic refers to a common mistake that our brains make by assuming that the examples which come to mind easily are also the most important or prevalent things.
The total number of dangerous events is decreasing, but the likelihood that you hear about one of them (or many of them) is increasing. And because these events are readily available in our mind, we assume that they happen more often than they actually do.
In other words, we overestimate the impact of things that we can remember, while we undervalue and underestimate the prevalence of the events we hear nothing about.
People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. — Daniel Kahneman
I’ll finish this one with the example of sharks saving lives of swimmers. If you analyze the deaths in the ocean near San Diego, the data shows that on average, the death of each swimmer killed by a shark saves the lives of ten others.
Why? Every time a swimmer gets killed, the number of deaths from drowning goes down for a couple of years before it slowly turns back to normal.
This effect occurs because reports of someone being killed in a shark attack are remembered more vividly than reports of drownings. The memories of shark attacks are tied to strong emotions and therefore more ‘available’.
What those swimmers probably don’t realize are the many other dangers that lurk at the beach.
For instance, coconuts.
Did you know you’re twice as likely to be killed at the beach by a coconut than by a shark? Because it’s easier (and scarier) to imagine being killed by a shark than a coconut, death-by-shark comes to mind more easily than death-by-coconut, so it’s more likely to affect your behavior.
Photo by Nipanan Lifestyle on Unsplash
Where to Go From Here
The world is an extremely complicated place, and cognitive biases are often a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify the input it’s receiving. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Biases are often extremely useful. They help us act fast, filter information, and remember what’s important. Cognitive biases have evolved for a reason. They are hardwired into your brain because you need them to navigate the world.
However, as we’ve seen, they can also become problematic. At times, our biases can lead us to perceptual distortions, inaccurate judgments, and irrational decisions.
In cases like these, here are 8 bite-sized decision heuristics that have been useful to me when making hard decisions. Take what you need and leave the rest:
Schedule time to think. “Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” — Pablo Picasso
The rule of 5. Think about what the decision will look like in 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years, and 5 decades.
When you have a hard problem, explain it to a rubber duck (or another thing) in simple terms. This helps verbalize the problem and often, fix it. In the wise words of Captain Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean): “The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.”
Read books and learn from others. Your personal experiences comprise around 0.000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. Essentially, we’re all biased toward our personal history. Learn from others and read often to bridge that ‘gap’.
Play poker. Professional poker players are probability machines, which helps them be less affected by mental biases. Not only can they estimate the likelihood of events more accurately, but the habit of constantly trying to estimate alone comes with plenty of benefits.
Read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It’s an amazing book that explains how irrational we humans are, and what to do about it. If you only read one book on human behavior, make it this one.
Most regret often comes from the things you decide not to do. This is something my dad often tells me whenever I’m facing a hard decision. In other words: to try and fail is at least to learn, whereas failing to try is suffering the inestimable loss of what could have been.
And finally…
Regularly reflect on your choices (without falling for outcome bias, of course!). Correct your mistakes before they become your habits. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/how-to-make-better-decisions-by-avoiding-these-thinking-traps-157296715ff6 | ['Yannick Bikker'] | 2020-07-31 19:01:01.195000+00:00 | ['Choices', 'Decision Making', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement'] |
Mentor Mondays with Ashish VR | In this instalment of Mentor Mondays we catch up with Ashish VR to find out how this Engineering graduate wound up mentoring young public problem solvers with Reap Benefit.
Ashish VR handing over a Skill Certificate to a Solve Ninja.
An early habit of taking on responsibility
Ashish is always volunteering to help out with new projects at Reap Benefit, a habit that can be traced back to when he was just six years old.
“I joined a residential school in the third standard, and being in hostel taught me a lot about how to work for and with others. The wardens used to give me responsibilities — big and small — from looking after attendance, to managing laundry schedules to collecting the sign-off slips for school excursions.”
“So from a young age, I learned the importance of coordinating between different stakeholders and as I grew older, how to manage conflict between them. It wasn’t uncommon for people to approach me whenever they needed support or help.”
At Reap Benefit, Ashish has gone beyond his role as a mentor to work with team members and plan and steer new initiatives like our Solve Ninja Leadership Accelerator (SNLA) and Solve Ninja Policy Committee.
Changing views of power and leadership
While studying Engineering, Ashish got involved in local volunteering projects with organisations like Parivartan. Attending rallies, citizen meetings and protests and listening to what people were saying gave him a ringside view to citizen movements, grassroots work and leadership.
But it was during his PGDM at the Indian Institute of Development Management, that Ashish says his perspective on leadership, development and what impact looked like all changed.
“Meeting diverse people from across the country working at the grass root level in development was very inspiring and eye opening. I realised that it was important not to have power residing with one person or institution, but that decentralisation of power benefits everyone.”
But it was on a field work trip to Rajasthan that Ashish got the chance to interact with gram panchayat leaders. “A lack of funding and citizen engagement was holding Gram Panchayat’s back from becoming vibrant places for rural change and improvement.”
All these experiences informed Ashish’s resolve to work with an organisation that was doing grass root level work around environmental and civic issues with local government bodies.
Which is how he joined Reap Benefit as a mentor in May 2019.
Turning challenges into opportunities
Ashish started out mentoring Government and Private schools in Bangalore when he first joined.
“The first 6 months was challenging. You’re visiting schools across the city every day, taking sessions with adolescents and you don’t really see the impact right away. It takes time. And that was hard at first.”
Ashish recalls the exhaustion of travelling across Bangalore by public transport to mentor students. “But it was also an opportunity to really look at the city and see what kind of civic and infrastructural issues were plaguing it and the behavioural issues that made them worse.” he shares.
For someone who had never conducted a session in a classroom before, suddenly having to engage, mentor and guide 180 teenagers every week was a huge leap.
“Engaging young people is hard and classroom management is a real skill. Both were things I had never done before. While I had some experience in reporting issues, I had to really work at being hands on with projects, which I learned on the job while working in Government schools. Even though sanitation and water were not my area of expertise, I had to look into them deeply to be able to support my students.”
So how did Ashish learn to do these things?
“By just doing it! Also, weekly meetings and regular feedback loops with mentors like Vinod, and buddying up with Subhani and Nisha helped tremendously.”
Adjusting to the new normal
The pandemic forced Reap Benefit mentors to shift online, a move that Ashish says was seamless thanks to extensive training, demo sessions and more. “But it was frustrating to not have a direct connection with students and trying to maintain their interest levels online was also hard.”
“The pandemic has really shown how unequal society is. If we want more equity then we need to ensure more young people from marginalised communities have their voices heard.”
Ashish believes that Reap Benefit’s SNLA that mentors veteran Solve Ninjas from Government and Affordable Private Schools to further strengthen their civic muscle is a step in this direction.
“We need leaders from all sections of society, otherwise our work will always be superficial.”
Trust, energy and intent
What does Ashish want to share with young people aspiring to join the social sector?
“Think of the world as you wish for it to be, and find an organisation aligned with that vision. Remember, no organisation is perfect. So it’s important once you join to observe, learn and put in the work before you volunteer ideas on how to improve things. Reap Benefit is very open to supportng new ideas and suggestions, but then they also expect you to take ownership of these ideas and put them into action. It’s important to build trust with people within the organisation and show that you’re willing and able to put in the work.”
If Ashish’s journey inspired you and you’d like to work with mentors like him on strengthening your civic muscle, then type ‘Hi!’ on the Solve Ninja WhatsApp Chat Bot today. | https://medium.com/reap-benefit/mentor-mondays-with-ashish-vr-8e1348df2af4 | ['Reap Benefit'] | 2021-07-06 02:31:17.376000+00:00 | ['Environmental Issues', 'Civic Engagement', 'Public Problem Solving', 'Mentor Mondays', 'Mentoring'] |
What’s the difference between imagesc and imshow? | Hi,
When I want to display an image in figure screen, both works the same way. I was wondering what’s the difference between both imagesc and imshow commands?
ANSWER:
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imshow has a number of default settings intended for displaying images, such as turning off the axes and locking the aspect ratio, that imagesc does not. imshow also had additional options for customizing how you view the image that are not available or not as easily doable through imagesc. You can see the basic differences by doing something like the following and looking at the two figures side by side.
Read More:
https://www.matlabsolutions.com/resources/what-s-the-difference-between-imagesc-and-imshow-.php | https://medium.com/@technicalsource9/whats-the-difference-between-imagesc-and-imshow-57fc1127010 | ['Technical Source'] | 2020-12-24 08:36:43.734000+00:00 | ['Matlabsolution', 'Math', 'Matlab Assignment Help', 'Mathematics'] |
A Brief Introduction to Supervised Learning | Supervised learning is the most common subbranch of machine learning today. Typically, new machine learning practitioners will begin their journey with supervised learning algorithms. Therefore, the first of this three post series will be about supervised learning.
Supervised machine learning algorithms are designed to learn by example. The name “supervised” learning originates from the idea that training this type of algorithm is like having a teacher supervise the whole process.
When training a supervised learning algorithm, the training data will consist of inputs paired with the correct outputs. During training, the algorithm will search for patterns in the data that correlate with the desired outputs. After training, a supervised learning algorithm will take in new unseen inputs and will determine which label the new inputs will be classified as based on prior training data. The objective of a supervised learning model is to predict the correct label for newly presented input data. At its most basic form, a supervised learning algorithm can be written simply as:
Where Y is the predicted output that is determined by a mapping function that assigns a class to an input value x. The function used to connect input features to a predicted output is created by the machine learning model during training.
Supervised learning can be split into two subcategories: Classification and regression.
Classification
During training, a classification algorithm will be given data points with an assigned category. The job of a classification algorithm is to then take an input value and assign it a class, or category, that it fits into based on the training data provided.
The most common example of classification is determining if an email is spam or not. With two classes to choose from (spam, or not spam), this problem is called a binary classification problem. The algorithm will be given training data with emails that are both spam and not spam. The model will find the features within the data that correlate to either class and create the mapping function mentioned earlier: Y=f(x). Then, when provided with an unseen email, the model will use this function to determine whether or not the email is spam.
Classification problems can be solved with a numerous amount of algorithms. Whichever algorithm you choose to use depends on the data and the situation. Here are a few popular classification algorithms:
Linear Classifiers
Support Vector Machines
Decision Trees
K-Nearest Neighbor
Random Forest
Regression
Regression is a predictive statistical process where the model attempts to find the important relationship between dependent and independent variables. The goal of a regression algorithm is to predict a continuous number such as sales, income, and test scores. The equation for basic linear regression can be written as so:
Where x[i] is the feature(s) for the data and where w[i] and b are parameters which are developed during training. For simple linear regression models with only one feature in the data, the formula looks like this:
Where w is the slope, x is the single feature and b is the y-intercept. Familiar? For simple regression problems such as this, the models predictions are represented by the line of best fit. For models using two features, the plane will be used. Finally, for a model using more than two features, a hyperplane will be used.
Imagine we want to determine a student’s test grade based on how many hours they studied the week of the test. Lets say the plotted data with a line of best fit looks like this:
There is a clear positive correlation between hours studied (independent variable) and the student’s final test score (dependent variable). A line of best fit can be drawn through the data points to show the models predictions when given a new input. Say we wanted to know how well a student would do with five hours of studying. We can use the line of best fit to predict the test score based on other student’s performances.
There are many different types of regression algorithms. The three most common are listed below:
Linear Regression
Logistic Regression
Polynomial Regression
Simple Regression Example
First we will import the needed libraries and then create a random dataset with an increasing output.
We can then place our line of best fit onto the plot along with all of the data points.
We will then print out the slope and intercept of the regression model.
print("Slope: ", reg.coef_[0])
print("Intercept:", reg.intercept_)
Output:
Slope: 65.54726684409927
Intercept: -1.8464500230055103
In middle school, we all learned that the equation for a linear line is y = mx + b. We can now create a function called “predict” that will multiply the slope (w) with the new input (x). This function will also use the intercept (b) to return an output value. After creating the function, we can predict the output values when x = 3 and when x = -1.5.
Predict y For 3: 194.7953505092923
Predict y For -1.5: -100.16735028915441
Now let’s plot the original data points with the line of best fit. We can then add the new points that we predicted (colored red). As expected, they fall on the line of best fit.
Conclusion
Supervised learning is the simplest subcategory of machine learning and serves as an introduction to machine learning to many machine learning practitioners. Supervised learning is the most commonly used form of machine learning, and has proven to be an excellent tool in many fields. This post was part one of a three part series. Part two will cover unsupervised learning. | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-brief-introduction-to-supervised-learning-54a3e3932590 | ['Aidan Wilson'] | 2019-10-01 04:36:45.128000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'AI', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
Resisting Progress: The Fragmented History of Station Eleven | Station Eleven presents a poignant and compassionate understanding of the troubles of modern life through the imagination of its destruction. It looks back on the present from a post-pandemic future, noticing the beauty, the superficiality, the technology, and the absurdity of its existence. The storyline oscillates back and forth in time, weaving between characters in the past and present, between places familiar and imagined. It jumps from a dinner party in Los Angeles to a beach in Malaysia to the fantasy world of Miranda’s Station Eleven, connecting Arthur, his ex-wives, his friends, and his co-workers to the people in the airport terminal and the Traveling Symphony. Through these disjunctions, Station Eleven constructs its own narrative of history by deconstructing both time and place. More specifically, it resists the idea that history progresses linearly– mirroring ideas found in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment– through its fluid conceptualization of time, its critique of modernity, and its appreciation of the surprising beauty that flourishes in the ruins of modernity.
In the same way Horkheimer and Adorno understand that “the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (28), Station Eleven too is conscious of the pitfalls of the modern world and the mythical illusion of progress. Despite the advanced technological moment that the pre-collapse world is set in, its characters are plagued by unhappiness. When Miranda sits down with Arthur in his dressing room to talk, she wonders to herself, “did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life?”. “The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy” (Mandel, 211). Arthur’s fame and career force him to continually perform, to retreat further and further away from his authentic self. His identity is so inauthentic and performative that he cannot sustain his relationships; when asked “which one?” upon mention of his ex-wife, he realizes “this was a sign of having gone seriously astray, wasn’t it? Having more than one ex-wife?” (Mandel, 320). Arthur is not the only one who feels he has lost himself and what is important. During the 360 report, a young woman named Dahlia articulates a profound, shared depression characteristic of the modern world. She notices the expected drudgery inherent in life, commenting to Clark that “adulthood’s full of ghosts… high functioning sleepwalkers, essentially” (Mandel, 163). When she says this, Clark realizes, “when was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When was the last time he felt awe or inspiration?” (Mandel, 164). As he recognizes his own numbness and the despicability of his life’s work, progress and modernity are again critiqued as being mere illusion. In contrast, when he enters the new world, Clark shaves the left side of head and “after all these years of corporate responsibility, the haircut made him feel like himself again” (Mandel, 249). Authenticity is just one of the many things that struggles to survive in the seemingly progressive modern world.
Station Eleven reshapes the conventional understanding of linear progress not just by critiquing the modern world, but by showing the beauty in its destruction. As the people in the Severn City Airport notice, “time had been reset by the catastrophe” (Mandel, 231), turning “progress” on its head and imagining a world that seems to go back in time. Interestingly, this regression is characterized not necessarily by pain and struggle, but by feelings of awe, inspiration, and appreciation that failed to exist in the old, seemingly modern world. When we are first introduced to the post-pandemic world, we are told, “what was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty” (57). The new world is thus bookmarked as something valuable in itself; it is not an inherent tragedy to go “backwards”. Throughout the novel, as the new world is lived and experienced, it is similarly described by small moments of appreciation. When Jeevan first steps outside of Frank’s apartment into the streets of his city, he finds “a stark and unexpected beauty, silent metropolis, no movement” (Mandel, 182). Decades into the collapse, this feeling still permeates its characters observations: “in the morning light there was beauty in the decrepitude, sunlight catching in the flowers that had spring up through the gravel of long overgrown driveways, mossy front porches turned brilliant green, a white blossoming bush alive with butterflies. This dazzling world” (Mandel, 296). Unlike in the pre-collapse modern world in which objects like the paperweight get haphazardly moved around and forgotten about, objects regain meaning in the new world. The Museum of Civilization is created because “Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required” (255). The contrast between the characters’ ability to enjoy life in the new world and their unhappiness in the old world pointedly disrupts conventional thinking of the linear progress of history. By fracturing time and showing the beauty in modernity’s destruction, Mandel creates her own history that understands progress as myth.
The political message is not immediately clear in Station Eleven, but Mandel’s willingness to shatter time, to critique the banality of the modern world, and to appreciate the beauty in modernity’s destruction undeniably reveal the politically powerful way the novel uncouples progress and linear time. As she guides the reader through her fragmented narrative, she asks us to reconsider the way that the past, present, and future are commonly conceptualized, to learn to map history unconventionally, and to create new modes of understanding. | https://medium.com/@clairestratton_39862/resisting-progress-a-fragmented-history-in-emily-st-john-mandels-station-eleven-402d4c7276bf | ['Claire Stratton'] | 2020-04-23 23:04:43.326000+00:00 | ['Emily St John Mandel', 'Progress', 'Pandemic', 'History', 'Station Eleven'] |
How to Stop Violence Against Women | There has been an increase in the number of cases of violence against women over the last decade. Unfortunately, it has been overlooked. This is easily shown by the increasing number of cases listed in courts concerning crimes committed against women. Though the governments are taking various step to curb this menace, those are proving insufficient
The reasons for such violence are many, of which gender discrimination is one. The ego problem between the two sexes continues for generations. Most men hate getting dictated by women. Even a small disagreement between a man and his woman can prompt a violent response from the man, causing suffering to a woman.
Poverty is another significant factor resulting in violence against women. Statistical data prove that poor people are more prone to committing this evil. The reason is not difficult to guess. People living below the poverty line find it hard to raise their families. Frustration takes over the man when he fails to take adequate care of his family. This adds to the frustration of remaining unemployed and makes him angry and he lets up this anger against his wife on the slightest pretext, of which there are understandably many in a poor family.
Invariably, the women suffer silently as they have nowhere to go and none to help them out. Only a handful of them is lucky enough to get some kind of support from their relatives or an NGO like KAFA, Arab Women Organization of Jordan to stop violence against women. A lot of support is necessarily required not just from NGOs and governments but also from common people for preventing this violence against women. On noticing violence against women, a common man ought to bring it to the notice of police or another appropriate department of the government connected with the welfare of women. Should the man fear any adverse consequence of lodging such a complaint, he must take the police into confidence.
It is also equally important for women to be aware of their rights and exercise the same. They need to muster courage and report any act of violence committed against them. Though it will be incorrect to say that women in rural areas are not subjected to any violence, it is true that cases of violence against women in rural areas are quite rare. If need be, the laws should be amended to make sure that men committing violence against women get punished in such a manner to deter other men from committing such a crime against women.
In dubai there are lots of lawyers and law firm in dubai which come to help them and it is a good initiative by the lawyers in dubai.
Members of the family and friends must try hard to build a genial relationship with each other to eliminate the chances of any violence against women. An unhappy marriage is frequently the cause of violence against women. One needs to make every effort to find an amicable solution without getting violent. Everybody should contribute some time and effort if we want to eliminate cruelty against women for good. | https://medium.com/@aliceharmon007/how-to-stop-violence-against-women-182cf8da1d36 | ['Alice Harmon'] | 2020-12-25 06:59:00.655000+00:00 | ['Womens Rights', 'Legal Services', 'Legal'] |
Music Video: The Superweaks — ‘No Sorrow’ | The Superweaks have released the cool music video ‘No Sorrow’ this week. It’s taken off their new cut on the three-way split with Thin Lips and Modern Baseball.
Aside directed by Adam Peditto who recently had worked with Cayetana dan Thin Lips, this music video also can hit you with a deep feeling to connect with all confusing things in 2016.
“I’m trying hard to let it out / I’m feeling like I let you down / frustrated I wish I could get away” these lyrics go with the Make America Great Again slogan burning in flames. | https://medium.com/whyslackers/music-video-the-superweaks-no-sorrow-42bfdf58fb8b | [] | 2017-01-16 01:50:35.208000+00:00 | ['Music Video', 'The Superweaks', 'Wtnsound', 'Music'] |
Bitcoin Volume Sets a Record Reaching Nearly $44 Billion in 24 Hours | Photo by Clifford Photography on Unsplash
On Feb. 17th, 2020, nearly $46 Billion were traded using the currency Bitcoin. The mark was reached though the price was a little over 50% of the record price of $19,700. News like the social media giant Facebook announcing a crypto token called Libra has caused traders to stir with the prospect of a practical use for cryptocurrency.
Though a lot of us don’t see social media as practical, we as cryptocurrency traders see the public’s usage will create a volume boom. That means blood is in the water, and sharks are swimming. Speculation rules the market.
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash
The record high is a little over a year after a lull in trading volume beginning July 2018 and ending February 2019 saw the hope for Bitcoin dwindle as support after support fell for the price. Bitcoin was dying, and traders were scared that the HODLers had done the unimaginable, and stagnated the market.
Lightning Network promised faster speeds and volume grew with the hashrate ever since the lull ended. Back then the promise of the new network brought traders who, over time, built the volume off of the lightning speed of transactions. Sooner or later it’s going to happen again, but for now we can enjoy the fact that everyone has come to the arena to see the show and make the dough.
Photo by Michal Soukup on Unsplash
Cryptocurrency itself is a system that can make or break the back of a business. Casinos added cryptocurrency as a layer of security and loyalty that has paid off for industry giants like Cloudbet. The internet has other casinos, like MyBookie, that will take USD. Still, the loyalty of a $50,000 match play with a currency not everybody has is enticing enough keep the gambling industry buzzing.
Perhaps the sporting industries big game season (Super Bowl, BCS, March Madness and NBA All Star Game) has spawned a gambling boom which has in turn sent traders hunting BTC to sell to would-be gamblers. Then again it’s a growing industry, and some unseen interactor has shown up and is unseen…for now. No matter what is causing the Super March Madness All Star Championship Bowl Tournament of Traders, it’s exciting and I’m gonna go watch it. | https://medium.com/predict/bitcoin-volume-sets-a-record-reaching-nearly-44-billion-in-24-hours-116beb5f8ec1 | ['Jake Davis'] | 2020-02-18 21:16:28.015000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Future', 'Finance', 'Trade', 'Bitcoin'] |
AI & Machine Learning Use Cases in Retail and Other Industries | We are in the midst of fourth industrial revolution (or industry 4.0), where the introduction of innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) transforming the way companies across various industries operate their businesses.
In particular, businesses organizations that are in the retail industry or e-commerce companies have been using advanced AI powered and machine learning applications including Recommender system, Chatbot, Predictive Analytics system, etc. to innovate and enhance their business processes. A number of big Retail and E-commerce players like Amazon, Alibaba, Wal-Mart, Flipkart have successfully incorporated AI and Machine Learning technologies across their entire sales cycles from logistics to sales to post-sales services, thus improve results as well as business processes.
Now, many other Retails and E-Commerce companies might question whether they can adopt AI and Machine Learning for their business needs. The answer is YES, and you do not have to be a large enterprise in order to take advantage of the immense benefits provided from using Machine Learning technology.
In this article, we explore how both e-commerce and retails companies of any size can use Machine Learning applications to enhance their business — in order to increase sales and reducing costs — staying ahead of the competition.
Examples of Machine Learning in Retail:
Recommender Systems
One of the most popular examples of machine learning in retails and e-commerce is the application of recommender system to increase sales by offering the relevant items for purchase that users could be highly interested in. By leveraging the data collected across systems, many retailers and e-commerce companies have successfully implemented recommender systems providing highly personalized offers and a custom tailored online shopping journey to users via their websites.
Not only recommender system make it easier for customers to search for the content they’re interested in, it also provides suggestions to users on the offers they would have never searched for in the first place. Moreover, companies are able to enhance their marketing activities by sending out personalized emails offering recipients with special or relevant items that suit their purchase profiles.
Once customers begin to feel like they are understood and paid particular attention to, they will likely to purchase more products or consume the services more. More importantly, by understanding what exactly your customers want or currently looking for and providing it to them right away, it will be less likely that they will leave your platform looking elsewhere. This means higher conversion rates while reducing the chance of losing to competitors.
By integrating recommendation system into their e-commerce websites, retailers are able to provide added value to their customers, and at the same time enhance their sales process, staying ahead of the competition.
Pricing Optimization
Pricing is one of the critical factors ensuring business success and profitability. Retailers and e-commerce companies can leverage the immense power of machine learning to build an effective automation pricing solution.
As you may already know, a machine learning algorithm can learn patterns from data, instead of being explicitly programmed. In case of pricing optimization, a developed algorithm take into account a number of pricing variables to determine the best prices for items sold by retailers, as well as understanding how customers react to different pricing of products and services.
Retails companies can consider various factors such as: demand, supply, competition, and other external factors which affect their businesses in order to create an automatic pricing system which efficiently using Machine Learning Technology to adjust and optimize prices.
Additionally, the algorithm can search for business data related to the company products’ pricing (e.g. competitors’ products history, or future promotional program etc.) in order for business to have better information and make informed decisions.
Predicting Customer Behavior
Imagine if businesses can predict their customers’ behavior — such as particular interest in purchasing a special kind of product, or switching to competitors for a better price — having access to this information could open up so many sales opportunities for your companies.
Based on data collected regarding customers’ previous behaviors, a system developed based on machine learning can analyze to predict how customers will behave in the future. Such system enables businesses to carry personalized marketing activities that are more effective than the traditional approaches.
For example, being able to predict which customers are more likely to convert to paid subscription after the trial period ends, or to know which ones are more likely to purchase a company’s product in the next holiday season etc. allow businesses to send out very personalized offers, or provide special customers support focus on those users who are more likely to make purchase, result in a better conversion rate. Performing sales and marketing activities that are based on predicted customers’ needs also helps increase loyalty and retention rate.
Social Media: Tracking Brand & Customer Sentiment
As mentioned in our previous blog post, Social media has changed the way people shop with almost all major retailers brand have an active online presence these days. More than just for social networking, customers can actually browse products and services, send enquiries and/or placed orders directly through social media.
Furthermore, many also use social media as an official contact channels providing customers care to their customers. Thus, tracking customers’ sentiment and monitoring brand through social media is highly important to retailers. Thanks to AI and machine learning technologies, companies can now monitor their social media on a large scale, automatically obtaining analysis of business data about what is driving traffic, engagement, and customers’ sentiments. Besides, from insights gathered, retailers can generate social media content that are relevant to the current social media trend, marketing to their customers and prospects at the right time.
In addition to tracking the mentions of their brands automatically through social media in the text form, retailers can now also monitor to see how they are portrayed through other media forms such as images and videos thanks to image recognition.
AI Powered Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Chatbot is another popular example of applying AI and machine learning technologies into retail businesses. A typical chatbots application can communicate and interact with customers, simulating a conversation that is human-like providing answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) by customers. For big e-commerce companies with large catalogue of many items, sometime it would be difficult for customers to search for the specific item they need. More particularly, many customers want and need to search for items based on item attributes (e.g. color, size, etc.) without knowing the exact search term. An advanced chatbot application can help customers with their request fairly easily, similar to a human sales associate does.
Additionally, chatbot can provide added value, enhancing customers shopping experience by suggesting additional items for purchase, and handle a significant part of your company’s online customer service.
Above are some of the common examples of applying machine learning technology in retail, business organizations in other industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and transportations, etc. are also using machine learning today to better serve customers, improve their business process and innovations.
Healthcare: One example for the use of AI in healthcare is to help detect abnormalities in X-rays and MRIs or application of a HealthCare bot which is an AI application patients can interact with via a HealthCare website or via telephone to receive help with their requests.
Transportation: Autonomous Vehicles such as self-driven cars and trucks have been of high interest in the last several years. The leading examples include big players like Uber and Tesla who have successfully built self-driving cars and trucks solutions to save time and increase productivity.
Finance: AI and Machine Learning technologies can be used in finance to detect and prevent frauds automatically. By giving the algorithm large datasets about real and fraudulent activities, machine learning models can train themselves to make better guesses on which transactions are most likely to be fraudulent and such.
Data Required For Using AI And Machine Learning In Your Businesses:
In the various examples described above, machine learning models are trained with business data in different formats (e.g. text, images, numerical, etc.) regarding customers, products, competitors, etc. gathering from various sources. Without data, machine learning models wouldn’t be able to train themselves.
In case your businesses are newly established (e.g. start-ups) or do not have the data required yet, you may need to consider ways to collect such data by crawling the web or using services from machine learning consulting companies. Generally speaking, the bigger the volume of data gathered, the better the results (although in some cases, small datasets still provide good and exploitable results).
However, the more important thing is to understand your business well and put yourself in the perspective of customers so that you can provide precisely what they want anytime, anywhere in a very personalized way.
Side-notes:
TP&P Technology is a Software Development Company based in Vietnam providing AI & Machine Learning Consulting Services and build Data-driven solutions to help customers solving their unique business challenges in different industries such as Retails, E-commerce, Finance, and Trading & Investment.
We can work as an extension of your team to consult & build custom Machine Learning application, thereby helping businesses achieve their goals and improve KPIs. All so companies can deliver innovation faster and provide unique, tailored made, and personalized experiences to their customers. | https://medium.com/@TppTechnology/ai-machine-learning-use-cases-in-retail-and-other-industries-d4b00df3427e | ['Tp P Technology'] | 2019-04-12 03:08:37.521000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Predictive Analytics', 'Machine Learning', 'Software Development'] |
Developing a Web App Platforms | The problem with Developing a Web App is that most companies are building from scratch because the current development systems on the market aren’t flexible enough to design, and as a result, they’re below the webmaster’s design standards. .. The downside is the amount of time and skill required to write the correct code to complete an efficient operation across all platforms from scratch. The time required to write that amount of code is exorbitant for many web design companies. Web developers understand the great benefits of a “code-free” platform environment that allows less-skilled code writers to complete apps for corporate clients. Custom features usually require detailed programming to work properly on all different types of mobile devices.
Many web developers are adding mobile web services for their customers, and as a result, many web developers are creating their own cookie cutter platforms. These platforms have limited branding capabilities. What it does is dramatically limit what end clients receive in relation to branding. Find a platform that is easy to design in a custom way, with the right branding features and the implementation of custom layouts within your environment. Most platforms for mobile web apps are limited and have very limited design capabilities. Templates are provided to create cookie-cutter type apps for different types of businesses with limited customization flexibility within their own development platform. Find the most flexible platform to meet your client’s branding needs
The mobile web app development platform is a proprietary software stored on its own server to protect the copied platform. The code-free capabilities of the development platform itself and the ability to customize applications are important for branding purposes. This allows webmasters to tweak its platform to create unique mobile web apps for their customers.
The industry now seems to be using “mobile-friendly” conversions when mobile devices are trying to connect to the main website. In today’s world, this isn’t enough because conversions don’t make it easy for users to view layouts, and many systems don’t seem to convert things in the right format for that particular mobile device. A good platform provides a seamless and user-friendly experience without glitches, hangs, and improper layouts. With these systems, mobile web apps can rival almost all the benefits that native apps can have. Native apps are downloaded from the Google Play App Store or one of the other services that require you to download the program to your mobile device. This is different from mobile web apps that seamlessly display on over 5000 different mobile devices around the world without download. With the advent of 4G technology, mobile Internet access is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from almost anywhere in the world. Users can access the main website, recognize that they are using one of over 5000 different types of mobile phones, tablets, and other mobile devices, and convert it into a mobile web app. If the customer is using a desktop or laptop when trying to connect to the main website, the regular website will be displayed.
Pricing is for the entire spectrum. Service costs range from less than $ 4.00 per mobile web app per month to over $ 120 per month. This is the market rate for different platforms. Platform flexibility, user-friendly development tools, and the amount of services/training provided allow webmasters and in-house “do it yourself” individuals to actually make mobile web apps and websites for themselves and their customers. Decides what to use for development. | https://medium.com/@status-200/developing-a-web-app-platforms-34e94f316e05 | [] | 2020-10-13 06:17:59.440000+00:00 | ['Web App Development', 'Web Development', 'Status 200', 'Developing Mobile Apps'] |
Adding Space Between the Cells of a UITableView | Photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash
Exordium
Thank you for stopping by the Rusty Nail Software dev blog! In this post, I will be showing you how to create a UITableView that has spacing between the cells. I came across this design as I was recently working on a client’s application. I wanted to get away from the basic table view look and use something tailored more toward the UI/UX of the client’s app. For those who work as freelance software developers — versatility in design is essential because not every client wants the same thing.
To accomplish a clean table view design with spacing between the cells; you must work with sections rather than rows. Let’s get into how to create a custom UITableView with spacing and clean design. This post assumes that you have previous experience with Swift, Xcode, and UITableViews .
You can find the source code to this post on GitHub. Be sure to start with the ‘start’ branch of the repo.
What Is Already Set Up
If you open the project and run it on a device or simulator, you will see the current UI layout. I have set up a basic restaurant review application, all done programmatically, and we’ll be working with the fictional burger shack of Rusty Nail. The first view controller you see is the RestaurantReviewsViewController class. There are two classes in the View group; one for a custom UITableViewCell and one for a custom UIView . In the current state of the app, you can see the UIView in action, as this is the orange circle that holds the restaurant logo.
Back to the RestaurantReviewsViewController . First, I’ve stored a custom struct called Review that holds three properties; the writer of the review, the restaurant receiving the review, and the review’s text. There is also a method named setupView that sets up the UI elements of the view, and a method named applyAutoConstraints which activates the constraints for said UI elements.
Furthermore, in the viewDidLoad method, the view’s background color is set, and the setupView method gets called. Lastly, you will see a section marked Extensions and a method that makes a UIView circled.
Now that we’ve gone through the current code of the main view controller let’s build that table view. If you want to take a look at the other code provided in the project, take your time and get to know how it all works together. Briefly, the RestaurantReviewCell is a custom table view cell that contains two labels; one for the name of the person reviewing the restaurant and one for the review.
Configuring the Table View
To start, initialize the data array with some reviews. In this case, I’ve used characters from the show Bob’s Burgers. The data is initialized in the setupView method.
data = [
Review(writer: “Calvin”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Okay burgers. Okay tenant. Would like to see them pay rent on time.”),
Review(writer: “Felix”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Though my brother isn’t a fan of Bob’s cooking, I can’t find a better burger on the wharf.”),
Review(writer: “Teddy”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “I’m here everyday. Couldn’t ask for a better hangout spot.”),
Review(writer: “Mickey”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Hey Bob! Thanks for feeding me during that heist. I will definitely be back to visit.”),
Review(writer: “Marshmellow”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Hey Bob.”),
Review(writer: “Rudy”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “My dad drops me off here every once in a while. I like to sit in the back corner and enjoy my food.”),
]
Next, set the delegate and dataSource of the reviewTableView . I will conform to UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource protocols in the section marked Extensions — though you can do this directly off the RestaurantReviewsViewController class. Add the following to the setupView method after reviewTableView is initialized:
reviewTableView.delegate = self
reviewTableView.dataSource = self
The setupview method should now look like this:
func setupView() {
data = [
Review(writer: “Calvin”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Okay burgers. Okay tenant. Would like to see them pay rent on time.”),
Review(writer: “Felix”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Though my brother isn’t a fan of Bob’s cooking, I can’t find a better burger on the wharf.”),
Review(writer: “Teddy”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “I’m here everyday. Couldn’t ask for a better hangout spot.”),
Review(writer: “Mickey”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Hey Bob! Thanks for feeding me during that heist. I will definitely be back to visit.”),
Review(writer: “Marshmellow”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “Hey Bob.”),
Review(writer: “Rudy”, receiver: “Rusty Nail Burgers”, reviewText: “My dad drops me off here every once in a while. I like to sit in the back corner and enjoy my food.”),
]
restaurantImageViewBackground = RestaurantImageViewBackground()
view.addSubview(restaurantImageViewBackground)
restaurantImageView = UIImageView(image: UIImage(named: “cheese-burger”))
restaurantImageView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
restaurantImageViewBackground.addSubview(restaurantImageView)
restaurantNameLabel = UILabel()
restaurantNameLabel.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
restaurantNameLabel.text = “Rusty Nail Burgers”
restaurantNameLabel.font = UIFont.boldSystemFont(ofSize: 28)
restaurantNameLabel.textColor = .black
view.addSubview(restaurantNameLabel)
starStackView = UIStackView()
starStackView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
starStackView.alignment = .center
starStackView.axis = .horizontal
starStackView.spacing = 5
for _ in 0…5 {
let starView = UIImageView(image: UIImage(systemName: “star.fill”))
starView.frame = CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 40, height: 40)
starView.tintColor = .black
starStackView.addArrangedSubview(starView)
}
view.addSubview(starStackView)
reviewTableView = UITableView()
reviewTableView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
reviewTableView.delegate = self
reviewTableView.dataSource = self
view.addSubview(reviewTableView)
applyAutoConstraints()
}
The UITableViewDataSource is set up like any other table view. We return one row in each section and configure the cells based on our custom RestaurantReviewCell class. Before setting up the cell, register the UITableViewCell class used with the table view. Add the following to UITableView setup:
reviewTableView.register(RestaurantReviewCell.self, forCellReuseIdentifier: “reviewCell”)
To set up the cell, add the following to the cellForRowAt method:
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
// 1
let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier: “reviewCell”, for: indexPath) as! RestaurantReviewCell
// 2
if let writer = data[indexPath.section].writer {
cell.reviewerLabel.text = “\(writer) said:”
}
if let reviewText = data[indexPath.section].reviewText {
cell.reviewLabel.text = “\(reviewText)”
}
// 3
return cell
}
Here’s what that does:
1. Dequeue the cell, using the `reviewCell` identifier and the `RestaurantReviewCell` class.
2. Pull the data, based on the section being displayed. First, unwrap the value of the `writer` property of our data source (remember that this is of the type `Review`). Then, unwrap the value of `reviewText`.
3. Return the cell.
UI Work with the Table View
Next, in the `UITableViewDelegate`, set the number of sections of the table view to the `count` of the array `data` to create the number of sections needed to display the correct amount of data.
func numberOfSections(in tableView: UITableView) -> Int {
return data.count
}
Set the height of the rows to 140 (this can be changed according to your use case).
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, heightForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> CGFloat {
return 140
}
Now, to add the spacing to the cells, we must create a view for each section’s header. Call the `viewForHeaderInSection` method, and add the following:
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, viewForHeaderInSection section: Int) -> UIView? {
// 1
let headerView = UIView()
// 2
headerView.backgroundColor = view.backgroundColor
// 3
return headerView
}
Here is the breakdown of what was just added:
1. Create the header view as a `UIView`.
2. Set the background color of the header to the view controller’s `view.backgroundColor` property. (This creates a design effect that makes the header look transparent).
3. Return the `headerView` to set the header for each section of the table view.
This produces a basic spacing between the cells. The height of the header can be set as followed:
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, heightForHeaderInSection section: Int) -> CGFloat {
return 20
}
The UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource should look like this:
extension RestaurantReviewsViewController: UITableViewDelegate {
func numberOfSections(in tableView: UITableView) -> Int {
return data.count
}
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, heightForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> CGFloat {
return 140
} func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, viewForHeaderInSection section: Int) -> UIView? {
let headerView = UIView()
headerView.backgroundColor = view.backgroundColor
return headerView
}
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, heightForHeaderInSection section: Int) -> CGFloat {
return 20
}
} extension RestaurantReviewsViewController: UITableViewDataSource {
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int {
return 1
}
func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier: “reviewCell”, for: indexPath) as! RestaurantReviewCell
if let writer = data[indexPath.section].writer {
cell.reviewerLabel.text = “\(writer) said:”
}
if let reviewText = data[indexPath.section].reviewText {
cell.reviewLabel.text = “\(reviewText)”
}
return cell
}
}
Finishing Up
Earlier I mentioned a ‘clean’ design. Right now, each cell’s design looks like a basic UITableViewCell ; a white rectangle. To add to the ‘cleanliness’ of the design, change the leadingAnchor and trailingAnchor to push the table view sides 20 points away from each side of the view:
reviewTableView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.leadingAnchor, constant: 20),
reviewTableView.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.trailingAnchor, constant: -20),
The cells are still basic white rectangles, even though the RestaurantReviewCell has its layer.cornerRadius set to 20. This is because the table view’s background color is white. To fix this, we must remove the background color of the table view, which is currently white. Remove the background of the table view by setting the backgroundColor property of the table view to .clear .
reviewTableView.backgroundColor = .clear
Finally, since this is a basic list, tapping the cells is useless and doesn’t add to the user experience. To disable tapping on the table view, set the allowsSelection property to false .
reviewTableView.allowsSelection = false
Closing Notes
Thanks for stopping by Rusty Nail Software and reading one of our blog posts! If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you and your team are looking for a dependable iOS Developer, let’s talk about your project. Feel free to get in touch on social media, or via email. You can also read more of my writings on my blog. | https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/adding-space-between-the-cells-of-a-uitableview-590a0cfd2e22 | ['Andrew Lundy'] | 2020-12-30 02:57:23.574000+00:00 | ['iOS App Development', 'iOS', 'App Development', 'Swift Programming', 'Software Engineering'] |
Kollywood in portraying female characters | Kollywood has always been a pioneer in portraying females as lead or holding gravity female roles.
Let’s start this list in chronological order.
Kalathur Kanamma (1959):
This movie released in 1960 was positively received and declared a hit. The name ‘Kannamma’ in the title is the female lead of the movie. Notably, this is the maiden movie of Kamal Hassan.
Pasa Malar (1961):
This is a trendsetting movie for brother-sister affection in Tamil cinema. This is surely one of the best movies of actress Savithri. There is an interesting instance to be remembered while the shoot of this movie. After an emotional scene in the movie was shot, Sivaji Ganesan and Savitri literally cried for one hour just because they can’t come out of their roles easily. Such a meaty and intense role, Kollywood has offered females way back in 1961.
Vani-Rani (1974):
This movie portrays the female role in a double act. The entire film revolves around the chaos created when the duo swaps their positions. And this movie also deemed to be a blockbuster.
Aval Oru Thodar Kadhai (1974):
This Balachandar directed masterpiece totally revolves around a middle-class woman who sacrifices her life to support her family. This director played a vital role in carving a stature for women in Tamil Cinema. He just reflected the plight of middle-class women in this movie.
Enipadigal (1979):
This Sivakumar starred movie revolves talented young girl becoming a movie star.
Moondram Pirai (1982) :
This movie portrays Sridevi as a mentally challenged girl who seeks asylum under Kamal Hassan. The actress is still remembered for this role.
Sindhu Bhairavi (1985):
One of the very early movies to deal with polygamy. This musical blockbuster is yet another testimonial to Balachandar’s brilliance.
Mouna Raagam (1986):
Then there came the master Mani Rathnam to the stage. Every movie of his will surely have a strong female role. This movie is no exception. Or probably the best movie of his to showcase a strong female role in the industry. The character ‘Dhivya’ depicted by actress Revathy is one of the most intense female roles.
Anjali (1990):
This movie moves around a mentally challenged young girl and her survival. Again a cult classic by Mani Rathnam.
Roja (1992):
The entire POV of the movie is from a rural girl Roja, who struggles in Kashmir to retrieve her husband from terrorists. Both a female lead and patriotic movie by Mani Rathnam.
Karuthamma (1994):
This movie accentuated the importance of a girl child in the state. The movie was well-received.
Padayappa (1999):
This blockbuster gave us ‘Neelambari’, the testimonial to any villain female lead in the industry. Probably one of the very few Rajni-starred movies where another character held equal gravity in the movie as the hero role.
Alaipayuthey (2000):
This love story showed a very intense female character played by actress Shalini. Easily one of the best movies of the decade.
Kannathil Muthammital (2002):
A movie that’ll surely stir us from inside. This film revolves around a girl adopted from a Srilankan-Tamil mother who denounces her during a chaotic situation, goes to Srilanka to see her parents. There are two female leads in the movie. One is the Amudha (the protagonist girl) and the other is Indira (an affectionate mother of the girl).
Maaya (2015):
This horror movie has no male lead. The film was well-received to become a box office hit.
Iraivi (2016):
The movie’s name itself means a “Goddess”. The film shows how a man’s action affects his family, who are in no way responsible for the act.
Aram (2017):
Another movie to have no male lead. This movie revolves around a woman collector and her life.
Aruvi (2017):
A rare movie to deal with AIDS and that too with a female lead. Yes, the movie revolves around a young girl who got infected with HIV and her life aftermath. Surprisingly the movie became a blockbuster proving that the industry encourages even a controversial movie with a female lead.
So, here I conclude. I know what I listed are very few among the plethora of movies out there. I gave a bit more importance to old movies as they are less likely to be known. Suggest me if you know any. | https://medium.com/@giridharvel/kollywood-in-portraying-female-characters-3cc267589bee | ['Giridharan Shanmugavel'] | 2020-12-22 05:56:37.333000+00:00 | ['Feminism', 'Cinema', 'Kollywood', 'Indian Cinema', 'Society'] |
Neblio Partners with Leading Australian Blockchain Development Firm Labrys | We are extremely excited to announce that Neblio has partnered with Labrys , a Brisbane, Australia-based blockchain development company to provide Labrys’ current and future clients with blockchain solutions built on Neblio’s technology. Founded in 2017, Labrys boasts an award-winning portfolio of innovative blockchain projects across the industries of Finance, Government, Healthcare, and Supply Chain.
Labrys offers a full suite of blockchain development services, including consulting, design, proof-of-concepts, project management, blockchain integrations, security token development, and much more. Their talented team has built security-token trading platforms, identity management software suites for governments, patient health record management systems, and textile supply chain tracking platforms to name a few.
With the Australian government recently releasing a very forward-thinking National Blockchain Roadmap, opportunities for blockchain-based firms are rapidly increasing in the Land Down Under. Neblio’s next generation scalability, simplicity, and unique metadata & tokenization features will reduce development time and greatly expand the solutions Labrys is able to offer its clients. The Neblio development team will work directly with the Labrys team where necessary to ensure they are able to unlock the full potential of Neblio’s technology, tools, services, and blockchain platform.
If you have any questions, comments, or ideas regarding Labrys & Neblio, we encourage you to get in touch with the Labrys Team or the Neblio Team to schedule a meeting to learn how Labrys & Neblio can help your business grow to the next level. | https://medium.com/neblio-blog/neblio-partners-with-leading-australian-blockchain-development-firm-labrys-8573d6ea2a9e | [] | 2020-05-06 15:18:02.835000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Enterprise Software', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain'] |
Ford v Ferrari | Start your engines.
The title of this thrilling film by James Mangold may sound like it’s a story of American ingenuity versus Italian craftsmanship, but the happiest surprise of this very fun ride is that the movie is about the struggle of the artists against the suits. In this case, the artists are the legendary driver and car builder Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) who team up to build and drive the fastest American race car. They end up working for the Ford Motor Company, which wants to try to win a race at Le Mans, in order to beat a sales slump. Ford executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) convinces Henry Ford II (the fabulous Tracy Letts) to try to build a Ford to beat the six-time champion Ferrari at the 24 hours at Le Mans.
The biggest nemesis in the movie is John Beebe, the head of marketing at Ford (Josh Lucas, relishing the opportunity to play the meanie, bad hair included). Marketing is about surface and optics, and it dehumanizes people. And so Beebe doesn’t like that Miles looks like a schlub. He doesn’t care about his talent, or his courage, all he cares is that he doesn’t represent the brand, and he is willing to die on that hill even as Miles amply demonstrates he is the only guy for the job. Meanwhile we see the toll it takes on everyone to try to be as fast possible.
Damon and Bale are both spectacular and have genuine chemistry together. Damon’s acting is precise and unobtrusive. Bale inhabits the role of the eccentric Miles with his usual fierceness but brings charm and sweetness to the role. The racing scenes are shot up close and the sound of the engines and brakes is high so the audience can get close to vicariously understanding what it feels like drive a little car at over 200 miles per hour. Watching the cars zip by reminded me why I used to like to pick up speed on the highway. It’s a great feeling even at 90 miles an hour. Also, very dangerous.
Even though some of the writing by the Butterworth brothers and Mangold is a bit trite, the movie is gorgeously made, the race scenes are thrilling, and the entire cast rises above the din of the engines with verve. I am not a guy, I don’t care about cars, and I had a blast. | https://grandenchilada.medium.com/ford-v-ferrari-bdadee2bb325 | ['Yehudit Mam'] | 2019-11-17 18:34:01.801000+00:00 | ['Cars', 'Film Reviews', 'Film', 'Movie Review', 'Movies'] |
Fairytale Retellings: What Old Stories May Still Offer to the Modern Reader | Fairytales have been around for a long time. Millennia-kind of a long time. They’ve accompanied us for a long, long time and some have become almost second-nature to us. Everybody has heard them as kids and recounted them as adults.
They have insinuated in our lives in so many forms, always changing, always themselves. And of course, as writers, we have often appropriated them and make them our own.
But isn’t it odd?
As writers, we pursue the elusive idea of originality. If this is what we are expected to achieve, why are we still telling the same fairytales? And why are readers still reading them?
Retellings are addictive
I became fascinated with retellings when I was a teenager. After reading The Mist of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, I became obsessed with the Arthurian Legends. I discovered there were many different versions from many different periods, and — still more awesome — there were many different modern versions. Every time seems to have its own retelling of the story and, most fascinating of all, so many authors have given the story their own spin.
I suppose that’s when I became addicted to retellings. The fact that I could get the same story I love over and over again, and never the exact same one.
These stories are old and new at the same time. They are recognizable, familiar. In a way, they are like old friends. But at the same time, they are never the story we know. They always have something to offer, they can always surprise us. There is always something new to discover about them.
This is something I’ve realised a long time ago. But writing my own retelling in the last few months have made me think more closely to what it is that retellings can give to a writer, and therefore to a reader.
The power of these old stories
The secret to the power fairytales still carry, in my opinion, resides in their antiquity. They have been told for millennia, changing many times over the centuries, but far from having worn out over this time, they have gathered meaning and strength. They have become richer, and at the same time, they have learned to adapt, they have learned new languages, over and over again.
Adaptability is the magic world here, which is already a great lesson for a writer.
But there’s even more.
Fairytales have a strong message for our hearts
This is often why they have survived so long. Their core message is universal. They speak to us as human beings.
Their core message is universal. They speak to us as human beings.
As readers, we consume stories because we want to learn something about ourselves. We read because we want to understand things about ourselves that we can’t quite explain. Deep inside, we all have the same fears and the same hopes and the same desires. And fairytales know this.
When as authors, we pair up with fairytales, they lend us what they have learned about fears and desires and hopes over the centuries. We can let them lend us their characters, their plots, their twists, so that we may look further. We can experiment, we can search deeper.
It’s liberating. But it’s also challenging and inspiring. Pursuing my own retelling has allowed me to address my usual themes with a different take. Even as I bent the fairytale, it forced me to explore new territories that I might have never tackle without that prompt.
Fairytales speak the language of the heart
When they were first told, fairytales didn’t have the form we know now. Many fairytales were first recounted in a prehistoric time. I’m not joking. Scholars who have analysed their structure and elements have been able to determine that some well-known fairytales probably date back to Prehistory. Snow White, and especially Little Red Riding Hood appear to be among these.
It is clear, then, that fairytales have gone through huge changes through the many centuries of their existence. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, acquired the form we know today only a couple of centuries ago. Nothing, in comparison to its long life. It also appears that some of the older fairytales exist in many different cultures across the globe, even far away from one another (Cinderella has its own Chinese version, for example), though there is no accordance among scholars of how this happened.
Fairytales don’t fear to change and adapt. This is how they survived over the millennia. They changed, but they remained the same, to the point that we can recognise them no matter the language and the culture or the time. Adapting doesn’t mean losing themselves. It means reaching out to new readers, speaking their language.
Fairytales don’t fear to change and adapt. This is how they survived over the millennia. They changed, but they remained the same
This is how the very concept of retelling exists: as readers, we’ll recognise the story no matter what dress it will wear. This means that as writers, we will be free to experiment if we stay true to the core of the story. Retellings show us what’s crucial and what’s just makeup. What’s crucial is universal, and we’ll always connect with it. And because we connect with the heart of the story, we can play around with everything else.
Fairytales are old friends of ours
When we combine the steady core with the shifting language, we come to the true power of fairytale retellings. Telling our own version of a well-known story puts us writers in a place where we would always want to be, but we seldom are: we know quite well what readers expect and think.
Writer and readers both know the story, they both know the plot, the characters and the themes. So the writer has the opportunity to twist and turn the story, in a way that will surprise the readers once they have recognised the story.
But it isn’t just a matter of surprise.
Twisting the story will make it richer. Readers will have a notion of the original story, and the new twist, rather than destroy the old story, will enrich it. Our own theme will overlay the theme of the classic story, and the dialogue between old and new will give the possibility to spark even newer thoughts and reflection.
If we are faithful to the story, we can afford to betray it in all possible ways.
This is what I love about fairytale retellings. I’m thrilled that I’ve finally come to write my own.
— — — — — — — — — — —
Sarah Zama wrote her first story when she was nine. Fourteen years ago, when she started her job in a bookshop, she discovered books that address the structure of a story and she became addicted to them. Today, she’s a dieselpunk author who writes fantasy stories historically set in the 1920s. Her life-long interest in Tolkien has turned quite nerdy recently.
She writes about all her passions on her blog https://theoldshelter.com/ | https://medium.com/the-gogs-and-gears-storyteller/fairytale-retellings-what-old-stories-may-still-offer-to-the-modern-reader-5168b5bfefc | [] | 2019-11-10 13:53:27.140000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Writing', 'Writers On Writing', 'Fantasy', 'Fairy Tale'] |
When Marketing Platforms Merge Into One | Digital Marketing Technology keeps evolving, and businesses have to keep up to stay ahead in the competition. Marketing cut across several platforms and businesses try as much as possible to feature on each platform to get maximum exposure for their products and services.
APIs Integration
It has gotten to the point that even an account manager has to work on ten to twenty different platforms that have no connection to each other. This usually result into loss of interaction data and time, and this is becoming an Achilles heel for marketers looking for a way to manage the enormous amount of data and report on the progress of their marketing campaigns.
https://youtu.be/AQo7grfpA0k
What if there is a platform that can help you take care of all that? Oh, there is now! PlatformCore was founded to be the one-stop solution to marketing problems faced by businesses. PlatformCore helps businesses to improve their working methods by providing a simplified approach to marketing with a platform where you can integrate every other platform you uses for efficient management to improve productivity. Every interaction you make within the platform will have an impact on others and will improve your return on investment through time-saving and valuable resources.
Analytic
Content Management | https://medium.com/@platformcore.uk/when-marketing-platforms-merge-into-one-8f05c123e749 | ['Tommy Lambert'] | 2019-07-06 06:19:03.502000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Platform', 'New Technology', 'Management Software', 'API'] |
Aliens Are Here, And They Just Wanna Be Our Friends | Aliens Are Here, And They Just Wanna Be Our Friends
Like, they really REALLY want to be our friends
Courtesy of Chris & Jack
Since the dawn of mankind, we’ve looked to the stars and wondered what’s up there. Or, better yet, who is up there. In hopes of someday finding answers, the space probe Voyager 1 was sent out into deep space in 1977, carrying with it a time capsule full of sounds and pictures to show whomever may find it what Earth is all about.
What if the Voyager 1 eventually does find intelligent alien life way out in the cosmos?
And what if they… actually kind of suck?
It’s always felt like there’s this unspoken idea that if we ever make alien contact they’ll be very serious creatures. Intelligent, war-like, or indifferent. So the idea that they may be a bit much and a tough hang really tickled us.
Luckily this is a question none of us have to ponder, because the latest creation from comedy duo Chris & Jack has all the answers. In this hilarious sketch, the aliens who make contact with Earth in response to Voyager 1 aren’t… quite what everyone was expecting. Much like your college roommate in freshman year, these guys just want to be your best buds, and definitely need to take their enthusiasm about it down a dial or two. Or three. And, also like your first college roommate, what they lack in personal boundaries they make up for in fart jokes.
Although Chris & Jack’s body of work has covered everything from how villains workshop their monologues before the secret agent arrives to the inevitable hostile robot takeover, two things you can always expect from them are fantastic writing and award-worthy performances. According to them they improvised as these aliens for half a day, and the dedication shows.
Clear out some time in your day, because this 7-and-a-half minute video is one you’re gonna want to watch more than once. | https://medium.com/funny-or-die/aliens-are-here-and-they-just-wanna-be-our-friends-8b74ef4b7f0a | ['Funny Or Die'] | 2020-12-21 23:43:34.001000+00:00 | ['Friends', 'Aliens', 'Funny Sketch', 'Jack', 'Funny Best Of The Web'] |
State of the Guild #19 | GuildChat development schedule updates and TronTrade events
Welcome to the latest State of the Guild — the weekly compendium of news and updates straight from the BitGuild world. This week we fill you in on the development status for GuildChat’s new version, and catch you up on all the events and activities going on over at TronTrade. Now dig in!
GuildChat
For the past two weeks, the QA and Marketing teams, as well as the GuildKeepers, have been testing the beta version of GuildChat and providing their feedback to the development team. The main issues encountered included the loading time for messages plus other technical and structural bugs. To tackle these issues and provide a fully functional app with a great user experience, the development team has requested an additional two weeks of development (using Native App Development), which means our public beta release schedule will be pushed back by about three weeks.
On the QA side, a total of 385 issues were reported last week, and combined with the previous sprint, our development team has fixed 424 issues. Additionally, the first round of pressure testing of interfaces (claiming coin drops, login, account, transfer list, friends) was successfully completed by our QA team.
Next week we’ll start Sprint 8, during which engineers will be working on performance optimization, architecture refactoring, fixing bugs, and UI optimization. The UI team is designing the UI and animation of the welcome page.
An updated beta version will be provided today (August 30). The current schedule for development is as follows:
The second round of UAT (User Acceptance Testing) will last from August 30 until September 9.
All the feedback will be collected, prioritized, and assigned to engineers before September 3rd.
Fixing bugs and performance optimizations will last about 10 days, and the Final Round Testing will start after that, lasting approximately 10 days.
We plan to submit to the App Store around September 22.
The schedule is subject to change depending on the assessment of the product team and the amount of improvements identified.
TronTrade
We’ve been busy over at TronTrade, with three trading events going on right now: Topia and Diamond events from the TronTopia team, as well as the Bankroll event.
Topia Event: 100,000 TRX for the top 100 Traders.Ends 08/31, 23:59 UTC
Diamond Event: 100,000 TRX for the top 50 Traders.Ends 09/06, 23:59 UTC
Bankroll Event: 30,000 BNKR for the top 50 Traders.Ends 09/08, 23:59 UTC
For more details, check out our trading events page.
This week we also hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the TronTopia team. If you missed it, don’t worry — we got you covered. The AMA transcript is now up on our TronTrade Medium page.
That is all for this week, but there’s lots of new stuff coming up on the pipeline. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Telegram so you don’t miss out on any news!
BitGuild aims to bring blockchain and cryptocurrency adoption to the masses by providing compelling experiences that are easily accessible. BetweenGuildChat, our crypto social app, GuildWallet, the most user-friendly browser extension wallet, and TronTrade, our decentralized exchange, we’re firing on all cylinders to usher in a new age, changing the way people interact with their digital goods. | https://medium.com/the-notice-board/state-of-the-guild-19-864966a8bc85 | [] | 2019-08-30 10:26:43.674000+00:00 | ['Tron', 'Trx', 'Software Development', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Eminer hash rate platform | Hi,this is Eminer,the best cryptocurrency mining assitant.
Also,Eminer is a hash rate platform.
As an innovative global blockchain hash rate financial service platform, Eminer aims to re-define the mining industrial ecology based on blockchain hash rate and endow platform hash rate and devices certain value liquidity through specific methods to finally build into a blockchain hash rate financial service platform integrating hash rate service, financial service, investment service and information service.
Problems solved
Eminer hash rate service platform is launched mainly to solve the major pain points facing the current mining industries so as to involve more investors at lower thresholds and share the bonus brought by blockchain development.
Lowering industrial threshold and improving assets liquidity
After endowing miners, mining farms and other fixed assets and hash rate certain value liquidity through specific way of platform, Eminer platform lowers the access thresholds of the entire mining industry so as to involve more investors interested in mining without investing costly fixed assets cost and share the returns brought by mining. Meanwhile, the assets liquidity of mining farms and miners is improved to achieve faster development.
2. Carrying out large-scale and professional operation to lower expenditure cost
Compared with the mining ecosystem that is small, scattered and localized, large-scale and professional operation is the trend and direction for future mining industry. Eminer platform will produce certain scale effect through continuous building and purchase of infrastructure and mining devices and cooperation with other ecology partners, thereby lowering platform purchase, construction and operation cost. Meanwhile, due to the large scale of platform, it enjoys comparative advantage in electricity resources and compliance qualification.
3. Providing cross-currency mining service to improve mining DOF
As the consensus algorithm among different currencies varies, the miners required also vary. As a result, it puts some limits to the DOF of miners. However, Eminer platform can provide mining services of different currencies under different conditions according to the personalized requirements of miners so as to enhance the mining DOF of miners.
4. Empowering financial attribute to provide financial services for users
The development of any industries cannot be separated from financial support. Eminer platform continues to expand its financial services and products and provide all-directional financial services and support for ecosystem members such as miners, mining farms, pools and miners manufacturers and help the member to better stay afloat. | https://medium.com/@eminer/eminer-hash-rate-platform-80b480b1777a | [] | 2019-07-01 10:29:49.708000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Mining'] |
7 Sequential Operators You Should Know From Swift Combine | 7 Sequential Operators You Should Know From Swift Combine
first, last, count, contains, allSatisfy, reduce, and more
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash.
In this article, we will master seven useful sequential Combine operators. We will use an Xcode Playground to quickly experiment with examples.
The source code of all the examples is available at the bottom of the article. | https://medium.com/better-programming/7-sequential-operators-you-should-know-from-swift-combine-1775ce3c47c8 | ['Zafar Ivaev'] | 2020-07-22 10:53:05.893000+00:00 | ['Mobile', 'Xcode', 'iOS', 'Swift', 'Programming'] |
How to Start Writing a Novel | How to Start Writing a Novel
Tips on Jumping into the Narrative Waters
Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash
A couple of years ago, I reached out to aspiring writers to ask what challenges they faced in their writing. More than 2,000 writers have answered my survey, 5 Quick Questions About Your Writing Life. 66% of respondents said the hardest part of writing a novel is getting started. Maintaining a writing habit came in second.
For me, maintaining a habit for the long haul is the hardest part. This was true when I wrote my first novel 17 years ago, and it’s still true today, six novels in. Beginning is fun and full of promise. It’s the novel’s middle distance where I start to get weary, wondering how I’ll reach the other side. In the beginning, you don’t yet know what can go wrong, and how long it will take to fix it.
I’ll address writing habits in a separate post, but let’s tackle the big one first: how do you sit down in the chair and begin the hard work of getting the words on the page?
Step One
Get past thinking, “I’m writing a novel.” Instead, tell yourself, “I’m writing a few words today” or “I’m writing a piece of my novel today.”
Writing a novel is a daunting challenge and a major, time-consuming endeavor. Looking from the starting line to the finish line, miles away, can be mentally paralyzing. The only way to start your novel without psyching yourself out is to break it up into small, daily tasks. Approach each day as a mini-project, not a major project. The mini-project is a scene, a chapter, or a page for that day.
Step Two
You don’t have to know where you’re going. You don’t need an outline. You don’t even need a plot to get started. Just come up with these three things:
a specific (interesting) person
in a specific place and time
facing a specific problem
Who is the protagonist? What trouble is he or she in? Where and when does your story take place?
Character, conflict, setting. From these three elements, all of the rest flows.
Step Three
Come up with a situation that is worthy of a novel. The situation has to be big enough, the problem great enough, to sustain a novel for 250–400 pages. Beyond that, the protagonist has to be deeply invested in the problem. The stakes have to be high. You have to give the reader a reason to care about what happens to your protagonist, a reason to care about the outcome of this situation.
Watch my quick lesson on how to determine if your situation is novel-worthy.
So, if you’re having trouble getting started, do this:
Stop saying, “I’m writing a novel,” and say instead, “I’m writing a piece of my novel today,” or even just, “I’m exploring ideas for my novel today.”
Remember your three essential things: person, place, desire.
Determine if your situation is novel-worthy.
Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels and two story collections, including the psychological thriller The Marriage Pact, which has been published in 30 languages. She is the founder of Fiction Master Class and Novel in 5. | https://medium.com/a-writers-life/how-to-start-writing-a-novel-911d5ec45d16 | ['Michelle Richmond'] | 2020-12-11 19:40:16.718000+00:00 | ['Novel Writing', 'Writing', 'How To Start Writing', 'How To Write A Book', 'Creativity'] |
Trinity | photo by PhilipBarrington | pixabay.com
In the beginning
before there was death
was the Speaker,
Word, and Breath.
The three that is one and
the one that is three:
a paradox
and mystery.
A dance of love
to receive and to give;
eternal returning,
breathe in and live. | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/trinity-639f256efa92 | ['Darryl Willis'] | 2018-09-26 15:31:10.963000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Poetry', 'Poets Unlimited'] |
Are You Doing Your Manifestations Totally Wrong? | Are You Doing Your Manifestations Totally Wrong?
Reasons why sometimes even manifesting daily does not work. VIRGO Follow Jul 15 · 3 min read
Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash
Affirmations are positive statements that help us overcome negative and self-destructing thoughts of our minds. Sometimes when we affirm things, we think about them at every moment of the day and want them to happen right away because we think that this is how affirmations work!
Think about your goals; Make a vision of them in your mind; write them on a paper or your journal 5–6 times daily; read them aloud; believe in them and then you are gonna be attracting the things or goals that you manifested through your subconscious mind and finally there would be a time when you have that things in actual.
Well! almost everybody is well aware of this message and the manifestation techniques. But in reality, sometimes these manifestations methods do not really work. Why?
Sometimes, these manifestations make our life even more frustrating and anxious when things don’t happen the way they are supposed to happen, even after manifesting strongly. Why?
Well! sometimes, this happens with me, and it happens with many people out there too! What is the reason behind it? And why doesn’t it work for some people?
Reasons our manifestations don’t work often
To answer this first let's ask ourselves this very simple question;
“Why do we attempt to manifest in the first place?”
Because we are not happy with our present lives.
We are not satisfied with the things that we are doing now.
We want our lives to get better.
We want to feel happiness by achieving some goals and things that we think make our life more worth living.
In short, we are not happy in our present moment. Either we are stuck in our pasts, which is definitely defining our present situation, or we are thinking too much about our future.
We are projecting our happiness into the future through our goals and manifestations.
I am definitely not suggesting that we shouldn’t manifest. It’s just that sometimes these things also make our life more frustrating instead of making it better.
Because we are too much immersed in a good and bright future imagination that we stop living in the present moment. And when these manifestations don’t work in a specific period, we get anxious and start thinking more negatively about ourselves and our lives such as, “Even these things don’t work for me and start thinking that there is no way out there for me to be better and make my life better.”
Thus, we get more discouraged and more disappointed in our lives.
What can be the right way to manifest and not getting carried away with it.
There is nothing better than being in the present moment; live in it fully and enjoy the little happy things that are happening in our life now without even asking for them. Being grateful for what we have in this present moment, i.e. life, family, home, food on our table, relationships, friends, job, work, kindness, laughter, love, blessings, happiness; it can be anything.
Because when we feel grateful and acknowledge these little blessings in our life, then life seems a little smoother and happy and less difficult than we think it is!
Being grateful for the little blessings brings more blessings in our lives and in a much bigger way than we expect.
3. Manifest daily but don’t chase your manifestations too much. Because what we run after the most, that thing becomes more difficult to be caught and ultimately brings disappointment.
Instead, be patient and live in balance with your life and manifestations.
Choose to live in your present moment by knowing that you don’t have to chase anything. Just manifest what you want and leave it in the hands of the universe to complete them. When the time is right and you are ready to welcome change in your life and align with your manifestation, these will automatically flow into your life.
Life is precious. Time is precious. Don’t ever waste even a single second of it only thinking about the future and ignoring your present moment in which you can choose to be happy.
Always remember,
Happiness is a choice, and we create happiness through our efforts in the present moment.
Thanks for reading! | https://medium.com/illumination/are-you-doing-your-manifestations-totally-wrong-b3faa853ddfc | [] | 2021-07-15 19:28:12.310000+00:00 | ['Feeling Good', 'Personal Development', 'Manifestation', 'Goals', 'Life Lessons'] |
Elrond to provide the infrastructure layer for liquidity aggregator Orion Protocol | The first killer app for blockchain has been here for a while and that is money. Be it in the form of stable coins, tokens or many of the emerging decentralized finance tools, crypto’s core use case right now is value transfer and trading. The cryptocurrency markets represent the sum of centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, dark pools and over-the-counter trading. While the total value exchanging hands every day is in the tens of billions of dollars, only certain cryptocurrency pairs have significant volume, and even that is fragmented over a number of different exchanges.
Orion Protocol is a liquidity aggregator that connects centralized & decentralized exchanges to give cryptocurrency buyers & sellers access to more volume and tighter spreads. By deploying a set of smart contracts for managing liquidity and matching & executing orders directly between different chains, traders will have access to more liquidity than any single exchange and more cryptocurrency pairs which they can trade with less friction and costs.
Capitalizing on narrow timeframes of opportunity, quickly matching orders and executing trades in real time is critical for the success of Orion. In order to achieve its goals, Orion Protocol has chosen Elrond as infrastructure partner, to benefit from our top performing Virtual Machine and near-instant smart contract execution, as well as the high throughput and low costs that we natively provide. Elrond’s additional blockchain interoperability capabilities will contribute to Orion Protocol’s long-term success.
“We are proud to partner with Elrond and work together to bring a decentralized trading experience that is unmatched. Elrond’s unparalleled performance and scalability allows completely moving high-frequency trading familiar in traditional stock exchanges, to blockchain technology.” — Alexey Koloskov, CEO of Orion Protocol
The mutually beneficial partnership will provide Orion Protocol with the needed high throughput, low costs and fast execution times, while the Elrond blockchain gains yet another partner operating on top of it to further prove its capabilities and readiness for adoption.
“Levelling the playing field between centralized and decentralized exchanges, in order to bring liquidity in the fragmented crypto space, is an important step towards a truly free and direct marketplace. Orion Protocol has the right tools and approach for achieving this goal, and needs fast infrastructure & interoperability to come to life. We are pleased to support their vision and to enable their goals with Elrond’s high throughput and fast finality.” said Beniamin Mincu, CEO & Founder of Elrond.
About Orion
Orion is an all-in-one platform featuring a wide array of DeFi products. Its advanced Liquidity Aggregator Protocol is a standard for connecting to centralized and decentralized exchanges, enabling an ecosystem of dApps to solve liquidity issues and price parity. Orion enables cross-chain trading, omni-exchange accessibility, and liquidity among many other industry-needed features.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/orion_protocol
Telegram: https://t.me/orionprotocol
About Elrond
Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.
Elrond is built by a team of experienced entrepreneurs along with 13 engineers and researchers with significant blockchain backgrounds and technical experience at Microsoft, Google, Intel, and NTT DATA. The team includes two PhDs in CS & AI, multiple math, CS, and AI Olympiad champions, and a former member of the NEM core team. | https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/elrond-to-provide-the-infrastructure-layer-for-liquidity-aggregator-orion-protocol-f4fda4e3f322 | ['Lucian Todea'] | 2019-11-27 15:45:56.354000+00:00 | ['Scalability', 'Trading', 'Elrondbd', 'Defi', 'Blockchain'] |
Creating Waves in Immersive Tech: Meet Amy Shakespeare | She leads innovation across the museum sector with her work at Cornwall Museums Partnership and the Immersive Museum Network. From the wAVEs projects connecting England to Sicily to promoting accessibility and diversity through the latest AR, VR, and XR technologies, Amy Shakespeare Innovation Manager at Cornwall Museum Partnerships shares with us her thoughts on integrating new ways of working within the arts and inspiring others with the limitlessness of technology.
Amy, looking back, you have had a professional route that has been woven with innovation and visitor experiences. Can you share a bit about your path into the cultural sector and your current role as Cornwall Museums Partnership’s Innovation Manager?
I completed a degree in History at the University of Exeter, at the Cornwall Campus. I was drawn to the course there as it had modules in Public History — something that wasn’t available elsewhere until postgraduate level. During this time I completed a placement at the National Trust and volunteered at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. However, when I graduated I decided to go into recruitment consulting. After five miserable months, I quit with nothing lined up — realizing that as nice as it was, money wasn’t my main driver.
Following this, I got a job with the National Trust at Godolphin as Visitor Services Officer, managing the house and collections, marketing, and events. After 11 months I secured a promotion to Senior Visitor Experience Officer managing three sites across the Tin Coast and the visitor experience for West Cornwall countryside. During this role, I started my MA in Heritage and Interpretation with the University of Leicester.
Then, I decided it was time for a change as I wanted to progress my career, and I happened to attend one of Cornwall Museums Partnership’s events where I learnt about their goal to create positive social change with museums. I knew it was something I was keen to be involved with.
I applied to be their first Marketing and Impact Officer, but a few months later was project managing the Cornwall Heritage Awards, and then got the job managing the wAVE Project. During this project (which seeks to create immersive experiences in five museums in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly), we realised that there were lots of research and development opportunities for the charity — specifically around innovating with new and emerging technologies. New projects and collaborations were rapidly coming on-board, so we restructured to create a new Innovation Team, which made me the new Innovation Manager in early 2020.
I describe my specialism as being interpretation in all its forms, so I am particularly interested in how we can innovate to create better and more accessible, decolonised, and inclusive interpretation utilising the potential that immersive technology offers.
During my time at CMP I have completed my MA, winning the Professor Susan Pearce Prize for my dissertation ‘What If We Want To Give It Back? The Potential of Democratising The Repatriation Process in Britain’, and have now started a PhD with the University of Exeter.
Can you share more about Cornwall Museums Partnership and its mission?
Cornwall Museums Partnership is an independent charitable incorporated organisation, formed in 2015 to provide leadership for Cornwall’s museums; to support them, represent them and give them a voice. Our purpose is to create positive social change with museums. We do this through four areas of work:
Commissioning programmes
Brokering partnerships
Delivering training and skills development
Research and development
Also, what exciting projects that have been happening or are in the pipeline?
We’ve got the wAVE immersive experiences launching at museums across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in May which is really exciting — two VR, one AR, and two apps.
Through wAVE we’ve developed MuseumLens™ with local tech company Pansensic which is a new way of conducting evaluation through chatbots and data scraping of social media and review sites.
I’ve also been managing a project funded by the Museums Association Esmee Fairbairn Fund and The Space, to enable audiences to explore under-utilised audio archives through voice user interfaces in partnership with tech company Hi9. There are 216 variations of experience that users can access through their smart speakers or smart phones and we’ve been working with Plymouth University’s EPIC Health programme to work with care homes in Cornwall who have smart speakers and can use the experience for reminiscence work with residents.
I also founded the Museums Immersive Network which seeks to further establish the use of immersive technology in the sector through webinars and podcasts. This is a truly international network with over 300 members based all over the world.
We have a few exciting projects in the pipeline and I can’t say too much at this stage what they are, but they build on wAVE and our other projects. We are looking to investigate two main strands of immersive technology; the ability to make our museums more accessible in all senses of the word, and supporting museums with practical tools to decolonise.
wAVE Project
Now, wAVE is an amazing project that brings together heritage, academics, and the latest technology. Can you share more about the premise of wAVE, what is stands for, and the impact you have made so far?
The wAVE (AVE = Augmented and Virtual Experiences) Immersive Experiences in Museums Project is funded by the Coastal Communities Fund. The project brings together Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly’s coastal communities, heritage centres and academic experts to develop new and engaging virtual, augmented and immersive reality experiences within the five participating communities of Bude, Looe, St Agnes, Porthcurno and the Isles of Scilly.
wAVE was developed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership, Cornwall Museums Partnership, and Falmouth University. It aims to use Cornwall’s distinctive heritage to support digital innovation and economic diversification in five coastal communities by maximising Cornwall’s digital infrastructure, skills, and heritage for the benefit of the local economy.
The county’s distinct history coupled with its growing immersive-tech sector, presented a unique opportunity to position Cornwall at the forefront of the transformative potential of such technology.
wAVE follows three strands:
Digital Revival — Innovative technologies developed with Falmouth University’s research experts — such as VR headsets, HD projection, CGI and more — allows visitors to explore heritage sites, see artefacts in their original settings and meet historical figures in new immersive visitor experiences.
Human-Centred Design — Working with staff, volunteers, and communities to ensure that the experiences meet the needs of their future users.
Impact and Legacy — wAVE will raise the profile of Cornwall’s unique culture and heritage offer. Local communities have been involved in a programme of digital training to allow wider tourism businesses to harness the opportunity presented by immersive technology. Allowing local people to add value to their businesses through future-proofing their offer by differentiating their product, becoming more visible and accessing new virtual experiences to entice new visitors.
You can read about the impact of the project so far by viewing the project’s impact report here.
So, what was the reasoning behind implementing immersive technologies for this project? And what unique benefits do these mediums offer?
The heritage of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly is extraordinarily rich but is at times under-promoted and inaccessible. wAVE seeks to redress this by bringing together technologists, research experts, creative industries and local community networks to take visitors on an interactive and immersive journey into the past, presenting new opportunities for year-round international and domestic tourism.
In 2018, the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership published its ’10 Opportunities Strategy’ which set out its priority areas for investment. Their number one priority is the creative industries due to Cornwall’s artistic heritage and a rapidly growing digital sector. Falmouth University is one of the leading creative industries-focused universities in the country. The wAVE project aims to harness these assets, to inspire innovation and raise the region’s profile on a national stage. The two-year project runs until July 2021.
The Local Enterprise Partnership identified Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality, alongside cultural tourism as the key distinctive strength for Cornwall. wAVE’s ambition to create new and innovative visitor experiences helps to deliver the LEP’s strategic vision.
This project also allows us to capitalize on Cornwall’s £132 million investment in superfast broadband to enhance the visitor offer or drive footfall in the shoulder season, appeal to younger audiences and emerging international tourism markets. There is a large opportunity for the museums — there are 25.8 million visitors available to the five museums and the current penetration rate is just under 0.5%.
Cornwall’s distinct maritime history, coupled with its growing immersive-tech sector, leading technical and research expertise at Falmouth University presented a unique opportunity to position Cornwall at the forefront of the transformative potential of such technology
The augmented and mixed reality experiences have been co-developed with the five participating communities to interpret the areas’ diverse cultural heritage in new ways. The aim is to provide enjoyable, contemporary and inclusive virtual experiences which will strengthen the local economies.
This means the experiences are not only very different to each other but also deeply connected with the museums, their collections, and the local area.
What advice would you give to other museums and institutions looking at exploring immersive technology?
It’s a pretty common piece of advice — but don’t start with the technology, start with your collections and your stories. Think about what you want to achieve, utilize a user-centred design process, and if a form of immersive technology is still your conclusion then go for it and ask lots of questions!
Now, you not only have these awe-inspiring projects, but you are also creating waves in educating and sharing best practice with the Museum Immersive Network. Would you mind sharing more about this organization?
The Museums Immersive Network came out of a number of discussions and roundtables I was invited to around immersive technology and museums. I realised that there wasn’t one place where all of these conversations could be captured, and yet it was an emerging part of practice that people were keen to learn more about.
Once I had the idea, I got into conversation with Nicola Henderson from XpoNorth and we decided to partner on the network — to demonstrate leadership from the edge with two rural areas at the forefront in this field.
The network has been established to promote and share best practice, new developments, skills development opportunities, and potential collaborations with immersive technology and museums. We believe that immersive technology offers the potential to interpret our collections and share our stories in new, accessible, and interesting ways.
Museums Immersive Network
What is your vision for Museums Immersive Network?
I hope that the Museums Immersive Network will support the establishment of immersive technology more broadly within the sector and boost confidence in working with tech businesses to create new experiences for our communities, as well as innovating and improving practice in other areas of the sector. I think there is a lot of basic digital skills training for museum teams but there are those who are itching to try new things and move onto the next level. There are also those who want to work with tech companies and universities on these types of projects but are not sure where to start, or lack confidence when it comes to agile working and technical jargon. I hope that the network provides some of this training and CPD to boost confidence and enable collaborations which improve the way we work.
How can partners get involved?
We have a bi-annual webinar which runs roughly at the start and middle of each year and focuses on a specific theme — for example January’s webinar was on immersive tech in museums in a post-COVID world. We also have a podcast ‘Immersively, Museums’ which is about to start up again — you can listen to this wherever you usually get your podcasts, but we are also always on the lookout for guests who want to be on the show. We tackle common questions around immersive tech in museums such as ‘Does immersive tech really attract new audiences?’ and ‘How much longevity do immersive tech installations actually have?’.
You can sign up to the Museums Immersive Network mailing list to get all the latest updates here, or watch the previous MIN webinars on the CMP YouTube channel here.
What are you looking forward to at the Culture Reimagined Summit?
I’m really looking forward to the hands-on workshops on museum storytelling, audience mapping, and innovation from other cultural experts and of course any chance to network with other cultural innovators! | https://medium.com/musemio/creating-waves-in-immersive-tech-meet-amy-shakespeare-fa2257dec431 | ['Kaitlin Fritz'] | 2021-03-18 08:44:45.704000+00:00 | ['AR', 'Cornwall', 'Museums', 'Innovation', 'VR'] |
Pinterest Home Feed Unified Lightweight Scoring: A Two-tower Approach | Dafang He | Software Engineer, Home Candidate Generation; Andrew Liu; Dhruvil Deven Badani | Software Engineer, Homefeed Ranking; Poorvi Bhargava; Sangmin Shin |Engineering Manager, Home Ranking; Duo Zhang | Engineering Manager, Candidate Generation; and Jay Adams | Software Engineer, Inspire
Intro
Pinterest is a place where users (Pinners) can save and discover content from both web and mobile platforms, and where increasingly Creators can publish native content right to Pinterest. We hold billions of content (Pins) in our corpus and serve personalized recommendations that inspire Pinners to create a life they love. One of the key and most complicated surfaces for Pinterest is the home feed, where Pinners will see personalized feeds based on their engagement and interests. In this blog, we will discuss how we unify our light-weight scoring layer across the various candidate generators that power home feed recommendations.
Motivations
Home feed is what Pinners see first when they open the Pinterest app. To give relevant and diverse recommendations, we use a recommendation system comprising many different sources. One major source, for example, is Pixie[1], which is based on a random walk of the bipartite pin-board graph. Based on the Pixie platform, we are able to generate multiple different sources, some directly returning pins from a random walk based on the engagement history, and some based on the pins retrieving from boards that returned from Pixie random walk. In addition to Pixie, we also have recommendation sources that take in the topics or based on embeddings. These candidate generators usually have their own light-weight scoring model, which ranks and selects the most relevant candidates sent to final ranking. For example, we have a gbdt light-weight scoring model used in production after random walk[2]. The overall picture of home feed recommendation engines is in Fig. 1.
Most of these recommendation sources have:
Individual training data generation pipelines Different online serving approaches Different light-weight models which have different feature-set available during serving.
It takes a tremendous amount of engineering effort to develop a single machine learning model that serves only one specific candidate generator. This greatly limits the development speed for ML engineers.
In addition to the development speed, we are also seeing an increased online serving cost if we increase the feature set in order to improve the light-weight models. This is because each candidate source will need to do a relatively complicated online model computation on a large set of candidates (Pins). For example, for one of the sources that is powered by pixie light weight scoring [2], it uses a gbdt model in serving and needs to compute thousands of pins’ rankings per request. This computational overhead makes it hard to conduct feature engineering without introducing significant serving cost.
Fig. 1. Overview of current home feed recommendation pipeline. Home feed recommendation is powered by many different candidate generators. Each of them serves a unique role and has its own light-weight ranking layer.
Last but not least, many features are also not available during the online request phase for certain candidate sources. Adding these features will introduce infrastructure overhead and make it hard to justify the performance gain before actually collecting data and running experiments. This pain point was mentioned in the Pixie lws blog post as well.
All these factors motivate us to unify our machine learning modeling and serving approach for these candidate generators to provide a more personalized set of candidates to the final ranking model. Thus we decided to move to use a unified two-tower model[3], [4] for the light-weight modeling.
Two-Tower Architecture
In this section, we are going to describe our two-tower modeling approach for a unified light scoring with the goal of resolving the above pain points.
The overview of the two tower architecture is shown in Fig. 2. It has a separate user tower and a Pin tower with a final dot product that computes the similarity between a given user and a given Pin. The Pin tower takes the features from the given Pin and generates a Pin embedding for it. The features used include dense features such as Pin’s recent performance as well as sparse features such as category. The sparse feature will be passed into an embedding layer before sending to the pin’s MLP for final embedding computation. The user tower takes the engagement history features as input and generates a user-specific embedding. Finally, we do a simple dot product based on the two embeddings as a measure of how likely the Pinner will engage with the Pin.
Figure 2. The overview of two-tower architecture used in unified light-weight scoring. On the left side, it is the pin tower that computes the pin’s embedding, and on the right side we have the user tower that generates the user embedding.
Training
For the optimization of the two-tower model on the lightweight ranking layer, we must treat it differently than the recommendation on the ranking layer, since compared with the Pins that will be used for ranking, we will be facing much more negative candidates in serving on candidate generator level. Thus we apply the in-batch negative sampling approach [5] and use a batch size of 6000 in our training so as to make each positive candidate coupled with enough negative candidates generated for free. We found by applying this, we are able to achieve much better offline metrics as measured by recall at top k.
Serving
In this section, we are going to describe how we serve the machine learning model to support online candidate retrieval recommendations. The serving architecture will include two parts: the Pin embedding serving and the user embedding serving. We will discuss the two parts separately here.
Pin Embedding Serving
Home feed powers recommendation for all possible candidate Pins in Pinterest. So we have to compute all Pins’ embeddings. Usually for a recommendation engine the content distribution will follow a long-tail rule and it is important for us to avoid re-computation of the same pin embedding each time for an online request, as many of the requests will be attributed to the same pin. In another aspect, pins’ contents don’t shift much, so their embeddings are relatively stable. Thus we should be able to compute the embeddings for most of the pins in an offline workflow. In the online requests, we only need to retrieve the precomputed embedding instead of doing a recomputation. For fresh Pins (Pins that entered the Pinterest eco-system within hours), we will need to do online inference for them as they will not be picked up by the offline workflow. So we separate out Pins’ embedding computation into two different pipelines, as shown in Fig. 3.
User Embedding Serving
Pinners tend to change their status instantly. For example, if a Pinner engaged with a cat Pin, they are likely to engage with another cat Pin in the near future. Thus it is important for us to capture the status change which reflects their realtime interests. In order to do so, we enable online user embedding computation whenever there is a new user request. Adding something like this won’t be a costly computation, as we only calculate once per request.
Figure 3. The overall serving pipeline for candidate retrieval with two-tower embedding computation. Most of the existing pins will be inserted into candidate generators with an offline workflow that computes pin embeddings, while new pins will be inserted to be served after they get online pin embedding computation.
Wins
In order to evaluate the performance of the unified lightweight scoring approach, we did an online experiment with the light-weight scoring layer applied to all the candidate generators. We see the gains in the following aspects.
Engagement Win
We see a huge engagement lift by applying the light-weight ranking layer to all the candidate generators. For example, total saves and closeups both increased 2–3%. We also see total hides drop 3–4% as well. These metrics wins demonstrate the relevance improvement while using the two-tower architecture to replace the old light-weight ranking approach. We think this is because the two-tower approach can leverage all relevant features available for the Pin and the Pinner and thus we can get a better embedding representation for both.
Diversity
One concern of applying the same model to all candidate generators is that it will make our recommendation less diverse. As a platform that aims at inspiring Pinners, we don’t want to drop our recommendation diversity. However, in our online experiment, we actually see increased diversity in adoption (save, closeup, etc). We believe this is because (1) the generated user embedding can encode diverse interests based on engagement history. (2) a better recommendation powered by the two-tower approach filtered out unrelated Pins and the recommended items are more likely to be adopted.
Infra cost
Online computation with thousands of pins for each request is costly. This is especially the case considering the number of candidate generators we are working with. By applying a simple dot product at the light-weight ranking layer with the two-tower approach, we significantly dropped our online serving cost for each request. Considering a dot product with two 64 dimensional embedding vectors, we only need n multiplication operations with n add operations. This is significantly cheaper than, for example, a logistic regression model with online feature transformation, bucketization. Usually this ends up with a long vector with huge online serving cost in our original serving system.
Summary & Future Works
In this post, we gave an overview of our unified lightweight ranking layer currently used in Homefeed. We focus on the major motivations for these efforts and the learnings from them. To summarize, in a machine learning modeling perspective, a densely encoded learned embedding vector gives better recommendation and we achieved gains not just in engagement, but also in adoption diversity and infra cost saving. At the same time, we are able to apply the same model across different serving infrastructures used by different candidate generators.
For future work, we will try to keep improving the light-weight ranking model with better features and ML modeling. We will also try applying the model to some other newly added candidate generators to further unify our light-weight scoring layer.
Acknowledgements:
Bowen Deng, Zhaohui Wu, Haibin Xie, Wangfan Fu, Angela Sheu, Se Won Jang, Kent Jiang, Michael Mi, Zheng Liu, Dylan Wang, Zhiyuan Zhang, Sihan Wang, Bee-chung Chen, Liang Zhang.
To learn more about engineering at Pinterest, check out the rest of our Engineering Blog, and visit our Pinterest Labs site. To view and apply to open opportunities, visit our Careers page.
References:
[1] Pixie: A System for Recommending 3+ Billion Items to 200+ Million Users in Real-Time
[2] Pixie lws blog post: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/improving-the-quality-of-recommended-pins-with-lightweight-ranking-8ff5477b20e3
[3] Deep neural networks for youtube recommendations. Covington, P., Adams, J., and Sargin, E.
[4] Efficient training on very large corpora via gramian estimation. Krichene, W., Mayoraz, N., Rendle, S., Zhang, L., Yi, X., Hong, L., Chi, E., and Anderson, J
[5] Sampling-Bias-Corrected Neural Modeling for Large Corpus Item Recommendations. Xinyang Yi Ji Yang Lichan Hong Derek Zhiyuan Cheng Lukasz Heldt Aditee Ajit Kumthekar Zhe Zhao Li Wei Ed Chi. | https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/pinterest-home-feed-unified-lightweight-scoring-a-two-tower-approach-b3143ac70b55 | ['Pinterest Engineering'] | 2021-09-13 17:01:04.942000+00:00 | ['Infrastructure', 'Pinner Experience', 'Pinterest', 'Engineering'] |
Crypto Debit-Cards Are the Next Step in Crypto-Adoption. | With the booming cryptocurrency industry and its loyalists striving hard to introduce digital currency in the mainstream market, the introduction of crypto-debit cards shouldn’t come as a surprise.
The card functions just as a normal bank’s debit card would and allows you to purchase in stores and
online.
We all know that although the number of merchants accepting bitcoins is increasing steadily, it is a little difficult for a normal user to quickly spend BTCs on goods and services.
If you find a merchant which accepts bitcoins directly, then all is well and good.
Otherwise, buying something with BTC involves the tedious process of having to sell BTC on an exchange/OTC, withdraw the fiat, and then proceed to spending it.
Obviously this is not the way crypto-adoption permeates, and hence I think crypto-debit cards will be the next thing to create ripples (pun unintended) in this market.
This could be a great step in helping turn sceptics into believers.
Photo by Adrian Williams on Unsplash
Of the select few companies that allow you to own a crypto debit card, Bitcoin Cash Visa debit card is the most sought-after one, offering good payment options and nominal fees.
The other companies who allow crypto cards include industry leaders like Cryptopay, Fuzex and MoxyOne. Jumping on the bandwagon is Revolut offering debit cards that support various cryptocurrencies.
How about managing your USD, euros and UK pounds along with BTC and LTC, sounds too good to be true? Well, Wirex debit cards allow you to do so and all you need to do is register your account, fund it and get wired!
However, the drawback here is that only Bitcoin Cash of all crypto’s is capable of managing the large number of transactions that the Visa network supports.
The White Company is the latest addition to the long list of 100,000 merchants that accept payments via Bitcoin Cash.
Gone are the days when all you could do with your crypto was boast about it too your colleagues or trade it.
With the introduction of debit cards, a lot of people will be able to accept crypto as a mainstream mode of payment. The idea of a crypto debit card eliminates the use of technology that scared most people from using crypto.
Now, spend your crypto just as you would spend traditionally and put it to actual use instead of just talking about it on your social media. The adoption of these types of cards could actually bring cryptocurrencies to the mass market.
The introduction of debit cards like Bitcoin Cash Visa card, Revolut and TenX could change the way we perceive crypto payments and act as a stepping stone for getting mass acceptance towards
crypto.
These debit cards will give the user control and help one keep track on all transactions and assure safety of funds.
Spend Bitcoin online and offline for free
The normal cost of a Bitcoin exchange has, now and again, ascended as high as $162.
What’s more, the middle exchange affirmation time can be as high as right around 30 minutes.
Tolerance may be an uprightness, yet that is absurd. With Wirex, exchange expenses and hold up times will be the farthest thing from your psyche.
In the event that you’ve longed for utilizing Bitcoin for regular exchanges like paying rent or purchasing espresso, you’ll realize that high exchange expenses make that outlandish.
Up to this point, spending Bitcoin implied squandering gigantic measures of cash on exchange expenses.
This was the principle leap keeping digital forms of money from achieving standard reception.
With a Wirex installment card, you can spend cryptographic forms of money on the web or face to face with definitely no exchange charges.
We don’t charge you for utilizing your card, regardless of where you are or what you’re doing. You won’t see the distinction.
It’s similarly as speedy and consistent as utilizing your customary charge or Visa.
General information About Wirex | https://medium.com/hackernoon/crypto-debit-cards-are-the-next-step-in-crypto-adoption-ccc22a9750df | ['Shaurya Malwa'] | 2018-06-03 22:06:01.157000+00:00 | ['Crypto Debit Cards', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Debit Cards', 'Crypto Adoption'] |
This San Francisco Restaurant Offers Global Tastes | 25 Lusk’s New Traveler Menus Offer Jaunts Around the World (With Staycation Vibes)
Photo: Courtesy of 25 Lusk via @25lusk
Reinvention and multiplicity are smart moves in times like these. As international travel remains a struggle, menus that tour us around a region are a gift. Enter 25 Lusk’s new Traveler concept, which kicked off September 1 inside the restaurant and will rotate every six months to a new place in the world, while their casual rooftop menu remains.
The first destination? Mexico. Which is no easy menu to create. Whether you seek Oaxacan or Pueblan moles, Yucatecan poc chuc or Baja fish tacos, no two Mexican states serve the same style of dishes. So they wisely journey across states.
I have a range of memories at 25 Lusk since it opened in 2010, from drinks at the half-underground bar, to brunch on that inviting rooftop.
25 Lusk chef Matthew Dolan says this is a cocktail-centric menu with food pairings, and backing that up, he partnered with none other than Elmer Mejicanos (historically helming the bars of Tony Gemignani’s incomparable North Beach restaurants; currently of Spanish newcomer Red Window). Elmer envisioned the Traveler concept pre-pandemic and his cocktails are a draw alone (more on that in a moment).
But Dolan and the team have assembled a menu of gourmet bar food (shareable, small plates, fun), representing a cross-section of Mexico’s endless edible delights.
I have a range of memories at 25 Lusk since it opened in 2010, from drinks at the half-underground bar, to brunch on that inviting rooftop. But I would posit this menu collab is the best I’ve yet tasted here. CIA-trained (the ultimate cooking school: Culinary Institute of America) Dolan has spent a lifetime cooking from Manhattan to New Orleans and around Europe. But here, he wisely partnered with two of his kitchen staff from Mexico — Eutimio Avila and Jesus Fernando Ake Chan — letting them lead the way in creating regional dishes. Dolan tells me of Lusk’s powerhouse dishwasher, an older woman who perfects their daily-made tortillas and masa like no one else. This is, indeed, a team effort.
25 Lusk’s tlayuda — Photo Credit Virginia Miller
Mejicanos works closely with 25 Lusk bar manager Natalie Lichtman to execute a cocktail menu that is exquisite as it is drinkable and, important in these short-staffed times, recreatable in a timely fashion. Wisely, he steers clear of the obvious agave-only spirits selection or margaritas and palomas to give us a fresh take on Mexican flavors. But take notice of A Clear Classic.
It is, in fact, a Paloma variation, without limiting itself in the name. It’s a blend of tequila, mezcal, clarified grapefruit and lime juices. Carbonated with salt, it drinks light, bright, luxurious, as if a Paloma morphed into a champagne cocktail.
I immediately felt the urge to down a few (but resisted). A light, savory Fruit Stand Margarita (tequila, radish, cucumber, lime, “spicy bits”) is the margarita you didn’t know you needed. Ditto house Tepache Con Ron, Mexico’s fermented pineapple rind drink classic — with the added bonus of rum.
25 Lusk’s Zocalo Martini. (Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Miller)
Numerous standouts do not feature agave/Mexican spirits. Lichtman came up with the Zocalo Martini, working with Mejicanos on its unique cashew-washed gin base, showcasing caju — the fruit of the cashew tree — with blanc (white) and dry vermouths, plum bitters, and an apple slice garnish candied with an almost cashew-brittle-style candy. The cocktail is nutty, complex, boozy yet fruit-forward.
The Volcan de Maracuya cocktail proves how crushable a Scotch cocktail can be in the right hands. Its tropical-sweet-salty contrast of salted maracuja (passionfruit) foam with Scotch and ancho chile-infused Amaro Montenegro takes its place with some of the best refreshings, lighter whisky cocktails I’ve tasted at bars around the world — still too rare an occurrence.
Mexico is the only place I traveled a few times in the initial year of the pandemic (for work and nowhere near beaches, lest you think this was irresponsible vacationing).
Dolan’s menu does, indeed, support and make room for the cocktails to star, though the food is reason enough to visit. I adore elote (on the cob) or esquites (shaved off the cob) Mexican corn dishes. 25 Lusk’s elote asado keeps it classic: a toasted corn cob lightly doused in lime juice, queso fresco, chili powder and cilantro. Their tamal is as comforting as it gets, especially filled with cochinita pibil: the Yucatán Peninsula’s famed slow-cooked pork, marinated in citrus, vivid orange from annatto seeds, wrapped in a banana leaf so it stays tender.
My heart makes a happy leap when I see tlayuda on the menu, a top dish from my beloved Oaxaca, my favorite state to eat in all of Mexico (and as home of the majority of mezcal production, it’s double heaven). Dolan’s tlayuda is smaller and less thin and crispy than the dinner plate-sized, toasted tlayudas I ate around Oaxaca or in California’s best Oaxacan restaurants. But 25 Lusk’s version is elevated and a more approachable portion, topped with a traditional mix of Oaxacan cheese and beans, as well as radish, elote (corn) and tomatoes.
25 Lusk’s tamal wrapped in a banana leaf. (Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Miller)
The most irresistible dish may be the taco transito de lujo, or pigs feet taco. The rich pork fat crunch of pigs feet contrasts with pickled fresno chilis, cabbage and refried black beans. On those dreamy housemade tortillas with killer house salsas, it’s a ridiculously gratifying taco. They also offer cochinita pibil and fried cod tacos, but take a risk and try the pigs feet (you’ll realize that almost all damn parts of the precious pig are delicious).
Cool off with a finish of paleta de Hielo de horchata, aka horchata (spiced rice milk) popsicles fortified with vodka to keep a creamy-yet-icy texture. The paletas (popsicles) are a case in point of just how fun the Traveler menu is.
We don’t yet know the next theme they’ll flip to in less than six months' time, but Dolan and Mejicanos are committed to working with a chef from each of the countries they “travel” through.
Mexico is the only place I traveled a few times in the initial year of the pandemic (for work and nowhere near beaches, lest you think this was irresponsible vacationing). But I miss the freedom of traveling Mexico’s vast regions. We are blessed to live in California, with its roots as part of Mexico and a Mexican population of millions going back to its inception. Authentic, regional Mexican food of every stripe — not to mention the deepest agave spirits selections — is in our blood.
25 Lusk offers a Modern Mexican menu that feels like a gourmet, playful road trip, where distances between states and flavors are blurred. The blurring is especially effective when drinking cocktails of this caliber and crushability.
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Much as I look forward to their next Traveler tour, I hope to experience their Mexican journey a few more times before it’s over. | https://thebolditalic.com/25-lusks-new-traveler-menus-offer-globajaunts-around-the-world-with-staycation-vibes-c2de99f87f1f | ['Virginia Miller'] | 2021-09-12 19:47:59.522000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'San Francisco', 'Food And Drink'] |
3 Things Entrepreneurs Should Keep in Mind | Dr. Yossi Vardi has benefitted from years of experience within the startup industry, achieving massive success. Not only is he credited for jump-starting Israel’s startup culture, but he has also been given accolades in various publications such as The Wall Street Journal. His impressive resume is why he is the perfect person to give advice to any young entrepreneurs reading or listening to our podcast.
Throughout his extensive experience, Vardi noticed 3 main pillars that he believes leads to entrepreneurial success: stoking passion, encouraging curiosity, and staying concise. In his opinion, creating an “ecosystem” using these three principles is important to building creative and innovative companies.
Working with Passion
In his experience, Vardi said that too often he sees people driven by money. However, the real motivator that truly pushes people to accomplish their goals is passion. Instead of seeking monetary success, passionate people are driven by a desire to share their talent for the appreciation of others.
“This is the difference between incentive, which you can obtain by offering people money…and motivation. Motivation is something that comes from within.”
True passion is striving to spread your talent to the masses, creating personal value by garnering appreciation for what you have accomplished, as opposed to only seeking monetary value.
By being driven by passion, people are more likely to reach for success no matter what, ultimately overcoming whatever obstacles they may face. Vardi gives us the example of performing arts entertainers who are still performing during the Coronavirus pandemic. They are adapting to the circumstances in order to continue performing, not because they are trying to make money, but because they are deeply passionate about their work and need an outlet.
Although they may not be making as much money as they could, they are still trying to share their talents for the world to see because they thrive on the appreciation of their talent.
Conclusion:
Entrepreneurs: Remember what got you started and keep that passion alive. Monetary motivation is not enough to keep you going when times get tough.
Self-portrait |1914 Egon Schiele | Source: Met
Staying Curious
While you may be born with a certain level of curiosity, it can be built and reinforced, often through childhood. For Vardi, curiosity is key for creating new innovations since curious people tend to ignore borders and therefore create in a way that breaks barriers.
They also know how to ask questions, so they tend to know about a variety of disciplines, which they can then apply to their respective roles. It is through this intersectionality of disciplines that innovation tends to happen.
Like building teams with talent, Vardi said that a leader must understand that they both need to stimulate curiosity and import it into the company should the team be lacking.
Conclusion:
Find ways to continuously feed your curiosity. Read books, visit galleries. Learn how to merge disciplines by going to conferences and lectures, like Vardi’s Kinnernet conference. Keep chasing knowledge outside your chosen industry by expanding your social and intellectual circle.
Portrait of Paris von Gütersloh |1918 Egon Schiele | Source: Met
Stay Concise
While trying to create and explain an algorithm to better understand success and how to continuously create compelling products, Vardi developed what he calls, “The Vardi Rule, ” which states: the amount of slides you need to explain a concept has an inverse relationship to your understanding of the concept.
In other words, the more someone understands a concept, the less slides they will need to see to properly understand the information. This means that it takes less time to introduce an idea to others.
Conclusion
In the startup world, we often understand the problems we want to solve. To us, the problem statement at the core of our business is like the north star, pointing us in the direction we need to go. This includes understanding our audience and spending time sharing information that is important to them instead of reiterating what they already know. This keeps things concise and will most likely keep the audience’s attention for longer. At The Artian, we provide mentoring services for developing problem-solving techniques that utilize this concept.
To listen to more of Vardi’s advice, thoughts, and business tips, tune in to our podcast episode, “The Art of Technology.”
#entrepreneurship #businesslessons #passion #curiosity | https://medium.com/theartian/3-things-entrepreneurs-should-keep-in-mind-8ddef655299 | ['Marisa Cedeno'] | 2020-12-04 12:00:28.249000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Business Development', 'Startup Life', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Tips'] |
I found comfort in ink | I found comfort in ink
trickling down onto the paper
like steady rain onto river rocks
i create those who look as i do
talk as i do
and walk as i do
though we can’t coexist
you were always real to me. | https://medium.com/@happyamylife/i-found-comfort-in-ink-daad1f4b4d | ['Mya Gibson'] | 2020-12-14 23:34:12.432000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Poet', 'Poetry Writing', 'Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium'] |
With Hardship Comes Ease Review | Inspirited Minds strikes again with another fab event that left some speechless, intrigued, and motivated to know more about themselves, addictions that we may be oblivious to, the realm of the unseen, and dealing with anxiety and depression — this time, in the form of an epic 2 day workshop.
Day 1
What better way to start the day than introducing yourself, to yourself, with Ramiz Ibrahim. It lead to many individuals taking a leap onto their journey of self-discovery. Everyone thinks they know themselves, but the attendees soon realised that they were their own strangers. Brother Ramiz had us think about our boundaries and limits that stop us from becoming the better us that we want to become, because we all want to improve and ultimately secure our places up top. However, as we all struggle with the daily battle against our nafs and other elements, we must know how to get over these hurdles — and that’s exactly what we were exploring. Underlying our daily hurdles is our resistance to change.
Why is there a resistance to change? Our ego. This is why we were taught to humble ourselves, remember our purpose and question if we were fulfilling that, remind ourselves that there is no harm in learning from our mistakes for betterment in the future, and be open to adaption and adjustment which are fundamental for progression and moving forward. In order to get to location B, we need to know where we are at with A and what path we need to take. We need to find ourselves, our true selves, who we really are, we need to understand and co-operate with our own mind, our emotions, our thoughts and how we change in situations in order for real and permanent change to be implemented.
“Most people dream about their lives, but do not live it. Stop dreaming, it’s time to live your life.” Ramiz Ibrahim
Have you ever wondered how awful it must be to want to change, but not know how to? Sister Nazish Hussain talked us through the processes, the consequences and the ‘background info’ to addictions that we all seem to ignore. It is our duty as Muslims to be empathic and non-judgemental, because we’re all struggling with something, whether it is with picking up the Quran once a day, drinking far too much green tea, swearing, smoking, gambling, drugs or even social media, we’re all struggling. Sister Nazish highlighted that we have to be the good company that people need, “with our scarves and beards, we cannot judge. We have to acknowledge responsibility”, and have to imagine how we would react, respond and treat the person who has come to us for help or needs help, if they were a loved one?
Sister Nazish effortlessly put it all into perspective and made us realise that there is a lot more to addictions than what we think, the roots, the cause, the strong feeling of need, the need for control, and so on, it’s a vicious cycle that would break down even the most strongest of people. Many would focus on their sinning (if we’re talking about gambling and substance use addictions), but we were asked to knock down the barrier we instantly put up, causing an “us” and “them” partition because it is against Islam. We fail to realise that something must have been missing in order to prevent their connection with Islam, something must have affected their spirituality that caused them to fill it with something else. We cannot go in guns blazing when trying to help, or be too hard for trying to deal with struggles, be sensitive to the chaos going on in someone’s life — as their struggle does not define their existence.
“They are not an addict; they are person with an addiction. We have to hate the problem, and not the person.” Nazish Hussain
Day 2
The second day started bright and early with jinns, black magic, and mental illness… Okay, it’s not as heavy as it sounds. Brother Abu Taher cleared a path for us to begin delving into the unseen influences by firstly highlighting how complex the relationship is between jinns, black magic, symptoms and the effect it has on our mental health. I believe most attendees went into the workshop believing that they would be able to put jinn possessions and mental illness into 2 different boxes, but we realised that the unseen world, parallel to us, is in fact more intertwined than what we thought. Brother Abu Taher had us examine case studies where certain people had illnesses and we had to conclude whether or not it was a jinn possession/black magic or whether they could be clear cut diagnosed with a mental health disorder — but it wasn’t as easy as that, and most of the times we found ourselves with a combined answer, demonstrating how mixed it is. Many misconceptions were cleared up from goat feet, to wolves’ kryptonite, but most importantly a clear distinction was made between black magic and jinn possession. These are commonly mixed up, which can often lead to misdiagnosis and further trauma.
Black magic are the symptoms of jinn possession let’s say, and jinn possession is when the mind and body has actually been taken over by an external force. Therefore, if someone is doing something out of character or they are acting unusual, or they have been feeling in some way for a period of time — we can’t jump to the conclusion that they are possessed, nor can we say that they must have had black magic done on them, as the symptoms can be very similar to other mental health disorders such as mania, hallucinations, hysteria, depression, erratic thinking etc. It was brought to our attention what Jinn’s actually are, where they live and how there are good and bad jinns just like us, who will also be held accountable and how black magic comes about — just think typical scary movies. (Who knew they would take such inspiration?) We were given duas to take home which can aid in protecting ourselves from such situations, as dua is the weapon of the believer. Although symptoms may appear to be intertwined, and that could be a reason of why mental illness is so easily blamed on unseen influences, we have to remember that mental health and jinns/black magic are acknowledged as independent in Islam, as it should be in today’s community.
“Verily we created man from a wet product of earth” [23:12] “& He created Jinns from smokeless fire” [55:15]
What comes prior to anxiety and depression? Sister Aaliyah Shaikh suggested what happens before the beginning, where potential causes of depression and anxiety take place, in the womb. When we’re young and healthy, what we put inside our bodies is for ourselves, but when there is another human growing inside us — it is different story. Harsh toxins and chemicals, not just in the air but in our food can expose stress to the embryo, we are all aware it is for the health of the child — but have we ever thought about the effects it may have on the mental health? In the last few stages of the pregnancy, where in some cases the baby has to be forced out of the womb can cause anxiety and depression at a very early stage in the life — but more externally, sister Aaliyah pointed out the fact that pregnancy is almost seen like an illness. Where pregnant women are expected to take on the sick role and end up being treated in hospital, where everything from the environment, to the machines to the uniform can set off alarm bells in the mind and cause the body stress and anxiety. We started to question society’s way of dealing with a natural process of life.
Our brain structure can be moulded by the events we experience, thus “children who experience maternal depression early in life may suffer from lasting effects on their brain architecture and persistent disruptions of their stress response systems”. This lead to an intense discussion on medicalisation, and politics of health and treatments, are we really getting what we’re asking for? The discussion sparked new and comprehensive ideas for a health care system that doesn’t involve GP’s having patients on conveyor belts, rather a more positive outlook on health with gratitude in all aspects. There is a lot of pain and suffering in every individual, and we all have degrees of unwellness, but it is our naivety and ignorance that needs to change in order to expose the true causes of suffering. Everything about us depends on our emotional and psychological wellbeing, and it is when we create boxes for our human aspects that it becomes labelled and uncommon to have an illness that nobody can see or touch. We are whole, not a body and mind made up of individual components. With that said, Sister Aaliyah gave us super beneficial pointers on how to stay healthy on a ‘whole’, from our food and nutrition, to sleep, to having regular routines, to moving, to being aware of our environment but most importantly recognising our intentions and realising our purpose. We need to have a peaceful meaning, to have a peaceful mind. | https://medium.com/inspirited-minds/with-hardship-comes-ease-review-52283d5fa4dd | ['Inspirited Minds'] | 2015-12-06 00:27:49.650000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Islam', 'Quran'] |
Forgiveness…What’s that all about? | Perhaps the two most difficult things for me to say are: “Please forgive me” and its twin, “I forgive you.”
But for my soul to be at peace; to achieve the goal of being kind, compassionate and loving unconditionally, these are words I must utter every day.
According to Buddhist teachings, we should strive to live in such a way that we never harm others or are impacted by those who harmed us. But that’s a tall order in the world we live in. Intentionally or unintentionally, our actions can hurt other people, other animals or the planet. If we are carnivores, our appetites require killing cows, chickens, pigs and fish. Even vegetarians have an impact. For example, converting what were once wild prairie lands into corn and soy bean field destroys wildlife habitat. Water diverted from the wild rivers to San Francisco for drinking and showering has drowned beautiful venues such as the Hetch Hetchy valley, and severely harmed aquatic habitat in the bay and delta.
And shall we count the ways we harm each other? Have you ever snarled at a Customer Support person on the phone, barked at your partner while “hangry?” Or can you recall when you’ve been the victim of slights, insults, robberies, frauds, scams, assaults, cheating spouses, liars, disloyal friends, unappreciative children…you name it?
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting triggered by writing all this junk down. As I sketched out the list above, I found myself digging out memories which in turn brought forth | https://medium.com/@tablestakesyogi/forgiveness-whats-that-all-about-48032724bdb7 | ['Dave Fogarty'] | 2020-12-07 20:51:40.814000+00:00 | ['Buddha', 'Confucius', 'Compassion'] |
Dealing with the Lack of Data in Machine Learning | In many projects I carried out, companies, despite having fantastic AI business ideas, display a tendency to slowly become frustrated when they realize that they do not have enough data… However, solutions do exist! The purpose of this article is to briefly introduce you to some of them (the ones that are proven effective in my practice) rather than to list all existing solutions.
The problem of data scarcity is very important since data are at the core of any AI project. The size of a dataset is often responsible for poor performances in ML projects.
Most of the time, data related issues are the main reason why great AI projects cannot be accomplished. In some projects, you come to the conclusion that there is no relevant data or the collection process is too difficult and time-consuming.
Supervised machine learning models are being successfully used to respond to a whole range of business challenges. However, these models are data-hungry and their performance relies heavily on the size of training data available. In many cases, it is difficult to create training datasets that are large enough.
Another issue I could mention is that project analysts tend to underestimate the amount of data necessary to handle common business problems. I remember myself struggling to collect big training datasets. It is even more complicated to gather data when working for a large company…
How much data do I need?
Well, you need roughly 10 times as many examples as there are degrees of freedom in your model. The more complex the model, the more you are prone to overfitting, but that can be avoided by validation. However, much fewer data can be used based on the use case.
Overfitting: refers to a model that models the training data too well. It happens when a model learns the detail and noise in the training data to the extent that it negatively impacts the performance of the model on new data.
It is also worth discussing the issue of handling the missing values. Especially, if the number of missing values in your data is big enough (above 5%).
Once again, dealing with missing values will depend on certain ‘success’ criteria. Moreover, these criteria vary for different datasets and even for different applications such as recognition, segmentation, prediction, classification, etc. (given the same dataset) even for different applications (recognition, segmentation, prediction, classification).
It is important to understand that there is no perfect way to deal with missing data.
Different solutions exist but it depends on the kind of problem — Time-series Analysis, ML, Regression, etc.
When it comes to predictive techniques, they shall be used only when missing values are not observed completely at random and the variables were chosen to impute such missing values have some relationship with it, else it could yield imprecise estimates.
In general, different machine learning algorithms can be used to determine the missing values. This works by turning missing features to labels themselves and now using columns without missing values to predict columns with missing values.
Based on my experience, you will be confronted with a lack of data or missing data at some point if you decide to build an AI-powered solution, but fortunately, there are ways to turn that minus into a plus.
Lack of data?
As noted above, it is impossible to precisely estimate the minimum amount of data required for an AI project. Obviously, the very nature of your project will influence significantly the amount of data you will need. For example, texts, images, and videos usually require more data. However, many other factors should be considered in order to make an accurate estimate.
Number of categories to be predicted
What is the expected output of your model? Basically, the fewest number or categories the better.
What is the expected output of your model? Basically, the fewest number or categories the better. Model Performance
If you plan on getting a product in production, you need more. A small dataset might be good enough for a proof of concept but in production, you’ll need way more data.
In general, small datasets require models that have low complexity (or high bias) to avoid overfitting the model to the data.
Non-Technical Solutions
Before exploring technical solutions, let’s analyze what we can do to enhance your dataset. It might sound obvious but before getting started with AI, please try to obtain as much data as possible by developing your external and internal tools with data collection in mind. If you know the tasks that a machine learning algorithm is expected to perform, you can create a data-gathering mechanism in advance.
Try to establish a real data culture within your organization.
To initiate ML execution, you could rely on open source data. There are a lot of data available for ML and some companies are ready to give it away.
If you need external data for your project, it can be beneficial to form partnerships with other organizations in order to get relevant data. Forming partnerships will cost obviously cost you some time, but the proprietary data gained will build a natural barrier to any rivals.
Build a useful application, give it away, use the data
Another approach that I used in my previous project was to give away access to a cloud application to customers. The data that makes it into the app can be used to build machine learning models. My previous client built an application for hospitals and made it free. We gathered a lot of data thanks to it and managed to create a unique dataset for our ML solution. It really helps to tell customers or investor that you have built your own and unique dataset.
Small datasets
Based on my experience, some common approaches that can help with building predictive models from small data sets are:
In general, the simpler the machine learning algorithm the better it will learn from small data sets. From an ML perspective, small data requires models that have low complexity (or high bias) to avoid overfitting the model to the data. I noticed that the Naive Bayes algorithm is among the simplest classifiers and as a result learns remarkably well from relatively small data sets.
Naive Bayes methods: set of supervised learning algorithms based on applying Bayes’ theorem with the “naive” assumption of conditional independence between every pair of features given the value of the class variable.
You can also rely on other linear models and decision trees. Indeed, they can also perform relatively well on small data sets. Basically, simple models are able to learn from small data sets better than more complicated models (neural networks) since they are essentially trying to learn less.
For very small datasets, Bayesian methods are generally the best in class, although the results can be sensitive to your choice of prior. I think that the naive Bayes classifier and ridge regression are the best predictive models.
When it comes to small datasets, you need models that have few parameters (low complexity) and/or a strong prior. You can also interpret the “prior” as an assumption you can make on how the data behaves.
Many other solutions do exist depending on the exact nature of your business issues and the size of your dataset.
Transfer learning
Definition: a framework that leverages existing relevant data or models while building a machine learning model.
Transfer learning uses knowledge from a learned task to improve the performance on a related task, typically reducing the amount of required training data.
Transfer learning techniques are useful because they allow models to make predictions for a new domain or task (known as the target domain) using knowledge learned from another dataset or existing machine learning models (the source domain).
Transfer learning techniques should be considered when you do not have enough target training data, and the source and target domains have some similarities but are not identical.
Naively aggregating models or different datasets would not always work! If the existing datasets are very different from the target data then the new learner can be negatively impacted by existing data or models.
Transfer learning works well when you have other datasets you can use to infer knowledge, but what happens when you have no data at all? This is where data generation can play a role. It is used when no data is available, or when you need to create more data than you could amass even through aggregation.
In this case, the small amount of data that does exist is modified to create variations on that data to train the model. For example, many images of a car can be generated by cropping, cropping, downsizing, one single image of a car.
Unfortunately, the lack of quality labeled data is also one of the largest challenges facing data science teams, but by using techniques such as transfer learning and data generation it is possible to overcome data scarcity.
Another common application of transfer learning is to train models on cross-customer datasets to overcome the cold-start problem. I noticed that SaaS companies often have to deal with when onboarding new customers to their ML products. Indeed, until the new customer has collected enough data to achieve good model performance (which could take several months) it’s hard to provide value
Data Augmentation
Data augmentation means increasing the number of data points. In my latest project, we used data augmentation techniques to increase the number of images in our dataset. In terms of traditional row/column format data, it means increasing the number of rows or objects.
We had no choice but to rely on data augmentation for two reasons: Time and Accuracy. Every data collection process is associated with a cost. This cost can be in terms of dollars, human effort, computational resources and of course time consumed in the process.
As a consequence, we had to augment existing data to increase the data size that we feed to our ML classifiers and to compensate for the cost involved in further data collection.
There are many ways to augment data.
In our case, you can rotate the original image, change lighting conditions, crop it differently, so for one image you can generate different sub-samples. This way you can reduce overfitting your classifier.
However, if you are generating artificial data using over-sampling methods such as SMOTE, then there is a fair chance you may introduce over-fitting.
Over-fitting: An overfitted model is a model with a trend line that reflects the errors in the data that it is trained with, instead of accurately predicting unseen data.
This is something you must take into consideration when developing your AI solution.
Synthetic Data
Synthetic data means fake data that contains the same schema and statistical properties as its “real” counterpart. Basically, it looks so real that it’s nearly impossible to tell that it’s not.
So what’s the point of synthetic data, and why does it matter if we already have access to the real thing?
I have seen synthetic data applied especially when we were dealing with private data (banking, healthcare, etc.), this makes the use of synthetic data a more secure approach to development in certain instances.
Synthetic data is used mostly when there is not enough real data or there is not enough real data for specific patterns you know about. Usage mostly the same for training and testing datasets.
Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and Modified- SMOTE are two such techniques which generate synthetic data. Simply put, SMOTE takes the minority class data points and creates new data points which lie between any two nearest data points joined by a straight line.
The algorithm calculates the distance between two data points in the feature space, multiplies the distance by a random number between 0 and 1 and places the new data point at this new distance from one of the data points used for distance calculation.
In order to generate synthetic data, you have to use a Training Set to define a model, which would require validation, and then by changing the parameters of interest, you can generate synthetic data, through simulation. The domain/data type is significant since it affects the complexity of the entire process.
In my opinion, asking yourself if you have enough data will reveal inconsistencies that you have probably never spotted before. It will help to highlight issues in your business processes that you thought were perfect and make you understand why it is the key to creating a successful data strategy within your organization. | https://medium.com/predict/dealing-with-the-lack-of-data-in-machine-learning-725f2abd2b92 | ['Alexandre Gonfalonieri'] | 2019-06-03 22:00:41.485000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Business'] |
Build Slack apps in a flash | Build Slack apps in a flash
Introducing the newest member of the Bolt family
Illustration and design by Casey Labatt Simon
Last April we released Bolt, a JavaScript framework that offers a standardized, high-level interface to simplify and speed up the development of Slack apps.
Since then, we’ve seen a remarkable community of developers build with and contribute to Bolt, signaling an appetite for frameworks in other programming languages. Since its initial release in JavaScript, Bolt is also available in Java — and today, in Python.
Interested in seeing our latest addition in action? We’re hosting a webinar about building with Bolt for Python later this week.
Designing Bolt for simple, custom building
In the months leading up to the release of Bolt for JavaScript, our small development team held weekly white-boarding sessions (developing a recursive middleware processor was not as easy as we expected). We pushed hundreds of commits, took countless coffee breaks, and followed the guidance of JavaScript community principles.
Developing Bolt for Java and Python, we knew we needed to customize them to best fit each unique language community. As we trekked, we made small modifications to the different frameworks—in Java we modified how we pass in listener arguments, and in Python we adapted Bolt to work with existing web frameworks, like Flask.
Our specialized approach was complementary to Bolt’s core design principles.
A common listener pattern
A common listener pattern simplifies building with all the different platform features
Bolt is built around a set of listener methods. These are used to listen and interact with different events coming from Slack. For example, Events API events use the events() listener, and shortcut invocations use the shortcut() listener. All listeners use common parameters that allow you to define unique identifiers, add middleware, and access the body of incoming events.
A handful of built-in defaults
Built-in OAuth support makes multi-team installation faster and more intuitive
Bolt includes a collection of defaults that perform the heavier lifting of building Slack apps. One of these is a design pattern called receivers, or adapters in Python. These separate the concerns of your app’s server and the Bolt framework so updates for server logic doesn’t require framework updates, and vice-versa.
Your app has access to a built-in Web API client that includes features such as built-in retry logic, rate limit handling, and pagination support as you make calls to any of our 130+ methods. It offers a simple way to call Web API methods without having to think of all of the possible edge cases. And lastly, Bolt offers OAuth support which handles the “Add to Slack” flow, making token storage and access for multi-team installations simpler.
Helper functions and objects
The say() helper is available in all listeners that have a conversation context
To complete common tasks, Bolt includes a set of helper functions. For example, in any listener with an associated conversation context, there will be say() function that lets your app send a message back into that channel. And for events that need to be acknowledged within 3 seconds, Bolt surfaces an ack() function that streamlines the act of responding.
Bolt also offers helpers that make it easier to inspect and pass data through your app. Rather than having to unwrap incoming events to access the most important information, Bolt includes a payload object that is a predictable, unwrapped event (though you’ll still have body for the more verbose event).
You can also access context , which is a key/value dictionary that allows you to pass data through middleware and listeners. For example, if you have an internal data store that you want to associate with incoming events, you can create a global middleware function to store that information in context , which will be natively accessible in listeners.
The future of Bolt
As the platform grows, we will continue our investment in Bolt to make it easier, faster, and more intuitive to build Slack apps.
For example, steps from apps are now available in Workflow Builder. Each workflow step has a few associated events, so we collaborated with the Workflow Builder engineering team to design a common pattern in Bolt that lets you centrally handle the entire life cycle of a workflow step.
Also, we recently pre-announced Socket Mode, which will improve the experience of deploying apps behind a firewall. When generally available early next year, Bolt apps will gain support for this feature with minimal code changes.
We’re also unlocking more Bolt resources for custom use cases— whether that’s specialized hosting environments, simplifying new features, or building scalable apps for enterprise grid and Slack Connect. We’ll continue to expand our collection of Bolt-focused code samples, tutorials, deployment guides, and webinars; and if you need a more specialized approach to building Slack apps, we have ongoing plans for our lower-level SDKs that power Bolt under the hood.
Digging into the nuts and bolts
You can start building with Bolt using our guides in Python, JavaScript, and Java.
If you’re a JavaScript developer, you can read our new hosting guides to get your app up-and-running on Heroku with an equivalent for AWS Lambda coming soon.
Want to dive deeper into Bolt for Python? We’re hosting a webinar on November 11, which you can register for today. | https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/build-slack-apps-in-a-flash-700570619065 | ['Shay Dewael'] | 2020-11-09 19:13:15.144000+00:00 | ['API', 'Technology', 'Python', 'Programming', 'Slack'] |
10 Failed Doomsday Predictions | © Hemera/Thinkstock
Religious leaders, scientists, and even a hen (or so it seemed) have been making predictions for the end of the world almost as long as the world has been around. They’ve predicted the destruction of the world through floods, fires, and comets-luckily for us, none of it has come to pass.
Harold Camping
Among the most prolific modern predictors of end times, Harold Camping has publicly predicted the end of the world as many as 12 times based his interpretations of biblical numerology. In 1992, he published a book, ominously titled 1994?, which predicted the end of the world sometime around that year. Perhaps his most high-profile predication was for May 21, 2011, a date that he calculated to be exactly 7,000 years after the Biblical flood. When that date passed without incident, he declared his math to be off and pushed back the end of the world to October 21, 2011.
True Way
Taiwanese religious leader Hon-Ming Chen established Chen Tao, or True Way, a religious movement that blended elements of Christianity, Buddhism, UFO conspiracy theories, and Taiwanese folk religion. Chen preached that God would appear on U.S. television channel 18 on March 25, 1988, to announce that he would descend to Earth the following week in a physical form identical to Chen. The following year, he prophesized, millions of devil spirits, together with massive flooding, would result in a mass extinction of the human population. Followers could be spared by buying their way aboard spaceships, disguised as clouds, sent to rescue them.
Millerism
Religious leader William Miller began preaching in 1831 that the end of the world as we know it would occur with the second coming of Jesus Christ in 1843. He attracted as many as 100,000 followers who believed that they would be carried off to heaven when the date arrived. When the 1843 prediction failed to materialize, Miller recalculated and determined that the world would actually end in 1844. Follower Henry Emmons wrote, “I waited all Tuesday, and dear Jesus did not come … I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain-sick with disappointment.”
The Prophet Hen of Leeds
© Larry Lefever/Grant Heilman Photography, Inc.
In 1806, a domesticated hen in Leeds, England, appeared to lay eggs inscribed with the message “Christ is coming.” Great numbers of people reportedly visited the hen and began to despair of the coming Judgment Day. It was soon discovered, however, that the eggs were not in fact prophetic messages but the work of their owner, who had been writing on the eggs in corrosive ink and reinserting them into the poor hen’s body.
Great Fire of London
Because the Bible calls 666 the number of the Beast, many Christians in 17th-century Europe feared the end of the world in the year 1666. The Great London Fire, which lasted from September 2 to September 5 of that year, destroyed much of the city, including 87 parish churches and about 13,000 houses. Many saw it as a fulfillment of the end of the world prophecy. Given such a large amount of property damage, though, the death toll of the fire was remarkably low, reportedly only 10 people — not quite the end of the world.
Montanism
Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Germany
Montanism, a 2nd century schismatic movement of Christianity, began in Phrygia (modern Turkey). Based on the visions of Montanus, who claimed to speak under the influence of the Spirit, Montanists believed the second coming of Christ to be imminent. Many Christian communities were almost abandoned when believers left their homes and migrated to a plain between the two villages of Pepuza and Tymion in Phrygia, where Montanus claimed the heavenly Jerusalem would descend to Earth.
© Hemera/Thinkstock
Religious leaders, scientists, and even a hen (or so it seemed) have been making predictions for the end of the world almost as long as the world has been around. They’ve predicted the destruction of the world through floods, fires, and comets-luckily for us, none of it has come to pass. | https://medium.com/@timekawillis/10-failed-doomsday-predictions-659322ce8b13 | ['Timeka Willis'] | 2020-12-05 15:59:14.341000+00:00 | ['Predictions', 'End Of Days', 'Failed Predictions', 'Not True Prophecy', 'World Changes'] |
6 Questions That Helped Me Hire The Perfect Coach For Me | Accountability; What’s Their Approach?
What kind of coach are you looking for? Are you the self motivated type? Do you need check-ins during the week? Every coach should be open about the level of accoutability they provide. Find out exactly what they offer. Some coaches may only offer email/text support but you may want video calls or a Facebook Community Group. Don’t assume every coach offers the same services about this. emails?
Goal Setting; Is The Road Map Specific To YOU?
You’re perfectly in your right to ask them to show you how they’ve approached goal setting with previous clients. This is perfect because it may take a coach out of the mind of ‘selling’ and simply sharing what they’ve done in the past. Their goal setting might paint a picture into the kind of training they specalize in. Maybe it’s in 12 week fat loss, or 6 month strength gaining, or prepping for your first bodybuilding contest.
I’m not saying that you should chose a coach that only deals with your exact goals. However, proof that they’ve already helped someone along a similar journey can help boost trust in them. This will also show you how involved they are in the clients they coach. They may offer already created workout routines vs individualized training programs. Each has their own pros’ & cons that are worth asking about!
Training Philosophy; How Will They Structure Your Workouts & Why?
Sometimes training boils down to one simple thing. You’re more likely to keep doing something if you enjoy it. Does this mean you should hire a coach that is a ‘yes man’ who will only ask you to do things you find fun? Absolutely not. A coach with integrity will find the balance between programming things you want vs the things you need to be doing. This includes commonly ignored qualities like stretching, mobility, cardio, cool down methods, etc.
Find someone who will help you with what you might otherwise ignore doing because it’s ‘not fun’. For me personally, I wouldn’t trust working with a coach that didn’t place a big importance on mobility. Having healthy joints is so important to moving and feeling better. I couldn’t see eye to eye with someone that felt like that wasn’t important to prioritize.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Injury; What Happens If We Run Into Problems?
Nobody wants to get injured. However, you should absolutely ask them how they deal with this. Obviously every injury is different so you shouldn’t expect them to unload an encyclopedia of knowing off the top of their head. However, they should have a plan of pain management. Maybe they have access to a good physio or massage therapist when things get beyond their scope. Wether they can personally help you through symptoms of pain, they should have a plan of action towards how to get you past it. Injuries can derail progress — so it’s imperative you understand how they would plan on getting you back on track!
Diet; Do Your Values Align?
This one should be simple enough to get behind. Personally as a vegan I wouldn’t think to persue a coach that considers soy as the devil. Regardless of what your diet it — find someone that is on the same page as you. It’s not impossible to find someone who can provide value when they have opposite viewpoints — but it’s worth asking how important that is for you. Some coaches don’t even offer nutrition based services and focus only on the fitness routine. Find what works for YOU!
Understanding; Do They Have The Heart Of A Teacher Or Are They Lecturing To You?
I think we can all agree that sometimes fitness terms can be kinda difficult to digest. If you’re not actively involved in the community, there can be a lot of words that will sound like straight pig latin. You want someone who can understand complicated topics and explain them simply. I’ve heard of coaches that relate fitness topics to their clients hobbies; ie. cars, investing, travel, etc.
Let’s use me as an example; which of these sentences do you think would resonate more with me as someone who commutes everywhere via bike or train.
Option 1: This last week you biked over 50km. That’s a lot of time your hips & knees spent going into partial flexion & extension. Let’s spend some time stretching and getting stronger in the ranges your knees and hips never get challenged in during your ride. We want to make sure your strength & control is in a large range of motion and not just in a few select ‘zones’.
Option 2: This last week you biked over 50km. Let’s stretch you out cause you must be feeling tight and then jump into our killer glute workout today.
Every client will want a different level of explanation to their training. If a coach can’t explain WHY you’re doing something in a way you understand — move on!
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Which above question resonated most with you? What questions would YOU ask that I did not list above? Let me know in the comments! :) | https://medium.com/@juhajuppi/6-questions-that-helped-me-hire-the-perfect-coach-for-me-6510c9e65a0f | ['Juha Juppi'] | 2020-12-21 20:58:23.553000+00:00 | ['Personal Training', 'Hiring Tips', 'Fitness', 'Strength Training', 'Coaching'] |
The swimmer poised to make British Olympics history | Being the poster girl for Black swimming while also studying towards a master’s degree in social media and political communications might be overwhelming for some, but Dearing takes it all in her stride.
“The opportunity that I have with potentially qualifying to the Olympics as being the first Black woman to swim for Britain at the Olympic Games, this is a chance to really drive home these changes, this diversity and cements that swimming is a sport for everybody,” she adds.
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“It’s just about using my voice for positive change and I feel like this is the best year, well, it was meant to be year but now it’s ended up being two years to do it.”
Once the Covid-19 restrictions are lifted and local swimming pools reopen for the general public, Dearing hopes to see more people trying out swimming.
“It absolutely changed my life in the most amazing way so I’d love for other people to have those opportunities and just give it a try,” she says.
While she acknowledges the importance of her advocacy work, Dearing wants her legacy to be centered on her achievements as a swimmer instead of her skin color.
“I wish that race didn’t matter in the sport; it does matter,” she adds.
“But I really hope we arrive at a place where it is just like you just get in and swim and you don’t have to be seen for your color or anything like that.
“So, in the long run, I definitely just want to be remembered as a swimmer, not as the Black swimmer for Britain.”
“It’s a difficult challenge, especially with the setbacks of Covid. But I really think with the partners we’re working with, with having Swim England on our side, I’m really looking to connect with aquatic bodies not just in swimming, but across a whole range of sports to showcase that swimming is not just swimming, it’s aquatics in general,” she says.
“And learning to swim can open up a door, be it for being a lifeguard or surfing, or even just having a splash in a pool or in the sea on holiday.”
Dearing has also partnered with the brand Soul Cap, which makes swimming caps for thick, curly and voluminous hairstyles, like the afro.
Earlier this year, Dearing, a 2016 World Junior Open Water champion, co-founded the Black Swimming Association (BSA), a charity which encourages swimming participation and works to prevent drowning in Black and minority ethnic communities.
Over the next four years, BSA plans to reduce the percentage of Black adults and Black children who do not swim in England by five percent and also increase the number of Black children at school who can swim 25 meters by five percent. | https://medium.com/@lingulif/the-swimmer-poised-to-make-british-olympics-history-c36f21d21202 | [] | 2020-12-19 23:35:43.506000+00:00 | ['Olympics', 'British', 'News', 'UK'] |
Cynefin Framework, Part 1: Ordered, Unordered, and Confused Domains | Each week I share ideas on the future of work. And this week, the topic is decision making in a world of constant change.
Why am I writing about this? I’m working on a method to assess organizational agility. And as part of that work, I’ve dug into complexity theory and, with that, Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework. What follows is part 1 of a 2-part introduction. I’m building to think. And this here is a by-product.
A short introduction before we start:
Cynefin is part sense-making device, part decision-making tool. And in this first installment, I’ll focus solely on the sense-making aspect of the framework. Specifically, I’ll focus on the primary and secondary domains used to categorize and understand the context in which decisions are made.
Let’s dig in. | https://medium.com/workmatters/cynefin-framework-part-1-ordered-unordered-and-confused-domains-bd99aa33b413 | ['Andreas Holmer'] | 2020-07-14 05:56:46.162000+00:00 | ['Snowden', 'Cynefin Framework', 'Leadership', 'Decision Making'] |
BOUSTEAD PROPERTIES & THE CURVE BRING FESTIVE JOY TO THE LESS UNFORTUNATE | BOUSTEAD PROPERTIES & THE CURVE BRING FESTIVE JOY TO THE LESS UNFORTUNATE SiennyLovesDrawing Mar 4·3 min read
Conscious of the plight of underprivileged communities that have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, Boustead Properties Berhad (“Boustead Properties” or “Company”) together with the Curve extended a helping hand to 4 homes in an effort to ease the burden and lift spirits in the Lunar New Year
Boustead Properties, developer of the Mutiara Hills township in Semenyih, contributed RM15K to three homes within the area, namely Persatuan Kebajikan Kanak-Kanak Cornerstone Selangor, Pertubuhan Kebajikan Warga Emas Al-Fattah & Joy Garden Old Folks Home. A total of 82 residents consisting of children & senior citizens benefited from this altruistic gesture
In addition, representatives from the Curve visited a nearby old folks’ home, Pertubuhan Kebajikan Warga Emas Kenang Budi Kuala Lumpur, to donate an array of daily necessities such as rice, oil, flour, sugar & other groceries, along with face masks & hand sanitisers for its 15 senior residents
The residents of all 4 homes also received individual money packets or ‘ang pow’ from Boustead Properties and the Curve respectively
During the visits, both Boustead Properties & the Curve adhered to Movement Control Order (MCO) 2.0 regulations & standard operating procedures
Executive Director of Boustead Holdings Berhad and Acting Chief Executive Officer of Boustead Properties, Izaddeen Daud said, “These are exceptionally tough times when we must come together as Malaysians to show that we care. Some communities have endured much hardship & we hope our humble contribution will make this Chinese New Year a meaningful one for all the beneficiaries and help spread the much-needed festive cheer.”
Jazmi Kamarudin, Senior General Manager, Property Management & Investment of Boustead Properties Berhad, said, “During this special occasion, it is all the more important to share joy with those who are less privileged, where giving back can truly make a difference. We hope our donation will make the celebrations brighter for the residents.”
Lim Yee Siang, representative from Pertubuhan Kebajikan Warga Emas Kenang Budi Kuala Lumpur, said, “We value the Curve’s support and their contributions to bring happiness to our senior residents this Chinese New Year. Their generosity will definitely be helpful, especially amidst this unprecedented situation.”
In keeping with the Chinese New Year celebration, the Curve had adjusted its festive campaign under strict adherence to the MCO 2.0 regulations in order to lift the spirits of patrons for a much-needed break from being at home. The patrons were treated to a thematic décor at the mall, inspired by the 1960s era. The essential and non-essential services, food & beverage and other approved outlets remained open & operated within the limits of the MCO 2.0 guideline | https://medium.com/@siennylovesdrawing/boustead-properties-the-curve-bring-festive-joy-to-the-less-unfortunate-6e0d145e7569 | [] | 2021-03-04 04:05:31.054000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Donations', 'Community', 'Charity', 'Social'] |
Properazzi.com | Properazzi .com has just launched a new and simplified interface, with many improvements in terms of usability and speed.
These improvements are consistent with an expansion in the following countries: | https://medium.com/iv%C3%A1n-de-prado-alonso/properazzi-com-5465f4092675 | ['Iván De Prado'] | 2018-04-10 11:45:13.482000+00:00 | ['Properazzi', 'Computers'] |
A 30% Stabilising Slice in My Piotroski Portfolio | The last change I made to my portfolio last month was adding a 30% piece invested as a stabilising mechanism to weather difficult periods, crises and crashes. Until now I’ve been fortunate enough to never experience a real crash, mainly because I’ve only been investing in stocks since the beginning of 2013, but that’s the point: You need to prepare for the worst when you have the means of doing so, not when it’s too late. Because crashes will happen. And that’s fine by me.
So what is a stabilising piece, in my case? It’s an investment in long-term bonds, short-term bonds and gold. All three of those tend to not move the same way that stocks do, but rather in opposite direction. Gold is especially strong in crises, and bonds do not lose their value in crashes like stocks do because they are not stakes in a company but loans that have to be paid back no matter what happens.
Which instruments did I choose? I used DBXP for short term bonds, DBXG for long term bonds and XAD5 for gold. These are two ETFs by Deutsche bank and one ETC that tracks the price of physical gold. The bonds are exclusively European government bonds. Since I’m based in Europe I chose local bonds rather than international ones. Additionally, these two ETFs reinvest the coupon payments rather than distributing them, so it’s basically like a stock that goes up without ever really going down. This makes sure I don’t have to pay taxes on the capital gains if I hold the ETFs for at least 6 months. (In Luxembourg, the return from an investment held for more than 6 months is tax free.)
(I do not know why the DBXG jumped in value in 2014, but I’ve re-checked the net asset value, i.e. the value of the underlying bonds compared to the price of the ETF, and it’s very close to the price so there’s nothing irregular there.)
Now in case a crash does happen sometime in the future, I will still lose money since 70% of my portfolio is in stocks, but the loss will be strongly counteracted by the bonds and the gold.
The gold as such has no long term value to me: in my opinion it doesn’t have any real value and there is no guarantee it will go up in value in the future. So why am I holding it? I hold it because there is a good chance that it will spike in price when a crash occurs, as it did in 2008:
Additionally, it is pretty volatile, and this is useful for rebalancing: if gold rises a lot when my stocks fall, I will be able to sell gold at the end of the year to buy cheap stocks. Without the gold stake, there would be no money at that point to buy low priced stocks.
A bond / gold holding will inevitably reduce your overall returns but if that can take most of the sting out of crashes then it’s worth it to me. | https://medium.com/studies-of-life/a-30-stabilising-slice-in-my-piotroski-portfolio-9e0468f0f870 | [] | 2017-11-29 21:53:10.620000+00:00 | ['Bonds', 'Investing', 'Gold', 'Etfs'] |
Is Uber fare splitting fair? | Is Uber fare splitting fair?
Human behavior and game theory collide in the world of ride-sharing with friends. Ry Sullivan Apr 20·9 min read
Am I about to make ride-sharing less fun? Probably. Party on!
In my last blog post I combined two well known game theory exercises (the Unscrupulous Diner’s Dilemma and the Pirate game) into a new puzzle: the Pirate’s Diner Dilemma. The aim of the problem was to illustrate how the rationally optimal outcome differs from the solution expected from social norms.
Many friends questioned whether they wanted to dine with me again (I hope jokingly!). Others asked whether there was any practical use to the thought experiment. Wouldn’t all diners end up behaving based on emotion, psychology, and culture (i.e. splitting a check evenly) versus trying to be strategic and sneaky like pirates? What social activity will you ruin next, Ry?
These were good questions. The thought process that goes into dividing things amongst people raises a tension between what is rational and what people actually do in the world. Or more philosophically: What is fairness? Why do we think some things are fair and others aren’t? How does fairness change as we reimagine situations?
Rather than explore a theoretical and artificial game, I decided to seek a real-world example to understand fairness dynamics in the wild. I found one in a situation I face regularly but rarely think about while traveling around San Francisco (at least pre-COVID): Is Uber fare splitting fair? Time to ruin another social activity with math!
The Airport Problem
Before answering this question, I think it’s useful to take a step back and explore a well-known game theory thought experiment that deals with splitting costs: the Airport Problem.
Imagine three companies own and operate airlines. They decide to collectively build an airport with a runway that will support all of their different needs. Company A operates only small single-propeller planes and needs a short runway whose length costs $100 to build. Company B owns mid-sized jets that require a longer runway costing $200. Company C flies jumbo jets that need the longest runway costing $300 to build.
How should the airlines split the cost of building a single runway that they can all use?
The Airport Problem: How should airlines with different runway length needs divide the costs of a runway that they can all use?
If they all decide to split the total $300 cost evenly, Company A feels put out. If Companies B and C are willing to pay for the $100 of the short runway as part of their own cost, why should Company A pay $100 for this length? If Company A is asked to pay $100, why not just go build their own runway and not deal with Company B and Company C at all?
If Company A and Company B ask Company C to cover all the costs — e.g. “You were already going to build a $300 runway, so what’s the difference to you?” — Company C feels put out. Why coordinate on this project if Company A and Company B are going to freeload? Company C is better served by building their own airport runway.
Fairness in this case feels like it should exist somewhere between these extremes with each Company paying less than if they did things on their own. But what should the split be? The game theoretical mathematician Lloyd Shapley derived an answer to problems like these — earning him the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Shapley value for this problem is achieved as each company splits the cost of the parts of the runway they benefit from using.
For the first $100 section of runway, all three companies benefit so each pays a third: $33.33 each. For the next $100 section of runway, only Company B and Company C benefit — so they split the cost: $50 each. For the final section of runway, only Company C benefits so they pay the full $100. Overall Company A pays $33.33, Company B pays $83.33, and Company C pays $183.33. All benefit from working together and pay their “fair” share of the runway length they need. Note this is one way (among many!) to divide the cost of the runway — but one that mathematically approaches fairness.
The Shapley value solution to the Airport Problem.
Non-linear Airport Problems
The Airport Problem works out nicely, partly because there’s overlap between what the airline companies need when building runways. The runway needed by Company A is part of the runways needed by Company B and Company C. In the real-world, things get complicated when things don’t line up so nicely. An example of this is available from Yale on Coursera which I’ve recreated below.
Imagine three friends (Rider A, Rider B, and Rider C) want to share a taxi home but who all live in different parts of town. If each took a cab home separately they’d spend a total of $32 dollars as illustrated below:
All riders live in different parts of town and could travel to their respective destinations solo.
However, if the friends share a single ride, they can collectively reduce the amount to $18 with each leg of the journey adding $6 to the trip. How should the friends divide the total fare. Or, put differently, how should the friends divide the $14 in collective savings amongst themselves? Should they split the fare at $6-$6-$6 or something else? If they do an even split, why would Rider A not just choose their own cab?
The optimal path for splitting a ride between the three destinations.
To answer that question, we’d need more information including the costs of taking alternate routes between the destinations. Using GPS and taxi fare predictions, we could draw the following payment map:
The routes and fares between all rider destinations.
With this information we can apply the Shapley value once again to find what each rider should “fairly” pay. The Shapley value for this scenario produces the following result: Rider A pays $2.83, Rider B pays $5.33, and Rider C pays $9.83, for a total of $18.00. Similar to our airport problem, each rider benefits versus taking their own ride. And the riders who live closest (Rider A) or provide the most route continuity advantages (Rider B) pay slightly less than under the scenario where the total fare is split evenly.
If you want a full explanation of the math and reasoning — which involves probabilities and logic (fun!) — you can find it here.
What happens in the real world? Enter: Uber.
Calculating fares down to the penny is awkward and tedious for riders. Asking them to make a rational decision by calculating the optimal path versus multiple alternate routes to produce a Shapley value is difficult and (dare I say) a little weird. I’ve certainly never seen that happen in real life. And I have nerdy friends.
But what if you’re a software company like Uber that can do those calculations as fast as riders enter in their destinations and doesn’t have to ask riders about their sense of fairness? What do you do? Do you split the fare evenly amongst riders or do you adjust the fares based on the destinations of the riders including distance and how much contributes to collective gains (e.g. a destination on the route of two other riders)?
Uber’s fare split feature as rolled out in 2013. Photo from Techcrunch.
According to Uber’s help website, they opt for the even-split option. Every rider who joins a fare split ride pays the same amount. They also add a +$0.25 cost per rider, which seems unnecessary in my opinion.
Screenshot from Uber’s website.
This is probably what most people expected. And while I’d love to imagine the Uber R&D and business teams asking profound questions about human behavior, rationality, and fairness I expect the reasons are simpler. Occam’s Razor suggests that the following explanations are more likely:
It’s easier to code dividing the fare by the total number of riders than doing a complex Shapley value calculation. I imagine the original pull request by Uber’s engineers focused on getting a solution into the market quickly versus spending time finding a more complicated optimized solution.
If fares aren’t split evenly, Uber would probably get support tickets and complaints from confused riders. For the riders in our example $6-$6-$6 makes sense, whereas $2.83-$5.33-$9.83 is confusing. Support tickets cost money and confusing/losing riders is bad. Uber is a business after all.
Uber can’t match specific riders to specific locations (assuming they’re not tracking the GPS movements of our phones that closely…). Either they would have to do something creepy (like GPS tracking) or ask riders to input this information. This extra rider friction isn’t worth the effort, and it might dissuade use of the feature.
Trying to cleverly calculate payments exposes Uber to all sorts of edge cases. For example, what if riders stop at a destination to drop something off, but don’t actually get out there and continue on?
But what happens if one rider lives really far away?
In the prior example, I believe most people would agree that splitting an $18 Uber fare evenly amongst riders is reasonable. It feels fair — and behavior usually trumps game theory rationality. Like I said, I’ve never even checked how Uber calculated fare splits until writing this blog.
But what happens if Rider C lives 2 hours away? Now the total cost amongst riders is $212 assuming the first legs of the journey remain the same and the last costs $200. The new journey is shown below:
The problem earlier — except now one rider lives quite far away.
Does an even split where each rider pays $70⅔ still feel fair? Probably not. Yet, if you chose the split fare option on Uber, that’s how things would be divided: $70.66-$70.66-$70.67 (Now that I think of it, I wonder who Uber decides to give the extra penny to…).
What I imagine happens in this situation is that Rider C simply offers to pay for the whole trip, allowing Rider A and Rider B to tag along for free. Maybe they strike an off-app bargain where they agree to buy Rider C a drink the next time they hand out. That’s what would happen with my friends anyway.
In other words, people will naturally self-select into the fare-split option when they think doing so makes sense. In extreme cases, they won’t. Imagine what would happen if Rider C suggested the fare split option in this case. You can play this awkward conversation out in your head.
Lingering questions
I’m now left with new interesting questions to ponder. For the Uber fare splitting case, at what point do people stop offering to fare split? Is it when Rider C’s additional leg is $10? $20? $50? Do decisions change if people think in terms of distance versus dollars? What if the ratios of the problem were the same but the split was for something bigger like a large development project in the millions of dollars: would $6m-$6m-$6m be preferable to $2.83m-$5.33m-$9.83m or is fairness also based on size? Who most often suggests to split the fare in real life— Rider A, B, or C? Why?
I bet there’s some interesting behavioral insights to uncover — and I’m betting they’re not rational. If anyone has seen studies like these, I’d love to read them. If not, I tried polling my friends on Twitter. So far I’ve just learned that they’re good people… 😂
Additional Reading | https://medium.com/@rysullivan/is-uber-fare-splitting-fair-b7760c5925e6 | ['Ry Sullivan'] | 2021-04-20 16:00:11.999000+00:00 | ['Shapley Values', 'Uber', 'Game Theory', 'Curiosity', 'Fairness'] |
Betty’s best companion | Photo by Clément Falize on Unsplash
It had been a while since five year old Betty spotted a garden not far away from her house. Tiny bushes and shrubs held their positions in most parts of the land but there were flowers evenly spread throughout. Betty didn’t know the names of all the flowers nor of the plants that stayed in their fixed homes on the ground. She was determined to learn them though and walk regularly to that place at dusk when the heat of the day had left its strength.
Thus, every evening Betty stepped out of the house, accompanied by her Granny, to spend time in the so called “Butterfly garden”. The name was deceiving though, Betty had thought when she first heard it from a neighbor. She was disappointed to not find any of those flying creatures there. But Granny had reassured her that they were in hiding and once the time was right, they would appear and catch Betty by surprise. But she loved the garden anyway and didn’t ponder upon the case of missing butterflies; the irony of a name so forgotten.
She liked to imagine them instead, butterflies of all kinds and colors, hovering over the flowers, their wings bearing the color of dusk. Her Granny gave in to this little game of hers, playing with her imagination by adding bits and pieces like, “I can see a big red one right atop your head.” And then Betty would pretend to remove it from her hair and place it in her palms.
“It flew away Granny,” she’d reply. The game involved a lot of jumping and running, which obviously her grandmother never tried, but Betty flew through the entire length of the garden, clapping her hands at times, screaming, “Butterfly, butterfly! Granny I ain’t able to catch that butterfly!”
Granny made a song too.
Butterfly, O butterfly
Deviate not from your path
We ain’t no troublesome people
We just need your friendship
And Betty would join her, their voices sailing with the wind to the other side of the garden. Anyone who heard them, or saw them playing knew how perfect the pair was, their devotion to the other so robust and steady, their ages a fickle barrier.
When together, the spark in the grandmother’s eye never drifted, the bliss remained etched in her grandchild’s face. Betty never left her behind. She was her perfect company.
One evening, her grandmother caught a slight fever and was unable to go out with her. Betty had to go by herself, but it was no fun without her. She got bored and returned early.
“Did you catch that poor thing, that shiny yellow one?” Her grandmother inquired late at night, her voice hoarse, fever slipping into her tongue.
“They are on a trip, Gran. I guess they’ll return once you do,” Betty replied.
“Sweets, they never leave that place. I guess they are all in hiding today. Remember child, that the butterflies will always be there in the garden. For you.” She smiled, sounding confident of what she had said and drifted off to sleep.
Betty decided to wait till her Granny recovered. She swore not to visit the garden without her. She spent her evenings with her neighborhood dog instead and made plans for the next garden visit.
“Bruno.” She spoke to the dog. “Have you ever paid a visit to the butterflies? If you happen to pass by that garden, don’t chase them, alright?.
“Wuff,” the dog replied as if taking in all the words, his big round eyes gazing intently at her.
“I’m planning to take food for them next time, Bruno. I hope it’s fine with Granny. Would you like to come too?”
Another “Wuff” followed the question.
But it didn’t seem like Betty’s plans would work out soon. Because a week passed by and Granny was still unwell.
What’s taking her so long, she thought.
In the past there had been moments when Granny was sick. But she used to recover in a day or two; at most in three days. Betty tried to talk to her several times. She seemed too sick to reply. Her words would come out all muffled. So there wasn’t much conversation between them in that week. But she never stopped making plans and if she passed by the garden.
She’d say from afar, “Dear friends, Granny and I’ll return soon.”
One night she had an unusual dream. Her grandmother was in it and there was someone else too.
Have seen him somewhere, Betty thought in her sleep.
That round face, dark complexion and broad mouth were all too familiar. He seemed the same age as her Granny and both of them stood silently beside the other on the front porch of their house, their shoulders hunched. It was nightfall, their gaze remained fixed towards the sky, both of them seemed lost in thoughts. At first it looked like they’d forever stay that way, still as statues, staring at the night canvas. But they slowly stooped. It was then she noticed the things on the ground, and picked up the large bags. Granny held two of them, while the man held three. And then very slowly albeit with a swiftness they walked towards the gate. Before Betty could react, they had already unlatched it and were moving on the road outside.
Betty called out, “Granny!” once but no sound came out of her mouth.
They kept on walking, slowly and swiftly, but before they had reached the bend in the road, they paused in their tracks and turned around and smiled at her direction.
Betty gasped. “Oh”, she said and felt a strong desire to capture that moment forever for there lay an immeasurable warmth and grace in each of their faces. She could feel the warmth gliding across her cheeks and reaching her heart. And then they moved on thus disappearing at the bend. The road spawned empty by their missing footsteps, in front of her eyes.
The dream left a bittersweet feeling behind and some alien feeling that she couldn’t fathom and the first thing she did was to run to her Granny’s room. The curtains were drawn at that time, the room lay dark and the bed in the center of it stood empty, a stillness hovering over it.
Her mother appeared behind her and took her in her arms. She looked worn out and sad when she spoke. “Granny was rushed to the hospital at night. Her fever had risen.” And then she forced a smile as well as the next words. “But don’t worry dear. She’ll be back soon. It’s only a….”
But she broke off mid-sentence and started crying. She held on to Betty a bit tighter and Betty cried too. The room witnessed a duet of two sad voices and in the midst of it Betty’s eyes fell on the photo beside her Grandmother’s bed, the one with her Grandpa in it, the Grandpa whom she had never seen but known through that photo and Granny’s stories. Even in the photo, his round face, dark complexion and broad mouth formed the base of his features. | https://medium.com/lit-up/bettys-best-companion-83072501ff35 | [] | 2020-10-09 16:23:44.791000+00:00 | ['Short Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Family', 'Fiction', 'Grandmother'] |
How Spacex Makes Money | It recently raised around $1.16 billion via equity funding with the company now being valued at $74 billion. This is a 60% jump in its valuation from the valuation in August 2020.
Since SpaceX is not a publicly listed company. So, they are not obligate to share their financials with the public. But as many experts, these
2 Sources Majorly Generate Revenue For SpaceX -
Government Contracts
Its major revenue source is space delivery services. It has won many NASA contracts to send goods to the ISS or launch a satellite into orbit.
It also has done many projects with American Airforce. It also won a contract to provide 40% of all U.S. military launch requirements in 2020.
2. Starlink
It can be the next revolution in the global internet market. It is a network of satellites aiming to provide high-speed low-cost internet to remote locations.
As of now, they have launched more than 1700 satellites are currently in orbit. The most interesting point is that they are using their own reusable rockets to launch these satellites. It is an unbeatable cost advantage.
Elon Musk expected that it can capture 3% to 4% of the global internet access market soon. He expects that Starlink can bring revenue of over $30 billion per year by 2025.
We hope you will love this post.
Don’t forget to save the post. | https://medium.com/@nirav-parmar/how-spacex-makes-money-5ecd6fbbd237 | ['Nirav Parmar'] | 2021-06-23 11:53:15.848000+00:00 | ['Elon', 'Spacex', 'Space', 'Space Exploration', 'Elon Musk'] |
Δεν είναι άνοιξη | in Change Your Mind Change Your Life | https://medium.com/@efstratiospapanis/%CE%B4%CE%B5%CE%BD-%CE%B5%CE%B9%CC%81%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%B9-%CE%B1%CC%81%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%BE%CE%B7-9c4cf0578ef6 | ['Efstratios Papanis'] | 2020-11-22 17:01:34.034000+00:00 | ['Spring', 'Expectations'] |
Import/Export Best Practices For The CBD Sector — Robert Jappie & Alexej Pikovsky | Alphagreen is Europe’s largest marketplace for CBD products and is helping several US brands to distribute products in the UK. Together with Ince, a leading law firm in the UK, best practices on import and export of CBD products have been discussed.
The following summary gives an overview of the critical takings from the presentation, providing you with all the inside knowledge of the legal provisions for importing good from the US into the UK exporting from the US and importing into the UK, while also detailing the challenges of Brexit and the upcoming Novel Food application deadline.
What are the UK’s regulations?
Firstly, it is important to understand the current regulations in the UK. This may seem obvious for people looking to import CBD into the UK, but it is complicated and many people misunderstand the rules. There is also a lot of misinformation out there, so it is important to separate fact from the fiction.
Why is there so much product moving around the UK?
This is because the regulations of handling hemp in the UK are extremely tough. The UK license states that green material must be destroyed on site and all the buds, leaves and flowers must not be used for extraction. Because of the difficulties with regulations, most of the CBD extractions and products in the UK are sourced from eastern Europe or the US, and in some cases, other regions around the world.
The Difficulties with the UK Border Force.
The Border Force is challenging to deal with from a legal perspective due to their inadequate knowledge of the law. Disputes can often be dragged out, and discussion is virtually impossible when a simple resolution could be made. To avoid the inevitable answer of ‘no’, preparation is vital — it is advised to put the Border Force into a position where they can’t say no to your shipment coming in the first place. Without implementing this preparation, your imports will likely be seized at the border, and if this does happen, be aware that you could be waiting months of back-and-forth to get your shipment back.
What cannabinoids are controlled substances?
There are over 100 cannabinoids known to scientists today, and some of these are prohibited for use and therefore a controlled substance. For these substances, you need a license which is very difficult to get — most, if not all, entities that obtain this license have permission for scientific medical research, i.e. Big Pharma. The main cannabinoids which have been restricted are THC, CBN and THC V. Still, the Home Office also considers THC A and THC M — which are currently permitted to be imported into the country — to be unstable, as both can be decarboxylated into THC easily. So, with all the cannabinoids just mentioned, you must have an accurate Certificate of Analysis to know the precise levels of these compounds in your finished product to ensure you are not breaching regulations.
How much THC are you allowed? (exempt product criteria)
Most people see the figure of 0.2% and assume that this is uniform for extractions and finished products, but this is incorrect. When people review the law, they will see that you have to use EU approved strains of the hemp plant, which typically yield 0.2% THC or less. People assume this translates into finished CBD products and extracts, but it doesn’t, and anyone that suggests 0.2% limit applies across the board is incorrect and should be ignored. So, in the UK, we have something called the exempt product criteria. There are three parts, but the main bit we are concerned about is part C. This exemption allows you to have a small amount (up to 1mg) of THC in your product without the need for a license.
The exemption is set up in regulation two of the misuse of drugs regulations 2001, and there’s a huge dispute here in the UK as to whether or not this exemption can be used for CBD products. The home office has made some suggestions that this exception can only be used for Medicinal Products or pharmaceutical products. You should remember that all of this is untested — there’s no case law, there’s no case precedent and there are no Supreme Court judgments on whether this can be applied or not. This means you should always invoke the exemption and make it clear that you are using it.
Does this THC limit apply to Imports?
The Home Office view is that the one-milligram threshold referred to in part C applies to the whole container. So, if you had a packet of gel caps with 14 caps within the container, this ruling is applied to the contents of this container, not an individual gel cap. This effectively reduces your container size, as the bigger your container of CBD, the more likely you are to be in breach of that one-milligram threshold. This is a real pain for many businesses, particularly businesses that are importing bulk material like isolate or distillate in large volumes. If you are a US company be aware of this, as one minute you will be compliant, the next minute you won’t once you have imported your product into the UK.
What do you do if your shipment is seized?
In the worst-case scenario of your shipment being seized, you need to be aware of the technicalities of the judicial process in the UK so you can approach the situation effectively and have more chance of winning your case. From the get-go, it is important to note that this can be a long, drawn-out process and can cost your business a lot of money, so it’s best if you don’t get your shipment seized in the first place by taking the steps mentioned below.
What happens if you don’t invoke exemption?
The Border Force is strict, and they don’t use the most sophisticated tests. Upon asking for the results of these tests for THC, they will not disclose this to you, which is extremely frustrating and makes you wonder if they are even testing shipments. So here you have two problems — 1) the test Border Force are using may wrongly show higher levels of THC, meaning it seizes your shipment 2) If your test for shipment is positive for THC, they won’t show you the tests, meaning it is challenging to prove they are wrong.
Once you’ve had this review from a senior officer in the border force you’ve now got 30 days to appeal to take the matter to a court hearing. At the hearing, you can make your case that your product is legal due to the exempt product criteria.
Should you appeal and take this to court?
You’ve got to make a decision here — is it worth losing a lot of money in legal fees to take this to court? If your shipment is not worth much money, let’s say £3000, then you have to say to yourself, is this worth the stress, hassle and money to take this to court? The answer is probably no unless you and a legal team are sure you will win the case and receive compensation for your troubles. If your shipment is worth over £10,000, then you want to take this to court, as losing this amount of money could be catastrophic for your business.
If you do decide to cut your losses as your shipment wasn’t worth the legal fees, then take this as a hard lesson learnt. It is recommended that you still contest this as if you don’t, you are essentially accepting that you imported an unlawful product.
What happens when you appeal?
Once you have put in an appeal to the Border Force, they send this case to their lawyers who review the issue properly, and in turn, will send a summons to the court. This is going to be listed for a hearing where we can present our arguments to the court and hopefully get the shipment back. They have to lodge the summons to the court within six months of the appeal, and once this is processed, we will finally get our court hearing. This is when we can provide the evidence to the court and exhibit that the extractions or products do not contain above 1mg of CBD per container.
If I get my shipment back, do I get compensated?
Once you have taken this to the court hearing and it is confirmed that your shipment was unnecessarily seized, you can also apply for compensation for the damage that has been caused by the Border Force. The lawyer that works on behalf of the Border Force will ask the court to confirm that they acted reasonably in seizing the shipment once it entered the UK. If the shipment wasn’t seized for a short time, it could be argued that it was necessary. Still, it is more likely that the Border Force will have held your shipment for an extended period, which is a problem and shouldn’t be accepted by you or the lawyer working on behalf of your company. They will try and argue their innocence, but you’ve got to contest and be adamant that you still want the hearing to go ahead to receive your compensation and recover your losses.
How can you prevent a shipment from being seized?
Prevention is better than cure. Most brands will come to a lawyer once a shipment has been seized, rather than asking the lawyer to help with preparation before. It will be a lot cheaper, and you will save a lot of time if you get a lawyer to help you prevent a shipment from being seized rather than contacting a lawyer to help you get your shipment released.
You must invoke exemption before your import arrives.
The problem that many businesses have, is they don’t apply for exemption before their import arrives — they wait for the shipment to be seized and then they will call a lawyer to try and sort out the mess. At this point it’s too late — you must apply for this exemption before importing the goods to the UK. You also must provide clarity on your labelling and packaging to make sure that it matches your exemption, and it is clear for the Border Force.
Make sure you include all the relevant documentation.
So the first part is your documentation, you’ve got to make sure that it’s correct. If you don’t have the relevant documentation, it will become more difficult to argue against in court. You will be at risk of losing your shipment and losing a substantial amount of money in legal fees. If you are new to the industry and don’t know what is required, it will be beneficial to employ a lawyer to help you with this as it can be confusing and you don’t want to make any mistakes.
Make sure your labelling is correct.
What may be compliant in the US, France, Germany, or Eastern Europe may not be compliant here in the UK. Make sure that your labels and your packaging have been reviewed and are UK compliant, as while it is likely that the Border Force officer is not going to be experienced enough to pick up on these problems, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Use a partner organisation which can help with shipping and distribution
You must use an experienced shipping agent that knows the regulations surrounding CBD. Big companies such as DHL and FedEx usually do not know how to deal with the specifics of CBD logistics and therefore it is important to work with players who have done it before.
Alphagreen has a presence in the US and in the UK. Being able to store and bundle products in the US before sending it over to the UK or to Europe is a big advantage.
It is very important to stay on top of correct commodity codes, so you are paying for the right tariffs and avoid problems further down the line. Having the right distribution partner is vital and could potentially save you a lot of time, money and hassle.
Hire a lawyer to help you with your shipment
You can ask a UK lawyer to review your packaging and produce a letter to go with the shipment. This letter will effectively set out the relevant regulations so that when Border Force examines your shipment, you are already providing them with the documentation that proves your shipment is exempt from seizure. It also confirms that the products are compliant with UK law, and no license is required to invoke this exemption. This will significantly minimise the risk of your shipment being seized, which in the long-term will save you a lot of money.
How will Brexit impact upon importation into the UK?
With Brexit on the horizon, it is essential to know how this will affect imports and exports moving forward. Tariffs are going to change as a result of Brexit — these could either hinder or benefit your company, and it is crucial to be aware of what camp you are in.
Changes to tariffs and non-tariff barriers — who will benefit?
When inputting details for a standard commodity code on check future tariffs websites, you can see how the tariffs will be affected by Brexit for businesses in different regions. Currently, for the common external tariff — which applies to anyone from outside the EU importing CBD into the UK — you are going to be paying 5.5%. So, if you are a US supplier, you will currently be paying a 5.5% rate to import your products or bulk materials into the UK. After the UK leaves the EU, we are not subject to EU regulations anymore, which means Britain will have its separate tariffs. The suggestion is that the UK tariff will drop to 4%, so our friends in the US might get to benefit from the UK leaving the EU.
Changes to tariffs and non-tariff barriers — who will it hinder?
If your product is coming from mainland Europe, through the Channel Tunnel and into the UK, this is where the problems are going to arise. No one is sure about how this is going to go, but one thing is for sure, there is going to be a lot of additional documentation that has to be submitted. So, if you’re shipping into the UK via the Channel Tunnel from mainland Europe, you need to get on top of this now. Make sure you have all the necessary regulatory approvals and tariff documentation submitted to make sure that your product is not being held up at the French/UK Border.
You need to be extremely careful with tariff information as it can change quickly — one day you think you have got a generous tariff, the next day you find out it has been raised substantially. So again, this is another reason to have a good shipping agent on board as they get the Binding Tariff Information (BTI) before anyone else. These BTI’s are sent from the government for when there’s a dispute over what commodity code to use or what commodity code should be applied to a particular product and a reliable shipping agent will make you aware of this before any other entity. These BTI’s can be costly, which is why it is essential to find out as soon as you can.
Summary
This discussion has demonstrated how important it is to prepare your business before you import your products into the UK, and while we recommend that you avoid going to court if your shipment is not worth a bank-breaking figure, we have established the legal processes you will need to take to release your shipment if it is seized. We have also displayed the course of action to take if you wish to be compensated for an unjustly UK Border Force seizure.
We have shown it is critical to work with companies that are experienced with the UK’s CBD space to be successful. Both Ince and Alphagreen have a long track record of providing exemplary service in the UK — we have the tools and knowledge readily available so you can successfully import your shipments into the UK without legal disputes and without logistical problems. Without entities such as Ince and Alphagreen helping brands enter the UK market, we fear that the UK customer base will be starved of a plethora of great CBD brands from around the world. Competition is vital if the UK market wants to be the powerhouse of the CBD industry like many have predicted, which is why we need you to take the leap into the UK. For the reasons detailed above, we are happy to help anyone, anywhere and anytime. | https://medium.com/alphagreen/import-export-best-practices-for-the-cbd-sector-robert-jappie-alexej-pikovsky-62c6e4e05741 | ['Connor Bruggemann'] | 2020-11-19 15:46:10.185000+00:00 | ['Hemp', 'Regulation', 'Cbd', 'Cannabis', 'Import Export'] |
So Should You Document Software? | The Case
Ignoring cases when your company or team must abide by certain ISO standards, the case for documentation is usually believed to be pure altruism. Helping those that come later. I’d take a different approach, as altruism just doesn’t impress us busy engineers: We need documentation. For our own work. And not just some day, but also now.
“But what’s in it for me?” you might ask. Well, the same can be asked about unit tests — they take time to write and don’t seem to really benefit you in the short term. But in both cases you get a stamp of confidence, that you knew what you were doing. And much more.
Let’s dive in then. Here are the 3 main ways your documentation will benefit you.
1. Rethinking Your Application
When you write, you think. And no, not in the same way as when you write code. You’re forced to explain what you’ve done in plain language, which forces you to rethink all aspects of the solution. In order to communicate the complex ideas your code implements, you have to phrase them abstractly and precisely. It’s not easy, but it’s an acquired skill. Writing documentation puts you in the reader’s shoes in a way that code, unfortunately, just doesn’t.
Being the first reader of your document, you will also see problems in your application while documenting. Big or small, there will always be at least a couple. Confusing APIs, scenarios you might have missed, possible ways to do things better. Because you’re forced to “zoom out” and explain the big picture, you might discover the ways in which your solution doesn’t really live up to the principles we aspire to, like separation of concerns, single responsibility etc. It is true both for a little high level draft, and for a detailed technical design, where you will rethink the implementation, from module names to edge cases.
The same is true for comments: A good way to test that your code makes sense is to try to describe the goal of each code unit, like a function or class, with one sentence. Everything in the unit must be part of that goal, and everything related to that goal must be part of (or used by) that unit. Can’t do it? Then rethink the unit and/or the goal.
Critics of the traditional documentation process might say it actually lets you get away with not following the principles, or bind you to a bad solution. From my experience, it’s usually the other way around: Not writing documentation doesn’t allow you to see how you could actually write a better code, and as a result you’re left with a code that’s no better quality, but also undocumented. Everyone’s afraid to mess with it, because we’re just not sure why it’s the way it is. We all love it when the code is self descriptive, but on a growing scale where theory meets reality, your document will be there.
2. Summarizing Topics
Documents are always broken into topics, which naturally centralize some aspects of the application that are otherwise distributed and lost in the code. Aspects like configuration capabilities, monitored parameters, security, logging, and so on. This characteristic will save you and others a ton of time when looking for an answer to a “high level” question, like “Which APIs’ availability affects this service and how?”
UMLs, by the way, are great summaries in and of themselves. You can answer a question like that by looking at a picture. Or as one might say, a picture is worth 4 hours of reading code (more like days).
The critics often say that technical documentation is useless because nobody’s going to read a 25 page design. That’s true, but what’s also true is that nobody needs to — we have the table of contents for that. If you want the background and basic idea behind the feature, you read the first page. If you need the configuration capabilities — you go straight to the configurations section on page 9.
3. An Otherwise Lost Knowledge
There will always be things that code alone cannot explain. Things you might just know, but will forget shortly. From technical details like setting up a working environment for debugging, evaluated performance limitations or troubleshooting hints, to the very meaning of the components and terms in the application. Terms that might be the most talked about and understood today, but will sound alien to many of your teammates, and perhaps to you too, in less than a year. No “common knowledge” is eternal. The simplest ideas become forgotten, and the smartest people get confused.
When I think about the times I read someone’s code, which was not necessarily badly written, just trying to “get into their head” and figure what they meant by “Discovery,” or “Channel,” I would always wish having a document where I could just search for where it’s written in plain English. But forget someone else: If someone asks you what these terms mean in your project, you have a beautiful explanation you’ve already worded to yourself, and it’s also in a document you can refer people to. It won’t cover everything, but you can cover enough for a big initial boost. | https://medium.com/swlh/so-should-you-document-software-dac9d0075678 | ['Eugene Marin'] | 2020-11-29 17:28:02.739000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Documentation'] |
New Approaches to Digital Platform Governance: Regulatory Analogies | Photo by LUM3N on Unsplash
The cockfight between Facebook and Twitter over how to handle political advertising on digital platforms — and the all-too serious consequences — is only the most recent manifestation of western democracies’ failure to regulate digital platforms. There are a number of regulatory proposals and new laws, especially in Europe, to create oversight for digital media platforms, content regulations, transparency requirements, and responsibilities for monitoring political communications, among other interventions. For the most part, these moves extend analog media regulatory modalities onto digital platforms, ending the misplaced deference to a passé internet exceptionalism by which digital platform owners were able to disclaim responsibility for harms on the grounds that they are merely neutral conduits. Commentators have argued for many years that digital platforms are media companies; responsive regulatory reform is finally coming.
However, this reform impulse runs into two obstacles: (1) many of the moves, especially outside of the U.S., are content-based and bump up against individual speech liberties which, at a time of rising illiberalism, need defending both from state and platform power, and (2) the extension of analog regulation does not scale for the speed, volume, and algorithmic channeling of digital flows. New kinds of regulatory intervention are needed to deal with these platform governance challenges, not to mention other applications of AI. Media regulation is not sufficient. Because of both free speech sensitivities and scale problems, the most promising solutions focus less on disinformation and incendiary speech and more on systemic design issues. The following ideas borrow from regulatory modalities outside of media law, drawing analogies to other kinds of systems regulation that might bear on digital platforms and other technologies.
Products liability. Pioneering attorney Carrie Goldberg brought and lost a federal case against Grindr for enabling an ex-boyfriend to harass her client by creating fake profiles and then sending men looking for sex to his home and work. She claimed that the service should be liable in tort law as a defective product. She lost because Grindr is immune under federal law (Section 230) for the speech it publishes. If the scope of Section 230 immunity is this broad, it needs to be amended. Platforms should have some duty of care for harms caused or enabled by their platform design.
Danielle Citron and Benjamin Wittes have proposed that service providers should have to earn immunity through reasonable content moderation practices. Rather than assessing these practices on a case-by-case basis, courts would look at them as a whole. I have proposed with Karen Kornbluh a similar trimming of Section 230 immunity, but with the involvement of an expert regulatory agency. Any increased liability for digital platforms raises the danger that risk-averse platforms will over-police. That is why it is important to make liability reform part of an ecosystem change that enables more competition and reduces the power of any single platform.
Environmental regulation. For some years, privacy scholars have been agitating to end the notice-and-consent model of privacy incursion and instead treat the promiscuous sharing of data like an environmental harm. This is partly because the negative externalities swamp the individual harm and also because it is impossible to have meaningful consent where there is constant and ubiquitous data harvesting and transmission. Data practices are at the root of online harms. Microtargeting based on fine-grained data dossiers are what enables YouTube autoplay and Facebook newsfeed contributions to radicalization and conspiracy theories. Harold Feld at Public Knowledge, building on the work of Omri Ben Shahar, has proposed a tax on data transactions. If priced properly, such a toll could wean platforms from surveillance capitalism.
Of course, forcing the platforms to internalize the true cost of their data practices would almost certainly put an end to zero-priced platform services. That is why a data pollution tax should be attended by subsidies for public goods. A rather larger sphere of connectivity might have to be subsidized than currently is, perhaps using data tax revenue. Indeed, this revenue could also be used to help support high quality information, local journalism, data commons, and other services the market does not provide. The environmental analogy extends here too: these are the national parks.
Product safety. Regulators, scholars, and activists recognized that some practices to increase data flow threaten individual freedom of mind. The Council of Europe gestured at this in its 2019 Declaration on the Manipulative Capabilities of Algorithmic Processes, where it states that “fine grained, sub-conscious and personalized levels of algorithmic persuasion may have significant effects on the cognitive autonomy of individuals and their right to form opinions and take independent decisions.” Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology identifies design features that confuse or trap users into over-sharing personal information or driving compulsive use, especially by children and other vulnerable people.
The regulatory response to dangerous product features might be to ban them, or to defer to a standard-setting body to regulate them. A piece of legislation introduced by Senators Warner and Fischer would do both with respect to “dark patterns” (the Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction (DETOUR) Act). The law “aims to curb manipulative dark pattern behavior by prohibiting the largest online platforms from relying on user interfaces that intentionally impair user autonomy, decision-making, or choice.” It would empower a professional standards body to develop best practices, prohibit features that hook kids, and stop regulated entities from doing behavioral experiments (often through A/B testing) without informed consent.
These concepts need refinement; working them through for any technology requires competencies that Congress doesn’t have and few legislatures would. New kinds of regulators or regulatory partnerships may be needed to determine when AI has dangerous features. In the meantime, the precautionary principle may be appropriate to hold the line before bad features are released into the “wild” where they will do harm. For example, there is no good way yet to cabin the use of facial recognition systems so that they preserve the right of individuals to obscurity as they walk through the world. That may be a reason to ban facial recognition systems — or at least government deployment of them — as cities like San Francisco have done. Governments that procure algorithmic systems for policing or child welfare management are implementing controls about inputs or models they simply won’t use because of accuracy, bias, transparency, or other concerns.
Agriculture regulation. At the start of the 20th Century, Upton Sinclair’s description of revolting conditions at a Chicago meatpacker resulted in a meat inspection law. Later, agricultural inspection was expanded and carried out by the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and state authorities. They check farm production practices to monitor for pathogens and vectors of contagion. One of the chief critiques of algorithmic systems is that they are black boxes with no outside audits. Attempts by independent researchers to “contest” these algorithms are frustrated by lack of access. Sometimes, the inspectors even face legal liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for scraping data.
The inspection of algorithmic systems would allow for an audit of Facebook’s content decisions or Twitter’s trending topics. It would permit assessment of the accuracy of a prediction about credit-worthiness or promises around data flows. The recent federal court decision in hiQ v. LinkedIn, finding that scraping from publicly available data is not a crime even if it violates terms of service, is a positive step in empowering private inspectors. But affirmative actions are needed. Whether that means ensuring the appropriate regulatory bodies (such as the Federal Trade Commission) have access to proprietary algorithmic systems for inspection or relying on civil society and academic groups for that function, access should be given and inspection made. The very forces at issue on the farm — contagion and pathogens — are at work in digital flows. A bad sentencing algorithm can spread injustice through an entire state system and beyond. A tweak to the Facebook news feed algorithm can quickly change the public discourse. Grokking those results, even without the regulatory power to change them, is important not least to democratizing knowledge about the medium we are swimming in. | https://ellgood.medium.com/new-approaches-to-digital-platform-governance-regulatory-analogies-8800e6272c7e | ['Ellen P. Goodman'] | 2019-11-02 12:03:21.575000+00:00 | ['Platform Regulation', 'Advertising', 'Facebook', 'Internet', 'Democracy'] |
3 Things I Struggle With As A Blogger | I’ve been running the Cultural Wildchild full-time for almost a year and I still haven’t found myself following a strict routine. When you try to search for how to run a successful blog, post often and consistently has found its way to the top of most lists.
I can honestly say that I was one of those people who was trying to find the hidden formula to success but I also had to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that I’m not perfect and I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that this site is the best that it can possibly be.
This morning, I sat down and identified what I would say are my three biggest factors that I find myself struggling with more often than not.
Time Management
There’s a reason why I’ve branded myself as a cultural wild child. Sometimes I joke with people that I have the attention span of the dog in Up!
I can have the best intentions in the world of sitting myself down and creating new posts for you guys to enjoy but like any human, there are distractions.
My biggest vice: Social Media.
Scrolling on Twitter, watching left or right on Tinder/Bumble and playing iPhone games can take my process of writing/editing new content from the traditional 1.5 hours to well over 3 or 4. Sometimes, I find myself on my phone until the sun goes down and when I look at my computer, I only have two sentences typed.
Using apps such as Toggl have really kept me on track in the past with notifications when they see that I’m idle for too long and not typing on my laptop. Talk about an accountability coach!
Motivation
If you’ve been paying close attention to my updates and publishing schedule, or lack thereof, you might have noticed that I have posted anything since October of last year!
I’ve been candid in the past about my struggles with depression and anxiety and I chalk my hiatus up as a casualty of that ongoing battle.
I wasn’t finding myself where I wanted to be financially, career-wise or in terms of my blog so I decided to take a step back to try and enjoy the holidays with my family and work my primary job. Holiday hours in retail are no joke, especially when you’re the one behind the register.
Nowadays, whenever I have an idea for new content, I write it down immediately. Whether it be in a journal or my notes app on my phone, I always make sure that it’s not just a fleeting idea. I’m getting better so bear with me.
Coming up with consistent fresh content
As much as I would love to say that coming up with topics to write about is a breeze, I would be lying. One of the only advantages that I’d say that I have is the fact that I tackle a bunch of different topics.
Now that I’m launching my YouTube channel, it’s only going to get more challenging but when have I ever shied away from a challenge? Since most of you don’t know me very well, I’ll answer for you: NEVER.
I’m optimistic about what’s to come in the future and it will only go up from here!
If you’re a blogger or content creator, drop some of the things that you struggle with in the comments below! Don’t worry, this is a safe space. | https://medium.com/@culturalwildchild/3-things-i-struggle-with-as-a-blogger-e4473d16d482 | ['Chelsea Martin'] | 2019-02-07 16:24:01.187000+00:00 | ['Content Creation', 'Blogging', 'Digital Nomads'] |
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Airtable works like a spreadsheet but gives you the power of a database to organize anything. Sign up for free. | https://medium.com/y-pointer/b2b-content-marketing-afc166e66bb3 | ['侯智薰 Raymond Ch Hou'] | 2019-05-16 16:41:44.436000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Project Management', 'Social Media', 'Business', 'Marketing'] |
The Time is Right For a Climate Resilient Infrastructure Plan | The Chicago River is an engineering marvel that made the Midwest’s greatest city healthier, happier, and more accessible. Why are we waiting to make similar investments across the country?
As an MBA candidate last fall, fresh off the heels of a summer spent applying business strategies and financial lenses to clean energy, clean transportation, and environmental issues across the Midwest, I received permission to go completely off-script and add a graduate engineering program elective to my course load. The course focused on the design and implementation of systems that could make cities more sustainable — in the climate challenge-meeting sense of the word, not the green-washing sense. These intertwined thoughts flesh out a series of reflections on pressing issues and policies facing cities as they rise to meet the scourge of climate change, which were required for the class.
They were written before the COVID-19 pandemic; nevertheless, the climate crisis has not abated, and in the long-term, maintaining effective, resilient urban systems will be a prerequisite to mitigating climate change. In other words, the demise of the urban center has been greatly exaggerated.
The first step in addressing any problem is acknowledging the problem exists. Cities and municipalities, especially in the United States, have had to pursue climate action plans and sustainability efforts longer than states or the federal government out of necessity. City governments do not have the luxury of debating the political merits of recognizing climate realities. Moreover, they cannot, as both higher strata of government are wont to do, make the argument that fighting climate change is not on the table because it would be a waste of their budget because social efficiency is extremely low. That is, they cannot embrace the false choice that combating climate change affects only a small amount of their constituents and is therefore a boondoggle.
No, cities must act — have had to act — sooner and longer than states and national governments because there is no one else to whom the buck can be passed. Either cities take action to address shoreline erosion and flooding that threatens neighborhoods, or property is damaged and residents’ lives are at risk. They either find ways to provide mass public transportation between disconnected neighborhoods so residents of every socioeconomic status can access work, education, recreation, and other interests, or train tracks corrode into overgrown trip hazards and roadways continue to falter under the constant weight of rush hour traffic with smog hanging low over the skyline. And as the world’s urban population continues to explode, cities will continue to find themselves on the frontlines of climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Recognizing the Problem, Prescribing the Wrong Solution
Climate Action Plans or “Insert City Name Here” Vision 2050 plans are the municipal sustainability answer du jour right now. That does not make them good roadmaps for city planning and strategic planning initiatives; rather, they can often feel like theoretical exercises or justifications for doing something else entirely. Namely, this mismatched set of priorities and published proposals stems from a misunderstanding of what making a city ‘Sustainable’ truly means — contrasted with the noxious use of ‘Smart’ city — which is crucial because the distinctions can lead to city-sponsored greenwashing and policies that inhibit progress towards resilience (or mitigation) instead of encouraging it.
Many city leaders are striving to create plans and strategies for addressing the implications climate change poses for their municipalities. Nevertheless, all too often specific policies are implemented piecemeal. Cities are expanding publicly accessible charging stations to encourage faster adoption of electric vehicles. They are implementing community solar projects that reduce a town’s dependence on natural gas or coal to power local businesses. Others airdrop in a single rapid bus-transit route as the spine of a hypothetical future mass transit system. Coastal cities are innovating ways to prevent flooding from higher sea levels and stronger storms while reinforcing the deep-water ports critical to effectively importing and exporting goods around the world. Still others are implementing congestion pricing and road usage charges that incentivize walking, biking, and utilizing mass transit to move around the city instead of exacerbating transportation emissions by solo car commuters. And finally, some cities are banning plastics in efforts to reduce waste.
But few locales intertwine these objectives into a cohesive plan and then actively enforce legislation that backs up these goals. Regrettably, the ones that do often struggle to find the political will to keep up with the long-term goals across multiple administrations, newly elected officials, and the need to address immediate crises. Climate action plans are often unveiled with great fanfare and in-depth design concepts that speak to high-browed ambitions, but receive little follow through on the part of city officials. And while they struggle to fully implement sustainability goals and actions beyond simple steps, there is a parallel path many cities follow that seems to evoke the same amount of enthusiasm: transforming metro areas into ‘smart cities.’
Let’s be clear: the two are not synonymous. ‘Smart Cities’ expand technologies that modernize city functions previously performed in traditional ways; ‘Sustainable Cities’ implement strategies that transform entire systems into climate-resilient lines of service. Replacing toxin-spewing old diesel-engine buses and train cars for mass transit systems with newer, more efficient diesel-engine powered vehicles, or ones powered by propane or compressed natural gas may be more economical, but it also has enough tangential impacts on some sustainability goals in climate action plans that metropolises can squint to equate the two. The same goes for improving or introducing citywide WiFi, 5G, and expanded data services that can support everything from citywide cameras to transit tracking to autonomous vehicles — again pursuits with obliquely climate-related benefits.
This makes it easy for places like Columbus, Ohio, to loudly tout their status as winners of a ‘smart city’ competition while slowing their completion of sustainable goals that are less palatable to state or federal officials. For political reasons, officials are often less apt to support climate change-specific plans. But truly pushing a city into the future, to create urban spaces resilient to new challenges or positioned to mitigate existing climate catastrophes, requires a blending of smart and sustainable initiatives that reinforce one another and are pursued by leaders from different political backgrounds over a multi-decade horizon. For example: expanded monitoring of sewer systems to better conserve water and pinpoint drainage problems improves the efficiency of public works employees and restore service faster, while also acting as an easy ‘win’ in the implementation of climate action plans. Baseball currently suffers from the pursuit of three true outcomes; everyone just wants to hit home runs. Sometimes cities need to just hit singles and doubles. Otherwise, sustainability will stay elusive and cities will remain, for lack of a better antonym, ‘dumb.’
During a fellowship with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, I spent considerable time analyzing the progress of cities across the Midwest in accomplishing their climate action plans. Having robust frameworks for these plans is a good first step, but it is imperative for cities across the spectrum of politics, built environments, populations, and natural topography to pursue goals that are attainable, have a reasonable time horizon, can be easily measured, and encourage cooperation between public and private stakeholders in their communities. Whether it is Ann Arbor or Milwaukee, Columbus or West Palm Beach, municipalities are addressing the areas of climate change as best they can. Good faith efforts only go so far, though; this is a national problem in need of national leadership, and the catalyst for expanding it is already in place — or rather, the catalysts: cities have been and will continue being those sparks of ingenuity and sustainable problem-solving because states and the federal government demurred in years past. Igniting those sparks requires spurring greater collaboration and cooperation between cities on what initiatives and programs work or do not work; once that is commonplace and not the exception, mobilizing for greater action at the state and national level will only get easier.
How to Grow and How Not to Grow
The consequences of urban growth without these considerations is manifested in sprawl that accelerated erosion along shores, bulldozed unique habitats and ecosystems, and threatened to eradicate species large and small. Cities mark the hubs of industry whose power plants and ports, factories and freeways, contributed the highest concentrations of greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere. Counterintuitively, however, cities also represent our best hope as green engines driving the sustainable economy of the future.
Growth — especially in urban areas — can be insatiable. As more and more people in more and more countries flock to cities, the need to house, feed, employ, and care for these new urbanites demands that cities expand their housing stock, their supply lines, and their infrastructure. And while most cities have permitting processes and plans for city development, this guidance may in some places be ignored or hand-waved away as an inconvenience that inhibits growth.
The consequences of such decisions may not manifest immediately, but they frequently become apparent at the most inopportune time; with hundreds of millions of city dwellers living in coastal areas, those times often coincide with water-based natural disasters like hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, and in some cases, drought. In many instances, residents have mere days’ notice to evacuate or take other precautions to protect their property and their belongings despite living in dangerous areas without being required to possess insurance or other risk mitigations. The true damage done by these natural storms and violent weather events has its roots in misguided decisions made years earlier in the planning process, and current residents are left in the crosshairs.
Human decisions to authorize construction of entire neighborhoods in flood plains may have seemed a low-risk development decision twenty-five years hence, when the odds of 500-year floods matched the implied frequency in their name. But continuing to presume these events will be few and far between straddles the line between willful ignorance and logical fallacy. Continuing to allow these sorts of city planning decisions invites greater damage to property and to lives. Is the benefit of expanding urban areas worth the rebuilding cost and potential migration of people to other regions?
This can have long-term deleterious effects on the economic vitality of the cities choosing to build in flood plains and other low-lying areas. During my naval service, I managed the day-to-day operation of multiple bases in the D.C. region (including disaster response, emergency management, and implementing public works projects). On a daily basis, the Captain I reported to implored us to ‘Make the first pass count,’ a sage leadership tenet at all levels of government. We could not afford to rework decisions or jobs that provided crucial services to tenants that relied on us. The same holds true for cities: they cannot afford to get development plans and construction approvals wrong, especially in coastal areas, because having to rework them after a disaster could be exorbitantly expensive in lives and property reconstruction. In places like Houston, it is too late to take this to heart — they have already been materially affected by this problem — but many other cities have a chance to reevaluate previous decisions before disaster befalls them.
Sometimes, our well-intentioned man-made solutions to these problems can only shift the risk to a new threat. The Army Corps of Engineers has produced astounding feats of technological construction. But the willingness to ignore the externalities of building dams and levees up and down rivers (e.g., the prospects of dangerous water level rises upstream that don’t directly affect the city building the barrier) contorts the Corps’ talents and puts other Americans in danger. It also means that the Corps of Engineers and other groups will be called upon to rebuild the dams and levees post-disaster — and in another display of short-sightedness, to do so in grander and grander fashion.
There is a better way, however. Man-made exacerbations can be replaced with man-made solutions with proper education, long-term horizon planning, and acknowledgement that insatiable growth is not necessary. The narrative can be changed, but it requires tremendous courage on the part of civic leaders and public servants to resist the short-term ‘win’ of green-lighting developments in flood-prone areas or mistaking the construction of levees and dams that distort natural features as ‘infrastructure improvements.’ Instead, human action can be taken to increase coastal softening, to build resilient cities with urban plans for coastal cities that balance the need to have beachfront access and drive tourism with safely protecting not just current residents, but future generations of city-dwellers that will likely have to deal with both rising sea levels and stronger and stronger water-borne natural disasters.
Reframing the City for Its People, Not Its Vehicles
Who is infrastructure for? It’s certainly not for inanimate objects; it should be designed to best serve the people that use it. One of my favorite adages is that “Every city resident is a pedestrian at some point in the day.” This fundamental fact about urban living illustrates the ‘chicken or the egg’ nature debates around urban planning, infrastructure investment, and which modes of transportation we encourage. Walkable and bikeable communities should be designed — because of the pedestrian needs of every resident — but they should also be demanded as a matter of city dwelling culture. Yet this implementation varies wildly from city to city; decades of messaging, lobbying, advertising, and expectation-setting warped peoples’ understanding of what urban culture should be and how cities are designed. Once again, this is an opportunity for strong national signaling and leadership that helps in the uphill battle against the inertia of urban areas laid out to facilitate car-centric living — but the battle can be worth it. Incorporating walkable and bikeable communities into cities today is the urban planning embodiment of the classic Steve Jobs quote: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Because of this conundrum, inducing cities to expand, or in the worst case create from scratch, truly walkable communities may have to result from design until the cognitive recognition that they embody real urbane culture sticks. Living on blocks and in neighborhoods that are pedestrian-centric, not devoted to facilitating vehicular traffic, is unlikely to happen overnight. Sure, individuals may opt into walking and talking mass transit and biking to and from work; to go to the grocery; to visit friends or tourist attractions. But the declines in ridership of major city transit systems is well-documented, ubiquitous enough that modest increases in year-over-year ridership in New York City and Washington, D.C. garnered national headlines in 2019. COVID-19 safety restrictions and an emphasis on social distancing have coupled with increased ridesharing options that actually make vehicular congestion worse in cities at precisely the moment when the long-term reduction of vehicular traffic should be the priority of urban planners.
Changing these practices may take intentional design decisions at first, but like any other cultural movement, small and incremental changes in disparate cities should not be viewed as a detriment or warning that the movement is waning, faltering; in fact, it should be the opposite. Small design changes — lower speed limits, introducing bikeshare programs — can snowball into complete streets that treat pedestrians as equal to drivers and cyclists, streets designed with plantings and islands, and more equitable access for all residents. The point being: victories do not have to look like 500 superblocks taking over a city. But it can certainly be given a jolt with renewed investment and guidance at the federal level that elevates sustainable options like public transit to the pedestal highways and personal vehicle transportation have jealously guarded since post-World War II.
Renewing the culture of walkability and living in cities without relying on driving to and from destinations, therefore, may end up in the near-term being caused by design since as a culture (especially in America) the concept of ‘freedom’ is inextricably linked to the personally-owned vehicle. Fighting that embedded yearning to get in a car and just…go may seem a fool’s errand, but policy can nudge us in the other direction, at least those in urban environs where ‘going’ doesn’t have to be all that far and reachable on foot or by bike or by bus or by train.
After all, much of municipal government’s power derives from their ability to influence everything from business development to zoning to public transportation; all serve a role in facilitating more walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. Ultimately, chasing this ideal walkable and bikeable city should not be consigned to the realm of wishful thinking or to being a flight of fancy held by passionate advocates. It can fundamentally improve well-being, health, and happiness in neighborhoods and communities in every city, across the country.
‘Everything in Moderation’ Goes for the Planet, Too
I remain bullish on the effect cities can have in efforts to prevent unmitigated climate disaster. It’s the little things, like Chicago schools partnering with a non-profit to measure the air quality in neighborhoods across all 77 neighborhoods so those patterns could be used to identify and correlate areas suffering from higher rates of illness and student absence from school; to highlight how much of a difference hybrid or electric buses can have along bus routes keeping students and commuters alike healthier; to help the city justify relocating schools away from areas that might cause more harm to children than good. These are all things well within the scope of what a single city can do to move its local environment in a more sustainable direction, but they are not the only endeavors.
There’s a concept called Earth Overshoot Day — that point in the calendar year when humans through industry, globalization, and energy consumption have used up all of the Earth’s resources that should be sufficient for sustaining life throughout the entire year. It continues to move earlier in the year at just the time when we, as a species, should be crafting solutions that push us back nearer to using up all the resources as near to New Year’s Eve as possible. Instead, regrettably, we need to acknowledge that while Global Earth Overshoot Day may be around August 1, the political will and leadership to address the challenges surrounding overshoot (and climate change more broadly) are the equivalent of a New Year’s Resolution: it lasts just long enough for a week-long conference with other heads of state in Paris or Kyoto, but whenever following through requires sacrifice or perseverance, the resolve evaporates.
How does this manifest? The EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook best illustrates this in depicting the projection for sources of electricity production through to 2050. Even as leaders in major industries and at the highest levels of government espoused concern about climate change, decried the continued use of fossil fuels, and reiterated their commitments to the Paris Climate Accord, no meaningful long-term actions have been taken. As the EIA reports, over half of electricity is likely to be provided by natural gas or coal by 2050 — not even considering industrial and transportation uses — a reality that does not square with the stringent guidance needed to curb global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius. The disparity is starkest next to Dr. Johan Rockström’s pathway to deep decarbonization, which requires our carbon emissions to precipitously drop between 2020 and 2050; that roadmap creates a dangerously large scissor graph when overlapped with the rise in natural gas consumption and staunch refusal to eliminate coal.
As utilities continue to expand their natural gas sourcing and lock themselves into at least partial dependence on fossil fuels until 2050, the lack of momentum to sharply cut carbon emissions will necessitate technology changes that can overcome human inertia towards making no substantive changes. But that’s the point: technology solutions to climate change may be necessary, but they’re not a panacea. They’re a symptom of the larger lack of political will to implement policy changes and demand worldwide sacrifices to achieve climate change resilience goals. This becomes a Catch-22, however: these transformative technology developments and innovations will likely be so expensive that no single company will undertake them, meaning spurring that invention will also require policy prescriptions and political will to fund more research and development — possibly while paired with ending government subsidies for fossil fuel exploration. And if these efforts on the energy-creation side of the ledger are a fool’s hope, that leaves reform and renewal of our transportation infrastructure into a climate resilient national backbone the only viable option to climate mitigation leadership.
Granted, the EIA report looks at United States trends, but as the world’s largest economy and arguably the most influential country globally, the United States refusing to lead on climate change action would depress action by allies and competitors alike. Even as anecdotes about specific companies or countries making wholesale changes proliferate (buying fleets of electric transit buses for their cities, companies sourcing all of their energy from renewable sources, etc.), this could be seen from a more skeptical point of view as high-concept greenwashing. Or, worse, as a conceit that cities, smaller countries, and most companies have little influence to create broad market trends and spark the peak-and-fall of carbon emissions laid out in Rockström’s roadmap.
This should not be viewed as a doom-and-gloom diagnosis of current American climate policy (or lack thereof). Without a doubt, there is much left to be desired. Smaller movements to address climate change at a local or company level are necessary to lay the groundwork for action at the national level. Cities across the Midwest are developing, implementing, and following through on those climate action plans I mentioned earlier. Sure, some plans become exercises in consultant-produced shiny objects done more for signaling than as a true overarching strategy (the local government equivalent of greenwashing), many are actively expanding acquisition of electric vehicles for municipal fleets or ensuring that, whether through additive renewable energy resources or renewable energy credits, municipal energy is not sourced from fossil fuels. These are good steps! But progress is not uniform, and whether it is setting renewable portfolio standards on a national scale or achieving substantive, climate resilient infrastructure, it will be persistent political courage and will that determines our success in combating climate change. | https://medium.com/@matthew-r-sanders12/the-time-is-right-for-a-climate-resilient-infrastructure-plan-3010da658c7b | ['Matthew R Sanders'] | 2020-12-16 13:01:29.694000+00:00 | ['Infrastructure', 'Urban Planning', 'Climate Action', 'Politics'] |
Why Japanese Americans Want People To Know Their History | Why Japanese Americans Want People To Know Their History
The first group forced to leave their homes in Bainbridge Island (photo in the public domain)
It was a great injustice in America
As an American of Japanese heritage, I have been engaged with trying to help tell the history of Japanese Americans. I have given many talks and written much about the story of this group of people who were severely mistreated during World War II when they suffered the ultimate racism and racial profiling. Japanese Americans want the story to be known so that no one else will ever have to suffer this most egregious act against the Constitution of the United States of America as they did.
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, around 120,000 persons of Japanese descent living on the West Coast of the United States were forcibly removed from their homes. Most lost everything they owned and were put into American concentration camps (confinement sites) which had been built in remote and desolate areas of the country. They were unjustly incarcerated in the camps for the duration of the war. Two thirds of the people were American citizens.
In 2005, I went to work for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the oldest and largest Asian American civil and human rights organization in the United States. My initial task when I arrived at the Washington D.C. office was to get legislation passed that would help to preserve the lessons and history of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The initial work was done by drafting legislation that would fund projects that would preserve various elements of the confinement sites and create educational programs related to the unconstitutional incarceration.
John Tateishi, then National Executive Director/CEO of the JACL, asked that I work with Gerald Yamada, who was national coordinator for the Japanese American National Heritage Coalition. Gerald had been working on the camp preservation issue for some time before the JACL got involved.
We were able to get the support of a powerful member of Congress, Bill Thomas (R-CA), who was then the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was able to guide the legislation through a Republican House. The Senate effort was led by Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) with Robert Bennett (R-UT), the Utah Senator, as the principal Republican author. During this time, our JACL Fellows, Jean Shiraki and Phillip Ozaki, took World War II veterans, Terry Shima and Grant Ichikawa, to visit senators to gain support for the legislation.
The bill was passed easily in both the Senate and the House. It was signed by President George W. Bush in December of 2006. It provided funding of $38 million that was allocated in two to three million dollar totals annually until the funding was expended. We are now at the end of this funding, which has provided money to support construction, educational projects, and preservation programs for most of the confinement sites where Japanese Americans were imprisoned.
This past month, HR 8637 was introduced by Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-CA). This will eliminate the sunset clause of the past legislation and provide funds to continue the program. This is similar to what has been done for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
The bill will be introduced in the Senate by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI). There has already been bipartisan support for the legislation which includes co-authoring by Congressman Rob Bishop (R-UT), the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, where the bill will be heard.
Asian Americans have suffered much discrimination, hatred, and racism over the years. The World War II experience of Japanese Americans was one of the worst cases of racism ever in the United States of America.
Japanese American groups and individuals are currently trying to gain support for the bill in Congress. I and many others are continuing to work on this important issue. It is a critical component of telling our history so that no one else will ever have to suffer such racism, discrimination, and prejudice as were unjustly inflicted upon this innocent group of Americans and legal immigrants during World War II.
[Reference: The Japanese American Story As Told Through A Collection Of Speeches And Articles, www.thejapaneseamericanstory.com] | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/why-japanese-americans-want-people-to-know-their-history-fb34048b8315 | ['Floyd Mori'] | 2020-12-07 16:31:11.025000+00:00 | ['History', 'Illumination Curated', 'Racism', 'Asian American', 'American History'] |
Amazon’s new Fire TV Sticks get faster and cheaper | Amazon is updating its $40 Fire TV Stick streaming player for the first time since 2016, giving it a much faster processor and HDR video support. The company is also launching a cheaper option called the Fire TV Stick Lite, which will sell for $30.
To go along with the new hardware, Amazon’s overhauling its Fire TV software, with fewer confusing submenus, new features for Alexa, and a bigger emphasis on user profiles.
Updated December 9, 2020 to report that Amazon has begun to roll out its new Fire TV software. The updates, however, will initially be made available only on these new devices; owners of Amazon’s higher-end streamers will likely need to wait until early 2021 to get the new user interface and other features.
[ Further reading: The best media streaming devices ]Both of the new Fire TV Sticks are shipping next week, and pre-orders are starting today. Here’s what you need to know about the new lineup:
New Fire TV StickThe third-generation Fire TV Stick (pictured above) looks identical to the previous version, but Amazon says it’s 50-percent faster. Elias Saba of AFTVNews reports that it’s using a MediaTek MT8695D quad-core processor, which is similar to what powers Amazon’s existing Fire TV Stick 4K. Speed had been a major sticking point for the old Fire TV Stick, but the new one should feel much snappier if it can match the speed of the 4K version.
Mentioned in this article Amazon Fire TV Stick (2020) Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $39.99See it The new Fire TV Stick also supports HDR video and Dolby Atmos audio decoding, just like the 4K model. The difference is that the new Fire TV Stick doesn’t support 4K video or Dolby Vision HDR. (HDR support is instead limited to HDR10 and HLG.) For those features, you’ll need either the $50 Fire TV Stick 4K or the $120 Fire TV Cube.
Fire TV Stick Lite Mentioned in this article Roku Express (2019) Read TechHive's reviewMSRP $29.99See it At $30, the Fire TV Stick Lite is Amazon’s answer to the Roku Express, which sells for $29. And like Roku’s budget streamer, the Amazon’s version makes a major compromise to hit that lower price: There are no volume or power buttons on the remote, so you’ll need a second remote to operate those functions on your TV.
Amazon The Fire TV Stick Lite ditches TV volume and power buttons for a lower sticker price.
Intriguingly, though, the Fire TV Stick Lite also includes a new remote button with a TV icon, which Amazon’s pricier streamers lack. This button takes you straight to the Fire TV’s Channel Guide, which can aggregate multiple live TV sources into one grid. Without the dedicated button, you’ll need to navigate to the guide through Amazon’s software menus.
The Fire TV Stick Lite otherwise has the same processor, HDR support, and Wi-Fi 5 support as the Fire TV Stick; both devices support Alexa voice commands through a microphone button on their remotes.
New Fire TV softwareAs for the new software, it looks like Amazon has recognized the chaos in its current interface and is taking steps to streamline it. Several submenus have been stripped away (including Your Videos, Movies, TV Shows, and Apps) in favor of a single “Find” submenu, where you can discover new things to watch. Meanwhile, your favorite apps will appear in a single strip on the menu bar, and they’ll stay persistently visible even as you scroll to other submenus.
Amazon The Fire TV menu system will look a lot different later this year.
The software will also support up to six user profiles, and if you say “Alexa, go to my profile,” you can set the device to recognize your voice and switch accordingly. Alexa itself will also be less intrusive, occupying just a part of the screen in response to voice commands, and Amazon says it will add a “hub” where you can learn what voice commands Alexa supports.
Amazon’s adding support for video calls as well, so you’ll be able to plug in a Logitech webcam for Alexa video calls. (Amazon says it will add support for other video chat services such as Zoom “over time.”)
The new software will debut on the 2020 Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite, and Amazon plans to roll it out to other devices later this year.
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/@bob02485644/amazons-new-fire-tv-sticks-get-faster-and-cheaper-81e44465e5f | [] | 2020-12-18 20:21:27.621000+00:00 | ['Internet', 'Home Tech', 'Entertainment', 'Chromecast'] |
A November Story | A November Story
It is an honor to have you here again. I am grateful for your presence on this journey. November is an auspicious month where standing at the cusp of another year, we review our lives, actions, relationships, and past to learn how we will end the present year and navigate the coming year.
November is usually a month of prospects, hopeful expectations, assessments, and opportunities for change, growth, and progress. In line with this, I present a selection of poetry and writing to spur you on as we move on from the events of 2020 and prepare for 2021. 2020 has been a difficult year no doubt but we must move.
Let’s kick off with ‘You’ve Got To Move’ featuring a quote from my Instagram page where I often publish quotes for life and living as well as other musings. Here, we are reminded that we need to finish 2020 strong, take up the gauntlet, and be ready to move boldly into 2021.
https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/youve-got-to-move-62f3c4c713f5
Next up is ‘The Valiant’ another product of my endless musing on womanhood. As women, our experiences are unique no matter our cultural context. We are exquisite, deep creatures with multiple layers
https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/the-valiant-6430555251
‘Butterfly, Butterfly’ is one of my favorites. I am grateful to live where there is earth and garden space not taken over by concrete walkways or paving stones. I get to enjoy beautiful sights like the exquisitely beautiful butterfly I came upon one morning
https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/butterfly-butterfly-f430ac24c204
November 2020 is a special one so I penned ‘November, November, Another November’ in honor of this special month of a very unique year. I am curious to see how we usher out 2020 and frame our expectations and /or trepidation for 2021
https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/november-november-another-november-8ff2b4826753
You all know I am a romantic at heart and enjoy reading and penning poetry and stories on themes of love, lovers, and good old romance. I present to you ‘Darling’ — love poetry from your truly
https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/darling-f85d8ec419
Another personal favorite is ‘Literary Seduction’ where I attempted some wordplay mashing up romantic language with literary themes. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it
https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/literary-seduction-a31a5583de6a
‘Uncertainty Mentality’ is a somber reflection on the state of the world with riots and skirmishes and protests unleashing anger, mayhem, disillusionment, and frustration. Almost no corner of the world is untouched
https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/uncertainty-mentality-37f695ade550
I hope you find something you enjoy in this November selection that resonates with you and brings you some joy and while you are at it I welcome you to a December to remember
Blessings Unlimited!!
Imabong | https://medium.com/mind-metamorphosis/a-november-story-52fc4298be93 | ['Imλbөпg Fλmiпц'] | 2020-12-04 17:45:50.198000+00:00 | ['Publication', 'Motivation', 'Inspiration', 'Poetry', 'Newsletter'] |
This is 2019’s Cindrella story😉 | Sneha, 28 years old , Senior Software Developer at Amazon, Banglore. Sneha works in Banglore, and her family lives in Delhi. She has an elder brother too working as an engineer in Pune. Sneha is happy go lucky girl. She loves her friends. Going out with friends , dressing up, meeting up old friends. Sneha works 10+ hours in weekdays and on weekends write poems and go out with her friends. Sneha is Single. She has never been in a serious relationship. Sneha’s most friend are married. Everyone wants Sneha to get married, but she is waiting for the RIGHT one! When asked, what she’s been looking for she always had one reply ” Just a real person. Who accepts me the way I am. And I enjoy his company!“.
On 23rd November, Sneha visits Delhi to attend her cousin brother’s marriage. There she met with Gaurav, his cousin’s bestfriend. Gaurav is 27 years old, Marketing executive at a firm in Delhi. Both Sneha and Gaurav were attracted towards each other. And Gaurav ended up asking Sneha’s number. Both, agreed to go on a date following weekend. The date was okayish as both were pretty different and had entire different interests.
On Sunday, Sneha returned to Banglore. Both kept in touch a little bit. 2 months later Gaurav visited Sneha in Banglore. They spent time together and for the first time, felt at ease. 3months later they both decided to get married!
One month after the marriage, they invited friends over. Sneha’s friend Riya asked”Aree tell me na, how come you liked Gaurav! Nobody could fit in your cutoff list, tell na Sne!“. To which Sneha told shyly “When Gaurav visited me, while returning back I took him to the airport in my car. And he not even for one second shied about me driving and he siting next to me”. Riya” And….?that’s it , that he let you drive?”. Sneha“No, ….yeah..see there has been those tiny moments. I remember we were browsing something on facebook on my phone, and there were some messages I didn’t want him to see. He saw the messages briefly but never asked my about them. And respected my privacy! And also, he never judged me for being a mess! I come late from work and my kitchen and cupboards both are pretty messed up🙈 . He used to very sweetly help clean the mess, and never gave those looks. I don’t know its too hard to explain!”
THE END……..
OOps were you expecting something different? Guys its just simple. But did you get the answer? ………Answer is actually in treating equally to themselves! Girls want nothing more than being respected and treated equally! That’s it.🙌 | https://medium.com/@engineerdiaries/this-is-2019s-cindrella-story-3d77e3c6577d | ['Priyanka Arora'] | 2019-05-15 18:07:28.262000+00:00 | ['Cinderella', 'Modern Love', 'Lovestory', 'Short Love Story', 'Short Story'] |
How Retailers Thrive Moving Their ERP to Cloud? | Retailers these days are mounted with the pressure of providing excellent products / Services while satisfying customers at the same time. COVID 19 has contributed the most to this mindset. Where people were restricted to their homes, retailers had to upgrade their services in order to reach their customers and survive. Unfortunately, some of them could not take the load and shut down, however, those who innovated and implemented technologies like Microsoft ERP Implementation are immune to the crisis.
However, technology consequently advanced to deal with the same. With powerful tools and intelligent AI-based technology, this seems possible. As soon as a retailer starts using the cloud, his entire team can access the real-time data whenever they need it, enabling every employee to take steps right when they are needed. In addition, moving your ERP to the cloud can deliver the following benefits to a retail business:
Complete security
Reliable and unified real-time data
Cost and Time Efficiency
Helps keep up with trends
Adds intelligence to the business
Scalability
Provides Security
As soon as you move your ERP to the cloud, you no longer have to fuss about a security breach. The entire responsibility shifts from the in-house system to the cloud service provider. Be it data legislation, security protocols, privacy requirements, or preventing the latest threats: each one of these is the provider’s responsibility. Therefore, even if there is a malware attack, you do not have to run and turn on the (figurative) fires in the middle of midnight. Microsoft experts will handle your problems anytime, anywhere.
Provides Real-Time and Unified Data
When you move your ERP to the cloud like Dynamics ERP Implementation, you and your team can easily access real-time data (in the shape of reports, dashboards, charts, etc.) and make more logical and quicker decisions. Having a unified AI-based platform like the one Microsoft offers, you can get intuitive reports extracted from big data. Various retailers struggle with inventory management and do not even realize how much it drains their money. Being backed up with live data, retailers can manage their assets more effectively.
Cuts Time and Costs Bot
As compared to on-premise IT infrastructure, Cloud infrastructure is much more reliable and cost-efficient. On-Premise IT needs assembly, testing, implementation followed by other costly development stages. Since every piece of data is stored in-house, ruptured hardware needs to be replaced as soon as possible. However, it is a lot simpler in the case of the cloud: there is no dedicated server at work which greatly reduces the implementation costs.
Keeps Up with the Current Trends
Traditional IT environments can take months to add new functionality. Meanwhile, businesses might lose some great opportunities due to this delay. Competitiveness depends a lot upon the effectiveness and efficiency of a business to grasp trends and make valuable decisions. Having the cloud at your service, you can enable yourself to use some power apps to keep you intact with the current trends. To stay at the top of the competition, you must understand customer behavior, spending pattern, and preferences.
Adds Intelligence to Business
One of the greatest benefits of using the cloud is that businesses can benefit themselves with advanced computational power. They can leverage the potency of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning-powered technology. This way, they get valuable insights into their business, make more logical decisions, improve productivity, and increase competitiveness. Applications like Power BI extract big data into insightful reports, these reports can essentially help understand every customer contacting your business, if combined with AI, it can even provide valuable market insights. These facilities are easily available with the cloud.
Scales with Your Business
Cloud-based ERP is the ideal choice for rapidly scaling businesses. It might take months to set your on-premise ERP for your growing business, also, it is a pretty costly affair. Many retailers will not prefer to shift from their on-premise system as long as it “works.” Little do they realize how it slows down your growth. If you want to expand your boundaries outside of your country, think about how much investment will it demand? The best way out is to upgrade your ERP to the cloud.
Time grows, and so does your business. It is time to embrace cloud-based ERP like Microsoft D365. If you are looking for an implementation partner, you can contact Trident Information Systems.
We are one of the best ERP software provider in India. | https://medium.com/@tridentwebs/how-retailers-thrive-moving-their-erp-to-cloud-c1e1ed5e7372 | ['Trident Information Systems Pvt Ltd'] | 2021-12-16 11:11:07.313000+00:00 | ['CRM', 'Erp Software', 'Crm Software', 'Dynamics 365', 'Erp'] |
4 Reasons why you need the best wipes for newborns | Newborn skin is super sensitive and new parents need to be very careful about the types of products they use on their baby in the first few months. Harsh ingredients can cause painful rashes and sores, a miserable baby, and probably a couple of tired parents. Here are four reasons that you need to be careful when choosing the best baby wipes for newborns.
Sensitive skin
A newborn baby’s immune system is still gearing up to fight the good fight, and their skin is tremendously delicate. Introducing chemicals and unknowingly harsh products can cause their skin to react leaving them susceptible to infections which they aren’t yet ready to fight. Dryness, chafing, sores, rashes, and other skin irritations are just a few possible outcomes if you aren’t careful in choosing the best baby wipes for newborns.
No place for harsh chemicals
Fragrances, Polysorbate 20, formaldehyde agents, petroleum-based products, parabens, and tons of other chemicals are just a few of the scary sounding ingredients no one would knowingly slather all over their newborn. Some of these ingredients are commonly found in brands of baby wipes. It’s important to choose an organic baby wipe made with safe ingredients which will be better for your child’s health.
Read More : | https://medium.com/@doctorbutlerseo/4-reasons-why-you-need-the-best-wipes-for-newborns-696aa7aea659 | ['Doctor Butler'] | 2020-01-08 06:45:55.944000+00:00 | ['Newborn', 'USA', 'Awareness', 'Health', 'Baby Care Products'] |
SIEMPRE SOY CIELO: AUNQUE MIS ESTRELLAS VAN Y VIENEN. | The kitchen is my happy place. I think the ingredients are my teachers. I advocate for food sovereignty. Cook & Writer. | https://medium.com/@anagcmaya/siempre-soy-cielo-aunque-mis-estrellas-van-y-vienen-55f41d340cd1 | ['Ana Castellanos'] | 2020-08-05 13:14:23.307000+00:00 | ['Pensamientos', 'Poesía', 'Español', 'Vida', 'Cuento'] |
Setup Mirth Connect Monitoring in a Day | Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash
tl;dr: If you are already familiar with the concept of monitoring and only need the Mirth channel exporter: https://github.com/teamzerolabs/mirth_channel_exporter
New assignment: Monitor Message Throughput and Errors with Mirth Channels
Let me know if this matches your story:
You have gone live with several hospitals on HL7 Channels.
You use Mirth Connect, and everything is running well.
Sometimes, you hear from the hospital that HL7 messages (ADT/MFN) are queuing up on their end. Or, they haven’t seen any message from you (MDM/ORU) in a while.
You log into Mirth, and discover that messages have queued up, or getting into the error states for the last two or three days.
You are busy leading a team in implementing new features, company is in the early phase, and cannot spare cycles to check up on Mirth Connect.
How can we set things up to be notified when messages are stuck or erred out?
Mirth Connect comes with its own Rest APIs in polling these numbers. If you are looking for something quick, you can call these two API endpoints, grab the numbers, parse them, and call Slack API to generate warnings. This script can be set on a tiny AWS EC2 or Azure VMs and run as a Cronjob every 10 minutes.
The first API endpoint is:
/api/channels/statistics
You make calls to it like this:
curl -k --location --request GET 'https://mirth-instance.yourcompany.com/api/channels/statistics' \
--user admin:admin
This assumes your mirth is deployed at https://mirth-instance.yourcompany.com, and has a user that can log into it with admin:admin as the credential.
And it returns information in the following format:
<list>
<channelStatistics>
<serverId>c5e6a736-0e88-46a7-bf32-5b4908c4d858</serverId>
<channelId>101af57f-f26c-40d3-86a3-309e74b93513</channelId>
<received>0</received>
<sent>0</sent>
<error>0</error>
<filtered>0</filtered>
<queued>0</queued>
</channelStatistics> ...
</list>
Using Python, Ruby, or NodeJS, we can easily parse the above and alert when error or queued reaches a threshold (say 50–100 messages).
To make the Channel Names readable, we call the second API:
curl -k --location --request GET 'https://mirth-instance.yourcompany.com/api/channels/idsAndNames' \
--user admin:admin
Which returns this payload:
<map>
<entry>
<string>101af57f-f26c-40d3-86a3-309e74b93533</string>
<string>Hospital-ADT</string>
</entry> ...
</map>
If you have followed this document from Slack: https://api.slack.com/tutorials/slack-apps-hello-world, you can see that we can programmatically send warning messages with this curl command:
curl -X POST -H ‘Content-type: application/json’ — data ‘{"text":"Error messages for Hospital-ADT is queuing up!"}’ YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL
And you can take a breather and know that messages are not queuing up or causing issues when Slack is quiet. | https://medium.com/teamzerolabs/setup-mirth-connect-monitoring-in-a-day-76c8db2cca15 | ['Jack Yeh'] | 2020-09-20 21:53:16.310000+00:00 | ['Mirth Connect', 'Grafana', 'Exporters', 'Prometheus', 'Monitoring'] |
Difficult conversations with my cervix | Photo by Micaela Parente on Unsplash
The one thing you don’t want to see is blood. That’s universal. There’s no-one that says “a little bit of bleeding just before your third trimester is lucky! Your child will have great wealth and happiness!” Blood is bad. Blood is go straight to the hospital. Do not pass Go. Do not stop to Google it.
So last Saturday I started bleeding. We were at home. Baby Daddy, as luck would have it, was on the sofa recovering from an operation: a strange greyish colour, his knee, which was operated on, roughly the size and shape of an American football. If he was to pick a time in his life where quick, decisive action, and some leaping to the feet and taking charge of the situation was required, he probably wouldn’t have gone for this one. Looking back later, we’ll reflect that this was our first taste of parental stress — the beginning of a long road of falling off swings, crashing bikes, standing on sea urchins, colds, flus, poxes, puking and temperatures, and then later, bad school reports, bad crowds, breaking curfews, underage drinking and lord knows what else. In our first roll of the dice, we did not do well. I’m afraid to say we flapped. I took a few turns around the flat for no particular reason. Baby Daddy went from greyish to white as a sheet. At some point, we found ourselves in an Uber to A&E, while the poor driver wondered which of us was going to pass out or puke in the back of his brand new Mercedes first.
The baby was fine, that much we established almost immediately. It’s only later that I’ll realise how incredibly fast everything went. If you’ve ever waited in a London casualty department on a Saturday night with anything less serious than the bubonic plague, you’ll know that going from the car park to the examination table in 15 minutes is something of a miracle. Are pregnant women more important because we’re actually two people in one? Or is the small, wrinkly, sinless creature currently sharing my oxygenated blood and glucose more important on its own than any ex-womb being? If it stops me having to sit in A&E for two hours contemplating how many ways there are for the human body to break down, frankly, I don’t care.
At maternity night triage the midwife calmly, but very quickly, found the baby’s heartbeat using a doppler — the little handheld device that I like to think of as the midwife answer to Batman’s grappling hook: always on the utility belt, used in almost every episode. We’ve heard the Little Bundle’s heartbeat before and this time it sounded no different. Also, she was doing her usual evening gymnastics display inside my belly. Even I know that there can’t be too much wrong with a wriggly baby whose heartbeat is as loud, clear and regular as a techno kick drum. The midwife seemed to agree because, as fast as she’d arrived, she was gone, presumably to go and casually deliver a couple of new humans into the world down the hall, while Baby Daddy and I sat alone in our cubicle for a bit and went “well, that was bloody stressful” at each other over and over, and he turned different shades of grey and green and clutched his knee in agony.
Next, a cheery lady in blue scrubs entered stage right, brandishing what looked like a small transparent traffic cone and trailing a shy looking male nurse. It started to feel a little crowded in the cubicle.
“We need to inspect your cervix,” said the doctor, in the voice you would use to tell a child we need to stop at Disneyland for jelly and ice-cream, and handed me a sheet while the nurse squeezed clear gel onto the traffic cone and fetched a bright light from another room. I slowly connected these dots in my addled mind: the cone, the lube, the sheet, the searchlight pointing at my groin like it had escaped from its cell and was trying to shimmy over the prison walls. Everyone waited patiently while I got my cervix out if its jeans and explained to it what was happening. “At some point,” I told it, telepathically. “The nice male nurse and Baby Daddy will be asked to leave, and it will just be me, you and this friendly lady having a quick chat. Ok?” Well, that was a lie.
“He’s staying is he?” I asked weakly, as the doctor, the traffic cone, the nurse and the searchlight all shuffled to the end of the examination table. He was. What happens at maternity night triage and all that. One incredibly uncomfortable, if not actually painful, procedure later and doc emerged from my nether parts, bright as a new button, with the good news that my cervix was closed, and not a drop of blood was to be seen near it. Which meant I wasn’t going into labour, and neither had my placenta detached itself and floated to the bottom of my uterus, like one of those alarming climate change videos you see of entire ice-caps breaking away and falling into the sea. Why was I bleeding, then? No-one seemed to know, nor be particularly concerned about it.
“Don’t look for problems,” counselled the midwife, as I coaxed my indignant cervix back into my knickers. If the bleeding started again, she told us, come back. Otherwise go home, order a pizza and file this experience under TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT THIS EVER AGAIN, along with Baby Daddy’s car crash and the film Saw II. Maybe she only said the first bit. Either way that’s what we did.
So of course on Wednesday evening it starts again. I feel more chill about it this time, but still, blood is blood. Back we go to maternity triage. The same midwife installs me in a cubicle and finds baby’s heartbeat, and while I’m wondering if the poor woman has been home or even stopped for a tea break since Saturday, a new doctor, a new traffic cone and, lo and behold, the same shy male nurse enter the scene for a cervix inspection. “Hello again,” the nurse and I say to each other politely. “Alright mate?!” my cervix calls out to him. She really is quite friendly once you’ve broken the ice. Knowing what’s about to happen doesn’t make me feel any less like a sock being turned inside out during the examination, but all is well with her indoors, which is a relief. Nevertheless they decide to keep me in for 24 hours this time.
“I’ve never stayed in hospital overnight before,” I say to Baby Daddy, who has stayed in hospital overnight more times than he cares to think about, and suddenly feeling like a small child. We’re shown up to the maternity ward and given a roomy cubicle with a bed, a reclining chair and a window that actually opens, which frankly all feels pretty luxurious if you know anything about hospital wards, which we do. An orderly appears with the next day’s menu and asks me to select what I want for lunch and dinner. I start to warm to the idea of being an inpatient. As the midwives hand over from day to night shift, a string of lovely women enter with dopplers, ask me how I’m feeling, and listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Can all this listening be for medical reasons? I wonder. Maybe they just like it. A second string of nurses swing by and take my blood pressure and temperature about 500 times too. It’s all very reassuring.
But then Baby Daddy leaves, the lights go down on the ward and the noises start. This part of the unit is where you go for the first bit of labour, the bit where the biggest muscle contractions anyone will ever feel in their life are getting started on moving the Little Bundle towards the exit, but before baby has packed its bag, kissed goodbye to its watery home and got itself arranged head first in the birth canal, like a kid at the top of a slip-and-slide. If you actually take a second to consider what your body needs to achieve to push roughly 7lb of baby through a channel that’s ordinarily a few centimetres wide, it’s no surprise that it hurts a bit. On TV people scream. In real life, it’s worse than screaming. Through that night and all of the long next day, I hear groans, whimpers, and sounds that can only be described as the expression of complete surprise. Like ‘I knew it was going to hurt but FUCKING HELL’. But no screams. As the only patient not actually in labour, or toting a brand spanking new baby, I become a sort of auditory spectator. By lunchtime I’ve begun commentating to myself. “Come on love,” I sigh wearily, as a lady across the hall who’s just 2cm dilated starts whimpering and begging for more pain relief. “The lass before you had been in there for 36 hours, and I barely heard a peep out of her.”
But the really amazing thing is listening to the midwives. My cubicle is next door to their station, so from behind my curtain I’m treated to a radio play of staff meetings, shift handovers, decision making, discussions with the doctors — who appear twice a day, always in a rush somewhere else — and phone calls to other departments. If you think midwives just look after pregnant women and deliver babies, you’re disregarding the incredible amount of project managing, bed juggling, cajoling, advocating, and eking out of stretched resources that is woven into each shift. Everyone is too busy. Every ward is almost at capacity. My doctor wants me to have a scan, but the imaging department phones back saying they don’t have a spare minute. They’re fuller than the last lifeboat from the Titanic. There’s no hope today, not a chance. And yet, and yet… 30 minutes later my triumphant midwife pops her head around the curtain like someone who’s just blagged backstage passes for Glastonbury. She’s managed to get me in. I guess I assumed a lot of this stuff was run by computers, but it’s not. It’s a daily, herculean, effort that means a bed is found even when every bed is taken, that an extra scan is squeezed in, that a doctor is plucked from the tail end of an emergency on another ward and persuaded to come here, to another patient, a new priority. As it happens, the company my brother works for are trying to write software that will automate this kind of decision making in hospitals, and hand the staff back their time for the actual medical care they’re trained in. I would say my bro has his work cut out.
At the imaging department we see the Little Seed for the third time. She really does look like a person now, albeit an upside down, see-through one. The sonographer confirms everything is well and takes some measurements to draw on our growth chart. The chart shows two gently curving lines, one representing the smallest baby should be at any given time, and one the biggest. Our darling little girl, the sonographer explains, is tracking above the upper line. She’s “off the chart”. A biggun. A bruiser. This is sold to me as a positive: big babies are stronger, fair better during labour and face fewer risks once they reach the big bad world. Baby Daddy, who is 6'3" and is surely to blame for this monster child preparing to enter the world via my most intimate parts, beams with pride at the news. All I can think is that I’m going to have a nightmare explaining this to my cervix.
With the scan confirming everything is as it should be, and the pressure for beds on Murray Ward not getting any lighter, I feel sure I’ll be sent home. But then on the way back to the ward, I stop for wee and there they on the standard issue sanitary towel the hospital have given me to wear — two tiny, undeniable drops of blood. FFS. There’s clearly some sector of my lady parts that’s enjoying all this attention and doesn’t want it to end. For few moments, alone in the toilet stall, I think bollocks to it, I’m not going to tell anyone. I can’t face another night listening to the Whittington Hospital women-in-labour choir. And I’m starting to fret about work and emails and meetings, picturing my unmet responsibilities stacking up in the hallway at home, like when you go on holiday and forget to cancel the newspaper delivery. But I can’t do it. I tell the midwife, and she asks to see the towel, and there’s a strange moment when she, Baby Daddy and are sat around a table, contemplating my used sanitary product in silence as though it’s a work of conceptual art. “It really is a tiny amount of blood,” I say pleadingly. Even so, the midwife explains, really they would want to keep me under observation until I’ve been bleed free for 24 hours. The cubicle, which last night felt roomy and luxurious by hospital standards, suddenly looks like a prison as I stare down the barrel of another night in it. Like a kid, I consider a bit of tactical crying to help my cause. I could definitely summon a few tears right now, I think.
But in the end there’s no need. A tired looking young doctor, who’s on the ward to see another patient, is lasso’d by my midwife in the hallway and made to look at the towel. She’s just come from an emergency elsewhere, and is now hurrying back to it, and she’s unimpressed by the tiny drops. Me, my attention seeking vagina and my outsized baby are free to go. As we’re leaving, my shy male nurse is arriving onto the ward to start his shift. We smile at each other awkwardly. “Laters pal!” shouts my cervix. “Let’s go for that pint soon ok?” | https://medium.com/the-millennial-mothers-guide/difficult-conversations-with-my-cervix-980e9aabafde | ['Lisa Key'] | 2020-05-06 13:48:08.901000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Humour', 'Nhs', 'Hospital', 'Pregnancy'] |
Kids Don’t Damage Women’s Careers — Men Do | Kids Don’t Damage Women’s Careers — Men Do
Stop blaming motherhood for a problem created by fathers
Credit: Stella/Getty Images
One of the most pernicious modern myths about motherhood is that having kids will damage your career. Women are told that we need to choose between our jobs or our children, or that we’ll spend our most productive work years “juggling” or performing a “balancing act.”
For those of us uninterested in circus tricks, a bit of perspective: It’s not actually motherhood or kids that derail women’s careers and personal ambitions — it’s men who refuse to do their fair share.
If fathers did the same kind of work at home that mothers have always done, women’s careers could flourish in ways we haven’t yet imagined. But to get there, we need to stop framing mothers’ workplace woes as an issue of “balance,” and start talking about how men’s domestic negligence makes it so hard for us to succeed.
Yes, we know American men are doing more than they have in past years: Fathers report spending about eight hours a week on child care, or three times as much as fathers in 1965. (Though keep in mind that the data is self-reported, and men tend to overestimate how much domestic work and child care they do.)
Men doing more, however, is not the same thing as men doing enough. Despite progress made, mothers are still spending almost twice the amount of time that men do, 14 hours a week, on child care. And not all parenting is tangible, quantifiable work — it’s the mental labor of having kids that’s often the most taxing. It’s easy to split, for example, who packs a school lunch or dresses a child in the morning. But someone also needs to keep track of those days when lunch needs to be bagged for a field trip, or when it’s time to buy new underwear or sneakers. How many dads do you know who could tell you their child’s correct shoe size?
This kind of invisible work almost always falls on women, and we rarely talk about the impact it has on our professional lives. Imagine if instead of our mind being filled with to-do lists about grocery shopping and dentist appointments, we had available head space for creative thinking around our work and passions. For mothers, the freedom to just think is a privilege.
Studies also show that fathers continue to have significantly more leisure time than mothers and that mothers use their off time to do chores and child care while fathers use time off for hobbies and relaxing. This, too, is about careers: We know that people who have more leisure time and time for creative activities tend to perform better at work.
To be sure, there are also “motherhood penalties” in workplaces that have nothing to do with men. (At least, not the ones we share beds with.) Mothers are much less likely to be hired than non-mothers, and when they have children, their wages fall off a cliff. Studies from 2017 led some analysts to come to the conclusion that the wage gap was almost entirely attributable to motherhood. Men, on the other hand, tend to see more money once they have children. Individual and structural discrimination against mothers remains, and that takes a tremendous toll on women’s abilities to achieve in the public sphere.
But the answers to workplace discrimination are straightforward, and more importantly, they’re finally being recognized as necessary. That men do less child care is widely known, but it’s not widely condemned. We hear again and again, for example, that women just “care” more.
I promise you, there is nothing fulfilling about remembering that your daughter needs hair ties, or that she’s about to grow out of that pair of sandals. There’s no joy in changing a diaper or clipping tiny toenails. If women in relationships with men seem to be more concerned with these tasks, perhaps it’s because we know it’s not our husbands who will be looked at askance if our kid goes to school sporting inch-long fingernails or ill-fitting shoes.
Americans need to stop believing that women do the majority of care work because we want to. It’s because we’re expected to, because we’re judged if we don’t, and most of all, because it’s incredibly difficult to find male partners willing to do an equal share of the work.
So let’s stop saying that it’s motherhood that holds up women’s careers; it’s not the institution of parenthood that makes advancing at work difficult. It’s not our kids. It’s that there’s no chance of equality at work while there’s inequality at home. It’s not that women can’t “have it all,” it’s that men won’t stop taking it. | https://gen.medium.com/kids-dont-damage-women-s-careers-men-do-eb07cba689b8 | ['Jessica Valenti'] | 2019-06-14 18:19:11.191000+00:00 | ['Power', 'Parenting', 'Women', 'Jessica Valenti', 'Work'] |
The Significance of the Portuguese Conquest of Melaka: Rebutting a Reviewer’s Argument | The Portuguese Conquest
The Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511 was far more consequential — not just in hindsight but in terms of its immediate effects. There are five points I wish to make here:
The Portuguese invaders served as the chief conduit for the Columbian Exchange in island Southeast Asia. The importance of this literally cannot be overstated. I will go into more detail on this point below. Post-conquest expeditions to other islands led to radical changes in the nature of the spice trade (broadly conceived); for the first time, nutmeg (e.g.) could be transported from Banda to Europe, or almost anywhere else on the planet, in one go. The model of goods being transshipped at multiple ports around the Ocean en route to India, Arabia, Africa, or Europe began to be superseded. The Portuguese conquest of Melaka was the longest-distance imperial conquest in human history up to that point: never before had an army taken territory so far from home (Figure 2, below). The capture of Melaka showed that European-led armies could theoretically capture coastal cities almost anywhere on Earth. The distance alone was unprecedented. The conquest also seems to have led to a new militancy among Muslims in the archipelago. Before 1511 Islam seems to have been propagated peacefully, for the most part. Afterwards there were a number of rapid military conquests by Muslim-led polities, particularly in Java. In some cases these were preemptive assaults intended to prevent alliances between the Portuguese and local rulers (as in Sunda in the 1520s). The nature of the sources on the archipelago changes after the conquest. We are suddenly confronted by an abundance of texts discussing court cases or describing regions undocumented in detailed writing before that point (in eastern Indonesia, for instance). The nature of sixteenth-century historiography is wholly different to that of earlier eras, just as it is in the Americas and parts of tropical Africa.
Fig. 2 — A little map showing the distance between Melaka and Belém in Portugal: 11,670 kilometres as the crow flies.
I’d like to focus on the first two points below, but I would say, simply, that the Portuguese conquest of Melaka was militarily, culturally, historiographically, and commercially revolutionary. I am baffled by the idea that a king’s entirely precedented religious conversion could be considered as important as all this. When one bears in mind just how much of a change the Columbian Exchange alone was and is, it seems a little like comparing a molehill with a mountain. And the mountain is Everest.
The Columbian Exchange
In my view ‘the Middle Ages’ can be defined simply as ‘the millennium (or so) before the Columbian Exchange in Afro-Eurasia’. I have described this position in detail elsewhere — here, here, and here — but it bears repeating, particularly as this reviewer’s eyes seem to have glazed over while reading my description of the process in the thesis. (The pandemic took a toll on all of us. I can’t entirely blame them.)
Before 1492 there were enormous differences in what could be found in the Americas and in Afro-Eurasia. People in the Americas grew and traded maize, potatoes, quinoa, manioc, tomatoes, peppers, chilis, common beans (Phaseolus spp.), squash, peanuts, chocolate, and tobacco, among other things. None of these were known anywhere in Afro-Eurasia before 1492 at the very earliest. American communities outside the Andes had few-to-no draught animals and wheeled transport was effectively unknown (although wheels themselves can be found on some pre-Columbian American toys). Obsidian was worked into points and artworks, but artificial glass was not manufactured (nor otherwise present, with the remarkable exception of a small number of Venetian glass beads recently discovered at a site in Alaska C14-dated to the middle of the fifteenth century, probably brought across from Siberia some decades before Columbus’ first voyage). Steel was not forged, nor were alcohol or rosewater distilled. Gunpowder was unknown. Because few large animals were raised for their meat or milk or for pulling ploughs or carts, zoonotic diseases that afflicted Afro-Eurasian populations — plague, smallpox, measles, influenza, and others — were largely absent.
In Afro-Eurasia by the fifteenth century, by contrast, glass and steel were commonplace between Indonesia and Ireland and beyond. Some foods were more or less ubiquitous, including rice, which could be found in Europe as well as Asia and Africa from an early period and which was, of course, completely unknown in the Americas. Rosewater, sesame, and dates seem to have been popular all over the place and can be found as readily in English cookbooks of the period as in Chinese or Arabic ones. (They’re mentioned in fifteenth-century Southeast Asian texts as well, and both rosewater and sesame are mentioned in Bujangga Manik.) Indo-Malaysian commodities like cloves, cubebs, and camphor were consumed from Japan to Denmark and the Sahel. Horses were raised almost throughout the supercontinent, including in Java. Gunpowder appears to have been quite normal in Southeast Asia by this point, just as it was in Europe, India, China, North Africa, and so on. Playing cards started to be made in Flanders and Egypt as well as Central Asia and China. (There is one reference to playing cards in Melaka in a Chinese text written — coincidentally — in 1492.) I also noted in my thesis that the Arabic language was extremely widespread across the hemisphere before the Columbian Exchange, and one might have been able to find speakers of Arabic anywhere from eastern Indonesia to China, Russia, Mali, and England. There were no Arabic speakers in the Americas until Columbus’ first voyage. (At least one accompanied the expedition.)
When the fleet of historical arch-villain Christopher Columbus sailed to the Caribbean in 1492, it brought these two largely non-interacting hemispheres into constant contact for the first time — and that inaugurated a new era in human history. This new era can rightly be called ‘modernity’. It involved the mingling of each hemisphere’s products in a sustained way for the first time, and it led to the still-ongoing genocide of indigenous Americans and the attempted destruction of their societies and civilizations by incoming Europeans. (This genocide is practically the hallmark of modernity itself.) This process was as consequential for Southeast Asia as it was for anywhere else in Afro-Eurasia. And it was the Portuguese who inflicted the Columbian Exchange on the region.
The route Portuguese ships took to the Indian Ocean — the route pioneered by Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama — veered close to the coast of Brazil, and it is notable that the oldest surviving description of any place in South America, the letter of Pêro Vaz de Caminha, was written in 1500 after a Portuguese expedition to Asia was blown off-course (Figure 3). It is even more notable when you bear in mind that its author was killed in India later the same year.
Fig. 3 — The first page of the letter sent by Pêro Vaz de Caminha to Manuel I of Portugal (here addressed ‘Senhor’ at the top of the page) in 1500. The letter is the oldest surviving written account of a society in mainland South America in any language.
The first people to have visited both the Americas and Asia east of the Levant were Portuguese. The first ships to come to the Indo-Malaysian archipelago from the east, across the Pacific from South America, were piloted by Spanish and Portuguese navigators. The people who first planted manioc in Africa were probably Portuguese, or enslaved by them, as were, in all probability, the first people to bring maize to Maluku (attested by the 1540s), among other such similar events.
Before the Portuguese conquered Melaka in 1511, the effects of the Columbian Exchange were likely barely felt in island Southeast Asia. Afterwards, these effects are integral to the region’s history (and culture and cuisine, etc.) and — importantly, from my philological perspective — must be taken into account when interpreting texts written either side of the divide. This is why I felt it necessary to explain this issue so thoroughly in the introduction to my text of Bujangga Manik, a work written in Java in the late fifteenth century, and thus before the Portuguese conquest of Melaka and the inchoate impact of the Columbian Exchange in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. It is this context that makes the text important.
In sum: Any periodisation that does not take account of the Columbian Exchange is weak and outdated. To my mind it is as simple as that.
Trade
But that’s not all. Look at the routes taken by travellers to the archipelago in the fifteenth century or earlier: Marco Polo, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, and Niccolò de’ Conti all got to and from the area by stopping at various ports around the Indian Ocean, whether in Arabia, India, or mainland Southeast Asia. By all accounts this was how commodities were traded as well. Cloves purchased in Europe before the 1510s, and certainly before Vasco da Gama’s voyage in 1498, would have been grown and harvested on one of the five clove-producing islands in North Maluku. Most would have been brought to Java (probably) in local Moluccan ships, perhaps by way of Banda, and then transshipped in one of Java’s ports. From there they could be shipped up the Strait of Malacca, perhaps being sold in Melaka itself, and then taken in the hold of an ocean-going ship to any number of ports between Melaka and Cairo (Pasai, Kochi, Calicut, Khambhat, Aden, Jiddah, Mecca, etc.), before being transported overland to Alexandria, whence they could be taken to Venice or another city in southern Europe.
Look at later routes, though, and you’ll see something very different. The routes taken by the first and second successful circumnavigations of the world are good examples of the possibilities opened up by the events of 1498 and 1511 — the first the Magellan-Elcano expedition (1519–1522) financed by Spain and the second an English expedition under the command of Francis Drake (1577–1580). Both expeditions involved crossing the Pacific from east to west, and both involved stops in eastern Indonesia to buy cloves and other commodities. After these expeditions left the archipelago (departing from Timor in Elcano’s case, Java in Drake’s), they didn’t go to Sri Lanka, India, or Arabia. They didn’t transship their cargo or stop to sell it before reaching Europe. Instead, both expeditions went straight across the Indian Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope. After Java, the next significant stop on the Drake voyage was Sierra Leone, and that was the last stop before England.
This route wasn’t even conceivable before the very end of the fifteenth century. After the Portuguese took Melaka it became a normal route for vessels from Southeast Asia bound for Europe. Europeans were able to bypass middlemen in the Indian Ocean and sell their goods at high prices in Antwerp (etc.). This represented a radical change in the nature of the trade in luxury goods from Africa and Asia. Until the nineteenth the quantities of these goods were really rather small, and probably didn’t change much between the Middle Ages and early modernity, but the way these products came onto markets worldwide changed radically as a result of the Portuguese (and later European) conquests in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. I don’t think the same can be said of the effects of the Islamisation of Melaka in the fifteenth century. | https://medium.com/@indomedieval/the-significance-of-the-portuguese-conquest-of-melaka-rebutting-a-reviewers-argument-86479ed4711f | ['Medieval Indonesia'] | 2021-03-08 14:55:55.261000+00:00 | ['Trade', 'History', 'Portuguese', 'Melaka', 'Islam'] |
RuntimeError: No application found. | Error in Flask while creating DB.
RuntimeError: No application found. Either work inside a view function or push an application context. See http://flask-sqlalchemy.pocoo.org/contexts/.
This worked for me. | https://medium.com/@iamnaran/runtimeerror-no-application-found-269237b0e7ad | ['Na Ran'] | 2020-12-19 05:51:11.764000+00:00 | ['Flask', 'Sqlalchemy', 'Python'] |
Joining the global protest fray: Islamists march on the Pakistani capital | By James M. Dorsey
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel and Castbox.
Pakistan, long viewed as an incubator of religious militancy, is gearing up for a battle over the future of the country’s notorious madrassas, religious seminaries accused of breeding radicalism.
Islamist-led protests also threaten to be a fight for the future of the government of prime minister Imran Khan.
The stakes for both the government and multiple Islamist and opposition parties and groups are high.
Pakistan earlier this month evaded blacklisting by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international anti-money laundering and terrorism finance watchdog, but only by the skin of its teeth.
Maintaining Pakistan on it grey list since June of last year, FATF warned the South Asian nation that it would be blacklisted if it failed to fully implement an agreed plan to halt the flow of funds to militant groups by February of next year when the watchdog holds its next meeting.
The warning was reinforced by a statement by FATF’s Chinese president, Xiangmin Liu. China has long shielded Pakistan from blacklisting.
“Pakistan needs to do more and faster. Pakistan’s failure to fulfil FATF global standards is an issue that we take very seriously. If by February 2020, Pakistan doesn’t make significant progress, it will be put on the blacklist.” Mr. Xiangmin said.
Pakistani officials acknowledged that Mr. Xiangmin’s comment underlined the seriousness of their country’s predicament but said it would serve as an incentive to push forward.
That is likely to energize Islamist opposition to Pakistani efforts to comply with FATF demands that would impose strict oversight on their funding and financing of social and cultural activities, including the operation of tens of thousands of religious seminaries.
A five-party Islamist coalition that demands “true Islamization” and the establishment of shariah law, led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the 66-year old head of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam and a former member of parliament, organized a countrywide march scheduled to converge on the capital Islamabad on October 31.
Mr., Rehman said the march of up to one million people was a declaration of “war” against Mr. Khan’s government. He demanded the government’s resignation. His protest is likely to secure a degree of support from other major opposition parties like the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).
With government efforts to engage the opposition in talks to fend off the march on Islamabad going nowhere, both Pakistani security forces and stick-wielding Islamist volunteers clad in yellow uniform-like garb have been preparing for the march. Security forces have virtually sealed off Islamabad’s government district.
The government is also considering closing roads leading to the capital and banning media coverage.
Pakistani media reported that authorities were also contemplating digging ditches along footpaths leading to Islamabad to prevent protesters from circumventing roadblocks by foot.
The Islamists were further energized by a controversial meeting last month on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly between Mr. Khan and George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist behind the Open Society Foundation. The foundation was banned from Pakistan in late 2017 as part of a crackdown on non-governmental organizations.
Mr. Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew who survived the Holocaust, and the foundation are globally in the bull’s eye of populist, ultra-nationalist and militant religious opposition to what they term ‘globalists’ and ‘cosmopolitans.’
The attacks, like in the case of the Islamist coalition in Pakistan as well as Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban and other nationalist and far-right forces, often take on anti-Semitic connotations.
Mr. Orban, who studied on a scholarship provided by Mr. Soros’ philanthropy, has charged the billionaire with secretly plotting to flood Hungary with migrants and destroy it as a nation.
Mr. Rehman, accusing Mr. Khan of being a “Jewish agent,” was particularly irked by the fact that the prime minister was believed to have asked Mr. Soros to assist in reforming Pakistani madrassas in a bid to counter radicalization and ensure that the seminaries adopt curricula approved by the ministry of education.
Greater government control of the seminaries would substantially weaken the significant street power of Islamist parties that often fare poorly in elections.
The emerging power struggle between Mr. Khan and the Islamists is in many ways an effort by the Islamists to force the military that long supported them to choose between them and the prime minister.
Mr. Khan is believed to have had military support in the electoral campaign that brought the former cricket player to office on a promise to end corruption and improve living standards.
Instead, a persistent economic crisis forced Mr. Khan to agree to a US$6 billion bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that involves stark austerity measures.
The Islamists ability to march on Islamabad has some analysts suggesting that they would not be able to do so without at least a military nod.
Whatever the case, the march could not come at a more awkward moment for Mr, Khan.
Mr. Rehman hopes to capitalize on popular discontent as Pakistan struggles to overcome the economic crisis and seems unable to garner substantial international and Muslim support in condemning India’s withdrawal of the disputed area of Kashmir’s autonomy.
Earlier this week, police in Islamabad employed water cannons to disperse teachers protesting the fact that they had not been paid for months.
Complicating affairs is the fact that solving the economic crisis, confronting India in the dispute about Kashmir and meeting FATF’s demands are all intertwined.
Militants and others have degrees of financial manoeuvrability because much of the Pakistani economy remains unrecorded. In addition, despite crackdowns, various militant groups like Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Jaish-e-Mohammed remain useful proxies in battles over Kashmir. All of which mitigates against full compliance with FATF’s demands.
That is the murky playground in which Mr. Rehman and his Islamist alliance is seeking to stir the pot.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture | https://medium.com/the-turbulent-world-of-middle-east-soccer/joining-the-global-protest-fray-islamists-march-on-the-pakistani-capital-1084e2d5678d | ['James M. Dorsey'] | 2019-10-26 04:07:00.823000+00:00 | ['Pakistan', 'Terrorism', 'Religion', 'Islam', 'China'] |
Delta at 30: Augoye Praise Gov Okowa’s Strategies | As Delta State marks 30 years of creation Delta at 30, Chief James Augoye, the immediate past Commissioner for Works of the State has lauded the developmental strides of the State Governor, Senator (Dr) Ifeanyi Okowa.
Chief Augoye lauded Governor Okowa in his goodwill message to Deltans on the auspicious occasion of the 30th anniversary of the creation of the State known as Delta at 30, noting that since assuming office in 2015, Okowa has contributed to the development of the State in no small measure.
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Augoye further noted that Okowa stands tall if the roll call of those who have served the State well in the capacity of Governor since its creation on 27 August 1991 should be taken. He, however, commended past leaders of the State for setting up a firm foundation for the State.
While commending Governor Okowa for maintaining sustainable peace in the State, Augoye thanked the people of Delta for their resilience, support and prayers for the State.
The former Commissioner for Works especially appreciated Deltans for peaceful co-existence, which he said has enabled the SMART agenda of the Okowa administration to thrive, stressing that no State government can succeed if there is no sustainable peace at this new Delta at 30.
Meanwhile, Augoye in the goodwill message described Governor Okowa as a true Deltan, who he said has the wellbeing and welfare of the people at heart. He said this is evident in the various projects the Governor distributed across the State.
The former Commissioner further explained that with the SMART agenda of the Okowa administration already working out, Deltans should be sure of an improved State by the end of the administration.
Augoye lauds Gov Okowa’s Development
While further thanking Deltans for their unflinching support for the administration, Augoye prayed to God to continue to fill Governor Okowa with wisdom and strength to pilot the affairs of the State.
“Today is a great day for us as Deltans. Today, our dear State is 30 years since creation. This sure calls for celebration. I, hereby, join all Deltans, especially our amiable Governor, Senator (Dr) Ifeanyi Okowa to celebrate on this auspicious occasion.
“As we reflect on the past year, there is much to be thankful for in how God has led us as a State.” God has been kind to us especially with the kinds of leaders he has given us.
“Past leaders of the State have presented a firm foundation for others to build on, and our amiable Governor, Senator (Dr) Ifeanyi Okowa has not deviated from the dreams of our founding fathers.
“Rather, His Excellency, the Governor of Delta State, Senator (Dr) Ifeanyi Okowa has set the bar high. Governor Okowa is a true Deltan indeed. This is also evident in how well he has astutely distributed key projects across the State.
“As we celebrate Delta State’s 30th anniversary, I pray that God will continue to strengthen our Governor.” I pray that God will continue to give him wisdom, knowledge and understanding to pilot the affairs of the State successfully.
“At this point, I want to thank all Deltans for their continuous support to the State Government, and for peaceful co-existence. No government can succeed in the absence of peace. We should not be tired of praying and supporting the government.
“As we celebrate today, it is my sincere hope that celebration will continue to be a part of our lives both now and in the future.” Amen.
Long live Delta State. Long live Nigeria,” Augoye stated.
#Augoyeliaison | https://medium.com/@newsvillepost/delta-at-30-augoye-praise-gov-okowas-strategies-ef16570dfcfa | ['Newsville Post'] | 2021-08-27 15:23:41.879000+00:00 | ['Augoyeliaison', 'Deltastate', 'Okowa', 'Deltaat30', 'Featured'] |
Security Blanket | Security Blanket
(Chapter 15 of The Utopia Thieves)
IN FACT, if we look at New Zealand and Australia and the way that the great majority of those countries’ colonists inhabit something akin to a Mediterranean Riviera, one comes to be struck, eventually, by the thought that the closest parallel to the colonisation of these countries is not the westward colonisation of North America but in fact the colonisation of Israel, or of Palestine by the Israelis, depending on how you look at it.
The Octagon even looks like a prefiguration of Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square.
And there are other historical parallels, in the sense of an initial period of mostly peaceful coexistence with indigenous people, which in New Zealand’s case followed the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, followed by wars in which most of the indigenous inhabitants were driven from the fertile and coastal regions that they, too, had always preferred.
Take a look at the following maps prepared in the 1920s by the frontier historian James Cowan, showing the sites of conflict between government forces and settlers and their Māori allies, and Māori resisters, in the New Zealand Wars of the nineteenth century; most of which took place in the 1860s. There is a heavy concentration on the outskirts of the settler ports, in the areas that MacLauchlan dubbed “attenuated suburbs,” and indeed in some parts that are now actually suburban.
Map of North Island engagements (there was only one armed incident of the same type in the South Island). Crown Copyright Reserved.
Map of engagements near Auckland. Crown Copyright Reserved.
Some of these engagements were quite large by any standards — notably Rangiriri at the lower edge of the second map, where 1,400 British and colonial troops hurled themselves nine times against a well-engineered Māori pā: a word that originally meant a gated village or stockade but that had, by the 1860s, also come to mean a more serious sort of a fort, capable of standing up to artillery and trapping attackers while they are fired down upon from a bastion.
The repulse of the Royal Navy storming party, Rangiriri Pā. (20th November 1863). Sketch by the British military engineer Charles Heaphy, who was present at the battle and made a study of the Māori defences, reproduced in ‘The New Zealand Wars’, vol. I, by James Cowan. 1922, p. 331. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
The wars of the 1860s were mainly caused by settler expansionism. Though the map above makes it appear as though Auckland was besieged, the reality is that the colonists were striving to break out of their beach-heads of first arrival. In the largest engagements, such as Rangiriri, it was the Māori who built the forts that were under attack — not the colonists.
Māori counter-attacks into the area already settled by Europeans, at places with such telltale names as Burtt’s Farm and Williamson’s Clearing, were more in the way of skirmishes and incidents involving a few dozen people, or a couple of hundred when the Pukekohe East Church Stockade was attacked. The last was an unusual instance of a Māori attack on a well-defended British position, which the Māori hoped to take because its defences weren’t quite finished at the time and its defenders few.
There were two broad motives for settler expansionism. The first motive was to obtain more land. The second was to impose a more unambiguous form of British control over the areas that the settlers inhabited and to secure them more completely against skirmishers.
There was, obviously, an element of circularity here in that if the Māori weren’t being attacked they probably wouldn’t have been counter-attacking. But be that as it may, the settlers tended to view the expansion of their pale of settlement as the best long-term guarantee of security.
Under the Treaty of Waitangi, the Māori retained a measure of sovereignty — exactly how much has been debated ever since — and many colonists did not feel secure under this arrangement. The expansion of the areas settled by Europeans, and a quest for greater de facto control of the margins of the pale of settlement against growing Māori resistance, were two motives that went hand in hand as the mother and father of conflict, so to speak.
In the colonial period the wars were represented very much in terms of the goal of ultimate pacification: of the settlers’ ‘quest for security’, to borrow a phrase first used in a later, twentieth-century context by the economist and welfare-state architect W. B. Sutch.
Rather revealingly, the very first war memorial erected in New Zealand, on the 1st of September 1865, frames the loss of those killed on the settler side in the small, 1864 battle of Moutoa just up the Whanganui river from the town itself, in terms of a struggle to preserve “Law and Order” from “Fanaticism and Barbarism.”
Its provocative inscription notwithstanding, this memorial was left alone when its site was occupied by Māori activists in 1994, even as another statue nearby, that of colonial premier John Ballance, was being pulled down and taken away to make sure of its destruction.
Apart from its gravestone-like aspect, another likely reason for the survival of the 1865 monument is that as one one walks around it, it becomes clear that the inscription is in both the English and the Māori languages, and that, furthermore, all but one of the “brave men” it commemorates were not settlers but, rather, pro-settler Māori. The exception was a Catholic lay brother who may have been trying to come between the combatants.
In other words, whatever one might think of its inscription today, New Zealand’s first war memorial was erected by the settlers in honour of their Māori neighbours, plus the unfortunate Brother Euloge. Perhaps this also counted in its favour.
But in any case, what’s also interesting is that the 1864 fight at Moutoa was framed, at the time, in terms of an opposition of “law and order” to frontier chaos.
In the 1950s, a somewhat revisionist historical school emerged, which emphasised the land-grabbing motives of the leaders of settler society. People such as the War Minister of the autonomous settler government, Thomas Russell, who was intimately involved with Auckland’s so-called “land rings.” This is now the dominant academic view of the wars.
All the same, the downplaying or overlooking of the earlier settler rationalisation of the conflict as a quest for security, now seen as a rather tainted idea, brings with it the risk of failing to appreciate the roots of the failure of later leaders of settler society to extend the welcome-mat of their own former full-employment welfare state to Māori, as the latter returned to a now- highly urbanised pale of settlement in search of employment after World War II: preferring, instead, to abolish the full-employment welfare state and to invest in police and prisons instead.
Most prisoners in New Zealand today are Māori, though Māori only make up 15% of the population; New Zealand also jails a larger proportion of its population than virtually all other OECD countries, though not as large a proportion as the United States.
Downplaying the security concerns of past and present populations of Pākehā (white settlers and their descendants), and the Pākehā population’s frequent susceptibility to the framing of social issues in terms of security, thus brings with it the risk of failing to understand the roots of a mentality that has indeed led to the framing of neoliberal-era social problems as matters of ‘law and order’, just as we see on the inscription of the 1865 memorial.
And even, ultimately, of a ‘penal populism’ in which Pākehā politicians of recent decades have competed, crudely, in a race to jail as many unemployed and restive urban Māori, victims of de-industrialisation and the ending of former affordable-housing policies, as possible.
It’s often said that those who fail to understand the past are condemned to repeat it. And that is precisely what the Pākehā have done, by failing to guard against their own persisting instinct to view the Māori stranger not as a contributor to modern urban civilisation but as a danger to it.
Under this mentality, Māori tended to be split into ‘good’ Māori of proven loyalty or harmlessness to the Pākehā like the warriors memorialised in 1865, or the small minority of Māori who are still rural and tribal today, and ‘bad’ Māori who have got into trouble, or whom the Pākehā simply do not know, or who live in urban slums: a majority of Māori, perhaps.
Such a revival of the old security-state neurosis was Kryptonite to the extension of the full-employment, affordable-housing welfare state from which Pākehā of earlier generations had benefited hugely, to the new indigenous proletariat.
Instead, the latest cohort of urban pioneers — the indigenous settlers, or re-settlers, of the now-urbanised Pākehā pale— fell into the condition of what the Guardian’s environmental and social correspondent George Monbiot deems a ‘sacrificial caste’.
In the narrow sense, the sacrificial caste are the sorts of people who fall victim to institutional-abuse scandals: people to whom things happen and who appear to have no redress until, after years of campaigning, the scandal is brought into the open.
The point is that these sorts of abuses, though widespread, don’t happen to everyone. They happen to a sacrificial caste, often some ethnic minority or a subset of the children of the urban poor, deemed to be in need of wholesale re-education by way of forbidding institutions.
We would not go far wrong in asking whether urban Maori under neoliberalism have not proven to be a sacrificial caste in a wider system of institutionalised abuse in which the city itself becomes a kind of open prison. A system of institutionalised abuse on the widest scale, driven ultimately by the idea that this minority is a threat to civil peace and prosperity.
A sacrificial caste to be corralled into ethnic ghettoes and micro-policed. But not actually helped to thrive, in the way that earlier cohorts of New Zealand’s urban pioneers, beneficiaries of what the historian John Martin calls New Zealand’s ‘settler contract’, were helped to thrive by way of a full-employment welfare state with plenty of affordable housing.
In the remainder of this post, I will delve a little deeper into the controversies surrounding the New Zealand wars of the 1860s. The idea that emerged in the 1950s, namely that the wars were driven by carpetbaggers, were actually quite familiar criticisms at the time even within the settler community and British imperialists themselves, and I will delve into that controversy. I will then go on to discuss the historian Alan Ward’s 1967 analysis of the security-state aspects of the wars; an analysis which unfortunately did not ring the alarm bell on contemporary parallels and the growing transformation of modern Maori (and Islanders, too) into a sacrificial caste in the New Zealand city.
A Controversial Conflict
As you can imagine, the Brits had trouble getting their heads around the idea that tribal ‘natives’ could put up that sort of trench-warfare resistance. Which looks more like something out of a European war of the day such as the 1864 conflict between the Prussians and the Danes, or even the American Civil War, than the swift rout of brave but disorganised warriors that the invading colonists had no doubt hoped for.
In a November 1863 letter to his parents, an English settler named Fred Haslam, manning a military picket at Drury some thirty kilometres or twenty miles south of Auckland at the time, complained that:
The once happy New Zealand, a land of homesteads and farms, cattle, and rosy children playing on the green meadows, is now the scene of ruin, desolation and bloodshed of the most barbarous character, and, worse than all, the destruction by our own defenders, the lawless mob introduced from Australia. . . . What fearful scenes I have witnessed of late, years of toil destroyed by Maoris & defenders while the inhabitants are out defending another part. Such is Auckland now.
The war, actually one of the larger colonial conflicts that Victorian Britain got itself into, was quite controversial at the time.
It’s often forgotten that in the age of empire, which was also an age of slowly-dawning enlightenment and humanitarianism, many people in Britain really didn’t like white colonists very much and didn’t see why they should kill and die for them.
The colonists, often drawn from a population still living, mentally, in the puritanical and witch-burning seventeenth century, would often get into unnecessary fights with indigenous people or face rebellions from their ill-treated slaves. And then if the British army and navy didn’t back them up, even though they were probably in the wrong, they would declare independence.
For example, among his other alleged tyrannies, King George III had forbidden the American colonists to expand westward over land occupied by native Americans: the so-called Royal Proclamation of 1763. A lot of people don’t remember that that was one of the chief causes of the American Revolution, not to mention the subsequent myth of the West as the land of America’s destiny.
Returning to New Zealand, the military historian Nigel Prickett has reproduced an extract from another letter, containing a rather darkly amusing anecdote about a disillusioned British officer and the Minister of Colonial Defence in New Zealand’s autonomous settler government of the mid-1860s: namely, Thomas Russell: an Irish Protestant who was widely accused of prosecuting the war so that he could grab former Māori lands himself in the same way that his ancestors had taken the lands of the Catholics in the cruel 1600s.
Though I am of the same origin myself, it has to be admitted that people from Russell’s small but combative community, which was also that of the former US President Andrew Jackson and which the Americans loosely term ‘Scots-Irish’, do seem to have been at the forefront of many a settler fight in the English-speaking world.
HMS Pioneer doing battle with a Māori pā at Meremere on 31 October 1863. Detail from an image catalogued as A-110–006 at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, via nzhistory.govt.nz.
Squeezed into an armoured gunboat of the type that was being used to bombard Māori pā on the Waikato River south of Auckland, a British infantry captain spoke plainly in a manner passed on by a fellow officer, in a letter that Prickett regards as something of a window into the divisions among those seeking to reassert Britain’s claim over New Zealand in the 1860s:
. . . the other day a Captain of foot was steaming gaily down on pleasure bent, and in the course of conversation at the little cabin table gave it as his opinion that ‘the Colonists were a greedy rapacious set,’ that Russell (the War Minister) was the worst of the gang, and that nothing would be done until he was hung etc. etc. ‘Perhaps Sir, you are not aware that I am Mr Russell,’ said a quiet gentleman at table.
In the course of the conflict, New Zealand was subjected to a form of partition: the usual British solution to problems of this sort, to judge by the experience of India, Palestine, Ireland and a number of other places.
It was a harsh partition. Many Māori, perhaps the majority, were actually expelled from the colonial pale of settlement into hillier and less fertile terrain. In much the same way, indeed, that many seventeenth-century Irish Catholics had been forced to choose between ‘Hell or Connaught’.
(Connaught, or Connacht, is the hilliest, poorest and most western part of Ireland. The rulers of seventeenth-century Ireland deemed Connaught a suitable place for dissident Catholics to be exiled to, on pain of being executed otherwise.)
In a less ruthless but otherwise similar fashion, the new and more overtly settler-dominated regime that emerged from New Zealand’s wars allowed only those Māori who had sworn loyalty to it or who had actually fought alongside the settlers, as some did, to remain in several key parts of New Zealand’s nineteenth-century pale; where the land of the expellees was also duly confiscated.
This, too, was highly controversial. The first Chief Justice of New Zealand, William Martin, submitted a memorandum which was reprinted in the Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives for 1863. It contains the following paragraph:
13. The example of Ireland may satisfy us how little is to be effected towards the quieting of a country by the confiscation of private land; how the claim of the dispossessed owner is remembered from generation to generation, and how the brooding sense of wrong breaks out from time to time in fresh disturbance and crime.
Along with the Irish parallel, this expulsion also prefigured the way in which so many Palestinians would later be exiled to the West Bank of the river Jordan, a mountainous district overlooking the coastal plains about to be renamed Israel.
However, in contrast to the situation in Israel, no permanent barrier was erected to try and keep the majority of the Māori forever beyond the pale in New Zealand.
Some confiscated land was also returned soon after it had been taken, and some more in the 1920s. Though most of the very best land, and nearly all of the land under the cities and suburbs, remained in settler hands.
Much the same exclusionary result had been achieved in the South Island, albeit more by the pen than the sword in the sense that nearly the whole of that island had been acquired by the colonial regime for a pittance in the 1840s, with much of it subsequently on-sold or leased to colonists, or made into nature reserves.
In 1881, the Smith-Nairn Commission ruled that Māori should not be forever excluded from the choicest, most urbanisable spots in the South Island, as it was clear that they had never envisioned their own exile into the wilderness as a part of the ill-understood bargain.
We consider that the promises made to the Native owners of the territory which is held to have been ceded . . . must be held to amount to a distinct pledge that the lands included therein would be so dealt with by the pakeha that the Maori would share them with him, and that the consequences of the surrender would, under such administration, be so advantageous to the latter that, in comparison with future advantages, the money payment offered ought to be regarded as, and really was, but a trifling part of the consideration.
Unfortunately, not too much came of these noble sentiments either until the decade of the 1990s; when South Island tribes, who were in many ways the most hard done by of all even if there had been little fighting in their island, began to receive some significant payouts at last.
The Quest for Security
It goes without saying that wars driven by settler expansionism soon inflamed the insecurities that helped to start them. A closer look at some of the ‘forest ranger’ Gustavus von Tempsky’s watercolours such as the Attack at Burtt’s Farm or his almost surrealistic image of two soldiers in blue guarding a fallen comrade under a tree fern with the full moon shining through its crown, is psychologically unsettling. Just about everyone who is depicted in detail in von Tempsky’s paintings looks fairly wild-eyed. The 1983 drama Utu, set during the post-1865 guerilla period, also seems to capture something of the insecurity of those times.
The net result of all this conflict and the conditions that led up to it, wrote the historian Alan Ward from the distance of the Australian National University in 1967, was that many Pākehā came to be afraid of unfamiliar Māori on some atavistic level, young Māori males in particular.
This accounted, at least in part, for the expulsions and confiscations of the 1860s, driven by greed at the top but endorsed more widely through fear.
Ward began his article, ‘The Origins of the Anglo-Maori Wars: A Reconsideration’ by acknowledging the revisionist vision of the European conquest of New Zealand had emerged since the 1950s. Older treatments of the wars, whereby the Pākehā had brought law and order to a wild frontier had, by 1967, given way to accounts of an avoidable conflict, one that was driven forward by the venality of a small clique of lawyer-speculator-politicians headquartered, for the most part, in Auckland:
IN the past decade New Zealand historians discussing the origins of the wars of the eighteen-sixties have invariably concluded that the Europeans, not the Maoris, were substantially the aggressors in the conflict. This article will not dissent from that general conclusion.
Ward then dilates on some of the diplomatic mis-steps that, in addition to the agitation of the Auckland “land rings,” ultimately led to the avoidable conflict:
[Governor] Grey’s egotism had wedded him to the idea of being the fond and wise father of the Maoris, a rôle he imagined he had played with success in his first governorship. He still regarded the chiefs as essentially childlike people responsive to a mixture of chiding and candy. He seemed quite unable to grasp the fact that he was writing to men who, backed by some 10,000 armed supporters, were experiencing the rich and heady satisfactions of creating an independent Maori nationality in defiance of the invaders.
The Māori were people who had modernised themselves to the point that the word pā, which in the days of Captain Cook, some fourscore and ten years before, had denoted a village surrounded by sticks, now meant a fort that could fend off waves of uniformed Victorian attackers.
Like the diverse and feuding inhabitants of Scotland in the days of Edward Longshanks and William Wallace, so the Māori, less diverse to begin with than the proto-Scots, had also grown more unified in the face of settler encroachment. That was the case overall, even if some had, often for local reason, allied themselves to the colonists in some places as well.
The hitherto obscure poetical term Aotearoa, meaning ‘long white cloud’ or ‘long bright land’ was, by the mid-1860s, stitched onto a famous Māori battle-flag and accepted by both sides as the Māori word for the whole of New Zealand (previously, there hadn’t been one).
Ward was no means the only historian to remark upon the irony of the creation of national identities out of tribalism, which seems to have happened many times in the course of the expansion of England, all the way from Wales, Ireland and Scotland right out to Aotearoa.
Furthermore, the destiny of what was known in those days as the white man was by no means as manifest as many a white man supposed. In theory, the British Empire was all but invincible in a colonial conflict. In reality, it was stretched thin.
And as we have also seen, not all Britishers, even in the army, were keen to die in a ditch for the land-claims of a bunch of troublesome colonists on the far side of the world. It was quite likely that if the Māori chiefs held out, they would get a better deal from London. As such,
Grey’s patronising suggestions were greeted with utter disdain.
Grey would be recalled by his masters in 1867, though the fighting dragged on until 1872.
Ward then goes on to point out that in mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand there was also a high degree of violent lawlessness in outlying areas, regions which neither the British nor the emerging Maori nationalism, known as the King movement (after the election of a pan-Maori king in 1858), could effectively police as yet.
Such areas suffered from the same sorts of problems as the Wild West, in the sense of no shortage of desperados and plenty of places for them to hide from justice.
We also tend to forget just how violent life often was before the coming of modern times: how routine the feud and the vendetta. The tribal wars of the 1820s and 1830s — the so-called Musket Wars — which preceded the major mid-century wars between the Māori and the settlers by a generation, had actually been even more violent than the latter, and certainly less chivalrous.
In the 1860s, even prior to the renewal of large-scale conflict, there was still a hangover of that kind of lawless violence in the remoter parts of the New Zealand countryside, including the kinds that were most likely to push insecure out-settlers’ buttons:
In December 1862 an incident occurred which gave Grey a new whip with which to beat the King movement. In the Rangitikei district a Maori of Kingite allegiance was caught attempting to rape a young English girl named Lind. In the process of being handed over to the magistrate, the Maori, Wirihana, was freed by men who called themselves the King’s soldiers and carried off into the interior. White races have always shown violent — almost pathological — reactions to sexual offences by coloured men against their women, and this case was no exception.
Unfortunately, the settlers began to identify the Māori themselves with forms of lawlessness that sprang from tribal feuds and a geographically hard-to-police frontier. This even became their principal objection to coexistence with the Māori. Not that they were incapable of behaving lawlessly in the pursuit of law and order themselves:
Settlers certainly displayed a highly emotional reaction . . . it stemmed from any indication that Europeans were likely to remain in what they believed to be a state of fearful dependence upon the caprices of a turbulent race of barbarians. When the [Auckland] war began in 1863 the European population reacted with violent brutality not just towards the ‘rebels’, but to Maoris as such. Sewell noted that in Auckland ‘no native however friendly, dared to show his face in the streets. The temper of the people towards the whole Native race is indiscriminately cruel.’ [Elsewhere,] J. White, Resident Magistrate in Upper Wanganui, protested at the kicking and striking, by soldiers, of pro-government Maoris, including the chief Hori Kingi upon whom the security of Wanganui largely depended.
In effect, Māori became re-framed as a race of would-be criminals who needed to be policed constantly and hard. Ward quoted from an 1864 petition of settlers in the Wairarapa, one of the more peaceful districts of the North Island at the time, which was nevertheless to this effect:
“That . . . the Government . . . ought not relax its efforts to establish the Queen’s supremacy until the whole Maori race yield entire obedience to the law . . . relations between the two races cannot be considered satisfactory nor can property, or even life, be regarded as secure so long as it remains purely optional with the Maoris [sic] whether or not they will obey the law. It would be easy to adduce instances of debts repudiated, or long unpaid, or crimes committed, of cattle destroyed, and other injuries sustained by the settlers, who are compelled to put up with them under the conviction that it would be fruitless to appeal to a Court of Law for redress . . . residing as they do in the midst of an aboriginal race well armed . . . and not as yet brought within the pale of the law, . . . therefore … it seems to your memorialists absolutely necessary that the strong natural positions and keys of the country should be occupied by a sufficient armed force of Imperial or Colonial troops. Such strongholds in the interior of the country would, moreover, not only strengthen the position of the settlers, but would render the towns on the sea coasts secure from all chance of attack.”
Ward thus concluded that:
The argument of this article has not been that European aggression in New Zealand can be justified, but that it must be explained as a complex social movement involving much more than land hunger.
Writing in the middle of a generally progressive decade, Ward ends his essay on a sanguine note. Concerning the New Zealand colonial wars of a century before, he concludes that:
In the long run they were much less disastrous to the Maoris than most imperial conquests of indigenous peoples, and the final settlement and reconstruction was shaped in a way that admitted some protection of Maori interests and — when later and more enlightened governments provided assistance and encouragement rather than compulsion — the possibility of full Maori participation in the new order.
Today, though, we have learned to be more wary of atavistic impulses and the way that they can come back to life after an interval of progress, as in Ireland or the Balkans, or America for that matter, where people used to think that the long shadow of racism and the Civil War was fading away.
Back in the 1860s, Chief Justice Martin warned of confiscations that would lead to smouldering resentments after “the example of Ireland.” And he was right about that.
But a sociologist might also have wondered whether a deep-dyed and perhaps unconscious tendency for Pākehā to identify those Māori who weren’t their immediate and proven allies with chaos, disorder and criminality, and in general as the sorts of strangers who were to be feared — surely, the most hardwired atavism of all — was not something that might frustrate the welcome of new Māori migrants into the cities of New Zealand, and make it less likely that the settler contract would be extended to the newcomers.
The tragedy of Ward’s article is that he didn’t make that contemporary leap. And in a wider sense, the tragedy of the 1960s and 1970s in New Zealand was that nearly everyone else suffered from a similar complacency. Virtually no Pākehā saw it as necessary to positively guard against an atavistic impulse to pull up the drawbridge once again. An impulse that would soon return.
Quote Sources
The quote from Fred Haslam is to be found in Ben Schrader’s The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities 1840–1920, Wellington, Bridget Williams Books, 2016. The quote about the “Captain of foot” is to be found in ‘The settlers’ story’ by Nigel Prickett, in Kiwis in Conflict: 200 Years of New Zealanders at War, edited by Chris Pugsley et al, Auckland, David Bateman in association with Auckland Museum, 2008, as well as in an earlier edition of the same book called Scars on the Heart.
Internal footnote references in the quotes from Ward have been deleted.
Click here for Chapter 16
Jump back to the start of Chapter One | https://medium.com/@chris-harris/security-and-the-sacrificial-caste-13b962c98210 | ['Chris Harris'] | 2021-06-08 04:36:04.984000+00:00 | ['New Zealand', 'Penal Populism', 'History', 'Settler Colonialism', 'Politics'] |
What is Freelancer?, Best freelancing sites? , Types of roles?, How to write a bid? | What is Freelancer ?
Freelancer is an online job that provides a means for employers and freelancers around the world to collaborate for mutual benefit. Individuals or businesses in need of skilled support for short- or long-term projects can post those projects and allow freelancers to submit bids to complete the work.
Why I should start freelancing?
Freelancing is your own small business where you deal with different clients and completes their projects. Everyone wants to become boss work, freelancing gives you that opportunity to enhance your hidden capabilities.
you can easily perform your task from anywhere in the world at any time, with no limitations.
Your earning depends on your skills, how you help the client by your expertise and solve the problem effectively.
You can start freelancing without any investment, many freelancing platforms give you opportunity to begin freelancing journey from zero.
What are the best freelancing sites?
toptal:– If you are a freelancer and you want to join Toptal, you will have to go through screening.
upwork.com: It is currently the largest freelance platform on the market, With more than 4 million clients. The freelancer has the possibility to apply to short and long-term jobs, work by the hour, or by the complete project.
99designs is a platform for freelance designers to complete contests and get feedback as clients choose the best ones.
Freelancer: Unlike most of the other platforms it offers millions of projects, Freelancer allows you to compete with other freelancers in contests to prove your skills. If you’re competitive and confident in your expertise, it’s a great way to showcase your abilities and attract more clients.
Craigslist : Craigslist is a platform for buying and selling miscellaneous things and also a great source of freelance jobs.
Project4hire : Project4hire is great for coders, consultants, designers and more to makes it easy to identify jobs that suit your skills.
Guru : This site lets you easily showcase your past work experience and offers a daily job-matching feature to make sure you don’t miss out on any good opportunities.
Freelance Writing Gigs : Whether you’re a writer, editor, blogger, publisher or any combination of those, Freelance Writing Gigs is a great option for freelancers who have a way with words.
Peopleperhour : This is a great platform, focusing on freelancing for web projects. If anybody is designer, web developer, SEO specialist, etc., peopleperhour is definitely worth checking out. Click here to read. | https://medium.com/@knowqab0ut/what-is-freelancer-best-freelancing-sites-types-of-roles-how-to-write-a-bid-4bb574339780 | ['Pankaj Sharma'] | 2021-06-17 11:51:03.446000+00:00 | ['Upwork', 'Make Money Online', 'Freelancing', 'Freelancers', 'Freelance'] |
Rockwall Investment Review: 4 Things You Should Know Before Investing | Welcome to my Rockwall Investment Review.
Is Rockwall investment a scam? Is it legitimate?
Can I trust them to deliver on their promises?
These and many more questions have come pouring in my mail and as a response; I decided to gather as much information as I can on Rockwall, and I am glad to share my findings with you.
Before going further, I will like you to be aware of the fact that I am in no way affiliated with Rockwall or any of its services. All information you will find in this review are products of thorough research, intended to give you a better understanding on what Rockwall is about.
This Rockwall investment review will illuminate the grey areas, secrets and hidden features that the admins of this platform want hidden from you.
In the end, you will have a better understanding of what Rockwall is about, so you know what to expect should you choose to get involved with them. | https://medium.com/nigeriabitcoincommunity/rockwall-investment-review-4-things-you-should-know-before-investing-29d99e5cbcd3 | ['Nigeria Bitcoin Community'] | 2020-10-21 07:56:40.535000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Scam', 'Scam Alert', 'Review', 'Crypto'] |
6 must-reads for new technical leaders | 3. It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work — by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
It doesn’t have to be crazy at work is that one book among our suggested list that will go against everything you will read and learn from the other resources.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founders of Basecamp, argue that a successful, profitable company shouldn’t require it’s employees to work crazy hours, forfeit holidays, and live in constant stress. They argue that there’s a calmer way of running a business, where you sacrifice insane short-term growth in favour of sustainable, continuous long-term growth.
If there’s anyone who can talk about sustainable growth, it’s these two. Basecamp has been around 21 years (yes — Basecamp was founded in 1999!) and it had $25m in revenue this year, with $0 outside investment and 63 employees.
One important takeaway from the book is that there’s currently a lot of buzz on social media about the crazy attitude and sacrifices needed to build a successful company. There are slogans in support of this, like “Extreme talent isn’t necessary, but extreme commitment is!” The book recounts a tale about Charles Darwin, the legendary evolutionary scientist, who wrote 19 books during his lifetime and is said to have never worked more than four and a half hours a day. The authors think that the solution to this craziness is “pacifism”: focusing on your own business, not the competition.
As a fresh technical lead, it’s your responsibility that your employees have a healthy life-work balance, that their stress levels are not constantly insane (let’s be honest, there’s no entirely stress-free technical job, but the stress can be managed). Your main goal is to protect your employees’ time. “No meetings that can be replaced with an email” is a great rule of thumb for achieving this. | https://medium.com/better-programming/6-must-read-books-for-new-technical-leads-99e9737b8630 | ['Catalin Ionescu'] | 2020-12-17 10:29:16.231000+00:00 | ['Technical Leadership', 'Management', 'Technology', 'Books', 'Programming'] |
To the Protector of the Desert….. | Sphinx,
Oh! Ruler of the desert,
With the same equanimity
please accept my humble greetings.
Desert is you,
And you are the desert.
To the Bedouins,
you are father of terror,
But without you
desert will be a loner.
Civilizations have risen,
Kingdoms have fallen,
You have been the silent witness
for ages,
Yet nothing could erase
the gentle smile of yours.
I wonder,
What’s the true purpose
of your being?
Are you conversing with silence?
About something which is beyond
simple understanding?
Or are you just teasing the emptiness?
Like you have been doing for centuries?
Your very presence blows
my soul and imagination,
while your splendour making me
kneel in front of you,
Spontaneously you become
the center of my contemplation,
Yet, no matter what I am to you,
Just embrace being a devotee
who bows down to you.
Time will flow
and the nations will change,
More pilgrims will arrive
and the old trails will be erased,
They will recite the holy words
trying to draw the attention of yours,
Yet you will remain the same
while hiding eternity within yourself. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/to-the-protector-of-the-desert-c12ad74315eb | ['Salitha Nirmana Meththasinghe'] | 2020-02-29 10:35:26.229000+00:00 | ['Sphinx', 'History', 'Egypt', 'Poetry', 'Culture'] |
Wootini’s Weekly Animal Crossing Diary 12/14/19 | Dear Diary,
Things are finally back to normal in Geneva… or well, at least as normal as things get in this weird little town. I’m back to buying terrible birthday presents and doing favors for people. And now that winter is officially here, there’s special work to be done!
With Toy Day approaching at a rapid clip, everyone is getting psyched up for the holiday. And Hamphrey and Gabi were among the first to let slip what they wanted for Toy Day, so I was careful to note their requests since I know that I’m going to be tasked with handing out the gifts for Jingle again this year. Want to make sure I get them right. No mistakes!
This week was Monty’s birthday, and I decided to buy him a foosball table. At first he looked excited to unwrap it, but then he admitted that he doesn’t have any experience with that sort of thing so he has no connection to it. He tried to claim that it just means it’s something “new and fresh” for him to try, but I know I blew it again. I pretty much blow it 99% of the time when it comes to giving gifts. These folks are so finicky!
So Hamphrey was finally home for a change instead of out exploring his new town, so I was able to check out his decor. It’s a nice Asian-inspired theme, well, aside from the shaved ice maker he bought last week. Oh, and I guess the stereo and fire extinguisher are a little out of place as well. But when you’re dealing with a pot-belly stove like that, an extinguisher is probably a good thing to have around the house!
Not only was Hamphrey the first person to tell me what they were hoping to get on Toy Day, but the guy also immediately asked me to bury a time capsule for him. He’s only been here a week and already he’s getting right into things. Good for him!
Later in the week, it was snowing again, but I noticed it seemed a lot heavier than it has before. Bigger flakes coming down thicker this time. So I knew what that meant… or at least, I hoped!
And sure enough, the next day I was proven right. That was a heavier snowfall than the previous ones, because now there’s snow everywhere! Winter has officially begun! Of course, this means running across snowballs that I could make into snowmen if I wanted to try, but I tend to resist because I’m rather terrible at it and I always feel bad making mutant misshapen snowpeople. I’m sure I’ll eventually do it, but not yet! | https://medium.com/@wootini/wootinis-weekly-animal-crossing-diary-12-14-19-c606f25137b0 | ['Chris Eades'] | 2019-12-14 17:27:03.069000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Humor', 'Diary', 'Animal Crossing', 'Videogames'] |
How our own thoughts deceive us | How our own thoughts deceive us? So I noticed that My mind create a perception about a person or image about a person on it’s own. Suppose I interacted with a person and I noticed a thought popped up in my head regarding that person. It may be negative becuase most of the time I judge a person in that way. But recently I started to question it why this thought came in the first place? Is there any logical reason that I should be thinking this way? And I couldn’t find the person.
But usually I continue believing this without any analysis. So our mind lie to us. We don’t even know how it lied if we aren’t self aware. | https://medium.com/@raushan-km/how-our-own-thoughts-deceive-us-e4dfe9894c8c | ['Raushan Mishra'] | 2020-12-25 18:10:19.752000+00:00 | ['Thoughts'] |
Python Statistics | rehardnur/Python-Statistics
Permalink Dismiss GitHub is home to over 50 million developers working together to host and review code, manage… | https://medium.com/@rehardnur-19050/python-statistics-a8abe52062bd | ['Rehard Nur'] | 2020-11-01 08:52:52.398000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Regression'] |
The PTSD-like Affliction That’s Traumatizing Health Care Workers | The PTSD-like Affliction That’s Traumatizing Health Care Workers
The invisible wounds of moral injury run deep for those on the front lines
Photo: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images
“Some experiences imprint themselves beyond where language can speak.” These are the words of psychiatrist and trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk. This is also the experience of many health care workers ensnared in the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I just can’t… can’t find the words… there simply are none,” whispered a doctor friend working in a hospital in New York City’s viral epicenter. We were Zooming — both of our backgrounds dark. Through the screen’s dim glow, I watched her head fall into her hands and rock back and forth. Her shoulders slumped forward, and she started to shake.
Marie, I’ll call her, and I had worked together in California’s Bay Area when I was doing palliative care chaplaincy and clinical ethics work. She was never at a loss for words. In fact, to call her highly verbal would be an understatement. And yet what she has recently witnessed, been forced to do, and could not prevent on the Covid-19 front line has brought about some kind of internal preternatural silence. “It’s as if part of my soul had been shredded with a knife,” she told me when she finally could speak; “the part that holds me in relation to my Hippocratic oath and personal values.”
Marie, like many health care workers, entered the field of medicine because, as she would say, she cares about doing good and not doing bad. From the day she started medical school, she had a clear vision of who she was and how she could serve humanity. But after “death by a thousand cuts” from a pandemic that has made her betray her vow to “do no harm,” she’s now questioning who she is, who other people are, and what life is all about — generally speaking. Some might call this experience a loss of innocence — a recognition that the world is more of a babel of bad than Marie originally believed. What I also know is that this suffering is a moral injury.
Moral injury is a transgression of conscience. It is what happens when a person’s deeply held values, beliefs, or ways of being in the world are violated. That violation could result from things the person did themselves, things they experienced, things they were made to do against their will or better judgment, or things they couldn’t stop from happening. And it’s more prevalent than many would think. Of the 2.7 million service people who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, reports show that roughly the same number who were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (11% to 20%) were also coping with moral injury.
But moral injury is not unique to veterans. Moral injury is a pall that has blanketed individuals, families, and communities throughout time and across cultures. It can be found on the battlefield; at the front line of disaster; behind closed doors of churches and temples; in hospitals, bars, brothels, prisons, refugee tents, abortion clinics, soup kitchens, unemployment lines; at borders and in detention centers; on school playgrounds and social media; and even in the unsuspecting house or office next door. This is because wherever human beings are, so too dwells moral injury.
Moral injury is a transgression of conscience. It is what happens when a person’s deeply held values, beliefs, or ways of being in the world are violated.
We are, as a species, hardwired to embody goodness, love, compassion, empathy, and a sense of right and wrong. Moral expectations are at the heart of who we are as people and societies. But human beings are also imperfect and limited. We can’t always meet our own moral expectations nor can others always meet them. Sometimes life throws us into situations where the stakes are high and no outcome is good, and we or others act, doing what we or they otherwise know to be bad, aware that harm will come in one way or another to ourselves or to another. Sometimes that is simply life.
Some have likened PTSD and moral injury. And while intrusive images of the past are similar in each experience, with moral injury, memories don’t trigger fear. Instead, they beget shame, guilt, rage, disgust, emptiness, and despair. With PTSD, the primary concern is physical safety. With moral injury, it is existential safety — or trust. Moral injury makes a person question themselves, others, life, or their God. It makes them question their or others’ ability to do right or be good. Moral injury deteriorates one’s character, ideals, ambitions, and attachments. It leaves people feeling contaminated in their being or that something they once held dear has been sullied. “Unworthy,” “beyond redemption,” “gone forever,” and “emotionally dead” are how many people have described the experience. “A soul divided against itself” is how Rita Brock, an author and the director of the Shay Moral Injury Center, defines it.
“How can I be a saver of life and a monster in scrubs at the same time?” Marie asked, her eyes distant and dark. “We’re all killing ourselves to save everyone we can, and yet we have to play God and decide who lives and dies. Who am I — or any one of us, for that matter — to make such a call?”
Anyone who has listened to the news in the last few months knows well the issue of limited personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators in this country: There simply weren’t enough. While politicians and talking heads debated the veracity of need, people like Marie were wading through jam-packed ER wards as if they were minefields, donning soiled or homemade masks. For the first time in their careers, many health care workers had to determine not if a patient needed a ventilator but rather who would get the high-value, vital air.
“How can you look anyone in the eye … gasping patients, pleading family members, knowing that your decisions will send many to their graves … or more like the make-shift morgue in the U-Haul van outside? I struggle to look at myself in the mirror, let alone at any of the people I’m trying to help.”
Marie mentioned that the sound of a cough is beginning to be what fireworks were to her Vietnam veteran father — a PTSD response. But the nausea in her belly — the sickness that comes from disgust at the situation — is the making of moral injury. Shortages of equipment, overloaded hospitals, overburdened staff, and insufficient testing made the U.S. Covid-19 response an ill-fated mission from the start. Having to be surrogate mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters for dying patients — holding up cellphones for family members to say their final goodbyes — was a task beyond medical training. Not being able to hold or breastfeed an infant child or tuck a scared youngster into bed at night because their essential work took precedence over essential familial love was felt by many to be a dereliction of duty.
The “invisible wounds” that are injuring Covid-19 front line workers bear the markings of a system equally scarred. “A betrayal of what is right, by a person who holds legitimate authority, in a high stakes situation,” is how psychiatrist and author Jonathan Shay first defined moral injury when he coined the phrase in the 1990s.
In the months since Covid-19 first reared its ugly head in the U.S., we have witnessed repeated stall tactics by leaders in the upper echelons of the government despite dire warnings from around the globe. We’ve heard the virus called a “hoax” and minimized in severity and threat. We’ve seen safety guidelines for the general public developed by respected public health officials and then flouted by the very leaders who employ said officials. We’ve heard the virus was contained when it wasn’t. We’ve discovered the organizations that ought to have been prepared for such a pandemic actually weren’t. We’ve endured a lack of testing and faulty testing. We’ve been exposed to inefficiencies and inequities in our health system. We’ve witnessed hospital administrations put finances above safety.
We are, as a species, hardwired to embody goodness, love, compassion, empathy, and a sense of right and wrong.
While no one person is to blame for the “injuries” that many are now suffering and while much is finally being done to stem the Covid-19 tide and get our society back on track, the above “betrayals” can also be summed up as widespread asystemic thinking and disorganization.
Whatever the labyrinthine conditions and events that created the current morally injurious climate for Covid-19 health care workers, we, as a society, must do better to help them heal — because, as research shows, once the acute phase of a situation like this subsides, it is the following period that is often the hardest for people to come to terms with. While the rest of society hastens to return to normal life, shifting their attention from stories of the front line to the economy and getting kids reintegrated in school, there will be swaths of people like Marie feeling the weight of all their decisions, questioning how this all could have happened, overwhelmed by guilt, shame, anger, disgust, emptiness, and despair.
Brock pointed out in a recent BBC article that the fight against the coronavirus is similar to battlefield medicine: “desperate and unrelenting encounters with patients, an environment of high personal risk, an unseen lethal enemy, extreme physical and mental fatigue, inadequate resources and unending accumulations of the dead.”
I wouldn’t pretend to know the demons that Dr. Lorna Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Manhattan, was wrestling with when she took her own life after fighting Covid-19 herself and fighting against it on behalf of her patients. But I do know — and research with veterans shows — that moral injury is associated with increased suicide risk.
Covid-19 health care workers are putting their lives on the line, and in some cases sacrificing their lives, so that others can live. We cannot allow the lives lost to be for naught nor the future of those who survived to be put at further risk or sacrificed because we, as a society, got distracted by our desire for normalcy and exhaustion with discomfort. Healing from moral injury requires a person to reconcile many difficult truths and to transform in difficult yet often unexpected ways. But it also requires communities and systems of shared values to support them. We all must do that now.
To the women and men who were courageous enough to serve on the Covid-19 front, we thank you and honor your experience. To those struggling to heal from the wounds of moral injury, either now or in the future, please know you’re not alone.
If you or someone you know is suffering from moral injury, here is a wealth of resources. If you are in crisis and in need urgent of help, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255. | https://elemental.medium.com/the-ptsd-like-affliction-thats-traumatizing-health-care-workers-1864be616086 | ['Michele Demarco'] | 2020-07-10 05:31:01.407000+00:00 | ['PTSD', 'Mental Health', 'Morality', 'Trauma', 'Ethics'] |
Personal Courage in Queer Stories | by James Finn
P&P storytelling goes deeply vulnerable this week. Many of our stories took courage to write.
Loren A Olson MD explores cheating and intimacy in a hard-hitting two-parter that makes no excuses and spares no pride.
theoaknotes thinks hard and publicly about their top surgery.
P&P newcomer Cam takes a searing look at the ties between queerness and alcoholism.
Tima Loku ponders sexual orientation and sexism in Sri Lanka.
We have lots of gems to offer this week, including one of Chandler Myer’s comic delights. He’s back and at the top of his form!
If you’re not a Medium member, please click on the underlined links to read for free. If you can afford a membership, you help support your favorite writers.
Editor’s Picks —
Artist Interview
James Finn
Life, Love, Death, and Porn: Creating During Covid
I sat down with queer actor/screenwriter James Patrick Nelson to discuss creation during covid-19 and give P&P readers a sneak peak of an exciting new project that might just take the LGBTQ media world by storm next year. Jamie’s take on constructing queer art is as interesting as the art itself: | https://medium.com/prismnpen/personal-courage-in-queer-stories-66d82de04f37 | ['James Finn'] | 2020-12-13 19:36:33.837000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Storytelling', 'Creative Non Fiction', 'Fiction', 'LGBTQ'] |
Read This If You Think You’re An INFJ | INFJ is one of the most frequently-mistyped Myers Briggs (MBTI) types, making it highly misrepresented and warped in pretty much everything you read online.
But most “INFJs” are actually ISFJ, ISFP or INFP.
Why does this matter?
1. Language integrity.
It matters for the same reason that we all have the same word for and understanding of “dog,” for example.
If we don’t all agree on what a word means — if people said “dog” when they were really talking about a bird — the conversation has no validity. This is even more critical if someone is Googling how to fix their “dog” (which is actually a bird) and end up feeding it dog food, playing fetch, or giving it St. Bernard-level amounts of insulin (see 2: “self-growth.”)
So many mistyped “INFJs” produce posts, articles and memes that most of the information on “INFJ” online is complete garbage that’s warped the description. So if you Google “dog” (INFJ) now, all of the descriptions read something like “has feathers, beak, wings” (i.e., describing other types), leaving no word for “has fur, four legs, barks” (actual INFJs.)
2. Self-growth
If you’re truly using MBTI for growth, it’s even more important that you’re accurately typed, as different types have different red flags and growth paths, and one types growth path is another type’s unhealthy place
“I took a test and got INFJ”
1.) The tests are almost always wrong.
I’ve taken Buzzfeed tests that told me I am a horse, an essential oil, and the season summer. And I know that these are meant to be a joke, but the point is: don’t believe everything you read online — even when it’s a quiz result.
2.) We are biased and poor at self-awareness. So we answer as our “idealized” selves, or put what we think is “right.” (Who isn’t going to answer “yes” to “logical” and “able to think outside the box?”)
Most “INFJs” are actually ISFJ, ISFP or INFP
But they’re easily confused for each other… which makes sense — because they’re all introverted, they’re all “feelers,” they have similar concerns.
But these are very different types.
QUESTIONS
Here are some things to consider…
How important is clarity, detail, and black & white information to you?
How important is support, consistency, structure, and security?
How important are your feelings, self-identity, self-expression?
How important are new ideas, novelty, and experimentation to you?
How do the happiest times of your life look?
How do the lowest times of your life look? (Specifically: what do you do?)
How do you “lash out” when desperate? (And what feeling causes that?)
What is your biggest concern or “life struggle?”
What’s your greatest aspiration? And greatest anxiety?
Why did you break up with your exes?
How weird are you?
These types are not “just one or two letters apart”
Most of us learn Myers Briggs as four sets of letters: extraverted vs introverted (E vs I), intuitive vs sensing (N vs S), thinking vs feeling (T vs F) and judging vs perceiving (J vs P.)
But in reality, the types are categorized by “cognitive functions,” which orient Sensing, Intuition, Feeling, and Thinking as extroverted or introverted (E vs I.)
These are defined as:
Introverted sensing (Si)
Extroverted sensing (Se)
Extroverted intuition (Ne)
Introverted intuition (Ni)
Extroverted feeling (Fe)
Introverted feeling (Fi)
Extroverted thinking (Te)
Introverted thinking (Ti)
And each type has a different “stack” of these “functions.”
INFP is… Fi — Ne — Si — Te
ISFP is… Fi — Se — Ni — Te
ISFJ is… Si — Fe — Ti — Ne
INFJ is… Ni — Fe — Ti — Se
Reasons for the confusion between them:
We assume being “analytical” makes us N or T (it doesn’t) We assume being “intuitive” or having “gut feelings” / “a ha moments” makes us an N (it doesn’t. Everyone has these.) We assume being a perfectionist or detailed makes us J (it doesn’t) We assume being unique makes us the rarest type We aren’t familiar with cognitive functions (see above) We are often blind to our first (aka “dominant”) function, and it’s so fundamental that we often underestimate how overpowering it is We are often blind to and don’t truly understand the cognitive functions that we don’t use a lot Introverted intuition (Ni), the dominant function of INFJ, is very difficult to define. (Which is totally meta, because Ni is the process of defining things that are difficult to define.) But because of this, it’s susceptible to others rushing in to claim it.
It’s almost easier to see Ni as what it isn’t.
Introverted intuition is not: our feelings, others’ feelings, certainty, action, ideas, or goals. It’s not even “logic” or “planning for the future.”
It’s just… what’s “left.” It’s white noise, white space, an ever-funneling toward “the one, abstract thing” — that can look and feel a lot like “nothing.”
Let’s explore each pair in detail.
INFJ vs INFP
Similarities:
Both are private. Both are idealists. Both can be perfectionists. Both are insightful, analytical, logical, and meticulous. And both are intuitives, preferring the abstract over black and white.
The biggest difference?
INFP is highly in tune with their own feelings
INFJ is usually oblivious to theirs
INFP’s dominant function is Fi (their own feelings), but INFJ doesn’t even have Fi in their stack. (Same for ISFJ.) Instead, their “F” is extroverted (Fe) — which is other people.
INFP has ever-expanding ideas …inspired by feelings
INFJ has ever-narrowing “insights” … about people
i.e., these are INFP not INFJ: | https://medium.com/personal-growth/read-this-if-you-think-youre-an-infj-d13bcdb7d21c | ['Kris Gage'] | 2018-11-28 23:01:27.747000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Love', 'Self-awareness', 'Personal Growth', 'Mbti'] |
Founders’ silent struggle — The daily headache (Part 3) | On the road to change the world or make significant impact founders have to be fit in many ways to deal with daily uncertainties and emergencies.
“What are your daily challenges as a founder?” the answers were overwhelmingly similar and marked by exhaustion:
1. Right resources
“You start with one skill that you are very good at and suddenly you have to know it all” stated Paul Rapacioli, founder of “The Local”.
There is no time or resources to hire experts in IT, marketing, design, HR, PR, finance, taxation, law, negotiations, sales, customer support, leadership, team management, and so on. Founders have to gain understanding fast in all those fields themselves.
“I don’t know what I don’t know and I need to know it now” founder from Australia reflected.
The biggest wish between my interviewed founders was to have a comprehensive startup blueprint of everything that they need to know…
2. Communicating to personalities
Dealing with people and their personalities is one of the most demanding parts of the daily startup life admitted founders.
Finding an understanding to keep moving forward is key.
Communicating effectively ideas and visions with a team, investors, and customers is an art that has to be mastered daily.
3. Finding time for everything
On top of hundreds of emails, team issues, investor problems, errors in products, the founders also need to manage their mind that is constantly flooded with millions of new visions and ideas for current or new startups to develop.
In a startup, there is never enough time for anything and everything had to be done already yesterday.
The greatest challenge becomes how to manage it all without spiraling into the unsolvable rails of startup obsession leading to sacrifice sleep, food, health, family, sanity and even themselves…
“Don’t let the short term fires to distract you. Don’t get panicked looking at how others are doing or comparing the journeys. Stay focused on your journey, your pace, and your learnings. The road is long. There is a place for everyone’s success” shared Dr. Wasim Mohideen founder of techmedhealthcare.com that revolutionized lab systems in India.
What is your biggest daily challenge and how do you try to deal with it? | https://medium.com/ofounders/founders-silent-struggle-the-daily-headache-part-3-f13fa8ba1375 | ['Inga Stasiulionyte'] | 2020-02-24 10:57:30.902000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Mental Health', 'Coaching'] |
Before Improving a Habit, Remove the Shame | Before Improving a Habit, Remove the Shame
Lie-ins, Amy Cuddy, and a head injury helped me identify toxic shame patterns
Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
I find myself uttering a silent ‘oh no, not again’ when my body fails to deliver as expected.
It’s not my favourite way to start the day. But it’s a common one. I’ve been struggling to wake up before 9 a.m. without a headache.
I’ve weathered a lot of things over the past year. Injury, fatigue, depression, grief.
But the most difficult one is the thick layer of shame painted on top of my disabilities. It’s not enough to just feel sad. I have to be ashamed of feeling sad.
Perhaps part of it is the way I was raised, part of it is human nature. I don’t know, and it’s not the topic of this article.
What I do know is that shame comes in invisible paint. It’s not straightforward to have it removed, because you simply don’t know when it’s gone.
Shame latches on to imperfections
In the woollen ball that is my mind, one thread can unravel the whole system.
It is a highly particular type of shame. A shame that cries, “why me?” and “I deserve this!” at the very same time.
Can’t wake up at 7 a.m.? Shame.
Another hour spent in bed? Shame.
Managed to journal and meditate, but didn’t do yoga? Shame.
“The hallmark of shame is a constant awareness of our defects.” — How to change your thinking about shame, Hazelden Publishing
If shame has a ‘mind of its own’, then it gets a kick out of giving bad scorecards to whatever activity I attempt to do.
Unlike guilt, shame does not need a trigger event to make its bearer feel down (Scientific American). Likewise, it does not consider whether an imperfect result is due to trauma or illness.
Shame standardises failures of all shapes and sizes and gives them equal quotas of disapproval — Lenin would be proud.
Shame does not celebrate progress
My 1-year concussion anniversary occurred recently.
My brain has put in some serious healing power. After an uncertain period of post-concussion symptoms, I was eventually able to work full-time again. Take long walks. Understand sentences with multiple verbs.
Yet, I still face triggers.
One last-minute sprint towards a midnight deadline, and I must welcome headache and fatigue with open arms in the morning.
Someone with a big love for weed moves into the building, and I spend the next day talking to my duvet.
It’s been a bumpy journey towards accepting my vulnerability — and I’ve learned two lessons:
Feeling vulnerable generally comes with some degree of shame; When shame is released, the undesirable condition is a lot easier to heal.
Human connection melts away the shame
Amy Cuddy, the researcher who studied power poses, gave an interview about her decades-old concussion.
She recounts failing to finish her university degree after a head injury. She describes the torment of imposter syndrome when offered a job at Harvard.
While grappling with a healing brain myself, I greedily absorbed every word of Amy’s story.
I wept, realising how alone I’d been feeling. Finally, someone spoke out about the maddening cluster of symptoms I was experiencing.
It was then that I began to see my invisible illness as a natural reaction to physical trauma. I apologised and forgave myself for my self-infliction.
A drop of shame melted off the iceberg.
Disrupted sleep made me aware of my shame patterns
Pre-injury/lockdown/depression, I would sleep through the night. This, in turn, would perpetuate regular exercise, a balanced diet and a steady psyche.
An old friend used to jokingly introduce me as “Ioana, who wakes up at 6 am, does yoga, goes for a run and saves three puppies by the time I get into the shower.”
However, over the past year, interrupted sleep has reigned.
My recovery strategy has included sacrificing my morning hours as an offering to the gods of slumber.
On good days, my eyes flutter open at 8 a.m.
On most days, it’s 9 or 10, with an hour reserved for mindless scrolling.
I am a morning person no more. This adds a lot of shame on my plate, way before I even have breakfast.
As a former high-energy, high-productivity poster girl, a reduction in the number of ‘doing’ hours is a significant loss. Emotionally, this translates to a badge of dishonour, reminding me, ‘If you keep doing this, you will be a good-for-nothing underachiever.’
When this mental narrative takes shape, the priority is to heal the shame before healing the sleep pattern.
An experiment: healing the shame in trichotillomania
I’ve talked before about living with trichotillomania.
Over lockdown, an increasingly anxious and depressive mood took hair pulling to a whole other level. I struggled. Like many trich sufferers, I felt shame when looking in the mirror or when finding myself unable to control it.
Psychology Today’s number one step towards reducing shame is to bring it to light.
My interpretation of this has been to face the shame in full, open nakedness, to demonstrate that there’s nothing to be afraid of.
One glorious summer day, I trimmed my eyebrows to oblivion. Aesthetics became trivial, as shame was taking over my life.
Once my eyebrows were (literally) naked, the shame of pulling and facing the aftermath dissipated.
Four months down the line, though not fully healed from trichotillomania, I am no longer ashamed of the compulsion. If I can unconditionally accept the state of my eyebrows, I believe the stress-fueled pulling will run out of triggers.
“Shame resilience is the ability to say, “This hurts. This is disappointing, maybe even devastating. But success and recognition and approval are not the values that drive me. My value is courage and I was just courageous. You can move on, shame.” ― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly
Choosing peace over perfectionism has helped me detach from shame
Prioritising peace of mind over perfectionism is an active choice.
Yes, it would be fab to jump out of bed and directly into a squat at 6 a.m.
Yes, it would be ideal not to have my headaches triggered by obnoxious neighbours.
Yes, I’d be ecstatic if I wrote more, walked more, meditated more, and organised a climate protest.
The human brain is trained to desire increase and success. But what if the thing standing in the way of my happiness is not diminished productivity, but my reaction to it?
Thus, my new process for healing unwanted patterns has taken shape:
Before doing any work on my perceived negative habits, I must first remove the shame. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/before-improving-a-habit-remove-the-shame-2759ebe719e6 | ['Ioana Andrei'] | 2020-11-24 23:50:08.876000+00:00 | ['Shame', 'Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Growth', 'Vulnerability'] |
Nimiq is speaking in Vienna | Nimiq is speaking in Vienna
We would like to see you there!
Team Nimiq will have a prominent appearance in the 1st International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies. This will be jointly organized by members of the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien), Princeton University and SBA Research Center for Information Security.
Want to be part of it? Keep on reading!
The event came to our attention thanks to some friends who are organizers from TU Vienna. Given the technical focus of the event and the contributive spirit of Nimiq, we decided to support the project as a Platinum Sponsor.
Nimiq at the event
As a sponsor, we get the special opportunity of presenting Nimiq at the conference. The summer school, code name #BDLT19, is one of the most interesting conferences of the year for Nimiq to give an in-depth explanation of Albatross to an experienced audience of engineers and researchers. Not only is Pascal, Blockchain Developer of Nimiq, giving a talk about Albatross, but Nimiq will also have a workshop for attendees to get their hands on Nimiq. In the workshop, we will teach attendees to interact with the blockchain directly using JavaScript.
Schedule of the event. Nimiq’s presentation will take place Wednesday 4
As part of this unique occasion, Nimiq is giving away two event access tickets to our loyal Community (EUR 1300 value each!). The conference will take place in Vienna, coming September 2–5, 2019. If you are a Nimiq supporter near the area, you can participate to win a ticket for the conference by sending a message with your full name to [email protected]. Team Nimiq is in the process of building something amazing with Nimiq 2.0 and we would love to share it with a couple of Nimiq die-hard fans and #BDLT19 school seems to be the perfect setting.
Rules of the contest
Send an e-mail with your full name to [email protected]
You have time to participate until Friday, August 16 2019
The winners will be chosen randomly by Team Nimiq and announced the same day
Winners will each receive one event access ticket
(ticket not refundable for cash value, regular registration and accommodation info: https://bdlt.school/registration/)
Discussions in the #BDLT19 school will revolve around novel attacks on distributed systems, consensus protocols and fault tolerance, incentive structures such as Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, blockchain scalability, payment channels, and state channels. These topics match exactly the current points of interest of the Nimiq Blockchain Team, so we expect to also learn a lot from other high-impact research projects. See you there!
Pura Vida
Team Nimiq | https://medium.com/nimiq-network/nimiq-is-speaking-in-vienna-d6d0faf3457d | ['Team Nimiq'] | 2019-08-14 02:36:11.840000+00:00 | ['Nimiq', 'Research', 'Blockchain', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Bitcoin'] |
Lightning and Thunder | Getting a shock from a doorknob after rubbing your foot on a carpet floor, resultsfrom discharge. Discharge occurs when electrons on the hand are quickly pulled to thepositively charged doorknob. This movement of electrons, which is felt as a shock, causes the body to lose negative charge. Electric dischargetakes place in a medium, mostly gases.Lightning is another example of discharge that takes place in clouds.
Lightning is produced by discharge of electricity from cloud to cloud or from cloudto ground. During thunderstorm air is moving upward rapidly. This air which moves rapidly,carries small ice crystals upward. At the sametime, small water drops move downward.When they collide, ice crystals become positively charged and move upward and the water drops become negatively charged andmove downward. So the upper part of the cloud is positively charged and the lower partof the cloud is negatively charged. When they Come into contact, electrons in the water drops are attracted by the positive charges in theice crystals. Thus, electricity is generated and lightning is seen.
Sometimes the lower part of the cloud which is negatively charged comes into contact with the positive charges accumulated nearthe mountains, trees and even people on the earth. This discharge produces lot of heat and sparks that results in what we see as lightning.Huge quantities of electricity are discharged in lightning flashes and temperatures of over30,000°C or more can be reached. This extreme heating causes the air to expand explosively fast and then they contract. This expansion andcontraction create a shock wave that turns intoa booming sound wave, known as thunder.
Lightning’s extreme heat will vaporize the water inside a tree, creating steam that may burnOut the tree.
Sometimes lightning may be seen before the thunder is heard. This is because the distance between the clouds and the surface is very long and the speed of light is much faster than thespeed of sound.
During lightning and thunder, we should avoid standing in ground and open spaces. You should make yourself as small as possible by squating. It is however safe to stay inside a car because the car acts as a shield and protects us from the electric field generated by the storm. | https://medium.com/@abrosegani7/lightning-and-thunder-919b52fafee4 | ['Indraiya Sinthanaikal'] | 2020-09-22 05:26:44.546000+00:00 | ['Lighting', 'General', 'Thunder', 'Knowledge', 'Information'] |
Write to Learn | Writing is learning in disguise.
I’ve learned a huge amount over the last two years I’ve been writing regularly, perhaps the most since I was a young child. I’ve learned more than in the last couple of years than I did at university, or even as a postgraduate studying for a PhD.
Writing is a powerful way to learn. Just ask any journalist who’s been put on assignment. I usually decide to write about things I know about, but not in depth. I put myself “on assignment”. By doing so, I ensure I research the person or concept thoroughly, since I cannot publish a half-baked explanation — there’s too much at stake.
The Feynman Technique is often cited as the best way to learn anything. It’s a tried and tested way to understand and memorise even complex concepts in a short amount of time.
The technique takes its name from Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Feynman made groundbreaking discoveries in the understanding of subatomic particles. He also had a knack for explaining complicated ideas. Watching him unpack scientific complexities into graspable images is a wonder to behold (see below).
Here’s how the Feynman Technique works, its simplicity is exquisite:
Choose a concept Teach it to a child Identify gaps and research the source material further Review and simplify even more (optional)
The mistake we often make with learning is that we think memorising the names of things makes knowledge. Memorised concepts don’t stick around for long in the mind. This is because they’re not connected by purpose.
To understand a concept is different. You could for example memorise all the parts of a car engine. You’d “know” what makes up the engine, but you’d struggle to explain how it works. I know what a carburettor is, but I have no idea what function it serves.
If you learn the parts of a car engine by learning how it works as a whole, you’d much better understand it. You understand not only what things are, but also their purpose. Purpose is what connects.
So how do you test if you understand a concept? You explain it in the simplest terms possible, in a way that could be understood by a child. This is basis of the Feynman Technique: if you can’t explain something clearly, you don’t really understand it.
Richard Feynman explains how rubber bands are stretchy. He uses simplicity and imagery to do so.
Writing as Learning
Now let’s reverse that statement — to know something well, we need to learn to explain it. That’s where writing comes in.
When I write, I research the concept as thoroughly as possible. Then I lay out the concept as best I can in words structured in simple sentences and small paragraphs. (As a sidenote, one of the best pieces of online writing advice I got is “the white spaces between paragraphs are your friends.”).
I am both learning and producing writing at the same time if I’m breaking complicated concepts into simple relationships. If my writing is failing in conveying ideas simply, I go back to the source material and learn some more.
My next long form post will be about the philosopher Plotinus. Before I started writing an article about the 3rd century philosopher, I didn’t really know that much about him. I knew he was a “Neoplatonist”, I sort of knew his ideas through reading generalist books about philosophy, but I didn’t have much depth. Now I know a lot about Plotinus. I read his work, I read quality sources, and I broke his ideas down into simple relationships.
I mostly write about philosophy but I’m not a specialist in the area. My “training” is as a historian, which gives me the advantage of constantly seeking the relationships between things.
The other important dimension to writing is imagery. People learn better when they can visualise what they are learning about. When you see Feynman explaining something, you can appreciate how visual he is. Similes and metaphors bring the learner’s imagination to the aid of cognition.
One way of keeping focused on simplicity is keeping an eye on the length of the words and sentences you are using. Longer sentences should only be used sparingly, and long words avoided if possible. The free Hemingway Editor which grades your writing for readability is a useful tool in this respect. The lower the grade, the better. Under grade 10 is good. This article is grade 6.
What I’ve found is that the less I knew about a subject before I wrote about it, the clearer my writing is. When I write about subjects I already “knew” a lot about my posts are more complicated, like here and here. I slip into jargon and vague generalities, instead of specific ideas.
Technical words of course have their place among specialists. They condense sentences into single words. I don’t have to explain what “epistemological” means in the company of philosophers. But outside specialist company, technical words become jargon.
People tend to use complicated vocabulary when they don’t understand what they are explaining. Jargon can be a kind of deception, a deliberate obfuscation of our own level of understanding.
We can deceive ourselves in this way, going through our lives thinking we understand certain things. It only takes a few naive questions and it all comes crashing down. The Feynman’s example allows us to more meaningfully communicate not only with each other, but also ourselves.
Thank you for reading, I hope you learned something new. | https://stevengambardella.medium.com/write-to-learn-3c7ea7df3f72 | ['Steven Gambardella'] | 2020-12-14 10:57:30.322000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Learning', 'Self Improvement', 'Writing'] |
Scrooge’s Dark Night of the Soul Proves that Narcissists Can Wake Up | Scrooge’s Dark Night of the Soul Proves that Narcissists Can Wake Up
Photo by Filip Bunkens on Unsplash
One of my favorite stories of all time is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The main character in this story, Ebenezer Scrooge (played by Jim Carrey) goes through a transformation and has a spiritual awakening.
He is a grumpy, cruel, self-centered old man without friends — much like the narcissists in our lives. All he cares about is his money and how to get more of it.
Three ghosts visit him on Christmas Eve to usher in his spiritual awakening through a shocking investigation into his life.
Scrooge is an unlikely sort of person to have an awakening.
His self-centered habits prevent him from seeing beauty in the world, let alone awakening to a new level of existence with knowledge of the unified consciousness. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the story to illustrate this:
“Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Likewise, the narcissists in our lives seem to be lost causes for spiritual awakenings. They are too focused on the wrong things in life. But let’s look deeper at this story to see why there’s hope for anyone.
Warnings From the Spirit Realm
One cold and foggy Christmas Eve, Scrooge comes home from his office to find the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley. Since Scrooge is on a path of darkness and selfishness, Marley comes to warn him of a life he will regret when he has passed onto the Spirit realm:
“Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!” “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
And after Marley leaves him, Scrooge sees where he might end up in the afterlife:
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Scrooge’s awakening has begun, as he feels the fear of regret. He has never thought about his ability to assist another human being in need, and now he sees the eternal sorrow that will result in keeping his selfish ways.
Anyone, even narcissists, can awaken in their path. They must first be shown the bigger picture that they never thought about. They have to see that death is not the end, and our souls are on this journey together, just as Scrooge was shown. The thought of the afterlife and the eternal nature of existence is all they need.
After we pass on from this life, we don’t have our money, our material possessions, or our status. All we have is our knowledge and experiences, and how they’ve grown our souls. Scrooge sees this when he is aware of the plight of the ghosts, and this gives us hope that narcissists everywhere can start to wake up.
Facing Past Trauma and Consequences of Choices
Three ghosts visit Scrooge to show him his past regrets, the consequences of his present actions, and his possible future.
The first ghost takes Scrooge to his past to view his actions, which can now never be altered. He sees his boyhood, his first job, and his relationship with the love of his life. In all observations of the past, Scrooge is unfeeling and focused on money or gain.
Finally, the ghost shows him a woman who left him because of his greed. She sees that he will not change his ways. Like narcissists, who see others as nothing but extensions of their own gain, Scrooge is set on viewing every part of his life as a chance to get something out of others. Like all victims of narcissism, she is tired.
Scrooge is then shown where she is years later, with a happy family, married to someone else. Her husband tells her of seeing Scrooge in his office:
“Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”
Seeing himself in the eyes of someone else, Scrooge is on the brink of breaking down at this point, and begs the ghost to stop:
“Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!”
So, he extinguishes the ghost, like shutting out memories of the past, and sits alone in his regret. If narcissists can also face their past through a realization of the consequences of their actions, they can start to wake up as well. But most people choose to forget the past; it’s too painful to face.
Next, Scrooge is visited by a ghost who shows him what’s happening in his current life, and the people he has a chance to exchange good energy with right now.
They observe the home of Bob Cratchit, his employee. Scrooge has been a horrible, cold, rude boss to this man. Cratchit lives in poverty and has many children. They see him with his youngest son, Tiny Tim, who brings light into their world. But Tiny Tim is disabled.
Scrooge begins to feel regret and empathy:
“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” Which all the family re-echoed. “God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all. He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him. “Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.” “I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
Scrooge continues his awakening by realizing he has the ability right now to change his ways and alter the course of many lives, and to possibly save others.
If Narcissists can feel enough regret about the way they’ve lived their lives until now, and then see that they can start acting differently right now, then they can start to awaken. However, to seal the deal they must see the results of living in this way by having premonitions of the future.
Enter: An Awakening
The final ghost shows Scrooge that his death in the near future saddens no one. In fact, many people are delighted that he has died. It also shows him that the Cratchit family is left destitute by his death because of the loss of income. Scrooge is shaken. He is terrified. The awakening has finally happened:
“Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been, but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!” For the first time, the hand appeared to shake. “Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”
He wants to believe that his changed attitude will make a huge difference in the world. So, he goes out on Christmas morning and spreads kindness through London. He is finally understanding the value of acting selflessly.
He has learned what the important things in life are. Overnight, he has transformed into a new person. I believe that this can happen to any of us.
Narcissists just need a traumatic or spiritual experience to snap them out of their selfish ways. Perhaps it will be in the form of a near-death experience or a visit from their spirit guides. Maybe they will “hear the word of God,” as some do.
Keep the faith that even the cruelest humans you know can awaken.
Conclusion
The people in our lives who only think of themselves and treat others without care are not beyond hope. Scrooge, like narcissists, had spirits watching over him that helped him elevate. Perhaps we cannot easily change the narcissists in our lives, but there are forces beyond the surface of reality that can guide them to a moment of reckoning.
We should simply send them our good energy and hope that this happens. If you liked this article, you can read Charles Dickens’ entire novel here for free. | https://medium.com/mystic-minds/scrooges-dark-night-of-the-soul-proves-that-narcissists-can-wake-up-3bbc39ac3829 | ['Emily Jennings'] | 2021-01-18 16:29:14.198000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Mental Health', 'Narcissism', 'Philosophy', 'Literature'] |
How COVID-19 Has Changed The Way We Shop Forever | A lot has changed in the era of social distancing. From the way we communicate with friends to how we pass someone on a sidewalk, people, for the most part, are doing what they can to avoid contact with others. However, shopping has experienced some of the biggest changes, and while some of these changes will fall by the wayside, other changes will likely remain from here on out and impact the way everyone shops forever.
Curb-Side Pickup
This service has been around for a few years now, but more buyers are taking advantage of it to help with social distancing. Whether ordering curb-side pickup from restaurants or from grocery stories, it cuts down on the amount of time people need to go into the physical location. As shoppers discover not only how easy this method of buying is, but how much time they save, curb-side pickup will continue as a popular method of “running to the store.”
Wireless Transaction
Buying with mobile applications such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet have been options for some time now, but not everyone has taken advantage. Despite most consumers now owning smartphones capable of wireless buying, the vast majority of shoppers continued using their credit and debit cards. That has all changed. In order to avoid touching screens that are not sanitized after every usage, visitors to stores have turned to wireless transactions in record numbers. This is another trend that will continue long into the future.
Shift in Consumer Habits
There are people who have always preferred to call in a food order instead of ordering online. There are those who have preferred to buy their non-essential goods by heading to the store. Some just preferred human contact, while others may not have felt comfortable shopping online. All of that has changed. People who didn’t like to do it or who were not comfortable doing it have now been forced into it. Many of these individuals will discover life is much easier making a few clicks on a computer instead of calling on the phone or heading out to the store. This will lead to a dramatic shift in consumer habits. Fewer people will go out for all their shopping needs. Instead of heading out to the book store they might order a book online. They may even order their dog food, plant seeds, and other goods through an Internet purchase instead of a store purchase.
This shift in consumer habits will play a major role in the companies that survive being shut down for months. Businesses that are able to adapt and embrace online shopping will thrive, while those that don’t will fall by the wayside.
Shopping Has Changed Forever
COVID-19 has changed a number of daily life activities, one of which is how we shop. And many of these changes, from buying almost everything online to how we checkout at grocery stores, are likely here for good.
For more information — or help sourcing PPE — email us at [email protected]. | https://medium.com/@anovelresponse/how-covid-19-has-changed-the-way-we-shop-forever-6a7d8fc08585 | ['Novel Response Group'] | 2020-04-20 13:18:32.725000+00:00 | ['Virus', 'Covid 19', 'America', 'Supply Chain'] |
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