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I Signed Up For Quora Two Months Ago — Here’s What Happened! | Why does it always have to be some unbelievable achievement? (Because it’s what we want to read about!)
It always the ultra-successful stories that are shared and exaggerated. (Yup, and?)
Can’t we just share who we really are? (No.)
Don’t you want to know how I signed up for Quora and did nothing? (No, we don’t.)
But, you can relate to how I’m also human… (No one cares.)
But it’s not all true! They’re making stuff up just to get views! They sugar coat reality and sell it to you. (So what?! It motivates us.)
Arghhh… (You, arghhh.) | https://medium.com/the-haven/i-signed-up-for-quora-two-months-ago-heres-what-happened-630826998979 | ['The Dozen'] | 2020-12-24 19:41:39.060000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Writing', 'Success', 'Reality', 'Humor'] |
6 Things You Can Do After Passing Coding Tutorials | Every person no matter if newbie in software development or a decent geek just trying new ways of working has encountered a problem what to do after completing basic coding tutorials. You can continue with other tutorials and then other tutorials and so on, but that’s not the only way to extend your skills as a software developer. In this article, I’ll present you 6 best ways what to do after passing coding introduction and how to dive deeper into the software engineering world. Here we go!
Photo by Windows on Unsplash
Help other people
I’m 100% sure that during your adventure you’ve used at least ONCE (but probably more) services like stackoverflow.com or generally speaking, you’ve been looking for a solution to your problem on the Internet. Does not matter if it was a setup issue or code problem or any other. Everyone did it at some point, but most of us (devs) do it until today and it’s totally fine and accepted in the industry. Now you have some knowledge about your language so why not to spread it across others and help them with their problems? Maybe you’ve faced something very specific with your environment or your code was not working, but now it compiles? All these problems are still being met by the new people starting with programming, so why not to help them? You might look at StackOverflow or any other forum to look for developers waiting for your help. You might even edit or extends some other people answers so you’ll gain some ‘reputation points’ which you may present in your CV later, but believe me that you will gain a lot of appreciation which is worth much much more!
2. Implement your idea
You had a great idea for an app, but you were unable to do this? Now you can do this! Try to think about your application as your project. Divide it into small pieces and then user stories and try to implement it step by step. Think about design, features and all the necessary things. Don’t make it either too complex or too silly. You’ll have a lot of motivation for creating a project where you’re your boss. If you don’t have an idea for an app try to look for it here.
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
3. Start reading more advanced blog posts or books
Now you can dive deeper into programming world by not only looking for easy articles about “How to start with coding?” or “How to configure something”, but also you can read about newest features in your programming language or how to use i.e. REST API, or maybe something about gems or how Docker works. If you’ll find something beyond your current level try to write all things that you do not understand and explain them by reading other articles or books (I’d recommend starting with blog posts). If you can understand the article that you’ve started with, it simply means that you did it right. After a few months, you’ll see how much you can understand. Remember to not only read about things but also try them out.
4. Contribute to open-source projects
Many projects are open source and need your help! Look for them and try to look for an easy issue, then make your first PR and you’ll love it. Start with https://www.firsttimersonly.com or https://www.codetriage.com. For sure you’ll find a problem with your level of expertise.
5. Go to a local UG meeting or find a conference
Another way to gain knowledge similar to reading intermediate or advanced blog posts or books is by attending a lecture at your local User Group. No matter if you are coding in Java, Scala, Ruby or Python. Try to figure out when and where do they meet. Start here: https://www.meetup.com/. Even if topics might look complicated just try it. Maybe you’ll find them easy or at least you’ll know other software enthusiasts and have a beer and pizza with them.
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
6. Try to write by yourself
Try to create your blog post. It might treat about a problem that you’ve overcome or maybe about a new feature that you’ve tried yourself or about your path from the bottom. You might sum up a conference that you’ve attended or created a story about your great app and its features. You have no idea how much you’ll gain by this at all stages. You might read another interesting story, useful for your post, you might solve somebody’s problem, you might explain easily a complex thing and many many more. All you have to invest is your time!
These are only a few ways how to develop your skills. You don’t have to choose all of them. Just try them and let me know how did it go! Have fun and send me a massage which one was the best for you. You can find me on Twitter, Linkedin or via mail. Awaiting your feedback!
Also, I encourage you to sing up to my newsletter below. | https://medium.com/swlh/6-things-you-can-do-after-passing-basic-coding-tutorials-6102618b0b22 | ['Marcin Krykowski'] | 2020-05-29 14:04:23.940000+00:00 | ['Junior Developer', 'Software Development', 'Learning', 'Software Engineering', 'Learning To Code'] |
Your soulmate was first a stranger | Your soulmate was first a stranger
Original by Author
Isn’t it incredible that you let them in so quickly? The trust was built as easily as it can get.
Going on holidays with them doesn’t bring thoughts of being with a stranger in the middle of nowhere.
It’s those feelings of being so comfortable that you don’t question if you should be scared or not.
It’s so incredible that someone wants to be by your side, that wants to spend so much time with you. That doesn’t get tired of you. Someone who is completely aiming to make you feel safe. And that you want the same for them.
It’s the perfect balance between being yourself and being influenced by that someone. And you chose that someone because you subsconsciously or consciously you want their influence.
It’s the harmony of growing in the same direction and that makes is so easy. | https://medium.com/@caroloca/your-soulmate-was-first-a-stranger-738bc5bbb1b0 | [] | 2020-12-30 09:30:40.095000+00:00 | ['The One', 'Love Life', 'Strangers', 'Love', 'Trust'] |
Whitewashing Saudi Arabia | The picture to the left was taken for an interview with Arab News in 2005 and appeared alongside an article entitled: Photographing Saudi Arabia (https://www.arabnews.com/node/265479).
I was 23 at the time and my dream was to produce powerful visuals that would depict the closeness of Saudi families, their friendships, the tremendous hospitality and generosity, the respect shown towards elders and their sense of humour. Humane facets of Saudi culture, which were seldom recounted in the often negative Western media coverage of the kingdom.
“Sebastian Farmborough is a young British photographer who is fascinated by Saudi Arabia.” Indeed I was, but the enslavement and gross injustice that I have experienced over the years have really worn me down.
There are some beautiful, decent people here. Unfortunately, they are not the ones in control.
At least previous governments were more honest in their approach. When questioned regarding corruption; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the US stated: “So, what!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoklqunA16s).
Today’s government is far more concerned with its image and instead of actually trying to improve the country for the sake of everyone, it seeks to deceive. It announced to the world that it would abolish the kafala system on 14th of March 2021 (https://www.arabnews.com/node/1825046/saudi-arabia) This has yet to happen.
Saudi Arabia’s own media has always been rather skewed towards the generation of a grandiose image of itself and its accomplishments, sometimes even bordering on the satirical. However, what is new, is to see articles of a similar nature appearing in mainstream international media. They are coupled with a bombardment of advertising, which strives to attract tourists. Personally, when I see it, I find it repugnant, because anyone living here knows the reality and many tourists will themselves wonder off the path and discover it.
Is this the government’s plan? Human rights abuse with the left hand, a tourism drive with the right? How long can that last?
Why is mainstream international media yet to expose Saudi Arabia’s failure to abolish the kafala system? God knows how many people continue to suffer on a daily basis because of it. I find it deeply disappointing that they have in this way, left us to the wolves. I believed that our media had greater ethics, but it would seem I have been rather naïve.
I know so many people who are being or have been abused by their employers. It is hard to fathom the true scale of the abuse. The problem is far greater than most would imagine, because the majority of the victims are too afraid to speak out, do not have the language to do so or choose not to as they know how impotent labour laws are and how uninterested the authorities are in enforcing them.
I was foolish enough to have been taken in by Saudi Arabia’s Vision2030 and to have believed that it was going to usher in actual, meaningful change. Yes, fresh faces and new blood have emerged, but the core is still rotten and their corrupt and inhumane practices persist.
Thanks to the kafala system, successive sponsors have stolen two and a half years of my life. What right should another human being have to prevent a person from working? I completed my contract, my wife is Saudi, we have made a home here. Why on earth am I still being prevented from earning a living and providing for her? Why would the Labour Office give greater consideration to a sponsor, who has routinely broken their own labour laws, rather than the employee that has always abided by them?
Where is the humanity in this ‘modern’ Saudi Arabia? And during a pandemic too. In all honesty my sponsor Abdulaziz Mohammed Alawad deserves to be in prison for the 18-month ordeal he has put my wife and I through.
My experience of Saudi Arabia is that the innocent are treated as criminals and the criminals as innocent. This inverted society encourages corruption, because it is rarely curtailed or punished. Quite the opposite in fact, it is bountifully rewarded. Perhaps justice in a land like this is just too much to ask.
People are often amazed to hear that someone British might find themselves in such a position, our embassy is perceived as being strong, but the nationality is irrelevant. Under the kafala system this can happen to any foreigner living in the kingdom.
Why has the kafala system not been abolished?
Why did the Saudi government lie to the world about doing so?
Why has that lie not been publically criticised by mainstream international media?
Now 40, I sincerely regret dedicating a substantial portion of my life to highlighting the positive aspects of Saudi culture. I have unwittingly assisted in the government’s whitewashing of widespread human rights abuse and should really have found a much more deserving cause.
https://sebastianfarmborough.com/ | https://medium.com/@sebastianfarmborough/whitewashing-saudi-arabia-8e984b40b56f | ['Sebastian Farmborough'] | 2021-08-18 10:13:44.969000+00:00 | ['Kafala', 'Middle East', 'Slavery', 'Saudi Arabia', 'Photography'] |
As the Election Looms, It’s Time to Forget About Your Stock Portfolio | As the Election Looms, It’s Time to Forget About Your Stock Portfolio
Investors need to look beyond the winner of next week’s election
There’s never been a presidential election like this before. Amidst a global pandemic, we are now less than one week away from finding out whether Donald Trump has won a second term as president, or whether he’ll be handing the reigns over to former vice-president Joe Biden.
No matter who’s getting your vote on November 3rd, 93% of investors believe that the presidential election will have an impact on the stock market. As election day approaches, investors all over the world are undoubtedly looking at the value of their portfolios in eager anticipation of who the next POTUS will be. But does the market really care who sits in the White House?
History doesn’t think so, at least not in the long run.
Since its inception in the 1920s, the S&P 500 has returned an annualized average of 10% per year, through a range of political scenarios and global events, regardless of which political party has been in power. This would indicate that, although there may be fluctuations in the market around election day, these will have a negligible effect on your investment returns in the long run.
So what’s an investor to do?
For most people, the answer is pretty simple. If you have a long-term horizon, the best thing you can do is leave your portfolio the hell alone.
Humans love to take action, to do something, it’s in our nature. But if you’re following an investing strategy that’s working for you, tinkering with your portfolio based on whose ass is sitting in the Oval Office is probably the worst action you can take.
In fact, history shows that fleeing the stock market on the back of an election is a good way to miss out on returns. The S&P 500 gained 26% in 2009 after Barack Obama was elected and 22% in 2017 following the election of Donald Trump.
But what about my individual stock picks?
If you’re picking individual stocks for your portfolio, then you likely did a lot of homework and bought companies with solid balance sheets, good management, and good long-term prospects.
Take Apple for example. My stock holding in Apple is down 11% since I bought it. With the election coming up, it might drop even further. Does that mean that Apple is a bad company and that I should sell? Of course not.
Now if either of the candidates passes an executive order making it illegal to buy an iPhone, I’ll probably reconsider my position. I know you’re laughing, but look at what happened to TikTok. Obviously, I’m using this example to make a point — that you should only look to amend your investments if you believe that the long-term outlook for the companies you own has changed irreversibly, or if you think you’re able to achieve greater returns by investing your money elsewhere.
Final Thoughts
The S&P 500 has been on an epic run since its low at the end of March 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic shocked the world. If that doesn’t demonstrate the irrationality of the market, nothing will.
The only thing easier than making money in the stock market is losing money in the stock market. Investing is simple, yet we insist on complicating it by making investment decisions based on things which — in the long run — will have little impact on our returns.
Go out and vote this November. But vote with your ballot, not your portfolio. Leave it the hell alone.
The views contained in this article are my personal opinion and should not be considered financial advice. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/as-the-election-looms-its-time-to-forget-about-your-stock-portfolio-5c6f82227cc0 | ['Jon Peters'] | 2020-10-29 01:29:00.824000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Election 2020', 'Politics', 'Finance', 'Investing'] |
Angular, Quarkus, Keycloak, Security | Angular, Quarkus, Keycloak, Security
Small guide of combining the two most used frameworks on the web in a secure manner.
Intro
This will be a small guide on how to tie and use together all the mentioned technologies in one nice end to end web project.
First of all, Angular is now a mature framework that makes use of typescript to develop modern and advanced UI applications. It’s taken care by Google and in the latest releases it came with lots of performance improvements.
Angular doesn’t necessarily require as much learning as other front-end technologies and it distinguish itself from React or Vue by being a framework not a library the can be easily plugged and unplugged.
This sometimes means that you have to write boilerplate code configuration to perform certain tasks and the framework will do it for you. Anyhow, you may use any front-end technology, the concept will still be valid just that there will be more code for you to write I assume.
The concept
The concept is based on the Oauth2 specifications, as well as UMA specifications. While you may go and read them for your own sake they are properly implemented within Keycloak by specialists.
Keycloak is also Opensource, mature, with a clear release cycle, broad documentation and highly used and appreciated by other people and corporations. What it’s important to take from here is that while it can be misused, chances of doing so are fairly low.
Security Concept
1. Angular — Keycloak Integration
If it were for someone to look into everything that Keycloak is capable of, I’d highly recommend their server administration documentation: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_admin/#overview.
From there, we’ll make use of the concept of SSO, SSO protocols, as well as Managing Clients, Roles and User Session Management sections.
Secondly, Keycloack comes with a great deal of adapters to support integration with most of the languages & frameworks available on the web. These are small libraries that are very closed to your project implementation.
In the end, depending on the technology and the type of client you are implementing (or resource server configuration) — from oauth2 specs — different oauth2 flows are supported.
For example, when you think about JavaScript clients there are 2 OAuth2 flows supported. However, we’ll see that there is a third option: hybrid. It’s important to keep in mind that the hybrid mode combines best best from the two: refresh token, access token available right away. You may read more about it here.
keycloak-angular
Keycloak angular is a library that makes the integration much easier. It has everything a user might expect from it:
Interceptor to attach the security token on each request. Guard to protect your paths based on roles or any other logic you may find suitable. A service that gives developers access to a security context KeycloakService . An init method were developers may configure certain behavior on application startup.
Installation
npm install keycloak-angular keycloak-js
Configuration
If you are looking to login users before using you applications you shall create a factory method and attached it to your APP_INITIALIZER providers.
Angular Module Configuration
Now every time a user will load the application, it will be first redirect to Keycloak for login and only after that he’ll be able to access the application.
Note that if this is not the behavior you may look for, you can anytime use the keycloakService.login method.
Quarkus Resource Server
The project can be found here. It mostly follows the guide publish by Quarkus about centralized authorization with the central point being the application.properties where the security configuration are put in place.
It’s important to set your correct auth-server-url following the pattern /auth/${realm_name}/${client} as well as the client-id and client-secret.
Consider storing your secret in a environment variable rather then having it hard-coded like me.
Quarkus-Keycloak configuration
Demo
To start up the projects you’ll need docker , docker-compose , npm , angular-cli and java installed.
First we must start keycloak. For this navigate within the keycloak-client and run a docker-compose up -d Secondly, you may want to import the same configuration as I have from https://gitlab.com/blogging4t/keycloak-client/-/blob/develop/realm-export.json . To do this, in Keycloak, navigate to the Import button. Within the keycloak-client run npm install; npm start ; This will start the angular project for you. The quarkus project can be taken from here. To run it, simply execute from the command line mvn clean compile quarkus:dev Navigate to http://localhost:4200. In there the following should be displayed:
Angular app screen
By Clicking show message, depending on what role you have, the application will say either hello admin, or, hello user.
While playing around you might take interest in watching the network tab and checking all the calls that are being done for you to obtain an access_token as well as the fact that all the requests sent contain an Authorization header.
To experiment more, try playing with these if and see what happens if the user is normal and tries to access the admin endpoint:
Last Security Consideration
Use an SSL connection when connecting from a confidential resource server and make sure your certificate is validated. For you angular-client (public client) disable Direct Access Grant from the keycloak adminstration console Make sure to always use encrypted traffic between your services The entire infrastructure is based on signing the JWT’s. From my end this not the best security model and a incremental security pattern should be implemented. For example, the private key may be exposed by one of the organization employees through social engineering. One way to achieve a better security is based on reference tokens where an intermediate service will replace an Opaque token with the access token before accessing the resource server. This entitles that the outside users should be only have access to the opaque tokens. Nevertheless, the community seems to be aware of it and there is a request for this kind of functionality: https://issues.redhat.com/browse/KEYCLOAK-8278.
Best of luck building and securing your APIs! | https://medium.com/swlh/angular-quarkus-keycloak-security-ac95d4547d1 | ['Catalin Patrut'] | 2020-12-08 15:54:56.261000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Quarkus', 'Angular', 'Security', 'Keycloak'] |
[S5E1] The Good Fight Series 5 Episode 1 (Full Episode) | ➕Official Partners “TVs” TV Shows & Movies
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The Good Fight — Season 5, Episode 1 || FULL EPISODES : Picking up one year after the events of the final broadcast episode of “The Good Wife”, an enormous financial scam has destroyed the reputation of a young lawyer, Maia Rindell, while simultaneously wiping out her mentor and godmother Diane Lockhart’s savings. Forced out of her law firm, now called “Lockhart, Deckler, Gussman, Lee, Lyman, Gilbert, Lurie, Kagan, Tannebaum & Associates”, they join Lucca Quinn at one of Chicago’s preeminent law firms. .
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⭐A Target Package is short for Target Package of Information. It is a more specialized case of Intel Package of Information or Intel Package.
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Its and Jeremy Camp (K.J. Apa) is a and aspiring musician who like only to honor his God through the energy of music. Leaving his Indiana home for the warmer climate of California and a college or university education, Jeremy soon comes Bookmark this site across one Melissa Heing
(Britt Robertson), a fellow university student that he takes notices in the audience at an area concert. Bookmark this site Falling for cupid’s arrow immediately, he introduces himself to her and quickly discovers that she is drawn to him too. However, Melissa holds back from forming a budding relationship as she fears it`ll create an awkward situation between Jeremy and their mutual friend, Jean-Luc (Nathan Parson), a fellow musician and who also has feeling for Melissa. Still, Jeremy is relentless in his quest for her until they eventually end up in a loving dating relationship. However, their youthful courtship Bookmark this sitewith the other person comes to a halt when life-threating news of Melissa having cancer takes center stage. The diagnosis does nothing to deter Jeremey’s love on her behalf and the couple eventually marries shortly thereafter. Howsoever, they soon find themselves walking an excellent line between a life together and suffering by her Bookmark this siteillness; with Jeremy questioning his faith in music, himself, and with God himself.
✌ STREAMING MEDIA ✌
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream refers to the procedure of delivering or obtaining media this way.[clarification needed] Streaming identifies the delivery approach to the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies especially to telecommunications networks, as almost all of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio tracks CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the web. For instance, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of this content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content.
Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, an activity in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user may use their media player to get started on playing digital video or digital sound content before the complete file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can connect with media other than video and audio, such as for example live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are considered “streaming text”.
This brings me around to discussing us, a film release of the Christian religio us faith-based . As almost customary, Hollywood usually generates two (maybe three) films of this variety movies within their yearly theatrical release lineup, with the releases usually being around spring us and / or fall respectfully. I didn’t hear much when this movie was initially aounced (probably got buried underneath all of the popular movies news on the newsfeed). My first actual glimpse of the movie was when the film’s movie trailer premiered, which looked somewhat interesting if you ask me. Yes, it looked the movie was goa be the typical “faith-based” vibe, but it was going to be directed by the Erwin Brothers, who directed I COULD Only Imagine (a film that I did so like). Plus, the trailer for I Still Believe premiered for quite some us, so I continued seeing it most of us when I visited my local cinema. You can sort of say that it was a bit “engrained in my brain”. Thus, I was a lttle bit keen on seeing it. Fortunately, I was able to see it before the COVID-9 outbreak closed the movie theaters down (saw it during its opening night), but, because of work scheduling, I haven’t had the us to do my review for it…. as yet. And what did I think of it? Well, it was pretty “meh”. While its heart is certainly in the proper place and quite sincere, us is a little too preachy and unbalanced within its narrative execution and character developments. The religious message is plainly there, but takes way too many detours and not focusing on certain aspects that weigh the feature’s presentation.
✌ TELEVISION SHOW AND HISTORY ✌
A tv set show (often simply Television show) is any content prBookmark this siteoduced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are usually placed between shows. Tv shows are most often scheduled well ahead of The War with Grandpa and appearance on electronic guides or other TV listings.
A television show may also be called a tv set program (British EnBookmark this siteglish: programme), especially if it lacks a narrative structure. A tv set Movies is The War with Grandpaually released in episodes that follow a narrative, and so are The War with Grandpaually split into seasons (The War with Grandpa and Canada) or Movies (UK) — yearly or semiaual sets of new episodes. A show with a restricted number of episodes could be called a miniMBookmark this siteovies, serial, or limited Movies. A one-The War with Grandpa show may be called a “special”. A television film (“made-for-TV movie” or “televisioBookmark this siten movie”) is a film that is initially broadcast on television set rather than released in theaters or direct-to-video.
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✌ FINAL THOUGHTS ✌
The power of faith, love, and affinity for take center stage in Jeremy Camp’s life story in the movie I Still Believe. Directors Andrew and Jon Erwin (the Erwin Brothers) examine the life span and The War with Grandpas of Jeremy Camp’s life story; pin-pointing his early life along with his relationship Melissa Heing because they battle hardships and their enduring love for one another through difficult. While the movie’s intent and thematic message of a person’s faith through troublen is indeed palpable plus the likeable mThe War with Grandpaical performances, the film certainly strules to look for a cinematic footing in its execution, including a sluish pace, fragmented pieces, predicable plot beats, too preachy / cheesy dialogue moments, over utilized religion overtones, and mismanagement of many of its secondary /supporting characters. If you ask me, this movie was somewhere between okay and “meh”. It had been definitely a Christian faith-based movie endeavor Bookmark this web site (from begin to finish) and definitely had its moments, nonetheless it failed to resonate with me; struling to locate a proper balance in its undertaking. Personally, regardless of the story, it could’ve been better. My recommendation for this movie is an “iffy choice” at best as some should (nothing wrong with that), while others will not and dismiss it altogether. Whatever your stance on religion faith-based flicks, stands as more of a cautionary tale of sorts; demonstrating how a poignant and heartfelt story of real-life drama could be problematic when translating it to a cinematic endeavor. For me personally, I believe in Jeremy Camp’s story / message, but not so much the feature.
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✔️ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com | https://medium.com/@the-good-fight-s05e01-ep-1/s5e1-the-good-fight-series-5-episode-1-full-episode-efc3fe9fd4ad | ['The Good Fight', 'Previously On'] | 2021-06-24 07:30:35.871000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Technology', 'Covid 19'] |
CleanVisuals | What We Will Create:
Above, we have a horizontal bar plot. For the moment, they are one of my favorites to create just because of the readability. Below, I am going to show you the code I used to create this, then break it down per section to make it easier to follow.
If you wanted to see what this looks like in its “raw” form..
In a lot of cases, this is totally fine. However as you can see, this plot needs a little love, but it can be achieved with this one line of code:
top_stem.plot.barh(x='Major', y='Total')
Now..to improve this:
# Using the five thirty eight style
plt.style.context('fivethirtyeight') # Colors
cmap = ['#fff100', '#ff8c00', '#e81123', '#ec008c', '#68217a', >>>>>>>>'#00188f', '#00bcf2', '#00b294', '#009e49', '#bad80a'] # Plotting the top 10 STEM Majors
ax = top_stem.plot.barh(x='Major', y='Total', figsize=(12,8), >>>>>color=cmap) # Title and Subtitle
ax.text(s="Let's Talk S.T.E.M ", y=10.6, x=-5, fontsize=17, >>>>>>>>fontweight='semibold')
ax.text(s="Looking At The Top Ten S.T.E.M Related Degrees Chosen By >>>>>>>>Both Sexes ", y=10, x=-5, fontsize=14, fontstyle='italic') # The little details
ax.spines['top'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['right'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['bottom'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['left'].set_visible(False) # Removing y-label, legend and hiding my y-axis
ax.set_ylabel('')
ax.get_legend().remove()
ax.yaxis.set_visible(False) # Plotting Labels particular positions
ax.text(x=60000,y=8.9, s="Civil Engineering", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=69000,y=7.9, s="General Engineering", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=70000,y=6.9, s="Multi-Disciplinary or General Science", >>>>>>>>fontsize=13, fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=74000,y=5.9, s="Chemistry", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=80000,y=4.9, s="Mathematics", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=89000,y=3.9, s="Electrical Engineering", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=99000,y=2.9, s="Mechanical Engineering", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=135000,y=1.9, s="Computer Science", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=215000,y=.9, s="Nursing", fontsize=12, fontweight='light', >>>>>>>>color=('#000000'));
ax.text(x=287000,y=-0.10, s="Biology", fontsize=12, >>>>>>>>fontweight='light', color=('#000000'));
If you are familiar with matplotlib style, then you know that they have many to choose from. Since, our goal is to replicate a fivethiryeight plot, we will go with that style.
plt.style.context('fivethirtyeight')
For this next part, you can add color in a few different ways, however for this particular plot, I wanted each degree to have it’s own color. That is why I went the more tedious route of adding HEX color codes individually. You do not have to do this, you can just pass in one color if you prefer.
cmap = ['#fff100', '#ff8c00', '#e81123', '#ec008c', '#68217a', >>>>>>>>'#00188f', '#00bcf2', '#00b294', '#009e49', '#bad80a']
After setting our colors, we can add that into our plot assigning it to color=()
ax = top_stem.plot.barh(x='Major', y='Total',
figsize=(12,8), color=cmap)
And like that you have a plot.. Let’s add a title and subtitle and set their positions.
ax.text(s="Let's Talk S.T.E.M ", y=10.6, x=-5, fontsize=17,
>>>>>>>>fontweight='semibold') ax.text(s="Looking At The Top Ten S.T.E.M Related Degrees Chosen By >>>>>>>>Both Sexes ", y=10, x=-5, fontsize=14, fontstyle='italic')
Next, I want to remove the black box style frame from my plot.
ax.spines['top'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['right'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['bottom'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['left'].set_visible(False)
I didn’t have an x-label on this graph, but I do want to hide the y-label and the legend. This is inner-changeable, if you wanted to hide an x-axis instead of a y, or hide both simply switch the y to an x.
ax.set_ylabel('')
ax.get_legend().remove()
In most cases, you are basically done at this point. This next step is a little more tedious…alright it’s annoying and you don’t have to do this. However, I chose to take this step because my y-axis descriptors are long and I did not like the look of it. So I placed them IN the plot. What’s cool about this is that you can set the position to wherever you like, and add all of the same customization features as a title or subtitle. I call it annoying because you have to keep tweaking it to get each label in just the right spot. However, once you get there the results are worth all the effort. | https://medium.com/@pbradshaw/cleanvisuals-da5b49d697fb | ['P. Bradshaw'] | 2019-04-27 22:45:03.659000+00:00 | ['Plotting', 'Data Visualization', 'Fivethirtyeight', 'Data Science', 'Matplotlib'] |
Topic Modeling in Python: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) | Topic Modeling in Python: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
How to get started with topic modeling using LDA in Python
Introduction
Topic Models, in a nutshell, are a type of statistical language models used for uncovering hidden structure in a collection of texts. In a practical and more intuitively, you can think of it as a task of:
Dimensionality Reduction, where rather than representing a text T in its feature space as {Word_i: count(Word_i, T) for Word_i in Vocabulary}, you can represent it in a topic space as {Topic_i: Weight(Topic_i, T) for Topic_i in Topics}
Unsupervised Learning, where it can be compared to clustering, as in the case of clustering, the number of topics, like the number of clusters, is an output parameter. By doing topic modeling, we build clusters of words rather than clusters of texts. A text is thus a mixture of all the topics, each having a specific weight
Tagging, abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents that best represents the information in them.
There are several existing algorithms you can use to perform the topic modeling. The most common of it are, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA/LSI), Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at LDA, and implement our first topic model using the sklearn implementation in python 2.7
Theoretical Overview
LDA is a generative probabilistic model that assumes each topic is a mixture over an underlying set of words, and each document is a mixture of over a set of topic probabilities.
We can describe the generative process of LDA as, given the M number of documents, N number of words, and prior K number of topics, the model trains to output:
psi, the distribution of words for each topic K
phi, the distribution of topics for each document i
Parameters of LDA
Alpha parameter is Dirichlet prior concentration parameter that represents document-topic density — with a higher alpha, documents are assumed to be made up of more topics and result in more specific topic distribution per document. Beta parameter is the same prior concentration parameter that represents topic-word density — with high beta, topics are assumed to made of up most of the words and result in a more specific word distribution per topic.
LDA Implementation
The complete code is available as a Jupyter Notebook on GitHub
Loading data Data cleaning Exploratory analysis Preparing data for LDA analysis LDA model training Analyzing LDA model results
Loading data
For this tutorial, we’ll use the dataset of papers published in NIPS conference. The NIPS conference (Neural Information Processing Systems) is one of the most prestigious yearly events in the machine learning community. The CSV data file contains information on the different NIPS papers that were published from 1987 until 2016 (29 years!). These papers discuss a wide variety of topics in machine learning, from neural networks to optimization methods, and many more.
Let’s start by looking at the content of the file
# Importing modules
import pandas as pd
import os os.chdir('..') # Read data into papers
papers = pd.read_csv('./data/NIPS Papers/papers.csv') # Print head
papers.head()
Sample of raw data
Data Cleaning
Since the goal of this analysis is to perform topic modeling, we will solely focus on the text data from each paper, and drop other metadata columns
# Remove the columns
papers = papers.drop(columns=['id', 'event_type', 'pdf_name'], axis=1) # Print out the first rows of papers
papers.head()
Remove punctuation/lower casing
Next, let’s perform a simple preprocessing on the content of paper_text column to make them more amenable for analysis, and reliable results. To do that, we’ll use a regular expression to remove any punctuation, and then lowercase the text
# Load the regular expression library
import re # Remove punctuation
papers['paper_text_processed'] = papers['paper_text'].map(lambda x: re.sub('[,\.!?]', '', x)) # Convert the titles to lowercase
papers['paper_text_processed'] = papers['paper_text_processed'].map(lambda x: x.lower()) # Print out the first rows of papers
papers['paper_text_processed'].head()
Exploratory Analysis
To verify whether the preprocessing happened correctly, we’ll make a word cloud using the wordcloud package to get a visual representation of most common words. It is key to understanding the data and ensuring we are on the right track, and if any more preprocessing is necessary before training the model.
# Import the wordcloud library
from wordcloud import WordCloud # Join the different processed titles together.
long_string = ','.join(list(papers['paper_text_processed'].values)) # Create a WordCloud object
wordcloud = WordCloud(background_color="white", max_words=5000, contour_width=3, contour_color='steelblue') # Generate a word cloud
wordcloud.generate(long_string) # Visualize the word cloud
wordcloud.to_image()
Prepare text for LDA Analysis
Next, let’s work to transform the textual data in a format that will serve as an input for training LDA model. We start by converting the documents into a simple vector representation (Bag of Words BOW). Next, we will convert a list of titles into lists of vectors, all with length equal to the vocabulary.
We’ll then plot the ten most frequent words based on the outcome of this operation (the list of document vectors). As a check, these words should also occur in the word cloud.
# Load the library with the CountVectorizer method
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
sns.set_style('whitegrid')
%matplotlib inline # Helper function
def plot_10_most_common_words(count_data, count_vectorizer):
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
words = count_vectorizer.get_feature_names()
total_counts = np.zeros(len(words))
for t in count_data:
total_counts+=t.toarray()[0]
count_dict = (zip(words, total_counts))
count_dict = sorted(count_dict, key=lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)[0:10]
words = [w[0] for w in count_dict]
counts = [w[1] for w in count_dict]
x_pos = np.arange(len(words))
plt.figure(2, figsize=(15, 15/1.6180))
plt.subplot(title='10 most common words')
sns.set_context("notebook", font_scale=1.25, rc={"lines.linewidth": 2.5})
sns.barplot(x_pos, counts, palette='husl')
plt.xticks(x_pos, words, rotation=90)
plt.xlabel('words')
plt.ylabel('counts')
plt.show() # Initialise the count vectorizer with the English stop words
count_vectorizer = CountVectorizer(stop_words='english') # Fit and transform the processed titles
count_data = count_vectorizer.fit_transform(papers['paper_text_processed']) # Visualise the 10 most common words
plot_10_most_common_words(count_data, count_vectorizer)
Top 10 most common words
LDA model training and results visualization
To keep things simple, we will only tweak the number of topic parameters.
import warnings
warnings.simplefilter("ignore", DeprecationWarning) # Load the LDA model from sk-learn
from sklearn.decomposition import LatentDirichletAllocation as LDA
# Helper function
def print_topics(model, count_vectorizer, n_top_words):
words = count_vectorizer.get_feature_names()
for topic_idx, topic in enumerate(model.components_):
print("
Topic #%d:" % topic_idx)
print(" ".join([words[i]
for i in topic.argsort()[:-n_top_words - 1:-1]]))
# Tweak the two parameters below
number_topics = 5
number_words = 10 # Create and fit the LDA model
lda = LDA(n_components=number_topics, n_jobs=-1)
lda.fit(count_data) # Print the topics found by the LDA model
print("Topics found via LDA:")
print_topics(lda, count_vectorizer, number_words)
Final Topics found vis LDA
Analyzing LDA model results
Now that we have a trained model let’s visualize the topics for interpretability. To do so, we’ll use a popular visualization package, pyLDAvis which is designed to help interactively with:
Better understanding and interpreting individual topics, and Better understanding the relationships between the topics.
For (1), you can manually select each topic to view its top most frequent and/or “relevant” terms, using different values of the λ parameter. This can help when you’re trying to assign a human interpretable name or “meaning” to each topic.
For (2), exploring the Intertopic Distance Plot can help you learn about how topics relate to each other, including potential higher-level structure between groups of topics.
%%time
from pyLDAvis import sklearn as sklearn_lda
import pickle
import pyLDAvis LDAvis_data_filepath = os.path.join('./ldavis_prepared_'+str(number_topics))
# # this is a bit time consuming - make the if statement True
# # if you want to execute visualization prep yourself
if 1 == 1: LDAvis_prepared = sklearn_lda.prepare(lda, count_data, count_vectorizer) with open(LDAvis_data_filepath, 'w') as f:
pickle.dump(LDAvis_prepared, f)
# load the pre-prepared pyLDAvis data from disk
with open(LDAvis_data_filepath) as f:
LDAvis_prepared = pickle.load(f) pyLDAvis.save_html(LDAvis_prepared, './ldavis_prepared_'+ str(number_topics) +'.html')
Closing Notes
Machine learning has become increasingly popular over the past decade, and recent advances in computational availability have led to exponential growth to people looking for ways how new methods can be incorporated to advance the field of Natural Language Processing.
Often, we treat topic models as black-box algorithms, but hopefully, this post addressed to shed light on the underlying math, and intuitions behind it, and high-level code to get you started with any textual data.
In the next article, we’ll go one step deeper into understanding how you can evaluate the performance of topic models, tune its hyper-parameters to get more intuitive and reliable results.
Sources:
[1] Topic model — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model
[2] Distributed Strategies for Topic Modeling. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/46405/ParallelTopicModels.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
[3] Topic Mapping — Software — Resources — Amaral Lab. https://amaral.northwestern.edu/resources/software/topic-mapping
[4] A Survey of Topic Modeling in Text Mining. https://thesai.org/Downloads/Volume6No1/Paper_21-A_Survey_of_Topic_Modeling_in_Text_Mining.pdf | https://towardsdatascience.com/end-to-end-topic-modeling-in-python-latent-dirichlet-allocation-lda-35ce4ed6b3e0 | ['Shashank Kapadia'] | 2019-09-05 22:20:58.102000+00:00 | ['Topic Modeling', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'In Depth Analysis', 'Towards Data Science'] |
Happy Holidays! | Happy Holidays!
May this season bring you and your family a little peace. Landy ·Dec 25, 2020
It’s been a challenging year, and unfortunately, many families have empty seats at their tables. But whether your holiday is festive or reflective, I pray you’ll find peace and may your new year be prosperous and vibrant.
Happy Holidays, from my family to yours! ❤ | https://medium.com/@simplyy/happy-holidays-95b7669a6fb1 | [] | 2020-12-25 05:29:54.054000+00:00 | ['Holidays', 'Merry Christmas', 'Happy Holidays', 'New Year', 'Family'] |
WRX Unlock — 31st May 2020. Starting 31st May, 2020, we’ll start… | Namaste Tribe! You — our community and early WRX adopters — have always been at the forefront of every new feature decision we make. In fact, thanks to your support, we have grown WazirX and taken WRX to millions!
Patience and hard work pay off! WRX token release is our way to reward you for trusting us. On Day Zero of WRX listing, we had unlocked 10% of your WRX tokens (with a maximum limit of 5000 WRX). This was followed by unlocking one-third of your locked WRX tokens which can be used to pay trading fees. Now, starting 31st May, 2020, we’ll start WRX token unlock for ‘Fixed periodic vesting’ and ‘Volume-based vesting’.
Fixed periodic vesting : Starting 31st May 2020, one-third of your locked WRX tokens will be unlocked equally over a period of 24 months (2 years)
: Starting 31st May 2020, one-third of your locked WRX tokens will be unlocked equally (2 years) Volume-based vesting: Based on your trading volume, a maximum of one-third of your locked WRX tokens will be unlocked starting from 31st May 2020. The token amount unlock will happen quarterly — divided into 8 quarters, i.e., 2 years.
Read more about WRX release schedule announcement.
From WRX IEO in February 2020 till today, we have come a long way and grown by leaps and bounds in these 4 months.
Keep BUIDLing
WRX — the first Indian exchange-backed token to IEO on Binance
Coinmarketcap listing for $WRX
Log in to WazirX via Binance
14 new trading pairs listed
₹25,00,000 INR worth prizes were given in trading contests
WRX on Binance DEX & FTX
TradingView Charts
Zero withdrawal fee
Support those who BUIDL — Blockchain India Fund
Our goal has been to involve everyone in the blockchain revolution. This also means providing the ecosystem members with knowledge and resources to move ahead. Binance and WazirX have created a $50 Million ‘Blockchain for India’ fund to support Indian entrepreneurs building in the crypto and blockchain space. As we educate and onboard more users, we can also see the community taking it further.
We Listen
Many may not know this but we have had users giving us feedback and working with us since 2018. We have had hundreds of users and thousands of community members who help us build the trusted platform that brings crypto to India.
Right from amazing charts to simple-looking options like a Favorite button, we have heard and our community has loved us back.
Utility
Exchange tokens become the fuel of an ecosystem. Our community has been HODLing and using $WRX to pay reduced trading fees as well as supporting the market by providing liquidity. This is a win-win.
The fact that ₹1.7 Crore INR worth of $WRX has been used to pay trading fees proves how much our community believes in it. This utility only increases as the number of users and volume grows on WazirX exponentially. A virtuous cycle has been started. And that juggernaut is difficult to stop. We’ll continue to innovate and provide the best product to all our users in India and across the world!
Jai Hind 🇮🇳 | https://medium.com/wazirx/wrx-unlock-31st-may-2020-fce8aa95ac48 | ['Wazirx Bitcoin Exchange'] | 2020-05-29 06:27:54.273000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency News', 'Blockchain', 'Announcements', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto'] |
Bandits, WebAssembly, and IoT | A part of the Bootstrap Thompson Sampling algorithm (image by author).
Bandits, WebAssembly, and IoT
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a relatively simple (to describe that is, not to solve) formalization of a sequential learning problem that has many applications. In its canonical form, a gambler faces a slot machine (colloquially called a one-armed-bandit) with k >1 arms (hence the term multi-armed bandit). Given a (finite) amount of coins, the gambler sequentially chooses which arm to play — subsequently she inserts a coin and pulls the arm — after each play observing some reward (e.g., a win or a loss — typically not winning coins that can be re-used). As the gambler one-by-one squanders her coins, she hopes to attain as high a cumulative reward as possible: this is tricky since each arm is assumed to have a different (static) probability of paying out. A successful strategy of playing the machine’s arms needs to on one hand explore the options (i.e., the gambler needs to play the arms whose expected rewards she is uncertain about to learn more), while on the other hand exploiting the available knowledge (i.e., the gambler needs to play the arm with the highest expected pay-off as often as possible).
The simple gambling setup above matches, sometimes somewhat loosely, many applied problems. Consider the following alternatives for the terms in bold above:
Gambler, medical doctor, online marketeer, e-commerce manager, …
Arms, medical treatments, advertisements, products, …
Rewards, medical outcomes (e.g., live or death), customer responses (e.g., click on the ad), purchases (e.g., yes or no), …
Because of this generality, the bandit problem formalization has been used to study many applied problems. Furthermore, effective strategies (often coined policies in the bandit literature which are formally mappings from the historical data to the next arm) to address bandit problems are used in many applications.
Effective bandit policies
Before discussing how we implemented effective bandit policies on edge devices using WebAssembly, it is good to explore a few possible bandit policies:
Just choose one: One simple, but not very effective, strategy is to just choose the arm you think is best and play it all the time. This policy does not have a formal name in the bandit literature, but it is common in practice: (e.g.,) online marketeers often simple create a single ad based on their own expert knowledge without doing any experimentation. e-first: A better — in terms of the expected cumulative reward where the expectation is over multiple executions of the policy to address bandit problems — strategy is to first devote a fixed number of n plays to randomly explore the different arms. After this exploration period, one selects the arm with the highest (observed) average reward for the remaining plays. Note that this strategy is known as the A/B test or the RCT depending on the field one is in. e-greedy: Where e-first effectively first explores and subsequently exploits, it is relatively simple to do both continuously: with probablity p the agent selects a random arm, and with probability 1-p the arm with the highest (observed) average reward is selected. Often, p is relatively small (<.1) UCB methods: The thoughtful reader should have noticed that exploitation means playing the arm with the highest expected reward (as estimated using the average of the historical observations), whereas exploitation effectively reduces the uncertainty surrounding this expectation. UCB methods combine both objectives quite intuitively: the gambler plays the arm with the highest upper confidence bound (i.e., the average reward + some quantification of its uncertainty). Thompson sampling: UCB methods can be shown to achieve (asymptotically) optimal rewards (or rather regret, but we won’t get to theoretical here). However, UCB methods are very frequentist in nature. Thompson sampling provides a (also asymptotically optimal) Bayesian alternative: the gambler plays each of the arms with a probability that is proportional to her belief (quantified in a Bayesian way) that the arm is the best arm.
While both 4. and 5. above can be shown to be asymptotically optimal — depending a bit on the exact bandit setup and the exact bounds etc. involved — even 2 and 3 above can be extremely useful and generally grossly outperform 1. For a comprehensive overview and analysis of bandit algorithms see this amazing book.
Bandits on the edge?
Bandit policies are often implemented on servers: the gambler effectively lives in a single “location”. For example, the sequential selection of ads to maximize CTR is often centrally coordinated. However, there are various applications in which one would like to deploy a bandit policy on an edge device: for example, the problem of selecting the fastest route through a network can often be formalized as a bandit problem.
To implement bandit policies in a software system, one effectively needs to implement 2 functions:
An action assignment function: When called this function returns the next arm to pull. An update function: When called this function, based on an arm-reward combination, updates the internal state of the application such that a next call to the action assignment function can be based on the collected history.
This is detailed quite clearly in this recent Journal of Statistical Software paper.
Perhaps surprisingly, both functions are easy to implement — even in a modular way — on edge devices. Using WebAssembly both steps can be implemented efficiently and effectively be deployed on any edge device. We recently used the Scailable platform to provide a small demo for one of our clients: We implemented e-greedy in the standard exposed predict function of a Scailable binary (see this tutorial), and we used orthogonal persistence to implement the update function such that the state of the machine could be update: see this Towards Data Science post for details. Iteratively calling the predict and update functions allowed us to implement a bandit policy on a ESP32 MCU. Pretty neat!
Conclusion
The bandit problem formalization provides an extremely useful model for many real-world sequential learning problems. Furthermore, the idea of splitting up a bandit policy into two simple function calls is both simple and powerful and can easily be extended to implement contextual bandit policies and batched policies. Finally, doing so in WebAssembly binaries allows for the efficient deployment and monitoring of bandit policies on various edge devices. This is pretty cool since, although rudimentary, we can now have each little chip learn from its direct interactions with its environment!
Disclaimer
It’s good to note my own involvement here: I am a professor of Data Science at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science and one of the cofounders of Scailable. Thus, no doubt, I have a vested interest in Scailable; I have an interest in making it grow such that we can finally bring AI to production and deliver on its promises. The opinions expressed here are my own. | https://towardsdatascience.com/bandits-webassembly-and-iot-a670ede2798b | ['Maurits Kaptein'] | 2020-11-24 15:27:40.905000+00:00 | ['Webassembly', 'Reinforcement Learning', 'Multi Armed Bandit'] |
The Art to Start: Settings Game | The Art to Start: Settings Game
Designing Prompts for GPT-3 (Series)
When I issue a threat, it’s serious. I did it. In our last part, we’ve experimented with 0-texts, which can be generated by GPT-3 without any human prompt. One of the random texts was a megalomaniacal monologue of a moviegoer. The text was created by Temperature = 0, i.e., redundant, repetitive, and opposite to chaotic-creative. I warned you to make it even crazier by changing settings.
And here we are.
In this chapter, I want to explore the power of various parameters influencing the text’s quality and character.
First, here is the text in its full beauty (we’ve analyzed it already). | https://medium.com/merzazine/the-art-to-start-settings-game-11f054a136 | ['Vlad Alex', 'Merzmensch'] | 2020-12-19 00:20:59.629000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Thearttostart', 'Merznlp'] |
7 WAYS TO HELP SOMEONE DEALING WITH LOSS | 1.Offer To Make Calls & Follow Up
Often times there are family members and loved ones to inform and keep updated. There are also various arrangements to be made to handle final affairs of the deceased. Assistance with these matters could be considered very helpful and would reduce overwhelm.
2. Food
It’s easy to forget to eat or experience loss of appetite when one is distressed. Meal delivery can help the bereaved remain nourished and healthy during difficult times.
3. Transportation & Logistics
The bereaved often has various appointments while making final arrangements. Co-ordination may also be required for family and loved ones traveling from out of town. Offering to help with airport/train pick ups, a ride to an appointment or paying for a taxi/Uber would definitely help the bereaved.
4. Dog Walking
Offering to walk the dog or gifting a dog walking service could lessen the bereaved’s to-do list.
5. Lawn Service
While grieving small tasks can sometimes feel like a mountain to climb. Help reduce your loved one’s to-do list by providing a lawn care service in the months following your loved ones’s loss.
6. Laundry Service/Housekeeping Services
If possible stop by your grieving loved one to help with laundry and house cleaning. A clean and organized environment can be uplifting.
7. Gift Certificates/Cards
Someone is more likely to make use of a service or buy a product with a gift card for a specific place. Instead of asking the bereaved if (s)he would like to go out for lunch or go for a manicure surprise them with a gift certificate/card.
Avoid telling the bereaved to call if they need you or asking what they might need. When someone is grieving (s)he does not always have the presence of mind to assess their needs or may not want to burden others.
Sunset Concierge is available to help you with the task of informing loved ones of a death.
Please call us at 404.820.1045 or email us at [email protected] | https://medium.com/@sunsetconciergellc/7-ways-to-help-someone-dealing-with-loss-9f97960f503b | ['Sunset Concierge'] | 2021-05-03 09:35:10.545000+00:00 | ['Grief And Loss', 'Grief', 'Grief Support'] |
An Introduction to t-SNE with Python Example | Introduction
I’ve always had a passion for learning and consider myself a lifelong learner. Being at SAS, as a data scientist, allows me to learn and try out new algorithms and functionalities that we regularly release to our customers. Often times, the algorithms are not technically new, but they’re new to me which makes it a lot of fun.
Recently, I had the opportunity to learn more about t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). In this post I’m going to give a high-level overview of the t-SNE algorithm. I’ll also share some example python code where I’ll use t-SNE on both the Digits and MNIST dataset.
What is t-SNE?
t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) is an unsupervised, non-linear technique primarily used for data exploration and visualizing high-dimensional data. In simpler terms, t-SNE gives you a feel or intuition of how the data is arranged in a high-dimensional space. It was developed by Laurens van der Maatens and Geoffrey Hinton in 2008.
t-SNE vs PCA
If you’re familiar with Principal Components Analysis (PCA), then like me, you’re probably wondering the difference between PCA and t-SNE. The first thing to note is that PCA was developed in 1933 while t-SNE was developed in 2008. A lot has changed in the world of data science since 1933 mainly in the realm of compute and size of data. Second, PCA is a linear dimension reduction technique that seeks to maximize variance and preserves large pairwise distances. In other words, things that are different end up far apart. This can lead to poor visualization especially when dealing with non-linear manifold structures. Think of a manifold structure as any geometric shape like: cylinder, ball, curve, etc.
t-SNE differs from PCA by preserving only small pairwise distances or local similarities whereas PCA is concerned with preserving large pairwise distances to maximize variance. Laurens illustrates the PCA and t-SNE approach pretty well using the Swiss Roll dataset in Figure 1 [1]. You can see that due to the non-linearity of this toy dataset (manifold) and preserving large distances that PCA would incorrectly preserve the structure of the data.
Figure 1 — Swiss Roll Dataset. Preserve small distance with t-SNE (solid line) vs maximizing variance PCA [1]
How t-SNE works
Now that we know why we might use t-SNE over PCA, lets discuss how t-SNE works. The t-SNE algorithm calculates a similarity measure between pairs of instances in the high dimensional space and in the low dimensional space. It then tries to optimize these two similarity measures using a cost function. Let’s break that down into 3 basic steps.
1. Step 1, measure similarities between points in the high dimensional space. Think of a bunch of data points scattered on a 2D space (Figure 2). For each data point (xi) we’ll center a Gaussian distribution over that point. Then we measure the density of all points (xj) under that Gaussian distribution. Then renormalize for all points. This gives us a set of probabilities (Pij) for all points. Those probabilities are proportional to the similarities. All that means is, if data points x1 and x2 have equal values under this gaussian circle then their proportions and similarities are equal and hence you have local similarities in the structure of this high-dimensional space. The Gaussian distribution or circle can be manipulated using what’s called perplexity, which influences the variance of the distribution (circle size) and essentially the number of nearest neighbors. Normal range for perplexity is between 5 and 50 [2].
Figure 2 — Measuring pairwise similarities in the high-dimensional space
2. Step 2 is similar to step 1, but instead of using a Gaussian distribution you use a Student t-distribution with one degree of freedom, which is also known as the Cauchy distribution (Figure 3). This gives us a second set of probabilities (Qij) in the low dimensional space. As you can see the Student t-distribution has heavier tails than the normal distribution. The heavy tails allow for better modeling of far apart distances.
Figure 3 — Normal vs Student t-distribution
3. The last step is that we want these set of probabilities from the low-dimensional space (Qij) to reflect those of the high dimensional space (Pij) as best as possible. We want the two map structures to be similar. We measure the difference between the probability distributions of the two-dimensional spaces using Kullback-Liebler divergence (KL). I won’t get too much into KL except that it is an asymmetrical approach that efficiently compares large Pij and Qij values. Finally, we use gradient descent to minimize our KL cost function.
Use Case for t-SNE
Now that you know how t-SNE works let’s talk quickly about where it is used. Laurens van der Maaten shows a lot of examples in his video presentation [1]. He mentions the use of t-SNE in areas like climate research, computer security, bioinformatics, cancer research, etc. t-SNE could be used on high-dimensional data and then the output of those dimensions then become inputs to some other classification model.
Also, t-SNE could be used to investigate, learn, or evaluate segmentation. Often times we select the number of segments prior to modeling or iterate after results. t-SNE can often times show clear separation in the data. This can be used prior to using your segmentation model to select a cluster number or after to evaluate if your segments actually hold up. t-SNE however is not a clustering approach since it does not preserve the inputs like PCA and the values may often change between runs so it’s purely for exploration.
Code Example
Below is some python code (Figures below with link to GitHub) where you can see the visual comparison between PCA and t-SNE on the Digits and MNIST datasets. I select both of these datasets because of the dimensionality differences and therefore the differences in results. I also show a technique in the code where you can run PCA prior to running t-SNE. This can be done to reduce computation and you’d typically reduce down to ~30 dimensions and then run t-SNE.
I ran this using python and calling the SAS libraries. It may appear slightly different than what you’re use to and you can see that in the images below. I used Seaborn for my visuals which I thought was great, but with t-SNE you may get really compact clusters and need to zoom in. Another visualization tool, like Plotly, may be better if you need to zoom in or manipulate your plot object. Also, a simple %matplotlib notebook call before you plots works as well assuming your using Matplotlib.
Check out the full notebook in GitHub so you can see all the steps in between and have the code: | https://towardsdatascience.com/an-introduction-to-t-sne-with-python-example-5a3a293108d1 | ['Andre Violante'] | 2018-08-30 19:12:07.466000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Effective Algorithms for Dart and Flutter. Big O. | Probably the most important part of a technical interview is the knowledge check for Algorithms and Data Structures. This is the must-have part of learning curve of a professional programmer in any language, especially for a Flutter.
The glory mission of Flutter is to write code for mobile devices. Mobile devices need a special attention to performance of its algorithms and effective memory usage. We don’t have the luxury of vertical scaling by upgrading server hardware for higher CPU and Memory here. Adding the superpower of effective algorithms, you literally can create faster and more stable code for Android and IOS. That’s why interviewers will stress-test your ability to do so.
Before any further reading, let’s do one check. Did you hear about leetcode? If yes, just continue the reading. If not, please spend some 10–15 minutes just walking around problems and community pages at this website. This is the reflection of industry trends in the whole process of interviewing and selection of a new programmer for a job or a remote project.
By the way, I’m going to explain some of most important leetcode problems in the upcoming parts of this topic.
Today we’ll try to understand the core principle or even law which we can use for estimation of the efficiency of any algorithm.
This knowledge, together with some Knowledge-Map of tricks and methods to improve the efficiency, is forming this “scary” part of IT.
Algorithms Matter
The first step to attack Algorithms and Data Structures is to accept understanding why they are so important.
Let’s consider a very simple Flutter app. This app has to count the sum of increasing sequence of integers like [1, 2, 3, 4, …].
We’ll use FlutLab.io and also you can grab the initial project from FlutLab’s WidgetBay . If you didn’t used FlutLab before, this is an online Flutter IDE where you can register and build your apps for free. If you already have an account, go to the initial project on WidgetBay and click “Fork to FlutLab IDE”.
Now you can find this project in your profile:
Go inside this project and run Web Build. You should see “Result: 0” in the center of Web emulator:
The calculation part of this app was made as an independent Dart class named “Algo”:
Currently it contains just a placeholder for method “perform”, returning 0.
That’s why we can see “Result: 0” when running this app:
Now let’s implement Algo to calculate the sum of elements of a list:
Easy, right? Let’s just run web build or hot reload again:
All looks good. And actually, usual Flutter developer will happily stop here.
But can we improve this solution?
Yes!
How to see that this solution is not ideal? Lets open the other part of our project containing unit tests of the algorithm:
Here we have 2 unit tests:
Algo should work correctly
Algo should work effectively
Let’s run this test bundle by click on “run test” button:
We can see, that the first test “Algo should work correctly” passed, but the second one, “Algo should work effectively”- failed.
This is because it took longer then 100 milliseconds, set as max allowed time for the algorithm execution:
Big O comes to help
We can change the code of unit test and can notice, that this test is passed for some not very big arrays.
So, the time which our algorithm needs to finish is some function of the size of the its input — array of numbers.
Big O notation gives us the simple criteria to estimate the speed or time complexity of our algorithm.
In this approach we should not estimate the physical time which algorithm needs. Because this time depends on the performance of our computer and how many background work it is doing.
But we can estimate the order of that time relatively to the size of input data.
For example, time to finish (let’s use time complexity term) can be in order of 1, n, n² etc. Where n is the size of data to process.
Respectively, time complexity of an algorithm can be O(1), O(n), O(n²)
O(1) is the Holy Grail of Algorithms and Data Structures — the most optimal algorithms have this time complexity.
O(n) is acceptable, but not so good. And O(n²) is the pure evil.
How to calculate the time complexity of our Algo implementation?
By counting of operations!
If we have the input array with size of n, how many logical operations will do our code?
1 operation for sum initialization
n operations for the loop
1 operation to return the value
Excellent! We have time complexity O(n + 2). Not so fast. When we need to know the order of time complexity, we should truncate all the constants. No matter we have O(2n), O(4n+3) or O(1000n + 2000), we should just mention the fact that time complexity is the linear function of n. The right answer here is O(n).
Don’t worry if you still did not completely get the conception of Big O. We’ll revisit the calculation of time and space complexity for different algorithms.
Wait a minute! — You can say. Can we really rework this algorithm to be an order of a constant, O(1). Yes, my friend, we can.
Let’s remember that we are summing the linearly growing numbers. Starting from 1 and each next value is greater by 1.
We can draw a small figure, where numbers to sum marked with dark color:
Where X axis is the position of an array item and Y axis is its value. We added 0’s element with value 0 to show one interesting phenomena: the sum of all items is the total area of the rectangle n*(n+1) divided by 2. Indeed, dark cells is occupying exactly one half of the space of big rectangle.
So our new algorithm should look like
It’s 2 operations, irrelevant to the size of input array. So, it’s O(1).
With this change all our tests passed successfully:
Conclusion. Algorithms and Data Structures is a complex and extensive Knowledge Base. However, we can learn it practically. The critical, small subset of its methods and terms allow us to write more effective code and pass coding interviews. Today we learned that even simplest algorithm can be optimized by just counting its operations. Also, we met Big O notation. We’ll see more examples soon to solidify our Big-O-instincts and form our new mindset.
To be continued.. | https://itnext.io/effective-algorithms-for-dart-and-flutter-big-o-874627c433ba | ['Aleksey Drobnych'] | 2021-06-17 09:22:35.577000+00:00 | ['Flutlab', 'Datastrucutre', 'Flutter', 'Dart', 'Algorithms'] |
No, You don’t want An Obsessed Lover. | The Internet is full of jokes that seem to border between truth and so-called “nuanced” humor. How many times have we’ve seen the “it’s just jokes” line when things go sour? Or some smart-ass person saying we all missed the punchline and need to calm down? Droll. Sometimes the “jokes” are a low-tier attempt at humor for attention. Sometimes, the jokes are just…bad.
A while back, I was on Twitter when I saw the following tweet:
Scribbled for their protection.
And…ok, alright I can see some humor in it. I haven’t become that old where dark humor or situational humor just don’t hit it for me. I might have a 60-something woman in my soul, but the 35-year-old screwball is still laughing at old Beavis and Butt-Head jokes about man-eaters and crappy dancers. Believe me, a good chunk of my day is devoted to mirth and nonsense. I'm not some “triggered” SJW on a maudlin mission to attack this guy, because he can feel and say what he wants. However…
Obsession ain’t it, babe.
Obsession fragrance? Awesome. Obsession by Animotion? A classic song, lyrics sort of…eh. Obsession of the relationship type? Not so much. All jokes aside, I’ve had the displeasure of hearing lots of “my ex was a psycho/crazy/nuts/obsessed” stories from men about the former women in their lives. Although a lot of them tend to omit why some of these women snapped, the stories of stalking on and offline, the property damage, family drama, expenses, physical anguish, kid drama, and mental anguish made it super clear — obsession isn’t sexy or cool. In fact, it makes life very hard. Why would anyone want that?
Devotion, on the other hand, is fine. Adoration, Admiration — cool. An obsession is deep. It’s an unhinged fixation that could be marginally uncomfortable or flat out dangerous. It’s one of those things where the phrase “f*ck around and find out” isn’t to be tested. It’s one thing to want somebody who loves you for who you are, going out of their way to do things for you. It’s special when your lover knows your taste and how you like nice things. It’s touching when they surprise you with flowers or your favorite fruit. The idea of being able to do something nice or contribute to the give/take dynamic with love is amazing. All of that can be very healthy. It’s another thing when they’re so into you that they’re ready to ruin lives, fight, and possibly kill others because they're possessive and jealous over you. Who steps up to the relationship plate looking for that kind of drama? It’s sexy until the cops are at your door, or the court dates pop up. It’s racy and dangerous until you’ve got to fix things they’ve torn apart. (Or when you have to hide the sharp kitchenware…)
The cutesy jokes about obsession are usually blatantly obvious. We laugh and brush them off, having enough common sense to know when folks are playing. I don't give those a second thought. Maybe the person tweeting was joking too. Nowadays, it’s a little hard to tell when people are doing so via text. I don't want to read too deeply into a tweet but the energy is absolutely weird. Even as a joke, the stories I’ve read and heard about obsessive lovers overshadow any kind of so-called mirth behind social media posts.
When I think of an obsessive woman, I’m picturing the kind of person who slowly slides from devotion to a dark place that quickly puts the life of her lover in danger. She is unpredictable, and not like a Jamie Foxx song. She doesn’t like her mate having female friends, so she finds a way to alienate every single one. Any friend of her mate could be a target, for that matter. This person now belongs to her and everyone else is the enemy if she considers them a threat. Imagine how quickly that could escalate. “Possessive” is an understatement, and devotion becomes a little too deep. She finds a way into her lover’s phone and smart devices to monitor steps and social behaviors. She studies their schedule not to anticipate her partner’s needs, but to calculate where he is and should be. If he isn’t, there’s a problem. This woman has little to no life, consumed by her lover. He comes first in all things…far beyond that of a caring partner. When/if it becomes too much, the other person has to find a way to get away from her. This is the particular hell I’ve been seeing play out in court, in lengthy posts, in pictures of destroyed property, and mental+physical battle scars that make men, women, and anyone feel unsafe for long after the fact. It’s the kind of extreme behavior that could make future relationships very hard for the other person.
Obsession is unhealthy.
It simmers in weird and uncomfortable energy on a lot of levels. You have to cleanse yourself after the fact. You need to unpack and re-evaluate so much. Maybe this is too “SJW” for the room, but you’re asking for trauma. Trauma. Trau-ma. You are no longer free because somebody is watching you closely. What is “me time”? Perhaps it’s not as deep as the dark picture I painted above, but the way some men dawg (not dog) out women after breakups, talking about them like they’re everything but a child of God (or a Bodhisattva of the Earth, holla if ya spreadin’ kosen-rufu!!) makes me think that no man would want to add onto that with a horrifying tale of a woman so into them that they got about 3 hours of sleep a night. It just seems like a bit much.
If you want a devoted lover to treat you like an equal, say so. If you want somebody who will treat you like a king and care for you deeply, speak up. I don’t think that anyone wants a person breathing down their neck or worshipping them to the point of…well….obsession! Unless we are in the realm of certain kinks where all parties have consulted, to be obsessed with another human being on any(detrimental) level bad thing. The mix-up of wanting love, affection, and respect seem to be the bigger issues.
(Note: I mean submissive-based relationships where one partner may not necessarily be obsessed, but rather worships and caters to the dom. This very well could be an obsession, but these relationships do not harm others outside of the union.)
Maybe you’ve been hurt before, and want somebody who will be loyal. Perhaps, like me, you’ve been lectured to about the things you like or “who you are behind closed doors” (cringe…). I’ve been in that space of people not really liking me for who I am, and it doesn’t feel good. Those are the things you can ask for instead — somebody who likes the flaws and the very best of you. Someone who understands the quirks and doesn’t try to change you to fit what and whom they think you should be. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s okay to ask for and push to manifest the kind of person who meets your needs. I don’t think that requires any levels of obsession. Love shouldn’t hurt. Love should not make you paranoid nor afraid. A good relationship is a rarity these days, and healthy ones take work. The phrase is worn out to death, but nobody is perfect. Why do you need an obsessed person?
Have a partner who loves and supports you. One who desires you. Somebody who is loyal and down to earth. I hope you find somebody who compliments the human being you already are. Peace, not chaos. Comfort, not scarred for life. | https://medium.com/@rox85/no-you-dont-want-an-obsessed-lover-b7777de95a66 | ['Veronica Williams'] | 2020-12-16 10:32:05.340000+00:00 | ['Domestic Violence', 'Bad Jokes', 'Relationships', 'Opinion', 'Domestic Abuse'] |
How Therapy Helped Me When I Went Back To Work | How Therapy Helped Me When I Went Back To Work
From one overwhelmed mother to another
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Growing up, I thought therapy was reserved for those with ‘real problems’
Asians stereotypically don’t do therapy. We suffer in silence and let that shit brew until it becomes stomach cancer.
Does the word therapy still relate to” crazy people”?
“Wow, there must be something seriously wrong with you!” “Can’t you just keep that shit inside or talk to your friends about that over some wine and call it a night?”
You may not say that out loud, but you may believe that. Your view of therapy depends on your level of understanding of what it is, your inherent biases, and how you were raised, social and cultural influences.
When I was growing up, the idea of getting help for your mental health was rarely talked about. And when it was discussed, it was usually about a Hong Kong celebrity going to rehab. Therefore, 90’s Hollywood movies and TV shows became my source of information.
In sitcoms or romantic comedies, the line “Well, my therapist says…” would be something a kooky character would say to the main character as a joke.
Cue Laugh Track…jump to the next scene.
In dramas, I’d see unhappy couples on the verge of divorce going to therapy, returned soldiers going to therapy, widows/widowers going to therapy, people who had survived shootings/bombings/car crashes/The Holocaust go to therapy…and the list goes on.
Therapy was always something that characters would do if they had experienced major trauma, or they had run out of options. It was like therapy was the last resort when you’ve completely broken down.
You know, if all else fails, try therapy…because then you’ve literally exhausted all options. As a kid, that was my misperception of therapy.
It’s a joke if you’re “normal” and reserved for only those who had “real” problems. From my ongoing recovery from perfectionism, self-harm, depression, and disordered eating, I didn’t go to therapy then, but I should have.
Entering working motherhood
After going back to work from my maternity leave, I started feeling extremely overwhelmed. I was really struggling to balance all the different hats I had on (working mom, writer/blogger, wife, sister, daughter, etc.).
Every time I switched gears from one role to another, I became more flustered and anxious (biting nails/picking my face type of anxiety). I realized that motherhood had replaced my ability to be mindful.
I felt like I was unraveling at the seams. I am a natural single tasker with a Type B personality. So motherhood had forced me to become someone who was required to multitask and have a Type A personality.
I was having trouble balancing who I was and who I needed to be as a mother. My mind was constantly thinking for another person. It’s like I had two minds going at once. I couldn’t be my natural self and have one thought at each moment.
There were always thoughts that were simultaneously running thru my mind, and if I stopped for one second to be mindful, it was brief. Because then she was grabbing something that shouldn’t be touched or yelling for my attention.
Even without her presence, I was thinking about whether she had eaten enough…if she had pooped…how long she napped for
As a result of this mindless multitasking, I lost my passion for the simple things in life that I used to indulge in.
The smell of the crisp air in the morning, the taste of a freshly peeled orange, the crunch of walnut between my teeth…all the small moments were rushed and completed mindlessly.
I tried to find the balance between the demands of a mother and the needs of an individual. I had a life living in the present, and now it had changed. I needed to find a way to do what I used to do while integrating this little person's responsibility.
I was scared to seek help
I knew I should have sought help, but I procrastinated for months because I was scared.
It got to the point where I couldn’t sleep. I was eating crap. I was unhappy. I was constantly negative. I was always tired. I was sick of myself. I was merely going through the motions of life, letting it happen to me instead of making it happen for myself. I was incredibly unfulfilled.
So one bright and sunny winter day, I made a call and got over my fear. I told myself,
“Fuck your excuses, just do it.”
One rainy Saturday evening
My therapist was a middle-aged woman (working mother of 2 full-grown children) who wore dark-rimmed glasses. Her face was gentle, and her eyes were wise. The crease between her eyebrows would tense up as she listened, then soften as she spoke.
We conversed. I unloaded. I expressed my feelings of being overwhelmed. I cried. I sobbed.
Tears flooded my face, just like the raindrops that were running against the windowpane.
I had 3 moments of clarity that I will continually remind myself so I can maintain balance during overwhelming times, keeping myself sane to be a good imperfect mom.
1.) It Takes Time To Adjust
It takes an average of 8 to 12 months for a mom who has returned to work to feel normal again. This is an actual, clinical fact. It takes time.
It was like a light bulb went off in my head. I could have easily read it in an article, but I needed someone (a professional, someone objective, someone with expertise) to tell me that to my face, that it’s normal to feel the way I was feeling.
2.) I am Valued
I told my therapist about my history of perfectionism and my ongoing road to recovery. Her response made me sob.
Childhood perfectionism often arises when the child does not feel she is valued. The child believes that by acting ‘perfectly, ‘she will create value for herself and those around her. When parents constantly praise a child for their maturity (i.e., grades), it can rob them of their childhood.
When I was in Grade 5, a friend of mine gave me the nickname “Mature Girl.” Although it was a joke, there was an element of truth.
I don’t have memories of being just a kid. I always coloured inside the lines, making sure the sky was blue, the sun was yellow, and the trees were green. I would laugh at the kids who coloured their animals purple.
I have to remind myself to let go of the idea that doing everything perfectly will make me valuable. I am valued because I value myself. I don’t want to be a supermom; I want to be a healthy mom.
3.) Keep Writing
I didn’t tell my therapist about my blog or that I’ve been a writer since I could remember. So when she told me to start writing, it made me smile.
She explained that the act of writing is an effective way for perfectionists to balance their emotions.
The right brain is home to emotions and intuition. Perfectionists are often in a state of stress (trying to meet impossible demands and constantly never satisfied), and so their right brain is in chronic overdrive.
The left brain is home to logic and reasoning. Writing helps activate the left brain, countering the emotional side of the overworked right brain.
I’m not afraid anymore
I’ve worked in mental health and did my graduate studies in the field. I fully understood why we need to take care of our mental and psychological health. I’ve encouraged and supported people around me to go to therapy; however, I had never gone myself.
Why?
It’s because I always had this fear that I would appear weak or “crazy.”
However, now I understand this misconception stems from my upbringing and the social and cultural influences that I had growing up. And after that first session, I’ve made strides to become happier, healthier, and more fulfilled.
I hope sharing my story will help remove the stigma associated with mental health issues, giving the courage to anyone who feels overwhelmed, unhappy, or just completely stuck in life to seek help. I firmly believe that those who ask for help demonstrate more strength than those who keep it all in.
So Readers, what are your thoughts on the word “therapy”? Have you gone? What was your perception of it growing up? Do you think your culture has influenced that view? | https://medium.com/modern-parent/how-therapy-helped-me-when-i-went-back-to-work-9b3608fbd77a | ['Katharine Chan', 'Msc', 'Bsc'] | 2020-12-20 21:13:27.234000+00:00 | ['Parents', 'Mental Health', 'Parenting', 'Therapy', 'Motherhood'] |
02 — my song on the radio. today was super eventful and super… | today was super eventful and super boring at the same time somehow. i woke up and the first thing i did was tune into the radio. i was on the radio this morning… WHAT?! somehow my choir teacher got the chance get a project that a group of 5 of us threw together in a week onto Alice 97.3 (shoutout to bay area, ca folks), which is absolutely insane. it was so strange to hear voices that i knew so well from that radio station saying my name… MY name! my voice! it was so surreal, and i have absolutely no idea who heard me sing this morning. such a cool thing to wake up to. today was also the last day of the semester, which means i am now officially on winter break!! YAY!! i can’t believe christmas is only one week away- i’m feeling super unprepared and there are a thousand things i still want to do before christmas, but i really need to stop stressing about it and enjoy the current moment. i woke up early today to hear myself on the radio, which means i was really tired throughout the day. and unfortunately, the coffee i drank in the morning (and tea in the afternoon) only caused me to be shakey and develop a horrible headache. i work at a local accounting firm every afternoon of the school week, but today was extra fun because we were wrapping gifts for a charity that we donate to each year. my evening has consisted of editing a video for my school’s student newsletter, chatting with my parents, and of course, watching a little too much tiktok. i would call it a pretty great day, but i’m definitely ready to get some sleep and see what tomorrow has in store.
throughout the day, one thought simply wouldn’t leave my mind — a thought about a boy. i mentioned in my first entry yesterday that, because no one i know knows about this account, i can share a few things that i wouldn’t normally parade around to all my friends. however, i need to be cautious in case anyone i know does find this eventually. there are two boys that typically inhabit my mind. the first is someone i’m good friends with, and i would never want to risk our friendship, so i’ve never said anything about seeing him as anything other than a friend (besides maybe a brother). when i first started getting to know him, i felt drawn to him but didn’t think there was any chance of him liking me back so i did nothing. now, i feel it’s far too late. there’s more to the story, but that’s the basic gist of it. he and i aren’t necessarily “perfect” for each other and i’m not sure if i could ever realistically see us getting married or being together long-term, but something in me is drawn to him like a magnet and i’ve always cared about him more than i would the average guy friend. maybe someday something will happen with us, but for now, i’m content and i don’t feel the need to “hold out” for him. the second is one that i’ve known for over a decade now, but i haven’t spoken to him in several years. we were close when we were younger, but he moved away and we didn’t really keep in touch. even though it seems sort of crazy since it was so long ago, to this day i have never had stronger feelings for someone or found someone more attractive. and maybe it’s just my mind longing for a simpler time, but part of me hopes for that hallmark movie ending where we reunite sometime later in life and fall in love once again. but most of my thoughts today were not consumed by a specific boy; it was just overall loneliness. in the winter months especially, sometimes a girl just wants a guy to love and to cuddle with. don’t get me wrong — i do like being single and i like my life a lot right now, but since we’ve been in quarantine for so long (and i was working through healing from a messy breakup before quarantine started), i haven’t even talked to a boy that i viewed as having “potential” in forever and i just crave the excitement of liking a boy. i simply want to talk to a guy with that feeling of not knowing where it may lead us. i think a lot of people my age are feeling this way right now; it’s our senior year which is supposed to be full of adventures and risk taking, but instead, the stakes are high and we instead make the mature decision to put aside the exciting parts of senior year in order to keep those around us safe and healthy.
those are my thoughts on this fine friday night. tune in for more tomorrow :) | https://medium.com/@katdiercks/2020-12-18-my-song-on-the-radio-70db9fee0894 | ['Kat Diercks'] | 2020-12-18 00:00:00 | ['Seniors', 'Boys', 'Radio', 'High School', 'Teens'] |
Calgary Council Agrees to Reintroduce Fluoride: What Impact Will It Have? | The city of Calgary will see fluoride return to the public water supply after the Council approved the results of the October 2021 plebiscite. As a result, the implementation of water fluoridation will take place. Consequently, oral health is expected to improve for residents.
The Calgary City Council have ratified the decision to reintroduce fluoride to the public water supply. This was the final hurdle to overcome following the results of an October plebiscite that showed Calgary residents wanted to see fluoride return to the public water supply.
Now that water fluoridation has been approved, the implementation of the system will begin. As a result, there are hopes for an improvement in oral health across Calgary.
Water fluoridation refers to the practice of adding the natural mineral fluoride to the public water supply. The main benefit of water fluoridation is an improvement in dental health. Furthermore, fluoride is a mineral that has proven benefits for dental health.
Water fluoridation is popular in many nations. However, many countries have outright banned the practice. Concerns over fluoridation include potential over-exposure, the ethics behind its use, and the costs involved [1].
Calgary has a complex history with water fluoridation. On Monday 18th October, Calgary residents voted on water fluoridation, which was the seventh vote on the issue in history [2].
Calgarians voted in favour of water fluoridation. The vote resulted in a 62%-38% split [2]. Furthermore, voter turnout was just under 47% of the electorate, equating to 333,888 valid votes [2].
Votes in 1957, 1961, 1966 and 1971 rejected water fluoridation. In 1989, Calgarians voted to add fluoride to the water supply. Moreover, this was upheld in 1999.
In 2011, the Calgary City Council stopped water fluoridation due to economic concerns [3]. Therefore, the 2021 decision has been heralded as a landmark moment for residents.
A plebiscite is not legally binding. Therefore, the final decision over the matter was referred to the Calgary City Council. The Council were expected to ratify this plebiscite. However, there had been concerns over whether or not they would.
In the end, the Council approved the motion 13–2, with only counselors Andre Chabot and Dan McLean dissenting [4]. Therefore, the Council ruled in favor of water fluoridation for Calgary.
Councillor Chabot had complained that the public had not been informed enough on the matter. Subsequently, Chabot has gone as far to say he will be installing a system to block fluoride from entering his water supply [4].
But other counselors cited a mass information drive, frequent news stories and past familiarity with fluoride as reasons to reject Chabot’s concerns.
Councillor Gian-Carlo Carra had originally been against water fluoridation, having been in favor of ending fluoridation in 2011. However, he changed his mind in 2021, due to his belief that the data clearly showed fluoride’s effectiveness [4].
News of the Council’s approval was welcomed by many. Calgary’s Mayor Jyoni Gondek praised the decision. She remarked that “oral health is public health”, and that this decision was an example of Calgary’s commitment to public health [4].
Juliet Guichon, a medical bioethicist at the University of Calgary, was among those to support the campaign to reintroduce fluoride. She thanked the council for their decision.
Guichon said that the decision “demonstrated an acceptance of the scientific consensus opinion based on over 75 years of peer-reviewed research that fluoridation is effective in reducing dental decay” [4].
However, the decision was not met with universal joy. For example, some declared they would seek filtration devices to avoid fluoride. Others took to social media to declare a hope that another plebiscite will be held soon.
Now that the decision has been made, attention has turned towards the implementation of water fluoride. The Council have stated that it will take 18–24 months to set up water fluoridation [4].
There will be an initial cost of $10.1million, with further maintenance costs of $1million per year for the next 20 years [4]. This equates to just $1.32 per resident, per year.
The biggest positive is that Calgary residents should see an improvement in their oral health. Fluoride is consistently praised by dentists. It is an important ingredient in toothpaste too.
Past studies into water fluoride have shown its effectiveness. For example, one study compared the dental health of children in Calgary and Edmonton, where water fluoridation exists [5].
The study found that tooth decay had increased significantly since Calgary stopped water fluoridation, whilst Edmonton’s tooth decay rate had largely remained the same [5]. Therefore, this shows the impact of fluoride.
Guichon has cautioned that it will take “not months, but years” to see a benefit [4]. However, these benefits will surely prove worthwhile. Calgary residents can look forward to improved oral health. This is a milestone moment for Calgary that will be remembered for many years to come.
is a Calgary Dental Clinic that offer many services, including regular check-ups, cavity fillings, and .
Any dental problem should be addressed early, and can be identified at check-ups. This helps to prevent the problem getting worse. So, when further treatment is needed after a check-up, we provide our patients with a clear treatment plan.
The best way of avoiding extra treatment is to have strong oral hygiene. This includes brushing our teeth at least twice a day, flossing regularly, and getting a dental check-up at least twice a year. Avoiding sugary foods and drink and not smoking also helps.
Our Calgary-based dental clinic also follows the . This means our prices are competitive, transparent and affordable. Alberta Dental Fee Guide
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[1] Robbins, O. (2018). Is Fluoride Bad for You? Or Is Adding Fluoride to Water A Good Thing?. Available: https://foodrevolution.org/blog/fluoride-in-water-dangers/. Last accessed: 20 thNovember 2021.
[2] Elections Calgary. (2021). 2021 Results — Calgary General Election. Available: https://www.calgary.ca/election/results/2021-results.html. Last accessed: 20 thNovember 2021.
[3] O’Neill, B., Kapoor, T., & McLaren, L. (2018). Politics, Science, and Termination: A Case Study of Water Fluoridation Policy in Calgary in 2011. Review of Policy Research. 36(1), p99–120.
[4] Toy, A. (2021). Calgary to reintroduce fluoride to water following city council vote. Available: https://globalnews.ca/news/8374757/calgary-reintroduce-fluoride-water-city-council-vote/. Last accessed: 20 thNovember 2021.
[5] McLaren, L., Patterson, S. K., Faris, P., Chen, G., Thawer, S., Figueiredo, R., Weijs, C., McNeil, D., Waye, A., & Potestio, M. (2021). Fluoridation cessation and children’s dental caries: A 7-year follow-up evaluation of Grade 2 schoolchildren in Calgary and Edmonton, Canada. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology. (Pre-publication issue): https://doi.org/10.1111/cdoe.12685. | https://medium.com/@taradaledentalgl/calgary-council-agrees-to-reintroduce-fluoride-what-impact-will-it-have-e2a4abba693 | ['Taradale Dental'] | 2021-11-23 04:17:42.791000+00:00 | ['Dental Care', 'Dentistry', 'Oral Health', 'Dental'] |
Starting An Online Business: 5 Things I’d Do Differently | We all have regrets. Some big, some small but regrets nonetheless. Disappointments feel even worse, though, when money is lost, and you’re in a race against time trying to make your business work.
When I look back at the things I could’ve changed when starting my online business, I shake my head. I could’ve saved myself a lot of headaches, driven more traffic to my site in a shorter amount of time, increased profitability, and overall had greater confidence that I was moving in the right direction. So, that’s in today’s post; I’m sharing the top five things I would’ve done differently if I started over today. I hope that you can use these insights to your advantage and turn my regrets into your successes.
About My Online Business
My name is Jenna Phillips, and I’m the owner and founder of VegasPrimer.com. My business is booking bottle service reservations at the pool parties and nightclubs in Las Vegas. As an avid club-goer and VIP host, I created my site to help visitors to Vegas better understand how the clubs work. I spend most of my day helping clients pick the right clubs and table options for their group size, budget, and music preference. My current business model is 100% commission based.
Regret #1: Choosing A Geographical Name
It turns out my first regret was also the first business decision I ever made. In deciding on the company’s name, I wanted something that I liked, but I also wanted to make sure it was memorable. Unfortunately, what I didn’t think about was the type of business name I was creating.
For instance, will the type of name you choose be descriptive (i.e., E*Trade), made-up (like Xerox), or geographical (i.e., Arizona Tile)? There are other types too, but these are some of the most popular. For my brand, I wanted to let visitors know what they’d find on my site: a guidebook to Las Vegas. So the name I chose ended up being a combination of geographical (Vegas) and descriptive (Primer). So, why does the type of name matter? The business name you choose may impact your rights under the law, and even your ability to register your trademark. At least in the US, anyway.
I admit registering my mark wasn’t initially on my radar, but I quickly realized that it would be a good idea. For example, let’s say a competitor starts using your business name on their website to essentially “steal” traffic from your business searches. Not only is this infringing on your mark, but it’s also competing unfairly. If you don’t register your trademark, you may still have some recourse, but a registered mark typically provides more legal protection as well as other advantages.
Here’s what I didn’t see coming with the trademark application, though. Using geographic or descriptive terms in your business name may make for a weaker mark and is often more challenging to register. It’s still possible to get approval, but the process may take longer and cost you more money. And just because you submit a trademark application, it doesn’t mean it will get approved.
Regret #2: Entering A Cyclical Industry
For the best chance of trademark approval, you may want to select an arbitrary (the name has meaning, but when applied to the business, it’s completely unrelated, like Apple for personal computers) or a made-up business name. From my understanding, these types of marks provide the highest level of protection. Full disclaimer, though, I’m not a lawyer, so it’s best to speak with a trademark attorney if you’re interested in registering a mark for your business.
Unfortunately, we all know too well now that when a pandemic strikes, some industries’ revenues come to a screeching halt. As my business is in the travel sector, I haven’t had income for months. And it’s not looking like that will change anytime soon as the clubs aren’t currently slated to reopen until the last phase.
But it’s not just a virus that can cause problems for a business. It’s also economic recessions. For example, while Vegas is going strong when the economy is good, it also takes a beating during a downturn. So when you’re deciding on the industry for your online business, you might want to consider how cyclical it is. If you don’t want to stomach the ups and downs, it’s better to select a sector that can weather the storm.
Regret #3: Launching With Limited SEO Experience
Examples of industries that have fared well during a disaster are banking, education, streaming services, and leisure activities like camping and fishing. Some of these sectors may be worth considering for starting an online business as they’ll provide revenue protection during catastrophic times. If I had to do it all over again, I would think long and hard before jumping into a cyclical industry. One good thing about Vegas, though, is that it tends to recover quite quickly. Fingers crossed for a quick recovery this time too!
If I could go back in time, the first thing I’d do before I started making my website would be to take a course on Search Engine Optimization. Now I did have some beginner knowledge from my first online business, but some things have changed dramatically since then. (It was 2009, after all!)
Regret #4: Not Focusing Enough On Content
With my current site, I got a hard reminder that it’s essential to set up your website correctly, as it can impact your rankings in the search results and thus your traffic. And even though it can feel like there’s a lot to learn about SEO, it’s so much easier to do it right the first time than to go back and fix it. You’ll save yourself a lot of time in the future, too, if you prioritize it now. There are plenty of books and classes you can take to learn SEO. If you’re just getting started, Google offers a fantastic guide called the SEO Starter Guide. That said, if you don’t want to spend your time learning, you may want to consider hiring an SEO consultant instead. Either way, you’ll ensure that your site is following best practices.
Regret #5: Trying To Be Perfect
Looking back, I wish I would’ve prioritized content creation over sales. By that, I mean, I wouldn’t have offered a way to book reservations through my site for at least the first year. By doing this, I could’ve just focused on delivering value through my posts and gotten to the content and traffic levels that I wanted sooner. I could’ve even written articles in advance for publication over the next year as well. This strategy would’ve helped me to grow the site faster, which would’ve ultimately led to increased revenue over what I have now. Additionally, it would’ve allowed me to help more people coming to Vegas, which is my primary goal for the site.
Instead, I got bogged down in booking reservations and hardly had any time left over to write. In the beginning, I felt that focusing on bookings was most important as it helped me to determine if the business was even viable. However, I quickly realized that the more traffic I got, the more feasible the company became. And thus why I wish now that I would’ve focused on content first. Of course, one way around this bottleneck is to hire writers. But with that comes additional monetary investment and perhaps some unknowns in the writing quality as well. Unfortunately, when I was starting, this wasn’t an option for me.
Okay, so I fully acknowledge that I still struggle with perfectionism. I’m sure it stems from my school years when anything less than an A was “not living up to my full potential.” Unfortunately, this need to be perfect has followed me into adulthood and impacts everything I do, including writing blog posts. There’s just something in me that makes me want to edit posts a bajillion times before hitting publish. I suppose it’s just important to me that my writing is clear, and visitors don’t leave my site with any unanswered questions. Being this thorough, though, means I spend a lot of time working on an article. For instance, there have been times when it’s taken me an entire month to finish one piece. Although some of those posts were close to 5,000 words, so they’re quite detailed.
Of course, there’s a catch to all this perfectionism. In the amount of time that I spend writing one post, I could’ve written many. And even more importantly, I could’ve helped more visitors coming to Las Vegas. So at a certain point, all of this editing and trying to write as clear as possible starts reaching a point of diminishing returns. Lately, I’ve found it helpful to remind myself that writing a good post is good enough and to move on to another task. So try not to worry about being perfect when you’re first starting. You can always go back and edit at a later date anyway. And as long as you’re providing value to your customers with each post, that’s what matters most. | https://medium.com/@logo-com/starting-an-online-business-5-things-id-do-differently-c039c8dc9daa | [] | 2021-06-17 16:59:29.392000+00:00 | ['Founder Stories', 'Business Lessons', 'Online Business'] |
Move Over Hades, There’s A New Musical in Town | Hadestown, the folk-operatic broadway hit that retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a Great Depression post-apocalyptic love story promises to do for myth what Hamilton did for history; the success of Hadestown, plus the buzz generating for Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian, the 3-hour long operatic love story between the eponymous emperor and his beloved Antinous, indicate that the time is ripe for more classically-inspired musicals. Here’s a roundup of eight more prodcutions that attempt to cash in on the classics trend:
1. Theogonytown
A jazzy, all-puppet spectacle that transforms the generational battles between the Greek gods into a modern tale where the characters must commit unspeakable acts to survive the streets of 1920’s New York. Breakaway hits include the up-tempo “Castration Station” and the heart-wrenching “Please Don’t Eat My Baby.”
2. Homertown
The director of this post-feminist musical, an adaptation of Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey, makes the brave and novel choice to use male actors to depict the all-female cast. This jukebox musical, consisting entirely of covers of Ani DiFranco and Amanda Palmer songs, illustrates moments from Homer’s life, including her illegitimate birth, her contest with Hesiod, and her sizzling affair with the real-life Mentor. Keep an eye out for the literal deus ex machina of the second act, when the actor playing Homer casts off his wig and emerges from the brilliantly-engineered floating scroll as an elderly blind man.
3. Hamiltown
This stunning spectacle imagines what would have happened if Alexander Hamilton had traveled back in time to the near-apocalyptic days of the First Triumvirate. This completely sung-through rap-opera, featuring hits like “Julius Caesar, Sir” and “The Cubiculum Where it Happens,” is sure to have adults and children alike learning to love loving history again again.
4. Supplianttown
Set in a post-Weinstein Hollywood, this heartrending production depicts the survivors of the Trojan War awaiting their fates and debating how difficult it can be to parse consent. Keep an ear out for the empowering “It’s hard to be a man,” the bewitching “It’s complicated,” and the catchy “What about his career killing my entire family?”
5. Ghosttown
There’s a ghost terrorizing the theater of Dionysus, and only one person can get to the bottom of it — Helen of Troy! This true-crime pop opera — which one reviewer dubbed “Phantom of the Opera but in Athens” — boasts authentic theatre masks and a nine-hour runtime.
6. Chicagotown
A reimagining of the musical Chicago is set in a post-post-apocalyptic futuristic Chicago—one that has relied on the trappings of Ancient Rome to rebuild her society. Characters wear togas, but the songs are basically the same as those in the original Chicago. Hits include “When you’re good to Mater” and “All that jazz (but with togas).”
7. Polistown
A Glass-like concept musical that examines the ethics of democracy, Polistown enchants with a bewitching dreamscape consisting mainly of a boys’ choir reciting passages from Plato’s Republic—in the original Ancient Greek! In an homage to sympotic Greek pottery, movement artists in full-body rust-colored leotards dance against a black backdrop. Smart audiences will rejoice at the sublimity that is reached deep in the 7th act, when the dancing team recreates various ceramic “dog defecating” scenes as the choir recites Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
8. Cretetown
This Porter-esque musical extravaganza, set in apocalyptic-adjacent 1980’s Manhattan, recasts the travails of Daedalus and Icarus as a metaphor for the excesses of Wall Street. Especially clever choices include casting a Donald Trump lookalike to play Minos and using the Lower East Side to depict the Labyrinth. Hits include “It’s Too Darn Hot This Close To The Sun,” “Master of Invention” and “Master of Invention, reprise, AKA I Need A Man to Make a Suit so I can Fuck a Bull, I Need a Bull-Fucking Suit.”
Sarah Scullin is thinking of quitting classics for the economic security of the theater. | https://medium.com/idle-musings/move-over-hades-theres-a-new-musical-in-town-6f43cb77ab50 | ['Sarah Scullin'] | 2020-02-20 15:38:34.209000+00:00 | ['Satire', 'Music', 'Classics', 'Mythology', 'Theatre'] |
News Brief — USCIS Updates Discretionary Criteria for Case-by-Case Interview Determinations of Adjustment of Status Applications Based on Refugee or Asylee Status | On December 15, 2020, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced updated guidance expanding the discretionary criteria USCIS officers use to determine whether to interview applicants filing Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status, based on refugee or asylee status.
The updated criteria are well within the parameters of USCIS’ regulatory authority to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether an interview is necessary to determine the admissibility of an alien applying for lawful permanent resident status under INA § 209. The updates do not change the eligibility requirements to adjust status.
The list of interview criteria can be found in the Policy Manual, Volume 7, Part L, Chapter 5, Part B (https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-l-chapter-5). The updated list provides greater parity with the criteria USCIS applies in determining whether to interview other adjustment of status applicants. Each determination by USCIS to waive or require an interview will continue to be made at the discretion of the USCIS officer on a case-by-case basis. While the updated criteria may result in more applicants requested to appear for an interview, the changes are necessary to help ensure program integrity and support USCIS’ efforts to detect and prevent fraud and risks of harm to the United States.
Please feel free to reach me at: [email protected] if you have any questions regarding this article. Thank you ^^ | https://medium.com/@nicolazjy/news-brief-uscis-updates-discretionary-criteria-for-case-by-case-interview-determinations-of-85724bc3e63 | ['Jiayun', 'Nicola'] | 2020-12-15 15:24:37.642000+00:00 | ['Uscis', 'Refugees', 'Asylum', 'Asylum Seekers', 'Immigration'] |
Is Consciousness…Separate From The Body? | And as we touched on these milestones, we hinted at two basic rules of thumb for when, historically, the concept of consciousness experiences an upgrade:
When our understanding of the body changes — in particular the parts of the body that are thought to be part of the mind. For example, Galen’s idea that the brain contained four chambers with ‘animal spirits’ that transmitted the will of a soul which resided in the surrounding brain tissue came from experiments that increased his knowledge of human anatomy.
When new analogies to the human body appear. For example, Plato’s view that the body has three souls came from an analogy between the body and his new division of the state — like the state has three types of people, there are three souls.
In this post, we will discuss the ‘middle’ period in the history of consciousness, which properly starts with the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650).
Descartes, in the primitive, pre-Ray-Ban era.
Descartes managed to do two things that are of crucial importance to the present-day understanding of consciousness:
a). Be one of the first to use the term ‘consciousness’ in its modern sense.
As mentioned in the first part of this post, the term consciousness comes from the latin con- which means ‘with’, and -scio, which means ‘to know’, as in knowing together. And before the time of Descartes, people would use the term in a way that meant conscious with someone. As in, I was conscious with you of this blog post, which meant I knew together with you of this blog post. Descartes changed all that by using the term consciousness to mean one’s own mental processes.
b). Be the first to remove the soul from the physiological processes of the body, and think of the body as a machine.
Until Descartes, it was largely believed that the soul was the driving force behind all of the bodily processes as well as the cognitive ones, but Descartes lived in a time when the idea of the clockwork universe was getting a lot of traction, fueled by the works of Galileo and Kepler. This was the view that the universe functioned like a mechanical device ruled by mathematical laws. Descartes took this idea and applied it to the human body. He came to see the body as machine as well, that functioned based on cause-and-effect laws like the rest of the material world. In his view, the only thing that did not follow the same causal path as the rest of the universe did was the soul, and so he reasoned that it had to be made of a different substance then the material world. This was the basis of the so-called dualist philosophy of mind that was to be so influential, and continues to be into the modern day: The idea that the body and the mind are separate substances.
Interestingly, Descartes still held on to the view that the brain was filled with ‘animal spirits’, which Vesalius (who we mentioned in part I of this series) and other scholars had completely debunked decades prior. Descartes proposed that the soul communicated with the body via the brain’s pineal gland, which was suspended deep within the brain in a whirl of “animal spirits,” dancing and jigging “like a balloon captive above a fire”(1).This part of his theory didn’t get much support even in his day, but you can’t win ’em all.
For Descartes, light that reaches the retina stimulates the ‘animal spirits’ which travel through the optic nerves and activate the jigging pineal gland. Can’t get enough of this word…Jigging.
Descartes was reported to have kept a mechanical replica of his daughter with him wherever he went.
Now, did Descartes have any help in reaching his revolutionary conclusions? A little known fact about Descartes is that he was also part of the first generation to have around complex automata around him, or what we might call the granddaddy of robots. These were mechanical machines that would look and act like people or animals. In fact, there was a rumour going around that Descartes was actually a builder of automata, and had made a life-size, mechanical replica of his daughter, who had died when she was an infant (2). Descartes was reported to have kept this replica with him wherever he went, until eventually the crew of a ship he was sailing with found it in his lodgings. Terrified that what they had discovered was made with magic, the crew destroyed ‘the mechanical daughter’ and threw it overboard. Descartes died a few months after this supposed episode.
Whether or not this story is true, there is no doubt that Descartes was influenced by the idea of the clockwork universe and the existence of automata in his time to formulate his radical idea that the body was a machine. Even when he discusses how the soul influences the movements of the body via the pineal gland, he uses concepts derived from the mechanics of automata. For example, he states that when the pineal gland moves due to the influences of the soul, it opens and closes valves that are found on the walls of the ventricles, which in turn determines the flow of the animal spirits which contract or relax muscles (3).
And here, we find traces of the first rule of thumb for when the concept of consciousness changes, that we mentioned in the first part of this series:
The concept of consciousness changes when the analogies that are available to us for understanding the body change.
In this case, it was the analogy between the clockwork universe, automata and the human body that led to the idea that consciousness was purely psychological, and the body purely physical, which is the basis for the dualist philosophy of mind that still stands strong to this day.
Joseph Priestley believed that the mind arose from nervous tissue — specifically from the brain.
Not long after Descartes, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) published his work on the Universal Laws of Motion, which completely revolutionised the sciences, but it took about a hundred years for their consequences to be felt on the philosophy of mind, and one of the first scholars to draw a connection (if not the first) was the British polymath Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). Priestley recognised that by introducing the idea that forces that acted upon matter’s constituent parts, Newton had completely uprooted the concept of matter as it had been understood during Descartes’ time. Using the Newtonian principles of matter as foundation, Priestley announced that there was no need to separate the mind from solid matter at all — they were two sides of the same coin. Priestley had an uncannily modern view of the origins of consciousness: He stated that “Thought is a property of the nervous system, or rather of the brain.” (4) That’s a noteworthy statement to be making 250 years ago! Since damage to the brain leads to deficits in mental faculties, it seemed to him a rational conclusion.
Consciousness was not the only topic that Priestley was a visionary in.
In Priestley’s time, it was common to think of the body as somehow hindering the abilities of the mind, which many still equated with the soul. The standard view in that age was that once the soul was free of the body, it would finally be free of earthly limitations. But Priestley saw that as nonsense — there was no account of the mind without the matter that supports it. Even though he was definitely ahead of his time, in Priestley, we see that it was possible to have quite a modern account of the mind in the 18th century. And much of that possibility was owed to the second rule of thumb that we mentioned in Part I of this series:
The concept of consciousness changes when the knowledge that we have of the human body changes.
In this case, it was knowledge that existed about matter in general, which invariably included the human body, that helped Priestley reach his conclusion. This new information came from Newton’s work, as well as from some of Priestley’s contemporaries, including R.J. Boscovich (1711–1787), who was regarded as one of the fathers of modern atom theory, and spoke about forces operating between ‘points of matter’ that made up the entire solid universe. (4) Priestley drew from these works to ascertain that the mind (i.e. consciousness) is a product of matter organized in particular way — specifically, in the way we find in the human nervous tissue.
Despite Priestley’s insights, the development of the concept of consciousness does not follow a linear path, and there were many in his time and beyond that still shared some of the beliefs of the mind that went back to ventricular psychology. But in the 18th century, we begin to see such bursts of intellect shedding light on what was to become standard understanding in the 20th century concept of consciousness.
Still, these were early days. Consciousness had yet to evolve from a relatively ‘fresh’ term with its origins in Cartesian thought a century prior, and mind and soul were still the words most used to denote the processes that we nowadays attribute to consciousness. Moreover, many discoveries were yet to be made before the foundation for our modern view of consciousness would be complete. This included the cell theory — the theory that all living things are made up of cells and the products that they create. We will tackle some of these discoveries and how they influenced the definition of consciousness in Part III of this series. | https://medium.com/is-consciousness/is-consciousness-separate-from-the-body-8bc84f5a8ec6 | ['Narcis Marincat'] | 2020-07-28 15:32:32.160000+00:00 | ['Neuroscience', 'History Of Consciousness', 'Philosophy', 'Consciousness', 'Philosophy Of Mind'] |
Trump’s Dynasty — A Failed State. What are your thoughts? | What are your thoughts?
12/23/20
Is Trump trying to hold on to the presidency?
It depends.
The presidency for a time. The time needed to set up Don Jr., Ivanka and Jared, and Eric as a dynasty.
Yes, it is possible to do.
But…
He is using every wiggle, every shape shift, and side shift to help his roller coaster to flatten the line so he can achieve his goal of a dictatorship.
He has the piss to do it, I am just not convinced that he has the vinegar! What do you think?
The real sad story is one quarter of a million people that have died from COVID-19. He doesn’t even acknowledge them!
By Christmas it will be over 300,000. By the inauguration the dead will pile up to be over 400,000!
Can you stomach that? Or can you now say, “Enough is Enough.”
Remember that is more people than have died in all of our wars and it has only been 11 months.
Are you going to be one of those that dies all alone, without being able to say goodbye to your parents, your spouse, your children, your friends?
Trump has not given a damn about the people that have died so far why would he change now.
Two things he needs to occur: poverty and chaos/confusion.
What will he get for his conniving and abuse of power?
A Country, the United States of America!
Even worse are the Republican Senators and Representatives that are spouting his lies and confusion to aid him.
I have written two articles in the last weeks. One discussed the money he owes to Russia. The second was his activities with the Russian Jewish Mafia and the mob bosses in the US.
Dollars on the Danube. Six things you didn’t want to know… | by Craig Martineau | Current Events | Nov, 2020 | Medium
Master the Insanely Powerful Endgame of Trump | by Craig Martineau | Current Events | Medium
Trump is in Trouble Again! Still? It is Good that He is His Own Worst Enemy! | by Craig Martineau | Current Events | Medium
His defense is his mob of supporters that will BELIEVE AND SAY anything he says. HHOW HHHHHow can anyone believe that slop without some critical thinking.
With Trumplicans of his party, the SA Sturmabteilung (the German SS), the storm troopers or “Assault Division” we may see Trump’s dictatorship come to pass.
Our military stated they will not intervene.
Trump’s cohorts are planning to install martial law on January 6th when Congress has to meet to approve the results of the Electoral College.
Our Senators and Representatives are conniving for some other way to change the voice of the people. I believe that Trumplicans that engage in actions against the U.S.A. should be sanctioned if they hold professional degrees and lose their government seats.
We also know that Russia has installed complex new software in our command-and-control computer. They started this in March. That gave them enough time I believe to take control. I also believe that these actions were preparatory in case Trump lost the election after which the game is on.
That opinion is born out, I believe by the actions that Trump is going to take before he departs the scene (this timeline includes time that he spends after he leaves office).
Why do I think this? He just vetoed the Defense Spending Bill. This adds another layer of complexity to our planning and his evilness. Is a foreign bad actor involved?
One major piece of information that the TV pundits are not talking about is Trump’s informal army. By the looks of the above image, they appear to be hearty. Training may be lacking but weapons and orneriness account for a lot in the opening salvos. They have the choices of choosing the date and time. With troops stationed around the White House the civilian force could choose another location.
I will follow this article with another one that is a deep dive into some other activities trump engaged in besides the Deutsche Bank. I am going to harass as much as I can.
Please stay tuned. Trump may be out of office, but he is not about to discontinue his evil ways.
“Trump is raising money under the guise of “stopping the steal.” Hardworking Americans are being fleeced out of their savings so that Trump can maintain his extravagant lifestyle post-presidency. The last number I heard was that he had raised $300 million. He 3 weeks to go.
Trump is drafting his pardons and commutations” to exonerate all the criminals around him, including Rudy Giuliani and Ivana Trump’s children. He will even try to pardon himself.
“That 4-year grift is almost over. In true Trump fashion, he has planted a garden of new schemes. Each of his “flowers” the country less safe, less strong, less stable.
He doesn’t care about the country and never did. He doesn’t even pretend anymore. All that has changed is that he and his cronies have stepped up the pace during which they continue developing their outrageous criminality.
His laziness during these times should be enough to impeach him.
I hope that the new DA puts manpower on these people and throws the book at them.
The longer they are around, the longer the deep swamp will remain.
Thanks for stopping.
Craig | https://medium.com/current-events-and-the-future/trumps-dynasty-a-failed-state-da21ba058b02 | ['Craig Martineau'] | 2020-12-24 04:19:12.449000+00:00 | ['Public Trust', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Crime Criminal'] |
NCAA CAUTIONS PILOTS, OTHERS OVER ADVERSE WEATHER IN NIGERIAN AIRPORTS | The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has issued Advisory Circular to caution Pilots, Airline Operators and others on severe dust haze/fog phenomenon prevalent in Nigerian airports.
This adverse weather condition expected occurrence is to subsist from October in the far North; November over the North Central; and December over the Southern part of the country. In addition, early morning fog may also be experienced in the months ahead especially along the coastal areas in the South.
With the issuance of this circular signed by the Director General, Capt Musa Nuhu, the NCAA-AEROMET-29 of August 2020 is accordingly cancelled.
This weather advisory circular is necessary to bring forth the evolving weather information to the attention of all stakeholders who need to perform their roles.
Therefore, to ensure safe and efficient flight operations during this period, Pilots, Operators and Air Traffic Controllers Pilots are directed to observe series of responsibilities enumerated below forthwith:
(I.) Flight Crews/Operators and Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) shall be conversant with each aerodrome weather minima and ensure strict adherence to the requirements;
(II) Air Traffic Controllers may temporarily close airspace when hazardous weather conditions such as heavy fog or severe dust haze reducing the visibility to below airport operating minimal are observed or forecasted by Nimet;
(III.) Pilots/Flight Crew Members shall obtain adequate departure, en-route and destination weather information and briefing from Nimet Aerodrome Offices prior to flight operations; and
(IV.) Pilots shall exercise maximum restraint whenever adverse weather is observed or forecast by Nimet and briefed passengers accordingly. Travelling public are however urged to exercise restraint and show understanding in this yuletide month as flights may be delayed or cancelled on account of weather situations.
From the foregoing, the regulatory authority will expect strict compliance to this Advisory Circular as violation would be viewed seriously
Signed:
Sam Adurogboye
GM, Public Relations. | https://medium.com/@theasovilla/ncaa-cautions-pilots-others-over-adverse-weather-in-nigerian-airports-be2c4e7790b1 | ['Government Of Nigeria'] | 2020-12-01 13:01:29.546000+00:00 | ['NCAA', 'Weather', 'Aviation', 'Nigeria'] |
Should You Stay In Your Lane as a Writer? | Stay in your lane can mean a couple of things.
Sometimes it means minding your own business. Keeping your head down and just doing your own thing and not worrying about what other people are doing.
Sometimes it means staying within the boundaries of a field of focus — especially if you’re an entrepreneurial type. Being a specialist, instead of a jack-of-all-trades.
It’s one of those platitudes that kind of hits me wrong — but also sort of makes sense.
I mean, if you know what it is you want to do, it makes sense to focus on that and do it really well. Willy nilly branching out can be problematic.
I’ve had friends try so hard to make a go of writing and fail because they couldn’t settle into a groove.
But I kind of hate the idea of someone else telling me that I have to stay in my own lane. Especially with regard to writing.
One of the things I love about blogging is that I can write about any old thing that comes to my mind and there isn’t anyone to tell me I can’t.
And if Neil Gaiman can write everything from picture books to books for adults, why can’t I?
Maybe I won’t have as many readers when I write about certain topics. Maybe I won’t be paid as much. But if I learn something or I enjoy myself or have an interest in establishing myself in that lane (so to speak) then that’s okay.
For writers, I think there’s room for both having a lane — or a niche — and also exploring outside of that lane.
The key is to know where your lane is, so that you can branch out on your own terms.
If you’re a non-fiction writer, your lane is the topic or topics that you write about regularly and with authority.
For instance, my non-fiction writing lanes are writing in general, but especially fiction writing. Also online business, productivity, and the business of writing.
If you’re not sure, or you’re a new writer, ask yourself these questions:
What are you good at?
What could you teach someone else?
What do people come to you for help with?
What do you spend your time learning?
What are you passionate about?
What topic did you read the most about last year?
One way to find your lane is to post this on social media:
What do you think I’m good at?
I get it. It’s going to feel seriously awkward. Like you’re fishing for compliments. But if you can’t figure it out for yourself, you’ll get some interesting responses if you’re brave enough.
If you’ve written blog posts already on a pretty broad array of topics, take a look at the analytics for them. Which are getting the most traffic? Which are getting the most interaction from readers?
Those posts are probably written in your lane.
Did you have fun writing them? This is an important question, because none of this matters if you’re not having fun.
Your lane is the lane where you want to be.
Let me say that one more time.
Your lane is the lane where you want to be.
Even if you are an absolute authority in a specific topic and you could teach the whole world something about it, if you don’t want to write about it, it’s not your lane.
You do not want to get yourself in a situation where you’ve built an audience who is expecting work from you on a specific subject and you’re making money writing on that subject — and you hate the work.
By the way, this goes for fiction writers as well. I’ve known fiction writers who’ve found success writing books they weren’t happy writing and struggled to shift gears.
That’s a trap that’s very difficult to get out of.
So, one more time for the writers in the back. Your lane is the lane where you want to be. Even if that’s not the lane where you are currently an expert.
We’re clear on that, right?
Changing Lanes Out of Impatience
Here’s what I see happen pretty often.
A writer starts writing on a subject they like a lot. They write a few posts. Or maybe they write an ebook. Or they write a novel. And they don’t get the kind of traction they want.
Nothing goes viral. Or they don’t make any money. (Or not as much as they thought they would) Or the book they self-published flops. Or they don’t get an agent.
So, they change lanes.
They start writing on a different topic. And nothing goes viral, etc.
They don’t feel like this lane works for them the way they want it to, either.
So they change lanes. Again.
The problem is that this person is trying to get from point A to point Z and they keep getting off at the first exit and going back to the start, then taking a different route.
They’re moving, and they’re logging miles, but they’re not actually making progress. They aren’t sticking with anything long enough to actually get good at it.
(Their starts might be getting better though, after doing them so many times. So there’s that.)
Here’s the thing about Neil Gaiman and his writing everything from picture books through adult novels. Somewhere in the beginning of his learning how to write, he stuck with something long enough to become a good writer. Then he branched out.
I remember reading that he had the idea for The Graveyard Book (a young adult book) for twenty years and had to wait until he was a good enough writer to actually write it.
Changing Lanes With Intention
What if, instead of changing lanes completely, because you’re impatient with how things are going, you changed lanes with intention.
You start out writing in your lane, about the topic that you’re very sure you want to write about. The lane you love.
Then, sometimes you branch out and add a new lane.
These are sometimes called shoulders, especially if they’re semi-related to the topic you’re already writing about. If I write about marketing, for instance, I’m writing in a shoulder lane to writing.
Writing middle grade is kind of a shoulder of writing young adult. It’s different, but not like crazy different.
But sometimes I write about my eating disorder. Or about taking care of my parents-in-law who both have Alzheimer’s and live with my husband and I. Or about being a soccer mom.
I’m knocking around an idea for a picture book about a spider that lives outside my office window.
Those are topics that are just entirely outside of my lane.
When I write on those topics, it’s because I have something I want to say. I know that those posts will get less traffic than blog posts that I write that are in my lane. But I don’t mind.
There are real benefits to leaving your lane sometimes.
Taking a break from my lane keeps you sharp. You might have to do research when you write about something you’re less familiar with. You’ll have to think in different ways. That’s good for your brain.
And you’ll find connections between the lanes sometimes that you never would have seen otherwise. That’s always very cool.
And it’s fun. It feeds the rebel soul. | https://medium.com/the-write-brain/should-you-stay-in-your-lane-as-a-writer-735517e5769b | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2019-08-16 15:40:40.696000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity', 'Work', 'Writing'] |
Dear Black Student Affairs Professionals and College Administrators, Let’s Talk. | IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A Higher Education Family Photo — A Mixture of brilliant Black cis and trans folks wearing a variety of colors. Joy is present.
Dear Black Student Affairs Professionals and Administrators,
Image Description: “Hi folks! It requires energy, time, and risk to write these pieces. Please consider tipping. Make it a one time tip or a monthly pledge. “ — cash.me/$CodyCharles, @CodyCharles (Venmo), or paypal.me/CodyCharles
We are living in scary times. Times when emotions, wants, needs are all in conflict. We are in a pandemic that continues to shift how we live and create every day. A pandemic that is disproportionately killing Black people. A roaring pandemic as we fight against police brutality. This is not normal. Most of us don’t know what to feel — angry, disappointed, hopeless, frustrated or even numb with fear. We don’t know where to direct our generational rage or how to let joy seep into our reality — a reality already dampened with misery. We are here. Hoping to have a miraculous turnaround on our campuses, however, that turnaround is not coming. We must deal with what’s in front of us. We must be bold, righteous and willing to risk and lose. We must be radically honest and radically together.
As a Black disabled fat queer non-binary femme human, I want to help start a critical conversation within in Student Affairs and the greater higher education community. I chose to do this by exploring positions and hierarchy. Remember, none of these hierarchies serve us, AND this is currently where we are.
If you are a Black Upper Level Administrator at your institution, please do not fall for the tricks of white supremacy. You’ve spent years pleasing white people to get to the position you are in, and whiteness knows you will do whatever it takes to keep what you got, even if that means stomping on the backs of Black folks beneath you. Whiteness will make you feel powerful and strong, specifically, during times of unrest. Whiteness will come to you for all discussions and decisions regarding difference — Blackness, queerness and transness, ableism, classism and policies regarding undocumented peoples. Before you know it, you are responsible to everyone and everything with very little resources and no parachute — you will be the fall person when things don’t work out. Whiteness is both strategic and easily read. It understands the system we live in, and how to use the system to keep Black people in isolation, in silence and in a continuous fight among each other. Whiteness will center you in ways that feels good but is wholly deceitful and murderous. Whiteness understands you as one of their greatest creations.
Remember, it is your responsibility to create more room for Black folks on your campus to take up space and directly contribute to bettering the lives of all Black folks on campus. Protect Black Midlevel Professionals and New Professionals who are loud around Black liberation. Move away from the colonized thinking around relationships and boundaries. You need to have intimate relationships with Black folks all around campus, no matter the title. Protect the Black risk-takers and truth-tellers who most often happen to be Black women and Black queer and trans folks. They are the ones who create more space for you to move in your current position. Remember they’re risking and losing for all Black folks, including you! Make friends with the Black risk-takers and truth-tellers. Be in communication with them at all times. Love them, affirm them and leverage their risk with your assumed power. Remember why you do what you do!
If you are a Black Midlevel Professional, you probably feel trapped and fearful of everything and everyone. You have no agency, however, you are expected to carry out the dehumanizing policies and procedures of the institution. Remember that you have choices. You can be bold. If you’re seeking justice and equity, your life requires you to be radically honest — so be radically honest with yourselves. Be transparent with your colleagues and the folks you supervise. Take care of your Black supervisees. Remember, you do have small pockets of decision making under your discretion. Routinely, offer days off to your (Black) supervisees, check-in as often as you can and protect their labor and energy in this time — when additional tasks are expected to get done with less, say “no” on their behalf. Remember to school new professionals on the workings of campus politics — who’s in relationship with who, names of known racist and anti-Black colleagues, organizations to be in community with and help fill in gaps around Black liberation…or be willing to learn from new professionals on Black liberation.
Moreover, we’re the group who’s most likely to be involved in professional organizations. Pay attention to those organizations that move in counterproductive ways. They make the bare minimum seem urgent and worthy of celebration. They glorify the importance of community that is clearly not intended for everyone. They will make money decisions over people decisions all day long. And liberation is nary a goal.
If you are a New Black Professional, continue to push the old heads — the ones who no longer know what’s best for Black people. However, remember the system of oppression is alive and thriving within higher education. Remember those barriers and challenges that make your life difficult to live are still present in the higher education structure. Get to know the system intimately, and let that influence the ways you push the Black folks who have not evolved their personal politic around Black lives. Bring your full selves everywhere — staff meetings, appointments with students, committees and taskforces and on your social media accounts. Be loud, and be strategic! Take time to unpack your undergraduate experience, and make sense of the ways oppression shaped your collegiate experience. Reflecting on your experiences will help you be a stronger risk-taker and truth-teller once you start your new position. And don’t get me wrong, many Midlevel and Upper level Administrators need to do this reflection activity as well.
Questions to think about-
What made you choose higher education as a career path? Think critically and thoroughly. Have you ever experienced a social justice training without the presence of white people? What is the impact? Who are your Black mentors? What is their personal politic? How do they treat Black women, Black femmes, Black queer and trans folks? How do you engage Black femmetors? (radical Black queer and trans folks who risk on behalf of all Black lives)
Imagine us all living and moving in alignment. Imagine trusting Black folks at dynamic intersections more than the white people we idolize. Imagine we call a meeting to talk about the state of affairs in student affairs and the greater higher education community. Imagine Black cishet folks listening to Black queer humans — Black queer women, Black non-binary people, Black trans women and all the queerness inside, outside and around these labels. Imagine us fighting for the most vulnerable folks within our community. Imagine us centering our most vulnerable students in our work. Imagine us not hiding behind words like scholars, Black excellence and representation. Imagine us fighting this system together.
Let’s have a community conversation. Who wants to help organize this Black ass meeting? What resources are you willing to contribute to the effort? White people if you’re reading, in what ways are you willing to risk and lose to make this conversation happen? Comment below.
And it’s by time, we as a community, acknowledge the labor and living of Black queer, trans and non-binary people which includes Black women!
Image Description: “Hi folks! It requires energy, time, and risk to write these pieces. Please consider tipping. Make it a one time tip or a monthly pledge. “ — cash.me/$CodyCharles, @CodyCharles (Venmo), or paypal.me/CodyCharles
Bio: | https://medium.com/reclaiming-anger/dear-black-student-affairs-professionals-and-administrators-lets-talk-2ca408ce04ad | ['Cody Charles'] | 2020-09-04 17:44:51.783000+00:00 | ['Queer', 'Higher Education', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Transgender', 'Student Affairs'] |
Aloe Vera Ice Cubes for Soothing Sunburn Relief | Aloe Vera Ice Cubes for Soothing Sunburn Relief
By: Courtney Hamilton
Have you ever spent an afternoon on the beach only to be left with a searing, stinging red reminder of that day? Sunburn, a radiation burn that results from overexposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, makes for a brutal end to a good day.
Enter aloe vera gel — a soothing ointment that’s been used since ancient times as a treatment for everything from skin disorders to epilepsy (1). You can buy it bottled, but the bright green stuff in the drug store is a far cry from the original plant. Besides, homemade aloe vera gel is extremely easy to make at home. If you’re lucky enough to have an aloe vera plant — a type of succulent — in your yard, you can chop leaves directly from the source. If not, many ethnic markets or natural markets carry the leaves for fairly cheap.
While aloe vera can be consumed to help with a variety of ailments, our focus today is treating the skin. Aloe vera gel has been shown to soothe the effects of overexposure to sun, and aloe vera helps generate an antioxidant protein in the skin — metallothionein — which then combats the effect of hydroxl radicals (2). It’s also been shown to have anti-inflammatory, anti-acne, moisturizing and anti-aging effects.
With aloe vera’s healing properties in mind, how do we boost the relief aloe vera provides after a long day in the sun? Freeze it. When your skin is radiating heat, counteract that burn with these refreshing aloe vera cubes. Be a super mom and have these stored in the freezer ready to go after your kids are outside all day, or just prep a batch the night before your morning hike. The cute, pineapple shaped ice cube molds are optional (you can get them on Amazon), but highly recommended.
Aloe Vera Ice Cubes Recipe
Total time: 3 hrs, 20 minutes
Serves: 2 trays
Cook Time: 3 hrs
Prep Time: 20 mins
When your skin is radiating heat, counteract the burn with these refreshing aloe vera cubes.
Ingredients
Gel from 2 aloe vera leaves
½ cup water
Instructions | https://medium.com/the-paleo-post/aloe-vera-ice-cubes-for-soothing-sunburn-relief-23d837c314dc | [] | 2016-10-11 08:54:12.759000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Health', 'Republished', 'Paleo', 'Skincare'] |
Brett Phillips Plays the Unlikely Hero in Game 4 of the World Series | Brett Phillips Plays the Unlikely Hero in Game 4 of the World Series
Photo via ESPN
Game 4 of the 2020 World Series was a wild ride. How wild? There was a record-setting home run, a go-ahead three-run blast, and four lead changes in four innings, and none of those moments were the top moment in the game. Instead, the highlight was an ending as wild as anyone could imagine, as the Rays defeated the Dodgers 8–7 to even this year’s Fall Classic at two games apiece.
Let’s go over a few of the other big moments first. The Dodgers jumped out to an early lead on a first-inning home run by Justin Turner. Corey Seager would continue his torrid postseason hitting with a solo shot of his own in the third to increase the lead to 2–0. Tampa Bay rookie Randy Arozarena, who has taken this October by storm, cut the deficit in half with his ninth dinger of the playoffs, setting a new MLB record for the most home runs hit by a player in a single postseason. Over the first half of the contest, the Dodgers would score in multiple innings, but the Rays would stay close enough to allow it to remain a ballgame.
The theatrics began in the sixth inning. A Kiké Hernandez double gave the Dodgers a 4–2 lead, but a dramatic three-run homer by Brandon Lowe off of Pedro Baez promptly flipped the script. Unfortunately, the good vibes didn’t last long for Lowe. In the very next half inning, the Dodgers loaded the bases, and Joc Pederson stepped up to the plate against Tampa Bay relief ace Nick Anderson, who has struggled this postseason. Pederson hit a liner to short right field, where Lowe was positioned on the shift. The ball deflected off the glove of the diving second baseman, and the Dodgers scored two runs on the play to retake the lead.
That didn’t last long, either. Baez — who for some reason was sent back out for the seventh inning despite being told by Dave Roberts that he was done for the evening — served up another bomb to Kevin Kiermaier. The game was tied once again.
But wait, there’s more! Seager would drop a bloop single into shallow left field in the top of the eighth to put L.A. on top once again. Things finally seemed to settle down, with a scoreless bottom of the eighth and top of the ninth putting the Dodgers three outs away from a commanding 3–1 series lead. Enter the unlikely hero: Brett Phillips.
Kenley Jansen got the call to close things out, but a one-out single by Kiermaier and a two-out walk of Arozarena put the tying run in scoring position. That brought up the number three spot in the batting order, which was now being occupied by… Phillips, who had pinch run for Ji-Man Choi, who had pinch hit for Mike Brosseau. Follow all of that?
There in the box stood the former sixth round pick, he who owned a career 69 OPS+ and had been left off the ALCS roster, for the biggest plate appearance of his life. A couple of well-located offerings on the corners from Jansen found the outfielder in a 1–2 hole.
But Jansen left a cutter over the plate, and Phillips sent a soft line drive into right-center field to tie the game. Chris Taylor was charging the ball and booted it. Arozarena kicked it into high gear in an attempt to score the winning run, but he stumbled and fell after rounding third base. It looked as if he was destined to be thrown out at home by a long shot or get caught in a rundown, but catcher Will Smith turned his attention to the runner prematurely as the throw was coming in, causing the ball to get by him. Arozarena slid headfirst into home, remaining on the ground for a few seconds to catch his breath and process what on earth had just happened.
Meanwhile, Phillips was, in his own words, “airplaning around the outfield” as his teammates followed.
It was a reminder that even in today’s game, where decisions are carefully calculated based on advanced metrics and probabilities, there will always be unexpected moments and surprising heroes. Playing percentages undoubtedly helps you win, but it never guarantees one. That’s because in baseball, you have to bat nine players in a specific and unchangeable order, giving everyone opportunities to contribute. Just as importantly, there are very few things in the sport that have a success or failure rate of 100%. Brett Phillips has a career .284 on-base percentage — extremely low, but not zero. Kenley Jansen has held opponents to a .243 on-base percentage over his career — extremely low, but not zero. Phillips happened to come up with a hit that will forever cement him into Rays lore. The Brewers and Royals both moved on from him due to his struggles at the plate, but tonight, he was the hero. It could very well be the highlight of his career, a moment that he’ll remember forever, one that he’ll tell his grandkids about someday.
As for the Rays, they now find themselves tied in the series rather than having to fight for their lives in a do-or-die Game 5. Should Tampa Bay end up hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy this year, the dramatic finish of Game 4 will no doubt be looked back upon as a turning point in the series.
Baseball is fun. | https://medium.com/@baseball7310/brett-phillips-plays-the-unlikely-hero-in-game-4-of-the-world-series-bb642cc89de | ['Jack Stern'] | 2020-10-25 06:38:13.924000+00:00 | ['Tampa Bay Rays', 'MLB Playoffs', 'MLB', 'Brett Phillips'] |
Paying Down Debt VS Saving For Retirement | Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash
While it is encouraged to start saving for retirement at a very young age, many people have trouble figuring out if you should prioritize saving for retirement or paying off debt.
Everyone has a different financial circumstance and for some, it may seem that debt is slowing their progress on other financial matters.
Some circumstances require them to focus on one vs the other and for some, it may still be feasible to both save for retirement and paying down debt.
When to prioritize debt first?
Many are weighed down by their student loans, mortgage payments, or their credit card payments.
If your total debt amount is more than your income, it would be more financially rewarding to prioritize your debt first.
You should always deal with the most threatening obstacles first, and it may also free your mind to concentrate on other things.
Getting rid of debt first can decrease your expenses each month further allowing you to maximize your income toward your retirement later.
If you have high-interest debt and your only contributing your minimum monthly payments further extending your loan, you could have saved thousands of dollars in interest that could have been going towards your retirement.
Consider thinking of your retirement as you work to pay off your debt.
When to prioritize saving for retirement?
If your debt is manageable for you, you should consider setting aside money for your retirement fund while still making those minimum monthly payments.
According to debt.org, “A lower amount of debt can boost your credit card score. If you’re planning on buying a home or car, this could make you eligible for better interest rates when you take out a loan.”
Not all debt should be considered bad as it can help you improve your credit score.
Making the minimum payments for low-interest credit card payments, for example, will help you to maintain a good credit score so that you are eligible in case you do need another loan.
If your employer can match your contribution in your 401k or a similar plan, it would be beneficial to use that free money. You’ll be doubling your money if you match your employer’s offer.
A retirement plan should be seen as part of your monthly expenses and should be treated as such.
Even while you focus on your financial necessities each month like your phone and car bill, your retirement should be apart of your financial necessity that you have each month.
For example, setting a retirement auto-payment plan will ensure that you never miss out on saving just as you would in making sure your bills are paid.
If your near retirement or older, your retirement should be a financial priority.
Consider opening a traditional IRA or Roth IRA to set up recurring transfers from your bank account.
While everyone has different financial situations, the goal for everyone is to keep a balance of paying off debt while still saving for retirement. | https://medium.com/@andrewcartwright-64037/paying-down-debt-vs-saving-for-retirement-f38237e11bc | ['Andrew Cartwright'] | 2020-12-13 20:43:49.354000+00:00 | ['Retirement Planning', 'Saving', 'Saving Money', 'Debt', 'Retirement'] |
Writing Goals: 2021 [Part 9] — The Only Way Out Is Through | 10 part series for writers to consider what we did in 2020 and will do in 2021.
We pick up from last week with our year-end attempt to help Go Into The Story readers set and achieve their writing goals for 2021. To revisit the process of self-reflection from last week, here are the links:
Part 1: Looking Back
Part 2: Assessing Where You Are
Part 3: Where Do You Want To Go As A Writer?
Part 4: Practical Matters
Part 5: Going Public
This week we shift the focus to a more pragmatic part of the discussion, considering a variety of tips about how to manage time and projects more efficiently. Here is what we have thus far:
Part 6: Schedule
Part 7: Time Management
Part 8: First Draft
Today: The Only Way Out Is Through
Imagine the process of writing a story as being a journey. Perhaps as you embark on your adventure, you have a map — an outline or beat sheet. Or maybe you don’t, plunging into your story in order to find it along the way. In either case, it’s almost certain that you will reach points in the writing process where you will feel lost. The plot isn’t working like you thought it would. Your characters feel remote and confusing. Your scenes don’t seem to be working. Your map or instincts become a labyrinth. Basically you are left to ponder, “What the hell was I thinking?”
That’s when you are tempted to give up.
Don’t. Giving up doesn’t get you out, rather it only allows you to avoid story — or so you think. It still exists. And by quitting, you create a shadow, your story as unfulfilled potential looming over you like a ghost.
No, the only way out is through.
You have to push yourself through your feelings of doubt. Push yourself through the ambiguities of your plot. Push yourself through the hard work of pounding out pages.
Rather than quitting, take the opposite approach: Go deeper into your story. To paraphrase “The X-Files,” the truth is in there!
If you go through the process, you will find your way out.
Every journey has its twists and turns. You may not be able to see where you’re heading around the next turn, but the fact is there is a path.
And the only way out is through.
This is one of the two most profound and powerful writing mantras I know. The other one I will reveal tomorrow in the final post in this series.
Tomorrow: Trust the Process. | https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/writing-goals-2021-part-9-the-only-way-out-is-through-e97b2a40a96f | ['Scott Myers'] | 2020-12-18 14:03:07.591000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Productivity', 'Fiction', 'Screenwriting', 'Creativity'] |
Making Friends | Photo by Hannah Lim
“Go on then, Jim. Go and play.”
Jim glares at Flossie.
“Don’t look at me like that. Go on! Go run off some of that excess podge. And make some friends while you’re at it.”
Jim wanders off towards a group of potential friends nearby and loiters at the edges, waiting for someone to invite him into their fold.
Flossie approaches her own pack.
“He’s not very sociable, your Jim, is he?” says a fluffy Pomeranian.
Flossie shakes her head. “I thought bringing him to the park every day would help him socialise, but he doesn’t seem to have got the hang of it.”
The pair watch as another human holds out his hand towards Jim. Jim ignores the gesture. The other human shrugs and walks away.
“My Lucy will play with him,” says a grizzly Border Terrier. “She just loves other humans. Even the quiet ones.”
Right on cue, a grinning human bounds over to Jim with her arms outstretched and forces a hug upon him. Jim wriggles out of her clutches and runs away. Lucy isn’t dejected for long, but a few of her friends have noted the interaction and they aren’t happy.
“What the fuck was that, Jim?”
“Don’t be such a dickhead!”
“If you don’t like us then why do you even bother coming over here?”
“Piss off, and don’t come back!”
Jim picks up his pace and bolts away from the mob of bellowing humans.
“I wonder what they’re all shouting at,” says the Pomeranian.
“I know,” says the Border Terrier, “I wish we could speak their language.”
“I just wish they’d all get along,” says Flossie with a sigh. “They’re all human; you’d think that would be enough for them to be friends.” | https://medium.com/ellies-telling-tales/making-friends-879f2e73bb70 | ['Ellie Scott'] | 2018-10-02 16:23:55.123000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Friendship', 'Fiction', 'Speculative Fiction', 'Dogs'] |
Meet the Master Committee! | A Local and National Network
As the Master Committee is a brand new initiative you may wonder how it actually came about; at least I did so I asked Robbert (Secretary & Treasurer). “Well, honestly it’s kind of a boring story. During the Thursday afternoon drinks Nigel (program coordinator JADS, Ed.) told us about the activities Pattern was organising after which we got in touch with them.”
Even though their founding story might not be that spectacular they have big plans for this semester: “We are planning on organizing activities to connect students with companies, but also with other bachelor and master students. After all, the long term idea is that Pattern’s board will consist of a variety of student backgrounds and that it will mainly operate from Den Bosch.” With that said, Jennifer (President) emphasizes that they don’t want to limit themselves to the Brabant region: “In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht you currently don’t find any similar data science programs like JADS offers which leaves tremendous opportunity to put our master students in the spotlight and collaborate with the industry. For example, through guest lectures, inhouse days and hackathons.” | https://medium.com/the-outlier/meet-the-master-committee-50d49c61b09b | ['Roy Klaasse Bos'] | 2018-03-13 14:14:25.338000+00:00 | ['Study', 'Education'] |
Exploring Design Drinking | Basically, each stage constrains one day of the Design Sprint process adding a party game attitude:
MEASURE / 06:00 PM — 08:00 PM
Participants must pitch their ideas and measure their goals. As soon as it’s done, we would order a few pizzas and we should have decided the focus of the sprint before the delivery is done. If not, the food will be cold.
SHAKE / 08:00 PM — 11:00 PM
We will run a few brainstormings to shake our minds and generate concept solutions. Instead of a timmer, we will play music, and when the track ends the Crazy 8's must be filled. If someone doesn’t accomplish it drinks a shot for each empty frame.
STRAIN / 11:00 PM — 01:00 AM
At this point, no one will be in the mood of sitting or writing post its. We need to drive this euphoria into something creative. That’s why we will evaluate our ideas by doing a role-play and giving a toast to each identified pain. At the end of the performance, we will have strained the most promising concept direction.
SHAPE / 01:00 AM — 04:00 AM
This is the most difficult part. The team must cold down and shape the selected idea as a testable prototype. Let’s avoid using computers and build something with all the garbage generated during the party.
SIP / 04:00 AM — 06:00 AM
It’s time to leave the apartment and expose our product to a walk of shame. We will carry out a guerrilla test with the people who leave the bars to collect user feedback. Because a drunk man tells no lies.
In addition, we established some rules to reinforce the party atmosphere: no chairs or tables and always with the music on.
Why we failed
Against all odds, the problem was neither alcohol nor fatigue, it was our setup. We were too confident about our experience running design sprints so we did not pay attention to some basic aspects for its success:
Overlapped disciplines
To come up with a solid outcome you must assemble a multidisciplinary team. The team consisted of a service designer and two product designers… there is a lack of diversity for sure.
Tiny team
Nobody will call a meeting of just three guys a party. Discussions were always between the same people and there was no way to split the team to explore in parallel different concept directions.
Reign of chaos
It became impossible to follow our agenda without someone looking beyond the design project. A moderator to control the timings and to cut endless discussions was mandatory.
Tailored challenge
We chose the challenge that best suited the sprint settings and not the most interesting one. We were always making decisions based on what works best for the setup and not what is most interesting to explore.
Afraid of working on something too big, we ended up designing something too boring.
So at 4:00 AM we decided to call the night (actually already the day) before even started Shape and Sip stages. We were sad but satisfied, we did not discover a new unicorn but we tested the approach and it was promising. | https://uxdesign.cc/exploring-design-drinking-f68f145e5411 | ['Marc Morera'] | 2020-10-17 10:01:50.205000+00:00 | ['Design Sprint', 'Design Thinking', 'Innovation', 'UX', 'Startup'] |
Economic Discrimination | Negative Effects of Poverty
Education
Those who live under the poverty line suffer many educational effects. According to The Borgen Project, people who live under the poverty line have a direct correlation to low academic performance “There is a direct correlation between low academic performance and poverty.” (Kellog). This could make getting into college tough. Even if they do go to college, getting out of the massive debt that they collected makes it even harder. They may have to wait years upon years in order to pay off the debt that they pulled out to go to college to help their family. This could make it hard for the children to get top management jobs that could earn them and their families more money. Instead it could cause the child to drop out or have a bad attendance record “Children living in poverty have a higher number of absenteeism or leave school all together because they are more likely to work or care for family members.” (“11 Facts About Education”). Leaving school to help your family is good, but education is also important.
Health
Poverty is also linked to health problems. According to an article from the Do Something Organization, poverty is a cause of developmental issues “Children that live below the poverty line are 1.3 more times more likely to have developmental delays or learning disabilities.” (“11 facts About Education”). Depression is also prevalent according to an article from US News, “Almost half of children who live in poverty have mothers with at least some symptoms of depression.” (Esposito). Decreased life expectancy is also prevalent “Between 10 and nearly 15 years- that’s the difference in life expectancy between the poorest and richest people.” (Esposito). When poverty leads to stress on the entire family, it can cause some unwanted side effects “‘If a child is exposed to constant stress in a childhood, essentially their stress mechanism is never turned off.’ Duffe Says. ‘So it resets at a higher level, a higher heart rate, higher blood pressure.’” (Esposito). The risk of unwanted effects of stress can come in and make someone’s life a whole lot worse than it was before. Along with stress and depression comes the rise in cortisol levels. Cortisol is responsible for regulating proteins,carbohydrates and fats. It also regulates heart functions like blood pressure and blood sugar. The risk of injury can also increase “‘ They live in substandard housing. They can live in dangerous neighborhoods where they can be shot or injured.’” (Esposito). No one wants to get shot. These people do their best and live with what they have.
Crime
Another consequence of poverty is crime and the judicial system. In fact “ ‘POVERTY’. Wrote Aristotle, ‘is the parent of crime’ ” (“To Have and Have Not”). This means that poverty is connected to crime in a multitude of ways. Also according to The Borgen Project, poverty can lead to crime “Lack of economic opportunity leads to impoverishment which then leads to crime.” (Kellog). Crime is also another reason that people should help others that live under the poverty line. If the population wants less crime, help the people who are causing it, and it could go away faster. Poverty is also prevalent in teenagers as well, making crime a topic that’s hard to solve, according to Economist, “teenagers who had grown up in families whose earnings were among the bottom fifth were seven times more likely to be convicted of violent crimes.” (“To Have and Have Not”). Unfortunately, this means that teens are a lot more likely to commit crimes if their families are poor. This can cause problems in neighborhoods that are already poor. Crime could cause some unwanted side effects. After the crime is committed, if they’re caught, they go to a judge. The judicial system may still bias. In fact “The federal crack cocaine sentencing laws of the 1980s have received significant attention due to their highly disproportionate racial outcomes” (“Justice for All?”). This means that the judicial system might be biased. This isn’t fair because that could mean worse sentencing to those people. The statistics show that black people have a higher chance of going to prison “One of every three black males born today will go to prison in his lifetime as well, as will one of every six Latino males.” (“Justice for All?”). This also shows that the judicial system might be biased. One fact to really prove it is that there have been practices that are very different “Disparate practices of law enforcement related to the ‘War on Drugs’ have been well documented in many jurisdictions.” (“Justice for All”). Disparate means “not equal”. That could mean that the judicial system is somewhat biased.
Social
The final consequence of poverty are the social consequences. According to an Empirical Test, poverty has negative effects on social life, “Poverty in general has negative effects on social life.” (Mood). Sometimes, just because the person is poor, they don’t partake in public events because they think that they might be viewed negatively. In fact, being poor doesn’t excuse you from events, “Being poor is not about being able to partake in society on equal terms with others.” (Mood). Sometimes poor people are “withdrawing from social and civic life because of lack of economic resources.” (Mood). This isn’t good. The stigma around poor people needs to end now. In fact, “It has more harmful effects for relations with friends than for social support.” (Mood). If poor people were more social, problems like depression and stress could wither away and the negative effects that they cause. Also, women who are affected by poverty sometimes have less fancy clothes and abstain from public events because of how they look. If we help the poor, things could look a lot nicer and everyone could have a fair chance at life, rather than being discriminated against. | https://medium.com/@aaron-santacruz03/economic-discrimination-ebf31d2fd13e | ['Aaron Santa Cruz'] | 2020-11-14 15:24:34.241000+00:00 | ['Consequences', 'Discrimination', 'Health', 'Economics', 'Economic Disparities'] |
4 Pillars of Web Testing: A Guide for Beginners | By René Thomas
In an age when the entire world is glued to screens big and small, websites are now facing an unprecedented amount of traffic 24/7. Testing these websites to ensure they are able to hit user sweet spots has now become more crucial than ever. But what if you’re a rookie tester and you have no clue where to start? What do you do then?
In this article, I’ll share the four key areas you MUST consider when testing a website. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll have everyone thinking you’ve been around the testing block more than just a few times!
1. Functionality ….make sure it works, duh!
Let’s kick things off with a no-brainer! Functionality testing is done to make sure your website “behaves” the way it is intended to. It’s that simple. You might ask: “Isn’t that what all types of tests do?”, and the answer would be yes. The difference with functionality testing is simply that it focuses on validating whether the actions of the site match the requirements or specifications it was built to fulfill.
The design of a website is usually based on a list of basic core functions and expected behaviors that must be met. In the Agile framework, these design specifications are typically found in user stories written to meet your user’s needs. Functionality testing very closely simulates the user’s experience by testing all the actions the website is expected to perform in the real world. This means that these tests are useful in defining whether or not the final product is truly “Done”.
Another benefit of functionality tests is how they allow your testing scope to vary from very modular, unit tests to broad, system-wide tests. Since applications are usually weakest where multiple points interact, a great strategy is to integrate different unit tests into testing groups. Testing this way exposes whatever bugs are lurking at these integration points.
Check out this great article about 8 Functional Testing Types that you can include in your testing. Also check out this Functional Testing Guide for a more in-depth discussion on how to efficiently include functional tests in your test strategy.
2. Performance Matters!
Now let’s talk about Performance Testing. It’s really what the name suggests: executing tests to ensure the website performs at its best under varying conditions.
When we speak about Performance Testing, we are generally talking about testing site speed, scalability, and stability.
Site Speed & Scalability
“Two Hundred and Fifty milliseconds, that’s the magic number!”; so says Harry Shum, the Executive Vice President of Technology and Research at Microsoft when asked what he recommends as a competitive website speed.
A user should have little to no friction when using a website, so asking yourself questions like “Are loading times frustratingly slow?” and “How are click-through-rates being affected by slow load times?” should guide how you carry out your performance tests.
Slow load times = poor user experience. This leads to reduced website traffic and ultimately potential customer and revenue loss. Let’s say you’re a user in the middle of an online transfer on your bank’s website when suddenly the buffering ring of death appears just as you hit “SEND.” Was your transaction successful? Where did your money go? That situation would make anyone a little anxious.
This is where you come in as a Tester; by continuously putting the website under varying levels of stress and load, you can be sure it can handle a certain threshold of users at the same time without slowing down or crashing.
E-commerce websites like Amazon have seen other-worldly increases in revenue since the beginning of the CoronaVirus pandemic. So far, they’ve managed to maintain their usual site standards even with such crazy increases in concurrent users. Companies like that know they have to carry out these types of tests to be able to make predictions for the future. Can you imagine if Amazon crashed on Black Friday because their servers weren’t equipped to handle the influx of buyers?! Sure it works when there are 100 users online, but does it perform at the same standard when there are 100,000 users? *Insert scalability*
Site Stability
An alarming 47% of respondents in a recent survey said they would immediately leave a website if they had trouble loading an image. What’s even more concerning is that, according to SOASTA and O’Reilly in their book Time Is Money-The Business Value of Web Performance, users perceive load times to be 15% slower than they actually are. Stats like that mean you have to work twice as hard to keep users satisfied. What I’m saying here is that as far as testing for scalability goes, just remember: the website should always act optimally even with load increases. These results are crucial in helping you prepare for future influxes. If you only test under ideal conditions, you run the risk of releasing a website that simply won’t be able to handle sudden user spikes.
The take-away here? Keep Performance Testing at the top of your list, and you’ll have a website that’s not only stable but virtually tough-as-nails. Check out this list of 15 BEST Performance Testing Tools (Load Testing Tools) in 2020 that can help keep you up to speed.
3. Compatibility…like butter on toast!
Compatibility testing is generally understood to be a type of non-functional testing that ensures an application will run across different browsers, hardware, operating systems, and environments. Your goal is always user satisfaction, so it’s important to keep in mind that users come in different shapes, sizes, and device preferences. Since not all of your users have an iPhone, it is your responsibility as a QA specialist to make sure you test whether the website can operate on all devices that may be used to access your website.
Compatibility testing can be daunting because there are so many types of devices a user could be using. Even if you were to focus your tests on the most popular browsers and devices, it would be almost impossible for you to physically account for all the possible variations of those browsers, devices, and operating systems. The good thing is it’s 2020, and we have simulator tools to take care of that.
BrowserStack is currently one of the most reliable testing platforms, which allows you to simulate tests in minutes across on-demand browsers, operating systems, and devices. Check it out if you want to increase your website compatibility and test efficiency tenfold.
4. Accessibility, because… Inclusivity
Remember I mentioned before that users come in different shapes and sizes? Well, it doesn’t just refer to their devices and which browsers they use. Some users live with physical disabilities such as visual and hearing impairments.
With stay-at-home orders being enforced across the world due to the COVID19 pandemic, we are now living through what I am calling a “Digital Renaissance”. Normal everyday life is now virtual. A regular trip to the pharmacy has become a few swipes and a click on a user’s cellphone. This pandemic has proved just how reliant we are on the internet to live comfortably. As businesses continue to digitize their products and services to accommodate this new life, it is our job as testers to ensure no user gets left behind.
So what is Accessibility testing? It’s testing for user inclusivity. In more technical terms, it is a subset of Usability Testing. It adds to the general premise of usability testing (which tests that your site is usable by the average user) by testing how usable it is for people with disabilities.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a document that provides an international standard for web content accessibility against which creators and QA Specialists must test their product. You can view the WCAG Documents on the WCAG website to find out how you can keep your website compliant.
Remember, it’s not enough to just be user-friendly; your website isn’t fit for release until you’ve tested that it’s “ALL-user-friendly”.
Wrapping up
This short guide is clearly not the holy grail of web testing. It is however a great starter kit for a tester who is new to the space. The four areas mentioned — Functionality, Performance, Compatibility, and Accessibility — are core tenets of web testing that you must consider in your test plan. Having these bases covered is a great place to start. Here are my final tips for you:
Take advantage of the abundance of testing resources you have at your fingertips, including those I listed above and in our blog. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to clarify user stories or any information that seems murky or inconsistent with the app you’re testing. You’re a tester. It’s your responsibility to spot flaws and errors, not just in the app but in the testing process. Remember, you’re an advocate for the user — always focus on ensuring the app responds well to the users for whom it is being built. If there are gaps, speak up and share with your team.
Bearing in mind these tips and the 4 types of testing, you’re well on your way to being a great tester. Own your role and get testing! | https://medium.com/@rene-thomas/4-pillars-of-web-testing-a-guide-for-beginners-642a500b1001 | ['René Thomas'] | 2020-12-18 21:48:00.899000+00:00 | ['QA', 'Software Testing', 'Qa Testing', 'Quality Assurance', 'Testing'] |
Venezuela’s Two Presidents | Sign up for Taking Stock of COVID: New comics from The Nib
By The Nib
New comics from Matt Lubchansky, Keith Knight, and Niccolo Pizarro. Plus How Seniors Are Living With COVID-19. Take a look | https://medium.com/the-nib/venezuelas-two-presidents-2d9d48c704b8 | ['The Nib'] | 2020-11-30 16:48:47.450000+00:00 | ['Latin America', 'Maduro', 'Venezuela', 'Venezuelan Politics', 'Comics'] |
List: Continuing Training Courses For NYC Taxi Drivers | ◊
1. Red Lights Are Optional
Prerequisites: Feigning Colorblindness and Yellow Means “Speed Up.”
Why should everyone else’s safety and traffic laws stop you from earning more? In this class, you will learn the concepts of ignoring the fundamentals of traffic lights and common decency with strategies on how to do so in practice.
◊
2. Refusing to Go To Brooklyn Or Queens
Prerequisites: Bridges and Tunnels — A Last Resort, Staten Island Doesn’t Exist
Building on the dangers of leaving the island of Manhattan from the previous class, this five week course focuses on real world ways to turn down a passenger who just wants to drunkenly make it home at 3AM. Because why should their safety matter to you? You’re not getting a fare back to the city.
◊
3. Intro To Honking
For drivers in their first six months. Learn the ins and outs of ignoring the “No Honking. $350 Penalty Signs” as well as the ideal times to lay on the horn (typically between 1AM and 5AM, or while driving by someone on the phone). We’ll analyze different kinds of honks from the “Hot Girl Alert” to the “That Wall Better Move Out Of My Way.”
Note: Horns will not be provided but may be purchased for $200 or rented for $50/day.
◊
4. Making Girls Traveling Alone Feel Uncomfortable
Prerequisite: Refusing to Pick Up Men, Old People and Black People
So, you drove by all the people who you can’t hit on and have a cute girl in the back seat — now what? Improve your skills in attempting to bring home this lady. Topics include: Asking which apartment she lives in when you drop her off, pulling over in a sketchy neighborhood and joining her in the backseat, telling her you have another kind of tip you’d rather give her.
◊
5. Spying On Couples In The Backseat
Prerequisite: Making Girls Traveling Alone Feel Uncomfortable
You’re right, it is ridiculous that watching porn on your cell phone is against the law. Who makes these laws anyways? Turns out, you’re in luck. The wasted couple you just picked up is ready to get their freak on in your backseat. As such, it’s your right, nay, your duty to sneak glances back in the rearview mirror and looks as you pretend to need to change lanes. She’s pretty cute. Good thing you have a photographic memory. Learn the tips and tricks to not get caught.
◊
6. Pretending Your Credit Card Machine Is Broken
Prerequisite: Taxes, What’s The Point?
In the intro level course, we learned that you weren’t born here, so why should you pay taxes? You shouldn’t. That’s why. Building on the high level concepts learned there, this class features practical advice for pretending the credit card machine doesn’t work, but only after you’ve arrived at your destination. Practice with real New Yorkers and for extra credit you can learn to give incorrect change.
◊
7. Lane Lines Mean Nothing and Sidewalks Are Open Lanes
Prerequisite: Never Stay In One Lane
Public safety is none of your concern — the only thing you need to worry about is getting more fares. Learn to straddle the lane line, the art of constantly weaving while avoiding motion sickness and lose any respect for human life. If you’re not driving on the sidewalk, you’re sitting in traffic and losing money.
◊
8. Cleaning Up Vomit
Prerequisite: Things That Aren’t Your Job
Note: Course title may be deceptive. Rather than learn to clean up someone’s puke that may be a result of a few drinks or your expert NYC taxi driving skills, learn the lost art of not giving a fuck. Once the next fare in the cab and the meter is on, it’s too late.
◊
9. Uber
Topics include: Sideswiping their cars, talking shit about them to your customers, and how to use it to get home when your car breaks down because being a passenger in NYC taxis is the most terrifying thing on earth.
◊ | https://medium.com/endless/list-continuing-training-courses-for-nyc-taxi-drivers-8264635968a1 | ['Brent Goldman'] | 2015-06-09 05:40:14.087000+00:00 | ['New York', 'Humor', 'Comedy'] |
Bancor Protocol Use Case #2 | A network of smart token changers
BNT as the mesh between tokenstoken
Token changers - the first thing that comes to mind is one of those booths in the airport where one can swap one of their paper currencies into another for a small fee. Usually we have to do this because the country that we are going into won’t accept the country that we are coming from’s money. We utilize the currency exchange rate to determine how many of which currency we should get.
Money Exchanger — Image Credit
With the increase in availability of up to date exchange rates, we don’t necessarily need a physical store to tell us the rates. Unfortunately bank accounts in their current structure make it almost impossible to effectively swap one currency for another. Our money is stuck in one form that tends to have not much benefit associated with holding it. With Ethereum and Bancor, this can all change.
Let’s assume that we have a group of 20 people who are all utilizing the same 20 Ethereum applications and often need a small amount of the various tokens to utilize the dApps. Everybody has their own portfolios/tools, and earns their income directly in one of the Ethereum standard tokens, but not everyone stores all 20 of the tokens all the time.
So the group decides to utilize the Bancor Network Token as a base for an exchange. They set up a private network of 20 token changers that each can swap between an Ethereum based token and BNT. When people get paid in their respective token, they load up the changer with whatever amount they would like, which provides them the BNT to move into the other changers seamlessly. The BNT acts as the connective mesh.
Not only does this process remove the need for an exchange, but it creates a network of liquidity between a small group of parties. A small fee for access to the network continues to incentivize the existing and new parties to add more liquidity to the exchangers. This is valuable to people if you have a lot of liquidity because it ensures that everyone will always be able to swap their tokens for the ones they want.
Learn more about Bancor Protocol | https://medium.com/cryptodex/bancor-protocol-use-case-2-736a6454d358 | ['Jake Vartanian'] | 2017-06-11 23:20:13.984000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Decentralization', 'Ethereum', 'Smart Token', 'Crypto'] |
Building Custom Callbacks with Keras and TensorFlow 2 | 2. Building a custom callback for testing
Similarly, we can implement a custom callback TestingCallback() for testing.
class TestingCallback(Callback):
def on_test_begin(self, logs=None):
print("Starting testing ...")
def on_test_batch_begin(self, batch, logs=None):
print(f"Testing: Starting batch {batch}")
def on_test_batch_end(self, batch, logs=None):
print(f"Testing: Finished batch {batch}")
def on_test_end(self, logs=None):
print("Finished testing")
To use it for testing, pass it to the callbacks argument in the model.valutate() method.
model.evaluate(
X_test,
y_test,
verbose=False,
callbacks=[TestingCallback()],
batch_size=2000, // A large value for demo purpose
)
By executing the statement, you should get an output like below:
Starting testing ...
Testing: Starting batch 0
Testing: Finished batch 0
Testing: Starting batch 1
Testing: Finished batch 1
Testing: Starting batch 2
Testing: Finished batch 2
Testing: Starting batch 3
Testing: Finished batch 3
Testing: Starting batch 4
Testing: Finished batch 4
Finished testing [85.61210479736329, 0.8063]
3. Building a custom callback for prediction
Similarly, we can implement a custom callback PredictionCallback() for prediction.
class PredictionCallback(Callback):
def on_predict_begin(self, logs=None):
print("Starting prediction ...")
def on_predict_batch_begin(self, batch, logs=None):
print(f"Prediction: Starting batch {batch}")
def on_predict_batch_end(self, batch, logs=None):
print(f"Prediction: Finish batch {batch}")
def on_predict_end(self, logs=None):
print("Finished prediction")
To use it for prediction, we just need to pass it to the callbacks argument in the model.predict() method.
model.predict(
X_test,
verbose=False,
callbacks=[PredictionCallback()],
batch_size=2000, // A large value for demo purpose
)
By executing the statement, you should get an output like below:
Starting prediction ...
Prediction: Starting batch 0
Prediction: Finish batch 0
Prediction: Starting batch 1
Prediction: Finish batch 1
Prediction: Starting batch 2
Prediction: Finish batch 2
Prediction: Starting batch 3
Prediction: Finish batch 3
Prediction: Starting batch 4
Prediction: Finish batch 4
Finished prediction array([......])
4. Custom callback applications
A main application of callback is to perform some actions depend on performance metrics, for example:
Real-time plotting during training
Stop training when a metric has stopped improving
Save model at the end of every epoch
Adjust learning rate (or other hyperparameters) according to a defined schedule
etc
In this section, we are going to show you some examples of Keras custom callback applications.
Real-time plotting during training
Early stopping at minimum loss
Learning rate scheduling
4.1 Real-time plot during training
This first example shows the creation of a Callback that shows a live, real-time update of loss as your training progresses.
import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(12,4))
# Create plot inside the figure
ax = fig.add_subplot()
ax.set_xlabel('Epoch #')
ax.set_ylabel('loss') class TrainingPlot(tf.keras.callbacks.Callback):
def on_train_begin(self, logs={}):
# Initialize the lists for holding losses
self.losses = []
def on_epoch_end(self, epoch, logs={}):
# Append the losses to the lists
self.losses.append(logs['loss'])
# Plot
epochs = np.arange(0, len(self.losses))
ax.plot(epochs, self.losses, "b-")
fig.canvas.draw()
self.losses=[] is initialized in on_train_begin() for holding losses. The real-time plot is implemented at the end of each epoch on_epoch_end() by calling ax.plot(epochs, self.losses, "b-") and fig.canvas.draw() .
To use it for training, we just need to pass it to the callbacks argument in the model.fit() method.
model = create_model() history = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=20,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[TrainingPlot()]
)
By executing the statement, you should get a live real-time output like below:
image by author
4.2 Early stopping at minimum loss
Note: this example is originally from Keras guide “Writing your own callbacks”, please check out the official documentation for details.
This example shows the creation of a Callback that stops training when the minimum of loss has been reached, by setting the attribute self.model.stop_training (boolean). Optionally, you can provide an argument patience to specify how many epochs we should wait before stopping after having reached a local minimum.
To use it for training:
model = create_model() history = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=50,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[EarlyStoppingAtMinLoss()]
)
In this run, our training was stopped at epoch 28 as the minimum of loss has been reached
image by author
4.3 Learning rate scheduler
Note: this example is originally from Keras guide “Writing your own callbacks”, please check out the official documentation for details.
This example shows how a custom Callback can be used to dynamically change the learning rate of the optimizer during the course of training.
To use it
model = create_model() history = model.fit(
X_train,
y_train,
epochs=15,
validation_split=0.20,
batch_size=64,
verbose=2,
callbacks=[CustomLearningRateScheduler(lr_schedule)]
)
Conclusion
Keras provides a base class called Callback which allows us to subclass it and create our own callbacks. It is really useful for debugging and perform some actions depend on performance metrics.
I hope this article will help you to save time in creating your own custom callback and perform some custom actions. I recommend you to check out the documentation for the Callbacks API and to know about other things you can do.
Thanks for reading. Please check out the notebook for the source code and stay tuned if you are interested in the practical aspect of machine learning.
You may be interested in some of my other TensorFlow articles:
More can be found from my Github | https://towardsdatascience.com/building-custom-callbacks-with-keras-and-tensorflow-2-85e1b79915a3 | ['B. Chen'] | 2020-12-28 17:28:43.307000+00:00 | ['TensorFlow', 'Keras', 'Machine Learning', 'Callback', 'Deep Learning'] |
The EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy | About the author: Justin Tomczyk ’20 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with the Economic Policy Research Center. He is currently an a Master’s student in Russian, East European, Eurasian Studies, at Stanford University.
The EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy is a collection of policies designed to improve Europe’s economic connectivity to the emerging economies of Central, Southeast, and East Asia. While the creation of this specific policy portfolio was largely done in response to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the connectivity strategy is based on preexisting strategies which have been implemented to varying degrees in recent years. Additionally, the EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy is not designed to directly compete with BRI nor is participation in either project mutual exclusive.
Photo from the European Commission
Like the BRI, the EU’s connectivity strategy includes the construction of physical infrastructure. This is often aimed at the recent members of the EU and the broader periphery of Europe — particularly the Western Balkans. However, the infrastructure development sections of the EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy also include the creation and reconstruction of critical infrastructure in the surrounding regions. An example of this would be the reconstruction and reconnection of Central Asia’s power grid which has been fractured since the collapse of the Soviet Union and has largely fallen into disrepair.
Beyond physical infrastructure, the EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy also incorporates strategies designed to promote research and innovation among the EU’s trading partners. Programs like Erasmus+ have been expanded to provide more collaboration opportunities to academics and researchers in India. Additionally, part of the connectivity strategy is the promotion of single market aspects of ASEAN’s integration process. In doing so, the EU would have significantly streamlined trade with southeast Asia by funneling trade through two regional blocs
With regards to Georgia, a specific component of the strategy that is of great relevance is the recently signed free trade agreement between the EU and Japan. In addition to covering multiple areas of conventional trade, the agreement features provisions designed to accommodate digital trade and the digital economy. As per the agreement, both Japan and the European Union have agreed to a series of mutual standards on privacy and personal data storage and in doing so, have removed some of the largest barriers to trade between European and Japanese tech firms. Considering the large digital economies of both Japan and the European Union, these clauses are crucial to the normalization of digital trade as a part of the modern economy.
Like much of Eastern Europe, Georgia IT sector is one of the fastest growing elements of the economy. Participation in the EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy provides an interesting potential for further development of the digital economy. The construction of physical infrastructure, such as 5G towers or expanded fiber optic networks, would improve Georgia’s internet connectivity. Additionally, the approximation of Georgian regulations on the storage, processing, and sale of personal data would improve the country’s accessibility to European partners. Additionally, the development of the IT sector provides new job opportunities aimed at young professionals and skilled labor which may partially stem the emigration of young people from the country. With these factors in mind, the EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy provides a valuable opportunity to further expand Georgia’s growing digital economy and integrate the country into the EU’s emerging Single Digital Market. | https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-international-studies/the-eu-asia-connectivity-strategy-8ce605a5d8a4 | ['Fsi Student Programs'] | 2020-09-15 16:07:28.625000+00:00 | ['Stanford', 'European Union', 'Fsi Students', 'Internships', 'Belt And Road'] |
Why Ball Players are Moving to Real Assets to Assist them in Retirement | WITH THE SUPER BOWL THIS WEEKEND AND THE RECENT VIRAL VIDEO OF MARSHAWN LYNCH TALKING TO NFL BALLPLAYERS ABOUT GETTING THEIR MONEY RIGHT, I WENT TO SOME OF MY FRIENDS IN THE MLB, NFL AND THE NBA.
Ballplayers need to find real investments to take care of themselves after retirement that doesn’t require a risk of capital loss. Lambos, chains, watches and houses won’t provide for a ballplayer and their families in transition from the game to civilian life. While Tom Brady and Drew Brees are able to continue to stretch out their career, most ballplayers have a career that lasts less than five years.
Seattle Seahawks running back, Marshawn Lynch, brought this back to light with his recent ESPN interview that went viral, sharing with ballplayer peers to take care of all your bread so when you are ready to walk away you’ll be set.” If you didn’t see the interview, and you’re a rapper, ballplayer, athlete, artist, actor, producer, writer, comedian… or anything that requires a special talent — watch it right now HERE.
If you have trouble hearing it, this is what he says:
“I’ve been on the other side of retirement and it’s good when you get over there and you can do what the [expletive] you want to, so I tell y’all right now while y’all in it: Take care of y’all bread, so when y’all done you can go ahead and take care of yourself. So while y’all in it right now, take care of y’all’s bodies, take care of y’all’s chicken, take care of y’all’s mental. Because, look, we ain’t lasting that long.
“I had a couple of players that I played with that they’re no longer here no more — they’re no longer — so you feel me? Take care of y’all mentals, y’all bodies, y’all chicken, so when y’all ready to walk away y’all walk away and you’ll be able to do what y’all want to do.”
WHAT’S MARSHAWN SAYING TO ATHLETES?
THIS IS A REMINDER FOR ALL OF US WHO HAVE SPECIAL TALENTS, YOU HAVE A SHELF LIFE. NO ONE LASTS FOREVER.
It reminds me of when my dad who died at the age of 52, even after doing everything right with his money — no debt, house paid for, paid off car + some cash put away… my mother was left scrambling the week after his burial because the income had STOPPED and the expenses never do.
Certainty became uncertainty.
I reached out to a bunch of my professional ballplayer friends who have firsthand knowledge to get their input.
My friend, Deion Sanders, Prime Time, who played both in two Super Bowls and a World Series said, “Real Assets are REAL. Athletes identify with and pride themselves by the understanding and the notion of REAL. There comes a time in an athlete’s life that he or she looks in the mirror and recognizes he ain’t what he used to be and he can no longer do what he once did. Why should your assets emulate you?. It’s time for the Athletes to truly get in the game of life and THINK!”
Atlanta Braves slugger, Matt Joyce, who is coming to play with the Marlins in 2020, told me in my studio, “Investing in real assets is literally one of the most important decisions players should make before it’s too late. As soon as they start making decent money they should start creating passive cash flow and the best way to do that is through real estate.”
told me in my studio, “Investing in real assets is literally one of the most important decisions players should make before it’s too late. As soon as they start making decent money they should start creating passive cash flow and the best way to do that is through real estate.” Retired Skateboarder and real estate investor, Mikey Taylor , texted me, “as an athlete, you never know when your career is going to end and the last thing you want is to run out of money while you’re trying to figure out what’s next. Having cash flow coming in will solve that and I think real estate is the best way to get it.”
, texted me, “as an athlete, you never know when your career is going to end and the last thing you want is to run out of money while you’re trying to figure out what’s next. Having cash flow coming in will solve that and I think real estate is the best way to get it.” Hugh Jackson, NFL coach, friend and partner at CardoneCapital.com told me, “We live in a “CYA” (Cover Your Ass) World. Real estate appreciates and that asset is never going anywhere.”
ALL OF US WANT TO THINK WE ARE GOING TO LIVE FOREVER AND THAT OUR CAREERS WILL TAKE CARE OF OUR LOVED ONES.
This reality hits home even more so this week with the tragic loss of Kobe, his daughter and seven others, whose lives were cut short. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.
Rappers, artists, musicians, athletes, and the super talented …..I know you want to believe your talent will last forever, but nothing lasts forever.
Death is not the only transition in life just one of them. Look at Antonio Brown, one of the most talented receivers to ever play the game.
AB, had the NFL by the tail, or so he thought, and for whatever reasons, today it is over, at least for now. Regardless of how much bravado a ballplayer exhibits on the field or on Instagram, in real life, you can’t fund your lifestyle with chains, watches and big houses.
Real life requires cash flow in excess of expenses.
REAL ECONOMICS REWARDS ASSETS AND PENALIZES LIABILITIES AND DEPRECIATING ASSETS.
And there is a validation of these facts everywhere yet so many still deny the harsh reality believing they can defy the statistics.
Michael Vick, John Daly, Allen Iverson, Mike Tyson, Holyfield, and the list goes on and on. Michael Vick had career earnings of $100M and Mike Tyson had $400M…and filed for Bankruptcy.
Some reports suggest 78% PERCENT OF PROFESSIONAL BALLPLAYERS FILE FOR BANKRUPTCY 24 MONTHS AFTER RETIREMENT.
Whether you’re a baseball, football, or basketball player, whether you’re into golf, hockey, surfing, or soccer…there will be a time when the paychecks STOP.
What will you do for income? The best way to protect yourself is to either invest in a business that provides cash flow that does NOT depend on your talent or invest in assets that provide cash flow. Very few assets today provide constant and dependable cash flow the way the real estate we buy at Cardone Capital.
These assets provide my family with constant cash flow, even long after I’ll be able to provide it for them. | https://medium.com/the-10x-entrepreneur/go-beast-mode-with-your-money-ffa47bf53acd | ['Grant Cardone'] | 2020-01-28 21:16:28.798000+00:00 | ['Money Mindset', 'Seattle Seahawks', 'NFL', 'Retirement', 'Marshawn Lynch'] |
Unlimited Vacation Club Visits Puerto Vallarta and Sunscape Resorts | Unlimited Vacation Club Timeshare reviews the beautiful Sunscape Resort located in historic Puerto Vallarta.
With summer now here, one of the best spots for you and your family to beat the heat is in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. If you’re looking for a way to visit Puerto Vallarta with a fantastic deal, and incredible resort experience, the best place to stay is Sunscape Puerto Vallarta, and the best way to book is with Unlimited Vacation Club.
Membership benefits of Unlimited Vacation Club , you gain access to the Unlimited-Fun® experience, granting you “24-hour access to food and beverage choices including kid-friendly menu options, in-room mini-bar fully stocked with soft drinks, juice, bottled water & cold beer, buffet and à la carte restaurants without reservations required” and much more.
The Sunscape line of resorts is created with families in mind, giving kids a literal red-carpet entrance as they enter the resort. With Unlimited Vacation Club, you get 25% off the best available rate at any AMResort, just for being a member!
This is in addition to all of the other great, exclusive benefits offered through UVC.
The Explorer’s Club and Core Zone Teen’s Club can be a great way to give your kids some fun, while you enjoy all of the amenities that Sunscape Puerto Vallarta has to offer.
These spots are supervised by the trained Red Cross certified staff, and provide hours of entertainment for kids and teens. While the younger ones are having their fun, the adults can enjoy Secrets Spa by Pevonia® and other activities offered at the resort.
Enjoy great excursions in the town of Puerto Vallarta, like surfing, snorkeling, and ATV riding. Puerto Vallarta has a lot of excellent trips to choose from, and some have discounts, thanks to your membership with Unlimited Vacation Club, and AMResorts.
So if all of this sounds exciting to you, and you want to take that first step towards planning your vacation, don’t wait. Head on over to Unlimited Vacation Club and sign up to become a member today.
It’s your dream vacation, turn it into a reality with Sunscape Puerto Vallarta, and Unlimited Vacation Club. | https://medium.com/@unlimitedvacationclub2/unlimited-vacation-club-visits-puerto-vallarta-and-sunscape-resorts-a2f4c4af0e8 | ['Unlimited Vacation Club'] | 2019-03-18 16:29:07.268000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Vacation', 'Mexico', 'Puerto Vallarta'] |
How to generate your very own Bitcoin private key | In cryptocurrencies, a private key allows a user to gain access to their wallet. The person who holds the private key fully controls the coins in that wallet. For this reason, you should keep it secret. And if you really want to generate the key yourself, it makes sense to generate it in a secure way.
Here, I will provide an introduction to private keys and show you how you can generate your own key using various cryptographic functions. I will provide a description of the algorithm and the code in Python.
Do I need to generate a private key?
Most of the time you don’t. For example, if you use a web wallet like Coinbase or Blockchain.info, they create and manage the private key for you. It’s the same for exchanges.
Mobile and desktop wallets usually also generate a private key for you, although they might have the option to create a wallet from your own private key.
So why generate it anyway? Here are the reasons that I have:
You want to make sure that no one knows the key
You just want to learn more about cryptography and random number generation (RNG)
What exactly is a private key?
Formally, a private key for Bitcoin (and many other cryptocurrencies) is a series of 32 bytes. Now, there are many ways to record these bytes. It can be a string of 256 ones and zeros (32 * 8 = 256) or 100 dice rolls. It can be a binary string, Base64 string, a WIF key, mnemonic phrase, or finally, a hex string. For our purposes, we will use a 64 character long hex string.
The same private key, written in different formats.
Why exactly 32 bytes? Great question! You see, to create a public key from a private one, Bitcoin uses the ECDSA, or Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. More specifically, it uses one particular curve called secp256k1.
Now, this curve has an order of 256 bits, takes 256 bits as input, and outputs 256-bit integers. And 256 bits is exactly 32 bytes. So, to put it another way, we need 32 bytes of data to feed to this curve algorithm.
There is an additional requirement for the private key. Because we use ECDSA, the key should be positive and should be less than the order of the curve. The order of secp256k1 is FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364141 , which is pretty big: almost any 32-byte number will be smaller than it.
Naive method
So, how do we generate a 32-byte integer? The first thing that comes to mind is to just use an RNG library in your language of choice. Python even provides a cute way of generating just enough bits:
import random
bits = random.getrandbits(256)
# 30848827712021293731208415302456569301499384654877289245795786476741155372082
bits_hex = hex(bits)
# 0x4433d156e8c53bf5b50af07aa95a29436f29a94e0ccc5d58df8e57bdc8583c32
private_key = bits_hex[2:]
# 4433d156e8c53bf5b50af07aa95a29436f29a94e0ccc5d58df8e57bdc8583c32
Looks good, but actually, it’s not. You see, normal RNG libraries are not intended for cryptography, as they are not very secure. They generate numbers based on a seed, and by default, the seed is the current time. That way, if you know approximately when I generated the bits above, all you need to do is brute-force a few variants.
When you generate a private key, you want to be extremely secure. Remember, if anyone learns the private key, they can easily steal all the coins from the corresponding wallet, and you have no chance of ever getting them back.
So let’s try to do it more securely.
Cryptographically strong RNG
Along with a standard RNG method, programming languages usually provide a RNG specifically designed for cryptographic operations. This method is usually much more secure, because it draws entropy straight from the operating system. The result of such RNG is much harder to reproduce. You can’t do it by knowing the time of generation or having the seed, because there is no seed. Well, at least the user doesn’t enter a seed — rather, it’s created by the program.
In Python, cryptographically strong RNG is implemented in the secrets module. Let’s modify the code above to make the private key generation secure!
import secrets
bits = secrets.randbits(256)
# 46518555179467323509970270980993648640987722172281263586388328188640792550961
bits_hex = hex(bits)
# 0x66d891b5ed7f51e5044be6a7ebe4e2eae32b960f5aa0883f7cc0ce4fd6921e31
private_key = bits_hex[2:]
# 66d891b5ed7f51e5044be6a7ebe4e2eae32b960f5aa0883f7cc0ce4fd6921e31
That is amazing. I bet you wouldn’t be able to reproduce this, even with access to my PC. But can we go deeper?
Specialized sites
There are sites that generate random numbers for you. We will consider just two here. One is random.org, a well-known general purpose random number generator. Another one is bitaddress.org, which is designed specifically for Bitcoin private key generation.
Can random.org help us generate a key? Definitely, as they have service for generating random bytes. But two problems arise here. Random.org claims to be a truly random generator, but can you trust it? Can you be sure that it is indeed random? Can you be sure that the owner doesn’t record all generation results, especially ones that look like private keys? The answer is up to you. Oh, and you can’t run it locally, which is an additional problem. This method is not 100% secure.
Now, bitaddress.org is a whole different story. It’s open source, so you can see what’s under its hood. It’s client-side, so you can download it and run it locally, even without an Internet connection.
So how does it work? It uses you — yes, you — as a source of entropy. It asks you to move your mouse or press random keys. You do it long enough to make it infeasible to reproduce the results.
The process of generation an entropy by randomly moving the mouse. The large chunk of symbols shows the pool.
Are you interested to see how bitaddress.org works? For educational purposes, we will look at its code and try to reproduce it in Python.
Quick note: bitaddress.org gives you the private key in a compressed WIF format, which is close to the WIF format that we discussed before. For our purposes, we will make the algorithm return a hex string so that we can use it later for a public key generation.
Bitaddress: the specifics
Bitaddress creates the entropy in two forms: by mouse movement and by key pressure. We’ll talk about both, but we’ll focus on the key presses, as it’s hard to implement mouse tracking in the Python lib. We’ll expect the end user to type buttons until we have enough entropy, and then we’ll generate a key.
Bitaddress does three things. It initializes byte array, trying to get as much entropy as possible from your computer, it fills the array with the user input, and then it generates a private key.
Bitaddress uses the 256-byte array to store entropy. This array is rewritten in cycles, so when the array is filled for the first time, the pointer goes to zero, and the process of filling starts again.
The program initiates an array with 256 bytes from window.crypto. Then, it writes a timestamp to get an additional 4 bytes of entropy. Finally, it gets such data as the size of the screen, your time zone, information about browser plugins, your locale, and more. That gives it another 6 bytes.
After the initialization, the program continually waits for user input to rewrite initial bytes. When the user moves the cursor, the program writes the position of the cursor. When the user presses buttons, the program writes the char code of the button pressed.
Finally, bitaddress uses accumulated entropy to generate a private key. It needs to generate 32 bytes. For this task, bitaddress uses an RNG algorithm called ARC4. The program initializes ARC4 with the current time and collected entropy, then gets bytes one by one 32 times.
This is all an oversimplification of how the program works, but I hope that you get the idea. You can check out the algorithm in full detail on Github.
Doing it yourself
For our purposes, we’ll build a simpler version of bitaddress. First, we won’t collect data about the user’s machine and location. Second, we will input entropy only via text, as it’s quite challenging to continually receive mouse position with a Python script (check PyAutoGUI if you want to do that).
That brings us to the formal specification of our generator library. First, it will initialize a byte array with cryptographic RNG, then it will fill the timestamp, and finally it will fill the user-created string. After the seed pool is filled, the library will let the developer create a key. Actually, they will be able to create as many private keys as they want, all secured by the collected entropy.
Initializing the pool
Here we put some bytes from cryptographic RNG and a timestamp. __seed_int and __seed_byte are two helper methods that insert the entropy into our pool array. Notice that we use secrets .
def __init_pool(self):
for i in range(self.POOL_SIZE):
random_byte = secrets.randbits(8)
self.__seed_byte(random_byte)
time_int = int(time.time())
self.__seed_int(time_int) def __seed_int(self, n):
self.__seed_byte(n)
self.__seed_byte(n >> 8)
self.__seed_byte(n >> 16)
self.__seed_byte(n >> 24) def __seed_byte(self, n):
self.pool[self.pool_pointer] ^= n & 255
self.pool_pointer += 1
if self.pool_pointer >= self.POOL_SIZE:
self.pool_pointer = 0
Seeding with input
Here we first put a timestamp and then the input string, character by character.
def seed_input(self, str_input):
time_int = int(time.time())
self.__seed_int(time_int)
for char in str_input:
char_code = ord(char)
self.__seed_byte(char_code)
Generating the private key
This part might look hard, but it’s actually very simple.
First, we need to generate 32-byte number using our pool. Unfortunately, we can’t just create our own random object and use it only for the key generation. Instead, there is a shared object that is used by any code that is running in one script.
What does that mean for us? It means that at each moment, anywhere in the code, one simple random.seed(0) can destroy all our collected entropy. We don’t want that. Thankfully, Python provides getstate and setstate methods. So, to save our entropy each time we generate a key, we remember the state we stopped at and set it next time we want to make a key.
Second, we just make sure that our key is in range (1, CURVE_ORDER ). This is a requirement for all ECDSA private keys. The CURVE_ORDER is the order of the secp256k1 curve, which is FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364141 .
Finally, for convenience, we convert to hex, and strip the ‘0x’ part.
def generate_key(self):
big_int = self.__generate_big_int()
big_int = big_int % (self.CURVE_ORDER — 1) # key < curve order
big_int = big_int + 1 # key > 0
key = hex(big_int)[2:]
return key def __generate_big_int(self):
if self.prng_state is None:
seed = int.from_bytes(self.pool, byteorder=’big’, signed=False)
random.seed(seed)
self.prng_state = random.getstate()
random.setstate(self.prng_state)
big_int = random.getrandbits(self.KEY_BYTES * 8)
self.prng_state = random.getstate()
return big_int
In action
Let’s try to use the library. Actually, it’s really simple: you can generate a private key in three lines of code!
kg = KeyGenerator()
kg.seed_input(‘Truly random string. I rolled a dice and got 4.’)
kg.generate_key()
# 60cf347dbc59d31c1358c8e5cf5e45b822ab85b79cb32a9f3d98184779a9efc2
You can see it yourself. The key is random and totally valid. Moreover, each time you run this code, you get different results.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a lot of ways to generate private keys. They differ in simplicity and security.
Generating a private key is only a first step. The next step is extracting a public key and a wallet address that you can use to receive payments. The process of generating a wallet differs for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I plan to write two more articles on that topic.
If you want to play with the code, I published it to this Github repository. | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-generate-your-very-own-bitcoin-private-key-7ad0f4936e6c | ['Timur Badretdinov'] | 2018-06-29 00:40:27.290000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Programming', 'Python', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
An Easy Trick to Instantly Improve Your Well-Being | An Easy Trick to Instantly Improve Your Well-Being
Just express gratitude with three questions:
Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash
I write this to share a trick that works for me; it will let you easily and instantly improve your well-being. You just have to express gratitude with this simple daily routine: spend 10 minutes thought, and answer those three questions:
Remember something that made you laugh or smile today.
Thought to a task, a job, or some specialty that you master (your work, a passion…), and express gratitude for this.
Finally, express gratitude for a thing you acquire those last years, something useful that positively impacts your well-being or maybe thought to a special person who had appeared recently in your life and makes it happier.
You can use a journal to write your answers, or not. Find a way and a comfortable time for you (mornings or before going to bed is better). Try this routine for some days, and you will instantly notice a huge difference in your life. You’ll gain in happiness, well-being, self-confidence, sociability, and productivity. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/an-easy-trick-to-instantly-improve-your-well-being-99d52a55e3c6 | ['Rachid Meharich'] | 2020-12-25 03:38:30.600000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Wellbeing', 'Hapiness', 'Life', 'Short Story'] |
One Woman’s Hiking Experience to Ado Awaye | Sometime this year, I made the active decision to change my bucket list to a ‘will do’ list. And one of the items I had on my list was to go hiking. On a budget!
For years I had felt I could only do focused things like that if I had extra cash or time or something like that. It hit me suddenly that I would never get to tick anything off my list if I didn’t plan and budget for it like I do every other thing in my life.
So I set out to Google places I could possibly hike within Nigeria (I’ve got to start small). It had to be somewhere close because I only had a weekend to work with if I had to go anywhere at all.
Luckily, thankfully and happily I found two articles written by the very lovely Funmi and Bunmi. I can’t thank you both enough for writing the articles peppered with great tips, that wet my appetite enough to make the trip.
The sun shines differently in Ado Awaye
The articles were about Ado Awaye in Oyo State, a community that houses one of the 2 suspended lakes in the world and more importantly, a hiking trail for newbies like me.
I reached out to Bunmi and she connected me to David Atabo who is an absolutely brilliant guide. He made it much fun for me as I was going on this adventure alone.
I planned a 2 day 1 night trip because I wanted to start the hike in the morning before the sun comes out in it’s blistering glory.
We arrived Ado Awaye from Lagos after an approximately 5 hour road trip to one of the 2 hotels that are present there where we were informed they were no rooms. Luckily the other hotel had rooms for us. There I met Omolara who likes to be called Zainab, the makeshift cook at the hotel.
The next day dawned with me barely reigning in my excitement at the fact I was really going to do it. We left the hotel by 7:57am which was a fair enough starting time considering it was 22 degrees which might not seem like much to some but coming from a state that’s at an all time 34 degrees, 22 degrees was a welcome chill.
15 minutes later we got to the foot of the mountain and I was geared up with a walking stick. A totally essential feature you should not make the mistake of refusing.
I was immediately introduced to the 365 Irregular steps (with emphasis on Irregular). For me, this was one of the first fascinating aspects of the mountain. Apparently it was built by a previous deputy governor of Oyo State. Sadly it hasn’t been maintained so it requires your whole mental faculty to make the climb to the top of the steps.
The beginning of the beginning: 365 irregular steps leads the way to the mountain
Next up is Ishage rock that is believed to grant the wish of people that pray at the Rock. A white cloth is tied round the Rock by the chief priest whenever the land experiences a drought.
Contemplating what would happen if I pull the white cloth down (just kidding)
After the Ishage rock, the body of water I call the ‘green water’ is the next fascinating feature of the mountain. The story goes that a woman who specializes in tie and dye used the lake for her craft which turned the water to that particular shade of green.
Green is not my colour if not I might have taken a bath
The Iyake Lake, which the mountain and even the community is well known for is the most arresting of them all. There are a number of beliefs that surround this lake, with the famous one being that anyone who enters the lake can never come out.
Science buffs might say this is because the lake may actually be fed through a spring in the mountain which is where people that enter get sucked to.
Also also, it is said the leaves of the tree never ever drops on the surface of the lake.
Pretty for taking pictures…definitely not for diving
The depressions made on the mountains are referred to as the footprints of the elders…(who the elders are, I’m not sure)
What shoe size could the elders have worn?
We made our way to the felled tree with a trunk in the shape of an elephant. Makes one really wonder how these things come to be. A friend says it’s carved. Me, I say nature is mysterious, more things are possible than we can ever dream up.
carved or not carved?
We passed several harrowing paths, one of which is named “Ese Kan Aye, Ese Kan Iku” which literally means One leg in life, one leg in death. That path was unbelievably insane! The locals who had undergone the trip in the past used to go down the steep slope and climb up the same way before David Atabo worked together with the Kabiyesi of the land to construct this bridge.
But David Atabo being the small bully he is, made us all experience the old ways before the bridge was constructed (photocredit | Sami_Tunji)
Getting to the top, I can only describe it with one word- Breathtaking. Literally and figuratively, words can’t express or explain that feeling of reaching that point. I had hiked for 2 hours to get to the top and I’d reached the destination with a view so beautiful I could only stare for a few minutes. The very air felt alive and different. We couldn’t stay for long of course. We had to get down.
And about an hour and 30 minutes later we made it down with my shaky legs.
One word… Breathtaking.
We then made our way to the Kabiyesi’s palace where he welcomed us warmly and encouraged us to help the community in whatever way we can. Interestingly enough, I had informed David Atabo I would love to work on an information brochure pro Bono. My way of contributing and encouraging others to take the trip also.
I have ticked off hiking off my list because I had never done it, now I’m even more excited because my list would now have actual mountains I’d like to hike instead. (The beauty of ticking of items is that it allows you add more)
There are so many amazing places to visit in this world and my hope is to experience as many as I can in this lifetime. | https://missamase.medium.com/one-womans-hiking-experience-to-ado-awaye-976c1e2f7499 | ['Winifred Yachiga Amase'] | 2018-12-11 15:41:07.404000+00:00 | ['Nigeria', 'Suspended Lake', 'Ado Awaye', 'Travel', 'Hiking'] |
Hero Omar Calls Lawmakers ‘Shameful’ For Getting Vaccine Before the Vulnerable | Hero Omar Calls Lawmakers ‘Shameful’ For Getting Vaccine Before the Vulnerable
Image: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Despite fellow ‘Squad’ member Alexandria Ocasio Cortez taking the COVID vaccine, Ilhan Abdullahi Omar who married her brother, claimed that is ‘shameful’ for politicians to take the vaccine.
As many country’s recently-purchased vaccines are starting to roll out throughout their respective populous, debates in both the United Kingdom and the United States have sparked asking who will get the vaccines.
The National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom requested the racial background of healthcare workers in vaccine request form, which sparked controversy whether the government will follow many Democratic states in US, and start favouring one race for vaccine roll out.
One of the main debates on social media was whether politicians should get the vaccine before anybody else. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota lawmaker responded to a question posted by Anand Giridharadas, a far-left ‘journalist’ for The Ink, MSNBC and TIME, regarding whether politicians should receive the vaccine due to their “age” or “importance”.
Ilhan responded with a scathing attack on politicians who received the vaccine.
This scathing attack was very unexpected considering Rep. Ilhan Omar’s closest comrade and fellow ‘Squad’ member Alexander Ocasio Cortez (AOC) flaunted herself receiving the vaccine on social media.
Our Queen getting the vaccine.
Our Queen reminding us the vaccine is safe, showing the peace sign, cuz she cares.
Brave. Powerful. Empowered. Yass Queen.
Ocasio-Cortez was heavily criticised by her own followers asking what “qualifies” politicians to get the vaccine. The woman wrote;
“AOC, I love you, but I’m a nurse and I’m still waiting to get mine so what exactly qualifies politicians to get a vaccine before healthcare workers?”
Another angry healthcare worker also commented.
“Why are you getting this before health care workers? I put breathing tubes in people’s airways for 13hrs a day.”
The New York post added, in an article reporting on AOC’s vaccination, that Ocasio-Cortez’s dog ‘Deco’ wasn’t “enthused” by her Instagram stories | https://medium.com/molyneuxpost/hero-omar-calls-lawmakers-shameful-for-getting-vaccine-before-the-vulnerable-53fc2a8b5125 | ['Jack Smith'] | 2020-12-23 00:04:57.477000+00:00 | ['Ilhan Omar', 'Vaccines', 'Molyneux Post Stories', 'Congress', 'Covid 19'] |
The Birth of WAP at EMLYON by Keya | Allegro Cantabile#1 The Birth of WAP at EMLYON
I knew Diane LENNE from WAP (WE ARE THE PROJECTS). She is the founder of this innovative course, which aims at guiding people to take action on their future path. After 2 sessions of WAP, I couldn’t help recommending her to everyone I know. I posted a status:
I’ve participated in a great course, I’ve meet fascinating people. I wake up differently. I live differently.
It’s absolutely crazy to have a course designed and lead by a student in a school. Yet ever since I’m in WAP, wonders never cease. It’s like a living body, and it is growing, unexpectedly. I found such impulse in me: to introduce Diane, and WAP, to the world!
Here’s part of the interview I did with Diane on March 26th, after the 5th session of WAP. I delayed my schedule of publishing it, not only because it’s a huge amount of work transferring the interview, but also because I’ve been doing something else lately: Try WAP in China!
I hope this first script will give you, my reader, an idea of how WAP happened at EMLYON.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
“One summer, I started organizing peer learning week-ends with my friends. Every time, participants were telling me: “It gave me extraordinary amount of energy”. “Now I’m willing to to go and to make a change in my life, I’m going to change the world”… you know, ,these kind of things (laugh). So, for one year, we have kept facilitating knowledge sharing with peers in France, San Francisco, Romania, and always the same vibring atmosphere !
I have realized the potential of our methodologies for schools. That’s why I offered the EMLYON Academic Dean to create a course from it. I have showed him the process, ressources, references. He told me OK, let’s try .
The launching conference was in November 2015. The topic was “How the current world transformations will affect your life”. I was very very anxious, because I was a student, offering a very different course to my peers. I was not sure anyone would come. Finally, a hundred came, and 160 applied.
At first I was so unconfident, that i feared anyone will come back. But all of them were there at the 2nd session. Participants told me “Each step is unexpected, more interesting”. At the end of the course, participants asked for joining the meeting with the academic dean. They said the course should replace Career Service (a department for professional orientation at EMLYON).
“It truly helped me. It opened my mind” said Tian, international student. “My friend ask me : How do you know everything happening about social entrepreneurship ? Because I took action, at the WAP course” replies Adrien.
And also, one told me:
Back home after the sharing with each other, I got so inspired by one of the conversation that I have designed a full website. I have never done this, but now I’m getting used to take actions and putting my ideas into action.
She told me that it truly changed her life. But, it was not because of me. It was thanks to the interaction with peers. So I realized how important the interaction, communication an inspiration from students to students count. Actually, all this course is based from this.
I have always been absolutely convinced, that’s something special lies in every individual, every student. They can get inspired from each other. And they don’t need a teacher to inspire them.” | https://medium.com/wearepeers/allegro-cantabile-1-the-birth-of-wap-at-emlyon-by-keya-4e26eaac4f9c | ['Wap Community'] | 2016-11-16 01:48:25.212000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Education'] |
Small steps make big difference | S C Cunningham — Author, Filmmaker, Philanthropist.
A crime investigator, I write rom thriller novels for film and empowering, good-values, picture books for children.
I endeavour to have a “charity pot' revenue share in my projects. Encouraging the film industry to co-create and give back.
So that through the power of words, music and images we can entertain, raise awareness, funding and smiles. Make a difference to those in need and the home we live in, our planet.
If we all did something ‘good’, no matter how small, what a wonderful place this would be :-)
We have a duty of care, will you join us? Keep safe.
Siobhan
S C Cunningham
www.sccunningham.com
Rom Thriller THE DEAL is in film development, EVIL’S MATCH (working title) | https://medium.com/@sccunningham/small-steps-make-big-difference-60c182d876a3 | ['S C Cunningham - Author Books Film'] | 2021-02-03 01:52:41.427000+00:00 | ['Authors', 'Philanthropy', 'Film', 'Books', 'Love'] |
Curiosity pills: there are more water molecules in one liter bottle than stars in the Universe. | Curiosity pills: there are more water molecules in one liter bottle than stars in the Universe.
A mole of water contains, by definition, 6.022x10²³ molecules and weight 18 grams so, approximately, in a 1-liter bottle there are around 3.34x10²⁵ molecules of water. Scientists estimated the whole universe contains between 10¹¹ to 10¹² galaxies, each made of 10¹¹ to 10¹² stars. that means there are between 10²² to 10²⁴ stars in the Universe.
read the full story here: | https://medium.com/@diegotonini555/curiosity-pills-there-are-more-water-molecules-in-one-liter-bottle-than-stars-in-the-universe-5039fdca20f8 | ['Diego Tonini'] | 2020-12-14 18:50:43.366000+00:00 | ['Avogadro', 'Water', 'Molecule', 'Stars', 'Mole'] |
Simple weight loss methods-original theory | The mindset
At the age of 24, I lived an unhealthy life.
I used to ate whatever I liked with no regard for the nutritional value of the food. without any kind of physical activity
I used to live like a dumb, create unnecessary tension with my surroundings
I thought to feel like a tummy with this kind of health
Some years are passed with this health condition and mainly the mindset have a form that I am free from health and nothing can turn me down
And thoughts like health is just a secondary one. Nothing is going to bother me
The speechless moments
Yes!! I remember that’s the day I look at me
On the day I just go to visit the doctor for my viral fever
As soon as she checked my body vitals, and she just speechless about me
I was 88 kg, my BMI was 36, my blood pressure was touching 160+ and I had high sugar and very high cholesterol.
She told me that this kind of stuff is seen in 60+ ages
I was quite speechless for the first time ever
And finally, she told me that if you not able to maintain your health then it will lead to your own death
I build me
In the next year, I have completely changed my quality of health
I work hard intensely to maintain the health
Sometimes I have time nor energy to work out. But I mainly focus on quality foods and best supplement without any side effects on health
These are the four major things I did and followed consistently for 12 months:
1. Have Food on time. Add more protein, fewer carbs.
2.Say no to refined sugars. I mean no beverages, no sweets, no chocolates
3. Have a good supplement to intake which is organic and no side effect on the body
4. Have light-weighted food for the night and take good quality sleepy (complete 8 hours sleep)
I followed for 12 months with a quality supplement which leads to losing weight from
88 kg to lose 34 kg
Assets of my life
There are some lessons I experienced during my weight loss journey
1. Build the basement
Health is the only thing that you should build your own
It should be monitored every day more than anything else.
Even more than your anything. Include your loved one
You are the basement of your loved one and every loved person like your family and girlfriend are hooking with your support in that building
Moreover, your loved one hangs your support ..on the time your basement slips everything goes wrong
2. weight loss is nothing
There is no direct connection between weight and health.
You have seen a person with perfectly normal weight who is in bad health and so on
So don’t think only about losing weight, think about good health. and correct supplements to intake in this journey
A healthy life is a continuous, non-stop process that needs to be practiced equally by everyone, irrespective of their weight or age.
3. Even start now
Don’t wait for any notations and timings
You won’t always be as lucky as I was informing the information to you
There is no right age limit or any specific time to start working on your health.
4. Be patient but stay tunned
I didn’t do anything so high; I took one forward step at a time.
When I have supplements to intake it take months but it’s proven anyway
Don’t buy anything unwanted. Start with the thing which is efficient to you. And make results
The main rule is to ask yourself if you can do it for 12 months of consistency
5. Make goals by your way
The main common mistakes are done by most of us. when entering to weight loss they set a goal as biceps, chest, six-packs, etc..,
Good, I appreciate this .but this will lead to depression when it cant attain the moment.
But when it attains you cant be uncontrolled by your way
Now I am telling you that depression leads to stop the journey. but we are here to make the impossible to possible
So make a small step to attain the big achievements. Our aim is to weight loss daily
Three golden rules to achieve ‘process goals’ are:
1.make calculated workouts and make the work out harder
2. Take supplements in order to time and eat healthy foods with quality foods
3.push harder to your body to maintain your health
In this running world, most of us are not eligible to work out and cant takes healthy foods on time. even though foods are not taken on time due to work schedule
So supplements play a major role in this part
Intake quality supplements with naturally organic and without any side effects will lead you better weight loss on time.
See how other peoples are reducing their weight loss with good quality products join now | https://medium.com/@mohameduvais555/simple-weight-loss-methods-original-theory-aeb1efefcdf8 | ['Mohamed Uvais'] | 2021-06-08 08:37:20.454000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss Tips', 'Weight Loss Supple', 'Weightloss Foods', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Supplements'] |
What I learned after coding for a year | Writing a program is hard. And writing a maintainable program that everyone can understand is really harder. It takes a lot of time, practice and dedication.
Today, I am going to share what I learned through my one year journey as a software developer. This helps you to avoid these mistakes as early as possible. We start with a sample program given below. And we try to improve the program while looking at each section.
Note: It’s an illustration, not a complete working application.
If this program looks familiar, then you must continue reading further. As the program tries its best to describe as a note-taking app, it hardly conveys its intended purpose. After looking carefully for a few times you may start to realize the purpose of this program. Why its hard to read? Because it’s poorly written. Although the program works properly its hard to understand and maintain.
So let me share some of the basic principles and guidelines that you can follow to write a better program.
Formatting and Code style:
Formatting allows us to comprehend the code without any efforts. Without proper formatting, the code becomes hard to read and maintain.
Look at the above program. The braces are not indented properly. Either place opening braces at the new line or at the end of the same line. Follow any standard code style guidelines and stick to it.
Comments:
Comments are the easiest and, at the same time, the hardest part of coding. Because comments are hard to maintain than the code itself. Avoid comments as much as possible. Add comment only when required.
In the above example, the comments are not self-describing. And it also has useless comments. See line number 3 and 6.
Naming Convention:
Naming a variable, class, methods, or anything must tell the purpose to the readers explicitly. Do not name anything that doesn’t convey the purpose.
For example, in Java we follow conventions like the class names should start with a capital letter, method names should follow camelCase, and constants should be all capital letters, etc.
After applying all the above guidelines and principles, now the program looks like this:
Isn’t it looks better? But still, there is room for improvements. Let’s see them.
NULL and Magic Numbers:
null is the most mysterious keyword in any language. So, avoid passing and returning null values. Because it does not convey whether the object has no data, or its empty, or something is broken, or whatever.
Use exceptions whenever you want to notify that something went wrong. Use empty objects to denote emptiness.
And don’t use any numbers without making it a constant. Later you find yourself digging what this number supposed to mean? Make magic numbers as a constant so that others can understand its purpose.
Datatypes:
Always store data in datatypes that are meaningful. Because sometimes you may get confused, say, whether should I parse this as a Boolean or String.
return "true"; //bad. return true; //good.
Function Length:
Never allow any methods (functions) to exceed more than 10 or 15 lines of code. Even though you may not call that method more than once, split them into one or more methods so that each does a specific task. This allows you to easily test and maintain the code.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel:
For almost any task, there are many APIs available already. Try to use those APIs other than for learning purpose. And create only when it does not support your need efficiently or when it’s not customizable.
Refactor:
Software builds with changing requirements. Which means you have to change the code now and then. So whenever you modify something refactor the existing code. Because you are making a mess by modification, and you should clean it up. Otherwise, it becomes a maintenance headache as the system grows.
Now take a look at the below program that followed everything I just described. Its cleaner and easier to read. Compare it with the first program and see the difference.
Always TEST the code:
This is the most important part of software development. Yet easily overlooked by all of us. Even if you change a single letter in code, test the entire module at least, if not the whole system. Because software easily break. Try to automate the testing process wherever possible.
Happy Coding! Happy Learning!!! | https://medium.com/@ajithcpas/what-i-learned-after-coding-for-a-year-c747dcf8cedc | ['Ajith K'] | 2019-01-28 10:26:43.962000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Java', 'Best Practices', 'Programming', 'Software Development'] |
Getting Started with TigerGraph Starter Kits | Getting Started with TigerGraph Starter Kits
Motivation
Fraud is a growing problem faced by all industries leading to billions of dollars lost every year. As hackers become more prevalent and more advanced, fraud detection is an issue that must be addressed immediately.
Enter, TigerGraph.
By harnessing the power of the graph, users can detect fraud in real-time, perform in-database machine learning, and identify hidden trends with deep link analytics.
Note: While this blog focuses on a fraud detection Starter Kit, the steps used to set up the graph are the same for any Starter Kit.
Using the Fraud Detection Starter Kit
Creating a Graph Instance
If you haven’t already done so, check out the guide Getting Started with TigerGraph 3.0. It contains all of the information needed to create a full graph, from creating an account to designing a schema to loading data.
Under the Create a Solution header, you can find instructions for creating an instance of a TigerGraph box. Follow those steps, this time choosing the Fraud and Money Laundering Detection (Fin. Services) Starter Kit.
Fraud Detection Starter Kit
Once the solution is done loading, open the solution in GraphStudio.
All Starter Kits come with the Design and Data Mapping complete. This saves us from a lot of headaches. To start using the kit, all we have to do is load the data.
Loading Data
First, make sure you see AntiFraud as the graph listed in the top left corner. Next, click the Load Data tab. Then, hit the play button to start the data loading.
Load Data Tab
After about one minute, all of the data should be loaded.
With that, the graph is now ready to use. It’s that easy!
Exploring the Graph
Instead of walking through the Explore Graph page, we’ll leave that up to you. There are lots of really interesting data available in this Starter Kit, so take the time to play around with selecting different vertex types, expanding from vertices, and finding paths between vertices. This will give you a really good sense of the data and the schema design for the graph.
Explore Graph Example
If you’re having trouble with some of the options available on this page, refer back to Getting Started with TigerGraph 3.0. The Explore page, along with every other page, is covered in great detail in that blog.
Running Queries
All Starter Kits come with a bunch of ready-to-use queries. All queries come with a few lines of text describing what the query does and how to use it.
Example Query
This Starter Kit comes with some very cool queries, including detecting users who abuse referral bonuses, finding circular flows of money (associated with money laundering), and determining whether a user is sending money to themselves via a fake account. These are all based on real-world scenarios, and I highly recommend looking at all of the queries to get a grasp of how they work conceptually and in terms of GSQL syntax.
But, let’s just try running two specific queries for now.
MultiTransaction
The comments for the MultiTransaction query are as follows:
This query is motivated by detecting money laundering activities between two groups. Given a transaction, it finds the network of users related to the sender, and finds the network of users related to the receiver. Then, it finds all transactions among the two networks. Intuitively this query can help data analysts to visualize the money laundering activities, since it can visualize the transactions between the sender and receiver groups, and the transaction patterns within each network. 1) Start from an input transaction, find its sender and reciever
2) Start from the sender, via Device_Token and Payment_Instrument edges find users within 4 steps.
3) Start from the reciever, via Device_Token and Payment_Instrument edges find users within 4 steps.
4) Record transactions cross the sender and receiver groups. Sample input
transaction: any integer between 1 and 500.
This tells us what the query does and provides a sample input for running it.
I randomly chose the number 333 as the input parameter.
Sample Query Input
Here’s what the visual output looked like:
Query Output (visual)
And here’s what the JSON output looked like:
Query Output (JSON)
According to the comments provided, the Start is supposed to print transactions in common between the networks of the sender and receiver of the input transaction. For this example, Start is empty, indicating that there are no common transactions, which suggests that this transaction and the users are trustworthy.
circleDetection
According to the provided comments, circleDetection is a query to detect money flow circles from a starting user.
Circle Detection Query
This query makes use of some features that only work for Installed queries. While Interpreted queries can run right away, they don’t offer all of the functionalities available.
You can find a full list of features not supported in Interpreted Mode here.
So, after installing the query and waiting for about 1 minute, we can finally run it.
Let’s try inputting a random user 456.
Circle Detection Query Input
Here’s the visual output.
Circle Detection Output (Visual)
You can clearly see that there is a circular trail of transactions and users around the input user.
Let’s see what the JSON output looks like.
Circle Detection Output (JSON)
In this case, the JSON output lists the connecting users and transactions that form the circle.
These queries are just a few examples of how fraud detection can be analyzed using graph databases. They also highlight some general methods of detecting fraud.
These queries come with the Starter Kit, but you of course can write any custom query you would like with the data provided.
Let's try writing a custom query.
CREATE QUERY TotalTransaction(Vertex<User> Source) FOR GRAPH AntiFraud { /*
This query grabs all transactions involving the input user
Example input: 333
*/ start = {Source}; transfer = SELECT tgt
FROM start:s -(User_Transfer_Transaction:e) - :tgt; receive = select tgt
FROM start:s -(User_Recieve_Transaction:e) -:tgt; PRINT transfer, receive; }
If you’re unfamiliar with GSQL, the proprietary query language for TigerGraph, check out this great article that goes through some of the basics.
The query above, given the id of a user in the graph, returns all transactions made by that user was a part of. This includes money transfers made by the user as well as transfers to the user.
Let’s try out the suggested input of 333.
Running example query
This query returns a sample of transactions, so the only output should be Transaction vertices. We can confirm this with the visual output of the graph.
Query output (visual)
We can also show this in the JSON output.
Query output (JSON)
This query was pretty basic, and there are many more powerful queries that can be implemented using this Starter Kit. But, we’ll leave that as a test of your creativity and GSQL skills.
Conclusion
In this blog, we covered a very brief overview of the Fraud and Money Laundering Detection Starter Kit from TigerGraph. This kit is just one of many kits covering everything from finance to healthcare to recommendation engines. I encourage you to explore other Starter Kits, following similar steps as those outlined in this blog. There’s a whole world of use cases for graph technologies, and we’ve only scratched the surface.
In the next chapter, we are going to further expand on this Starter Kit by developing a custom dashboard to visualize some of the data stored in this graph. | https://medium.com/@akash_kaul/getting-started-with-tigergraph-starter-kits-5a4d8ddac974 | ['Akash Kaul'] | 2020-11-23 21:44:27.231000+00:00 | ['Graph Database', 'Graph', 'Tigergraph'] |
My Dog is running for the Office!! | “I will drain the swamp,” Brewski was chewing on my sneaker now.
“Those politicians, they are all the same.” I continued. “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”
“I will throw them a bone,” Brewski had his face inside the shoe. “Everybody can be leashed.”
“And the Economy? What are you going to do about it?”
“I will print money and give it to everyone in America.”
“Isn’t that what the government just did?”
“But they gave it all to the rich.” Brewski sniffed around the bushes. “The not-so-rich are still working like dogs.”
“It’s the poor’s turn to get something,” Brewski said, getting in position to relieve himself on the grass.
“Every dog has his day.” I mused. | https://medium.com/the-story-hall/my-dog-is-running-for-the-office-a44bbfcb41b0 | ['Rakesh Gambhir'] | 2020-10-05 19:54:49.578000+00:00 | ['Presidential Debates', 'Dogs', 'Humor', 'Election', 'Dog Humor'] |
How “I” passed one of the HOTTEST IT Certification — Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer 2021… | How “I” passed one of the HOTTEST IT Certification — Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer 2021 version?
Disclaimer: All views are my own & have nothing to do with my employer. Also, I have tried to keep this post per Google’s certification secrecy policies.
FIRST thigs first! GCP professional DE is the HOTTEST cloud certification of 2021. I am not saying this, the industry suggests so- See link:
https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/17/15-top-paying-it-certifications-for-2021/
2. Who am “I” ? Just another next door Data engineer with 10+ years of hands on Data Engg. experience in OLTP,OLAP, Bigdata & cloud. Been fortunate enough to work on some really large datasets. This is what helped ME most in cracking this GCP DE exam. I will explain in details how.
3. Certification preparation is like TRAINING a ML model :
If you do UNDERFITTING — You will FAIL both in exam & in real life.
If you do OVERFITTING — You will PASS the exam but FAIL in real life.
Choice is yours. If wish to succeed in both scenarios- practice & practice.
HINT: If you understand the keywords I mentioned above, you can answer some questions in the exam :)
4. Shortcuts can cut short your chances of passing! AVOID it. The exam is VERY scenario based so taking any short cuts, like asking questions from friends who have appeared won’t help much. They tweak the questions smartly for the very same scenario. So not sure how any PAID mock test can be helpful.
I myself wrote several pages of paper notes ( like we did in school ) to ensure I don’t forget some of the tricks & importsnt details.
5. Breadth & Depth of the GCP services — The exam covers almost all GCP DE related services like storage, ingestion, processing, consumption, governance etc. But one does not need to know all these services in depth. For some, if we just know WHEN to use & WHY , we are good. For some services we ALSO need to know HOW to use them EFFICIENTLY.
HINT: GCP is being marketed as an alternative to customers Data warehouse & Data lake on premise infra to Google’s infra. So MIGRATING data from on prem infra & its associated service offerings are key. Remember, COST is not always the choosing factor while selecting a cloud service, sometimes it is the “AVAILABILTY TO MARKET” / infra ramp up is a key differentiator.
6. Focus on YOUR strengths & work on weaknesses: Remember, the exam requires 70% to pass not 100%. So it is okay to not know everything. But before even preparing if you know your strengths & weakness it can help you.
In my case I have done only 1 real-life ML project & 0 stream processing ingestion project. So I knew these were my weak spots & I would score less here. This is exactly what happened in exam too. So I had prepared for the rest of the sections in depth. My past hands on experience made that easy for me and I was able to solve all scenario based questions.
7. LEARNING Resources I used: Different people learn new things differently. It seems my brain has been trained to learn from videos first & then text.
Google Cloud has some amazing short videos which I always watch & then follow up with Google sketches/blogs. Priyanka is an amazing teacher for sure.
For topics that requires deep understanding or have higher weightage in exam, I read Google clouds documentations multiple times. For example, Google BigQuery is a game changer for some DW,DL & ML use cases.
Not only I have a good understanding on how my organization is migrating to cloud but how other companies are doing too. A medium article by Walmart helped me understand the migration strategy they used, complete end to end landscape.
Last year some CVS employees had a 5 day GCP training. I was not invited to that training but I heard it was good. The trainer had shared some PDFs and hand written digital notes. I took access of those materials & it did help me plan when I started preparing for this. So if you are a CVS employee / contractor, contact me in company IM to get it.
8. How to get hands-on ? Hands on is a MUST. I did some of my practice in my day to day job. Also I used quicklabs. Qwicklabs has a 300$ FREE credit program which one SHOULD use. If you are smart, you will know how to get another 300$ credits :). GCP is fairly new as compared to some of its competitors, so getting internships and hands on is little challenging.
9. Exam time tip: You have 2 hours to complete the exam. HINTS to the answers are hidden in the question. Read the question very carefully. If required read it 2–3 times & it will confess the answer :).
Sample QUESTION format:
In 2020 USA presidential elections, a successful American businessman turned politician from the grand old party of the United states of America was defeated by a Democratic candidate. When this Democratic candidate was a Vice president in past, who was the POTUS?
Option 1 — Joe Biden
Option 2 — Kamala Harris
Option 3 — Donald Trump
Option 4 — Barack Obama
So if you don’t know what is POTUS — President of the US, you will be confused!
10. Lastly, THANK YOU for reading till the end! Believe in yourself & get GCP certified. If “I” can do it, YOU can do it BETTER than me. Good luck! | https://medium.com/@bitthal24/how-i-passed-one-of-the-hottest-it-certification-google-cloud-professional-data-engineer-2021-9cd9959af9cf | ['Bitthal Khaitan'] | 2021-09-04 21:29:52.949000+00:00 | ['Certification', 'Big Data', 'Money', 'Technology', 'Cloud Computing'] |
Asva Labs 2022: An agile roadmap for a thriving metaverse | We bid goodbye to 2020 in a rush of euphoria from the DeFi upturn, ready to explore the bizarre trends crypto has to offer. As imagined, the year comes to a close having successfully ventured into some novel, experimental landscapes that managed to intrigue even the most vocal crypto cynics.
If we were to pin down one factor that took the industry where it is today, it has to be the conviction that bands the crypto community together. The fire of innovation got us through thick and thin, bringing us closer to our united vision one step at a time. So has been the case here at Asva Labs.
We kicked off our operations back in Q1 2021. The goal was to empower the industry with cutting-edge interoperable applications and make crypto mainstream. Months down the line, our objectives have evolved to reflect the fast-paced changes in the industry centered around the metaverse. If we began our journey with a multi-chain DeFi aggregation engine, today, our product line-up includes the first-ever metaverse launchpad and incubator, a metaverse marketplace, and a play-to-earn guild.
We’d like to take this moment to thank our incredible community, team, investors, and partners who pushed Asva Labs to pursue its grand ambitions.
Year-in-review
ASVA, the native token of the Asvaverse ecosystem, went live on 30th December 2021. The tokens were sold out on Starter, NFTb, and our native launchpad MetaLaunch a few minutes into launching the IDOs. ASVA is currently listed on the leading BSC-based decentralized exchange, PancakeSwap . Track ASVA on CoinMarketCap .
. Track ASVA on . MetaLaunch is our premier product dedicated to the emerging metaverse industry. The advanced fundraising and strategic frameworks on the platform are designed to nurture the long-term growth of ambitious start-ups. ASVA IDO marked the debut of MetaLaunch.
Stepping into the year of innovation
2022 will be a massive year for Asva Labs. How can we be so sure? Because, we have some ground-breaking products underway that reimagine DeFi, NFT, and the metaverse.
Applications are invited from promising start-ups for MetaLaunch listing. We plan to host public token sales for projects from diverse sectors in the metaverse and gaming industries. MetaLaunch V2 will feature more functionalities along with Avalanche and Solana integration.
The metaverse marketplace, slated for release in the first quarter of the year, will supplement the frameworks on MetaLaunch. Unlike traditional NFT marketplaces, the activities on the platform will not be confined to NFT trades. It will host Initial NFT offerings, auctions, and special NFT drops for listed projects.
MetaFi DeFi Vault, as the name gives it away, introduces DeFi infrastructure into the metaverse. It is designed to maximize passive income opportunities on listed tokens by offering staking and yield farming from one unified interface. A key feature of the platform will be NFT farming.
In the following months, the Asvaverse ecosystem will feature a play-to-earn guild system, some novel products in line with the latest trends, improved functionalities, and DAO integrations.
The world is ready for the metaverse. Our job is to streamline its growth for all. Join us in this journey to the next phase of the internet.
Let the Metaverse thrive.
About Asva Labs
Asva Labs is an innovation lab that is building a unified finance ecosystem to catalyze the metaverse movement. The suite of MetaFi applications maximizes the productivity of virtual ownership assets. MetaLaunch, the premier application from Asva Labs, is the first-ever multi-chain metaverse launchpad and accelerator that delivers strategic fundraising and growth frameworks to fuel virtual world and gaming economies.
Asvaverse also features MetaFi DeFi use cases, a metaverse marketplace, and play-to-earn guild integrations. We foster metaverse interoperability by deploying applications on multiple blockchains.
Be on the radar for the latest updates from Asvaverse.
Asva Labs website | Telegram | Asva Labs Twitter | MetaLaunch Website |Metalaunch Twitter | Medium | https://medium.com/@asvalabs/asva-labs-2022-an-agile-roadmap-for-a-thriving-metaverse-ee06169d4f2a | ['Asva Labs'] | 2021-12-30 21:44:02.512000+00:00 | ['Asva', 'Metaverse', 'Roadmaps'] |
Weaponized Email Attachments — A Solution for the Enterprises of Tomorrow | Despite significant investments in defensive technologies, email continues to be the leading security threat. Creative integration of cloud storage technologies can leverage the human mind for potentially one of the most effective defenses yet.
Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been reminded about the dangers of email. Despite significant deployments of antivirus, data loss prevention and other defensive systems, email continues to be the number one attack vector for hackers. As we’ve posted before, content is safer outside of email than inside.
Email and email attachment payloads are often being used by ill-intended actors to deliver “weaponized” files, or files that have been altered with the intent of infecting the recipient’s device. In one recent case, the attack vector is a PDF attachment with an embedded URL routing through Google’s infrastructure and in the most recent example, image files like png and jpeg sent as email attachments are used to compromise Android devices.
These ill-intended exploit strategies, at their essence, are exploiting human tendencies. Like all humans, email users are creatures of habit that often get distracted. One email attachment in a daily user average of 120 messages, is all it takes for the hackers to gain a foothold within the organization.
Whenever content can interact directly with the end user, hackers can spring their trap. When users open content locally, i.e. on their laptop, mobile phone, etc. hackers have an opening to execute code behind the company’s defenses.
If hackers can leverage our humanity to penetrate our virtual walls, might there be a counter strategy that uses that same humanity to strengthen our defense?
While hackers are skilled at embedding malicious code in files, what they can’t engineer at scale is content that is meaningful to the recipient. In other words, if users were able to safely inspect the attached document proactively, they could readily ascertain if a document is suspicious. An invoice from an unknown vendor for an unknown product to a nonexistent employee is suspicious, especially when it’s received by an account executive who has no role with company procurement. In other words, if we can allow the human brain to do the pattern recognition and contextualization that it does do well, we can more effectively defeat this type of assault.
Modern cloud content management platforms like Egnyte, Box and Microsoft’s OneDrive combined with technologies like mxHero provide a ready means of ensuring that email attachments can first be safely inspected by the user away from the user’s devices before being downloaded and opened locally. Through an automated software enabled process to auto-extract email attachment payloads in favor of secure and collaboration-based links to modern cloud and hybrid-based content management platforms, users have a natural defense against weaponized content attachments.
Letting users open files safely away from their devices
Importantly, the process can be centrally deployed and controlled, requiring nothing of the recipients or senders in terms of software or training. As such, user adoption is not an issue. Furthermore, it works uniformly across every device and all email systems.
Attachments automatically moved to cloud storage for safe preview before download
By innovatively combining technologies that take advantage of our human strengths we can better defend against those ill-intended content weaponization efforts that exploit our human weaknesses. At a time when “artificial intelligence” is all the rage, let’s not forget that “real human intelligence” and common sense, with the use of available technology today, might be one of the best solutions.
Related Stories from DDI: | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/weaponized-email-attachments-a-solution-for-the-enterprises-of-tomorrow-380ff9926c93 | ['Alex Panagides'] | 2019-02-09 07:19:56.265000+00:00 | ['Virus', 'Cloud Storage', 'Security', 'Email'] |
My Best Birthday Was Spent by Myself | November 16th was my birthday, and this year, I decided to celebrate it by myself. Since starting my self-care journey a few months back, I thought it was essential to spend this special occasion without the presence of others. I guess I can say I was looking forward to this for a while.
I’d say I didn’t do much. I played video games, worked out, listened to one of my favorite albums, went to the park to finish a book, and ate a bunch of my favorite foods.
In between all of that though, I also got my first couple tattoos! This is a big deal to me not only because they’re tattoos, but because for the first time in my life, I made a decision on my own without seeking the approval of others. I love them so much, and I can’t wait to add more art to this canvas that is my body.
For the first time in a really long time, I actually enjoyed my birthday. It was a great feeling to know that I didn’t need to do anything big and eventful, or rely on anyone else to help make it special — I was able to do that all by myself.
Most importantly, I realized that I can have this type of day whenever I want to. It all comes down to doing the small things that give me joy.
Man, this was the best birthday ever.
Like what you’re reading? You’ll love Buibui — Have you tried reading from there lately? Click here to learn more | https://byrslf.co/my-best-birthday-was-spent-by-myself-42f15fabd520 | ['Derrick'] | 2020-12-23 10:11:58.243000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Self Care', 'Beyourself', 'Birthday'] |
Ruby on Rails Vs. PHP: Which One’s Right For Your Project? | If we look at the Ruby on Rails vs. PHP, there is a clash of titans; Basecamp & Airbnb vs. Yahoo & Facebook! The first two giants are developed with Ruby on Rails, whereas the latter are built with PHP.
Aren’t you wondering who’s right?
Let’s take into consideration more context related to our topic. Let me make the blurry difference between RoR and PHP clear. Rails is only a framework that is built with Ruby programming language, while PHP itself is a programming language.
Then, why are people so confused about this topic? Let’s clear the confusion;
What is Ruby on Rails?
RoR or Ruby on Rails is a framework that is written in Ruby language. It is developed for making coding faster, easier, and more convenient for web programmers.
There are various quality practices in RoR such as DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) that allows programmers to reuse blocks of code.
Ruby on Rails has powered around 824 thousand websites worldwide, becoming one of the most popular technologies. That stimulates more and more businesses to choose Ruby on Rails development company for their web development.
Ruby was ranked #13 in the list of most popular programming languages in the StackOverflow survey.
In the most popular language list, as per the TIOBE Index, Ruby on Rails got the place in the top 20 most popular technologies around the world.
What is PHP?
PHP is a scripting language that is considered as one of the most renowned technologies. It was developed with the aim of delivering web applications and websites in real-time. PHP is It is currently used by 79% of all the existing websites. Initially, Facebook was developed in PHP and then translated to C++.
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP: Which one’s right for your project? — A face-to-face shootout
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP — User Interface
Ruby on Rails is famous for enhancing the user experience while delivering polished and shining websites. It is born after the UX principles, and this modern technology fully backs the development of user-centric websites.
PHP comes with a strong background for being the tool to connect websites with databases. PHP still needs the support of other technology such as JavaScript to deliver an exceptional user experience.
Verdict: Ruby on Rails outruns PHP.
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP — Architecture
RoR forces users to follow the best practices for developing applications, as it has adopted the Model-View-Controller paradigm. Thus, this framework has a stable and well-performing architecture.
With programmers building their own stack of technologies, PHP usually used saute. PHP gives freedom to developers for delivering unstable architecture and messy code though the quality is only dependent on developers’ skills.
Verdict: RoR outperforms PHP.
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP — Speed of coding
Ruby on Rails development allows programmers to perform what is best at — coding, because of the Convention over configuration forced and DRY principle.
RoR development helps to reduce the time, which is generally wasted for tedious work of delivering a programming environment and configuration.
PHP does not have any tools to speed up configuration or any other aspect; therefore, it falls short. Thus, it can give a headache while implementing the end solution even though it is relatively easy.
Verdict: Better luck next time PHP.
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP: Speed of coding
RoR is elegant and fast. Ruby on Rails offers good performing code backed by reliable architecture and good programming practices. The latest version of both PHP and RoR runs on a JIT engine that improvises the speed.
PHP 7.0 comes with built-in web building capacities that amplify the performance without gobbling up more memory, and this is the thing that makes it a powerful server-side scripting language.
RoR also speeds through the performance, but it leads to the high consumption of memory. And to offset this, programmers are required to change the runtimes to compensate for the slowdown.
Verdict: No definite winner can be declared here as both PHP and RoR comes with their own pros and cons.
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP — Community & support
There is a huge demand for PHP coders as it is a venerable, unsinkable, rustproof, and renowned language.
PHP has been here since 1995, and therefore there is a massive library of already solved problems, questions & answers, and tricks. Besides on Stack Overflow and Github, there are numerous PHP developers for help out of any issues and problems.
On the other hand, Ruby on Rails is much newer technology having a thriving community. Still, it is difficult for RoR to outrun the experiences of PHP since 1995.
Verdict: Many Times, nothing can beat experience, so PHP is the winner.
Ruby on Rails vs. PHP — Stability
Ruby on Rails offers stability with the DRY paradigm and MVC. And developers can also make sure of zero hidden dependencies or hard coded information that needs to be inserted as a variable by reusing blocks of code
On the other hand, there is total freedom with PHP. It includes the freedom to create as well as to destroy. As there are not any imposed rules, stability heavily depends on the programmer skills. And that’s something that makes the stability a matter of concern in the PHP.
Verdict: Ruby on Rails seems to be a better choice here.
PHP vs. Ruby on Rails — Learning Curve
In comparison with other programming languages, PHP is relatively easy and simple for beginners to pick up. It’s a different picture with RoR because it is more complicated than PHP. Therefore, it’s more difficult for one to become fluent in Ruby on Rails than PHP.
Verdict: Hats off to PHP here
Final Verdict
Here we have seen the thorough comparison of Ruby on Rails and PHP. So, we can say that there are always different technologies for different projects and different requirements, and there are no bad technologies. Based on the discussion, Ruby on Rails is the first pick in terms of speed and quick launches. You can also identify your requirements and hire Ruby on Rails developer for your project development. | https://medium.com/devtechtoday/ruby-on-rails-vs-php-which-ones-right-for-your-project-16712e9eaacc | ['Bharti Purohit'] | 2020-05-21 11:50:43.325000+00:00 | ['Ruby on Rails', 'PHP', 'Development', 'Ruby On Rails Development', 'Software Development'] |
Bitcoin Halving and Deflationary Pressures | Inflationary Fiat vs Deflationary Bitcoin
Unlike fiat currencies which operate on a model of inflation, Bitcoin is deflationary in nature. Inflation refers to a general increase in the prices of goods and services within the economy. For example, a bottle of whiskey would have cost you £2.69 back in 1970 but would set you back by more than £12 today. Inflation in the context of currencies then refers to the decrease in their buying power. With reference to the example above, the value of the Sterling Pound has fallen since 1970. Compared to 1970, if you were to purchase a bottle of whiskey today you’d require almost 5 times the amount of Sterling Pounds. All major fiat currencies today such as the US Dollar, Sterling Pound and Euro are inflationary. A deflationary environment is simply the reverse of the situation described above. Building on the example of the price of whiskey, this would be equivalent to a bottle of whiskey costing £12 back in 1970 and £2.69 today.
The primary reason for this difference between fiat currencies and Bitcoin is that the supply of fiat currencies are infinite while that of Bitcoin is finite. With respect to fiat currencies, central banks can print new money (fiat currency) at any time and there is technically no limit to how much money they can create. Over time as the central bank constantly issues new money as part of monetary policy, the value of the respective fiat currency falls as it becomes less scarce. In order to facilitate these inflationary pressures, central banks intentionally increase the amount of new money issued every year. The underlying principle is that agents in the economy will be more incentivised to spend (as opposed to holding) if the value of the fiat currency diminishes and in doing so, facilitating a robust economy with free-flowing cash.
In the case of Bitcoin however, money supply is fixed as there is hard cap on production of new currency and the rate of mining is predictable; The algorithm behind Bitcoin dictates that its supply is limited to 21 million units and that the last Bitcoin will be mined in the year 2140. Crucially, the in-built algorithm powering Bitcoin works such that the number of Bitcoin mined declines year on year. Coupled with the fact that after the year 2140, any Bitcoin that is lost (e.g. if an owner of Bitcoin loses his private key) is permanently removed from the money supply, the value of Bitcoin will rise as it becomes increasingly scarce.
Bitcoin Halving
Bitcoin halving is a pivotal component of the mechanism deployed to sustain the deflationary model that Bitcoin operates on. Every 210,000 blocks mined (roughly every 4 years) on the Bitcoin blockchain, the Bitcoin protocol halves the reward for mining new blocks. In other words, with each halving, miners receive 50% less Bitcoin in reward for verifying transactions. To illustrate, when Bitcoin was first launched in 2009, the reward for mining a block of transactions was 50 new BTC. After the first and second halving in 2012 and 2016, this block reward was recursively halved to 25 BTC and 12.5 BTC respectively. As lead developer of the Ethereum project Vitalik Buterin explained the essence of Bitcoin halving: “The main reason why this is done is to keep inflation under control”, Bitcoin halving ensures that the production of Bitcoin decreases over time so as to resist inflationary pressures.
Historical Impact of Bitcoin Halving on BTC Price
Historically, Bitcoin halving has tended to have a positive long-term effect on the price of BTC. In the year following the first Bitcoin halving in November 2012, the price of BTC surged 100 fold from around $11 to a high of $1100 in 2013. The second Bitcoin halving saw the price of BTC erupt from $600 to $20000. The economic concept of supply and demand provides a succinct explanation for this trend. As the production of Bitcoin slows, demand outstrips supply leading to a rise in the price. The theory of demand and supply however rests on crucial assumptions about the economic forces at play, particularly that the demand for BTC remains robust.
Alternatively, we can attempt to dissect the correlation between Bitcoin halving and the price of BTC by considering the role of miners. First it is important to note that the Bitcoin protocol keeps mining rates constant by adjusting the difficulty level of mining every 2016 blocks are added to the Bitcoin blockchain. This means that as a collective whole, miners are unable to verify more blocks than is stipulated by the Bitcoin protocol within a given period. On average, the Bitcoin protocol allows for 4380 blocks to be mined each month. At the time of writing the price of BTC is about $9000 and the block reward is 12.5 BTC. Each month miners are thus earning:
4380 * 12.5 * $9000 = $492,750,000
Following the halving, if miners were to cash in at the prevailing BTC price of $5000, monthly revenue will likewise be halved to:
4380 * 12.5/2 * $9000 = $246,375,000
The miners’ profits will be severely reduced and many smaller players may even be forced out of the market. Given that the mining rate of 4380 blocks per month is fixed, the only option miners have to circumvent this situation is to sell their newly mined BTC for an amount no less than $18000 (twice the prevailing price) in order to maintain their profit levels:
4380 * 12.5/2 * $18000 = $492,750,000
The main idea is that miners who persist with mining will only be willing to sell their newly minted mined Bitcoins at a profitable price. Since the block reward is halved and the mining rate is fixed, this will inevitably lead to an increase in Bitcoin’s asking price.
PlanB’s S2F Model
As Bitcoin’s 3rd halving scheduled for May 2020 draws closer, conversations around a potential BTC price correction have intensified. In March of 2019, an early Dutch bitcoin adopter pseudonymously known as PlanB published a report on Medium titled “Modeling Bitcoin’s Value with Scarcity” in which he/she leveraged upon the emerging Stock to Flow (S2F) pricing model to price Bitcoin. The report’s bullish predictions of the price of BTC has gained significant traction within the Bitcoin community and has since been established as one of the leading bull arguments vis-à-vis the impact of the third halving on the price of BTC.
In the report, PlanB uses S2F ratio to quantify scarcity. This simple ratio is given by:
SF = stock / flow
where stock is the volume of existing reserves and flow is the yearly production. PlanB then found statistically significant relationships between
and BTC market value as well as between
and BTC price on logarithmic scales. Based on the S2F pricing model presented in the report, PlanB forecasts BTC price to reach $55,000 after the third Bitcoin halving in May 2020. In essence, PlanB uses S2F to estimate the market value and price of BTC and in doing so, presents a highly bullish prediction for the price of BTC following the impending May 2020 halving.
3 Critiques of PlanB’s S2F Model:
Demand Conditions
While PlanB’s bullish case for Bitcoin is understandably celebrated by the Bitcoin community, the S2F pricing model driving PlanB’s predictions also has its fair share of critics. Critics argue that the S2F pricing model is fundamentally flawed as price is determined by a combination of supply and demand factors. The S2F pricing model which only takes into account supply conditions whilst omitting the latter is thus an erroneous measure of BTC market value and price. In layman terms, even as the Bitcoin halving acts as a negative supply shock, we cannot reliably predict a surge in BTC price without ascertaining that demand conditions persists or improve; Bitcoin scarcity in itself is not a sufficient condition of value.
OLS Assumptions
Flaws in the statistical methodology supporting PlanB’s S2F model have also been flagged out by critics. PlanB uses a simple Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to map SF to BTC market value and price. OLS regression rests on 4 key assumptions known as the Gauss-Markov assumptions. However, statistical tests conducted on the Bitcoin dataset used in PlanB’s report have shown that not all the assumptions hold at conventional confidence levels. This gives rise to the possibility of OLS regression identifying spurious relationships, casting doubt on the veracity of PlanB’s S2F model predictions. In particular, one critique of the statistical methodology behind PlanB’s S2F, after treating the original PlanB model for its respective violations of the Gauss Markov assumptions, finds that only orthogonal shocks to Bitcoin’s SF would result in a permanent correction of BTC price. Since the SF of BTC can be calculated ahead of time, the critique posits that PlanB’s prediction of a permanent price correction following the May 2020 halving is misguided.
Efficient Markets Hypothesis
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) holds that at any given point in time, any known information about a given asset should already be priced in. The date of Bitcoin’s halving is stipulated by the Bitcoin protocol and is publicly available information. Pointing to BTC’s recovery since its low of $3,300 following the 2017 Bitcoin crash, some critics postulate that in accordance with the EMH, markets have already priced in the May 2020 halving ahead of time and hence we can expect there to be little price movement following the actual date of the halving. In Bitcoin’s first 2 halvings in November 2012 and July 2016, it took more than a year before the Bitcoin market took off. In fact, in the immediate period following the 2016 Bitcoin halving, BTC’s price initally fell from $707 to $570. While the EMH argument appears especially salient considering the initial sluggishness of BTC prices observed in previous halvings, the longer term price corrections which subsequently ensued suggest that the markets may not have been as efficient as the EMH posits. Indeed, markets are never perfectly efficient and particularly in what is a relatively nascent market which remains deeply exposed to various risks including government regulation and fraud, the validity of the EMH as applied to the Bitcoin market is seriously challenged.
Conclusion
The process of halving does not alter the fundamental value of Bitcoin in the traditional investment sense; It is more appropriately characterised as a supply-side development which sees Bitcoin becoming increasingly scarce. The price of an asset is ultimately a function of both supply and demand factors and hence any credible attempt to prognosticate the impact of the halving on BTC price must factor in demand conditions. Accurately forecasting the demand conditions of the Bitcoin market is a herculean task as there are simply too many unknowns surrounding the future developments of the revolutionary DLT technology (especially in areas such as regulation and scalability). Having said that, history has shown that the occurrence of Bitcoin’s halving in itself tends to generate bullish hype about BTC’s price (and thus demand), inflating BTC’s price up in recursive fashion. Should this trend persists, we can expect to see Bitcoin prices react favourably to the upcoming halving in May in the longer term, if not the more immediate term. | https://medium.com/london-blockchain-labs/bitcoin-halving-and-deflationary-pressures-322d275ccd80 | ['Daryl Kow'] | 2020-04-04 01:49:12.922000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Investment'] |
TechNY Daily | TechNY Daily
Keeping the NYC Tech Industry Informed and Connected
1. NYC’s GoHenry, a pre-paid card and finance app for 6–18 year olds, has raised $40 million in a venture funding round. Princeton’s Edison Partners led the round with participation by Gaia Capital Partners, Citi Ventures and Muse Capital. The company now has 1.2 million members — which includes both parents and children — and has doubled its customer base annually for the last six years.(www.gohenry.com) (TechCrunch)
2. Car-sharing startup Turo is returning to New York. Seven years ago, the company left New York, its largest market, after a dispute with insurance regulators. Starting in January, small independent car rental companies will be able to list rentals on the Turo website and app. (www.turo.com) (Insurance Journal)
3. NYC’s Supergreat, an app for beauty enthusiasts, has raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding. Benchmark led the round and was joined by NYC’s Thrive Capital, TQ Ventures, K5 Global, Shrug Capital, Hannah Bronfman and Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss. The community-based Supergreat app allows users to review, shop, and share tips on their favorite products. (www.supergreat.com) (BusinessWire)
4. NYC’s Welcome, an HR software developer, has raised $6 million in a seed funding. FirstMark Capital led the round. The company’s platform is designed to help organizations close candidate offers by providing a clear picture of compensation, particularly around equity. (www.heywelcome.com) (TechCrunch)
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5. NYC’s Bizzabo, an online platform for event organizers, has raised $138 million in a Series E funding. Insight Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Viola Growth, Next47 and OurCrowd. Bizzabo’s platform can be used to plan and run both virtual and in-person conferences. (www.bizzabo.com) (TechCrunch)
6. Tom Brady and John Mayer have invested in NYC’s Hodinkee, a content and e-commerce site for high end watches. Other investors in the $40 million Series B round included TCG, GV (Google Ventures), LVMH Luxury Ventures, True Ventures and Future Shape. (www.hodinkee.com) (Forbes)
7. NYC co-living startup Ollie has been acquired by a competitor, San Francisco’s Starcity. The purchase price for the acquisition of Ollie’s assets and roommate-matching technology was not disclosed. Ollie, which had raised a total of $15 million from investors including the Moinian Group, and the Texas Employees Retirement System, operates co-living spaces in NYC, Los Angeles and Boston. (www.ollie.co) (The Real Deal)
8. Brooklyn’s Actasys, a startup that applies aerodynamic principles to solve problems in the automotive industries, has raised $5 million in a seed funding.The round was led by Volvo Cars Tech Fund and NextGear Ventures. The company’s ActaJet product uses air to clean vehicle sensors. (www.actasysinc.com) (BusinessWire)
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Package Free is on a mission to make the world less trashy though offering products that help you reduce waste daily. We source our products from individuals and brands with missions to create a positive environmental impact and since launching, have diverted over 100 million pieces of trash from landfills.
Head of Operations
Hyperscience
Hyperscience is the automation company that enables data to flow within and between the world’s leading firms in financial services, insurance, healthcare and government markets. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in New York City with offices in Sofia, Bulgaria and London, UK, we’ve raised more than $50 million raised to date and are growing quickly. We welcome anyone who believes in big ideas and demonstrates a willingness to learn, and we’re looking for exceptional talent to join our team and make a difference in our organization and for our customers.
Machine Learning Engineer
Senior Security Engineer
Braavo
Braavo provides on demand funding for mobile apps and games. We offer a flexible and affordable funding alternative to the traditional sources of capital like working with a VC or bank. We’re changing the way mobile entrepreneurs finance and grow their app businesses. Our predictive technology delivers on demand, performance-based funding, without dilution or personal guarantees. By providing non-dilutive, yet scalable alternatives to equity, we’re helping founders retain control of their companies.
Business Development Manager
VP of Marketing
Head of Sales
Yogi
At Yogi, we help companies decipher customer feedback, from ratings and reviews to surveys and support requests. Companies are inundated with feedback, but when it comes to turning this data into actionable business decisions, most companies fall short. That’s where Yogi fits in.
Full Stack Software Engineer
Ordergroove
We’re passionate marketers, engineers and innovators building the technology to power the future of commerce. We’re a B2B2C SaaS platform helping the world’s most interesting retailers and direct-to-consumer brands remove friction from the customer experience to deliver recurring revenue through subscriptions programs — shifting their consumer interactions from one-and-done transactions to long-lived, highly profitable relationships.
Data Scientist
Upper90
Upper90 is an alternative credit manager based in New York City that has deployed over $500m within 18 months of inception.
Investor Relations Analyst
Upscored
UpScored is the only career site that uses data science to connect you with jobs suited specifically to you while automatically learning your career interests. Its AI-powered platform decreases job search time by 90%, showing you the jobs you’re most likely to get (and want) in less than 2 minutes.
Data Engineer
Senior Frontend Developer
Senior Backend Developer
Frame.io
Frame.io is a video review and collaboration platform designed to unify media assets and creative conversations in a user-friendly environment. Headquartered in New York City, Frame.io was developed by filmmakers, VFX artists and post production executives. Today, we support nearly 1 million media professionals at enterprises including Netflix, Buzzfeed, Turner, NASA & Vice Media.
Frontend Engineering Manager
Sr. Swift Engineer
Lead Product Designer
Attentive
Attentive is a personalized text messaging platform built for innovative e-commerce and retail brands. We raised a $230M Series D in September 2020 and are backed by Sequoia, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and other top investors. Attentive was named #8 on LinkedIn’s 2020 Top Startups list, and has been selected by Forbes as one of America’s Best Startup Employers.
Enterprise Account Executive
Sales Development Representative
Senior Client Strategy Manager
Director of Client Strategy
KeyMe
NYC startup revolutionizing the locksmith industry with innovative robotics and mobile technology.
Customer Experience Representative
Inbound Phone Sales Representative
Systems Software Engineer
Button
Button’s mission is to build a better way to do business in mobile.
Enterprise Sales Director — New York
Postlight
Postlight is building an extraordinary team that loves to make great digital products — come join us!
Full Stack Engineer
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A brief introduction to tail recursion | Recursion is an immensely powerful tool for a programmer. Like many abstractions, it allows us see past the weeds of a problem and strive for a more elegant understanding of the underlying logic. Unfortunately, simplifying something for a human frequently comes at the expense of the computer. In the case of recursion, your beautiful, recursive solution demands an extraordinary amount of memory.
The source of recursion’s memory woes is simple: each recursive call requires its own space in memory to maintain its own runtime environment. That environment holds crucial data, including local variables, the script itself, and, most importantly, the location in memory of the previous recursive call. The final piece of information is especially important for recursive calls. Without a return address, each layer of recursion would be left waiting forever for the next layer to finish.
Our concern over memory goes beyond hypothetical optimization. In some cases, the engine executing our code will flat-out refuse to allocate more memory for further recursive calls. Consider a simple example of a recursive algorithm.
function addToN(n){
if (n <= 0) return 0
else return n + addToN(n-1)
}
The function returns the sum of all numbers from 1 to n. So addToN(5) = 5 + 4+ 3 + 2 + 1 = 15. Easy! But what happens if we want to consider especially large inputs? For example, addToN(1000000) will require 1,000,000 recursive calls. Most languages, including JavaScript and Python, will return an error stating that the maximum recursion depth has been exceeded. Many programmers encounter a similar error when they first learn recursion but fail to properly implement a base case, resulting in an infinite loop. In this case, we know that the function should eventually finish, but it requires more memory than we can safely expect.
Enter tail recursion. A powerful technique that is fundamental to functional programming languages, tail recursion overcomes the memory demands of recursion by asking, “What if we never needed to return to the previous recursive call?” More to the point, what if we can continuously recycle the memory carved out for each recursive stack?
It’s a simple question, and the execution is similarly straightforward. To accomplish this goal, we need to rewrite our recursive function so that no information is required from the previous call. This is often accomplished with helper functions and with additional arguments. For the case above, lets develop a second helper function that takes a second argument.
function addToNWithSum(n, sum){ if (n==0) return sum else return addToNWithSum(n-1, sum+n)
} function addToN(n){ return addToNWithSum(n, 0)
}
And voila! Each recursive call makes the call to the next layer, but has no operations after that call is returned. An optimization engine can recognize this feature. Since no information from the previous call is required once the next call is made, that chunk of memory can be safely replaced. Rather than demanding 1,000,000 separate stacks in memory, addToN(1000000) now only requires 1, and our memory requirement is O(1).
Unfortunately, the key to this technique is the optimization process. If you are working in a language that does not include tail-call optimization (TCO), you are out of luck. Even if your final return value is just going to be passed back up the stack, your engine will dutifully preserve every recursive call until the bottom.
So where does JavaScript fall in terms of TCO? Currently, it is unfortunately implemented pretty rarely. While previous versions of Node.js (specifically Node 6.5–7.10) allowed TCO with the “ — harmony” flag in strict mode, Node 8 has dropped the feature. Similarly, Safari is the only major browser that currently supports TCO. Some programming languages that are more “rigorously” steeped in the functional programming philosophy, notably Haskell and Scheme, gleefully implement TCO. Compiled languages like C are also capable of TCO with appropriate compilers. A high enough level of optimization with gcc will enable TCO and allow arbitrarily deep levels of recursion.
Even if TCO does not provide an immediate benefit to memory usage in many languages, it is still a unique, clever way to describe recursive problems. Asking yourself if it is possible to refactor a recursive solution so that it implements tail recursion can often force you to reevaluate what information is passed from one recursive call to another. Since the ultimate goal of recursion is to break down problems into more conceptually digestible problems, it is a valuable exercise for describing your solution. The more practiced you become at reducing massive problems into simple, human-readable procedures, the more confident you will feel approaching any complicated logical question! | https://avery-schiff42.medium.com/a-brief-introduction-to-tail-recursion-e85e7a713379 | ['Avery Schiff'] | 2020-12-16 22:38:04.212000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Recursion', 'Algorithms'] |
Digital payments trend to outlast Covid | Thousands of years since its first use, cash still dominates the payments industry, with over 80% of the world’s transactions conducted using this means of exchange. But change is afoot. The global digital payments market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24% in 2020–25, and Covid-19 could further accelerate this trend as consumer spending patterns have seen a considerable shift towards digital payments since the start of the pandemic. Governments, regulators and private sector businesses have all been encouraging individuals to avoid cash transactions.
Digital payments improve transparency, cost efficiency and financial inclusion in the economy while consumers benefit from greater convenience and security. Markets where cash penetration is high and digital infrastructure is strong represent good scope for a shift towards digital payments; Russia, Morocco, Indonesia, Lebanon and Pakistan scan well.
Digital payments platforms led by telcos and fintechs are likely to emerge as long-term winners. Banks should benefit in the short term due to lower operating costs and higher fee income. However, long-term challenges of loss in market share and payment providers expanding into other banking products remain a major threat to the industry.
Consumers are moving away from cash
According to our survey of 600 consumers in six EM markets conducted in July, 48% of individuals are using more mobile payments and 26% are using more credit/debit cards compared with pre-Covid levels, a clear shift in preferences.
Network International, a leading payments solution provider headquartered in the UAE, has seen a pronounced change in the card usage patterns of its customers, with credit and debit cards used much more frequently for online and POS transactions than was the case pre-Covid.
Strong volume growth for digital payments platforms
Transaction volumes for many digital payments providers were hurt during the initial phase of Covid-19 due to widespread and strict lockdowns impacting economic activity, but, as overall activity has rebounded, the growth in total payment volume (TPVs) has accelerated.
Covid-19 could be the turning point for digital payments in many EMs
Digital payments adoption has previously been slow in many emerging markets. We think the major issues are: i) a lack of consumer awareness; ii) a lack of consumer trust; iii) limited touch points; iv) a large undocumented economy; and v) comfort with cash usage. Now with Covid-19, consumers and merchants who were earlier reluctant to shift away from cash, are both attracted towards digital payments. This is encouraging both parties to establish relationships with digital payment providers. Previously this had proved challenging despite significant marketing and promotional activities by those providers. Our experience indicates that once consumers have signed up and feel comfortable with the digital payments process, they become regular users due to key benefits such as greater convenience and better security.
Which countries are well placed?
Looking at the cash penetration and technology infrastructure score (based on mobile and internet penetration), Russia, Morocco, Indonesia, Lebanon and Pakistan appear well placed to shift away from cash. | https://medium.com/tellimer-insights/digital-payments-trend-to-outlast-covid-cac541d83ea5 | [] | 2020-12-18 16:31:34.306000+00:00 | ['Payments', 'Digital Payment', 'Covid 19', 'Emerging Markets', 'Technology'] |
Yellow is for banana | I have never been explicitly called yellow, but I have been called a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I am an American-born Chinese, but I’m supposedly too American, to the point where I don’t fit in with my Chinese community.
Growing up in a predominantly white, Protestant town on the east coast of the United States, I knew I was the token Asian. To my white friends, I was “very” Asian. I looked different than them, with my thick black hair, high cheekbones and, as my third grade classmate pointed out, my “flat face”. I was quiet, obedient, and, as the stereotypes presumed, super smart.
But I wasn’t. I never got straight A’s. Kids would try to cheat off my maths papers. I sucked at maths. At the second grade talent show, I played “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the piano. Jon Shih played Beethoven.
I had two identities without even knowing it. I would go to school, gossip about celebrities with friends, scarf down slices of pizza and get another D in maths. Then I’d go home, wear slippers around the house, listen to Hong Kong ballads and hand wash all of my dishes — even though we had a dishwasher. These two sides are what make me Eden, though, an Asian American, an American-born Chinese.
Yet to everyone else, I had to be one or the other.
I didn’t find out that I was a “banana” until university, when I started hanging out with, as they referred to themselves, “actual Asians”. My new Indonesian, Singaporean and Japanese friends immediately pointed out my Americanisms, like small sores that kept me from being fully initiated into their exclusive club. According to them, I was an “other” in a multitude of ways, through my fluent English and my choppy Chinese, my taste in films and music, in my humour and even my personality.
I’m used to people saying fake Chinese words around me, as they pull their eyes back to mimic stereotypes that aren’t even relevant to me with my slightly bigger eyes. I never asked for it. That is the problem with being other.
Now, I actively try to avoid any stereotypes to make sure those around me know my heritage is not something to make fun of. I won’t be the first one to tell jokes about Asians anymore because I am the floodgate. And if that floodgate opens, the racist jokes and insensitive comments start rushing out.
Even still, with careful banter and calling out racist comments, I face microaggressions when people ask me where I’m from. A simple question, but to me it’s one that suggests they think I don’t quite belong. “Where are you from?” implies that I am not one of them, that I am not American.
I was optimistic a few years ago. I’d think, “Maybe this time they really are just wondering where I’m from.” But then I see their faces fall when I name my east coast town. It’s not what they expect when they see yellow, but get white. They don’t expect me, a banana. | https://medium.com/dendenwen/yellow-is-for-banana-7a24fc18ca0a | ['Eden Wen'] | 2021-05-14 19:23:30.008000+00:00 | ['Eden Wen', 'Stopasianhate', 'Racism', 'Race', 'Asian American'] |
Offline/Low-bandwidth UX Design Patterns | Design Patterns make expectations, intentions, and contexts understandable. Things you can’t ignore, but especially when creating an offline experience.
In our UX Design Patterns session held at Offline Camp, the team huddled together and brainstormed on what patterns existed (surprise, not too many!), discussed where and why design patterns could help us, and spent some time crystallizing what our barriers to defining those patterns are.
Most documented offline states appear to simply notify a user of their isolation.
Sure, there are a litany of apps that wall up their product and explain to the user that they’re currently offline, but that’s not a useful model for the offline enabled application. Instead, having a root design pattern for saving, loading, merging conflicts for multi-user offline editing, and certainly a wide variety more would help. Especially when there is some versioning or variety of instances of such patterns that reflect the unique environments they’re experienced within. To state plainly:
We need varieties of offline scenarios to help us define better reusable patterns.
From those we need a way to discuss, challenge, and fork the patterns for our own unique cases.
There are many more challenges than the non-existence of UX design patterns for offline, however.
Offline is the negative space
Well discussed was the fact that, regardless of being a maker or a consumer of tech, people of today’s world don’t expect offline to work. Decades of requiring constant internet connection — and with improvements being experienced only as incremental speed increases — have set us up to be somewhat blind to offline. Because of this, we don’t really see the opportunity in the negative spaces.
Some fantastic people and influential organizations have, however, and with their help we should be seeing a sea-change in expectations of apps. For the average customer, it will feel like the fabric of the app has gotten significantly stronger. Though, as we discussed in the session, this will not happen all by itself.
Community and contribution
To promote awareness of offline capabilities and their more-than-supplemental benefit to products in design communities, we’re going to also want to have a plan for how designers can get involved. Plenty of questions arose from this:
Can we work with an open design community? How has this been done elsewhere and can we get a level of teamwork from the design community in the same way we do for development?
How do designers contribute back? What tools could we use or create for designers to better do this within their communities?
Given that GitHub is a rather unnatural/uncomfortable place for designers, where would we plan to hold our discussions? In places like Discourse, Slack, or perhaps something more suited for documentation level discussion like Hackpad or Dropbox Paper?
How do we manage what the ideal solutions are? We’ll want discussion in the community, but having a release team for the solutions might be a good idea.
Consider versioned/forked patterns, as many patterns in software are useful to a point before having to be adjusted for their app context. A physical world example: a bench using standard bench form patterns may be followed, but perhaps context calls for adding a center divider to keep people from sleeping there for long durations.
Resources
Some resources were discussed, though it appears we’ve got some work ahead of us in discovering and/or making our own.
All in all, I think the session helped bold, italicize, and _underscore_ a glaring lack of design examples and open collaborative resources available. I’m looking forward to spiking on a concept for community tooling, as well as on creating an initial list of example offline product scenarios we can use as a guide for shaping our offline design principles and patterns.
If you’d like to collaborate, have resources you’d like to share for this post, or have suggested paths for solving the challenges we’re facing here, please comment in this post, join the #design channel in the Offline First Slack community, or email me directly at [email protected]. | https://medium.com/offline-camp/offline-low-bandwidth-ux-design-patterns-51391230a79e | ['Steve Trevathan'] | 2019-06-12 14:11:59.291000+00:00 | ['Offline First', 'Design', 'Design Patterns', 'UX', 'Offline Camp'] |
Why Escape Rooms Are Great For Dates | Escape Room Dubai
Discovering something to do out on the town can be extreme, regardless of whether it’s a first date, arranged meeting or night out, there’s an entire universe of choices out there and you need to take care of business. You might not have considered an escape room as a date choice, yet I’m here to disclose to you that escape rooms are incredible for dates!
Escape Rooms For Two Players
Here at Hungarian Games, we’re sufficiently fortunate to be one of the main escape rooms for two parts in Dubai. Most escape rooms expect you to have at least three players, yet we have planned our escape rooms with the goal that they can be finished by just two players. We likewise never blend gatherings, so it will simply be you two in the room, nobody else. You’ll truly get that quality alone time together!
No Distractions
There’s no telephones, workstations, Netflix or whatever other interruptions when you’re in an escape room. It is simply you and your accomplice and you can have some good times without checking Instagram at regular intervals.
You Can Work Together
Escape rooms allow you to cooperate and this is most likely something you don’t regularly will do as a team. This unites you and you will most likely gain proficiency with certain things about yourself and the other individual that you didn’t have the foggiest idea!
Improves Communication
One reason that escape rooms are so well known with organizations for team building exercises occasions is that they improve teamwork and communication. You may have heard that communication is likewise very valuable in a fruitful relationship, so as a team, doing escape rooms can help improve communication among you.
In an escape room, you should convey obviously and viably to illuminate riddles and work towards a shared objective, something that is incredible for connections.
You’ll Get To Know Them Fast
On the off chance that it’s an arranged meet up, or a first date and escape room for two in UAE is the ideal spot to become more acquainted with somebody quick! You’ll be secured together for 60 minutes, with no different interruptions. It’ll simply be you two and individuals’ actual characters come out before long under tension! You’ll before long realize whether they’re a manager or somewhat of an insane individual…
Sentiments Of Elation
There aren’t numerous preferable sentiments over the sentiment of beating a truly testing escape room. At the point when you complete it together, the mutual achievement will bring you closer!
In case you’re searching for indoor activities in Dubai or simply an escape room for two in Dubai, at that point you’ve gone to the correct spot! | https://medium.com/@sherlaktom9596/why-escape-rooms-are-great-for-dates-25cdb048ee12 | [] | 2020-11-26 10:00:11.087000+00:00 | ['Team Building', 'Escape Room'] |
Long Term Dependencies in Sequence Learning | Sir Kepler, a renowned astronomer with famous three laws under his authorship took long time to device his principles. A Neural Network(NN) would have predicted Tycho Brahe’s trajectories without requiring Kepler’s flash of insight to try fitting the data to an ellipse. Sir Isaac Newton, however, would have had a much harder time deriving his laws of gravitation from a generic model. But what gives NNs, so much of power that they learn data at unprecedented speed and so generic in nature? It is Optimization.
Most deep learning algorithms involve optimization of some sort. Optimization refers to the task of either minimizing or maximizing some function f(x) by altering x. We usually phrase most optimization problems in terms of minimizing f(x). Maximization may be accomplished via a minimization algorithm by minimizing −f ( x ).
Optimization in general is an extremely difficult task. Traditionally, machine learning has avoided the difficulty of general optimization by carefully designing the objective function and constraints to ensure that the optimization problem is convex. When training neural networks, we must confront the general non-convex case. Even convex optimization is not without its complications.
Gradient based Optimization
From our high school we know how first and second order derivative tests are helpful in determining minima and maxima of a mathematical function. This gradient based optimization is mostly used in neural networks to find solution of non-convex functions.
x∗ = argmin f( x )
How Gradient decent works in NN?
The directional derivative in direction u (a unit vector) is the slope of the
function ‘f’ in direction u. In other words, the directional derivative is the derivative of the function f (x + αu) with respect to α, evaluated at α = 0. Using the chain :-
To minimize f , we would like to find the direction in which f decreases the
fastest. We can do this using the directional derivative:-
where θ is the angle between u and the gradient. Substituting in || u ||= 1 and ignoring factors that do not depend on u, this simplifies to min u cos θ. This is minimized when u points in the opposite direction as the gradient.
In other words, the gradient points directly uphill, and the negative gradient points directly downhill. We can decrease f by moving in the direction of the negative gradient.This is known as the method of steepest descent or gradient descent . Steepest descent proposes a new point:- | https://medium.com/@lih-verma/long-term-dependencies-in-sequence-learning-2159bb4712 | ['Nikhil Verma'] | 2020-12-09 18:03:48.007000+00:00 | ['Gradient Descent', 'Optimization', 'Long Term', 'Sequence To Sequence', 'Rnn'] |
Fast and stable MongoDB-based tests in Spring | If your Spring application uses MongoDB, there is one question you will have to answer at some point: how to set up a database instance for your tests. Until early 2020 there was not much choice and the default was to use ‘embedded Mongo’ — my team was no exception. At some point, however, we realised that embedded Mongo was turning our builds into a nightmare. This ultimately prompted us to migrate our code to a tool getting much hype recently — Testcontainers.
In this article I would like to share some of the problems connected with Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo and talk briefly about Spring tests to explain what causes those problems. I will also guide you through the setup process of MongoDB using Testcontainers, and offer some tricks to improve Testcontainers performance. Finally, I will talk about how sar and other Linux tools can be used to measure the load on your machine.
Introducing Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo
If you search the web for ‘test spring boot mongo’ or similar terms, you will very likely end up with instructions which may harm your codebase. Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo was immensely popular at some point and many tutorials were written about using it. Those articles still rank surprisingly high in search engines — things don’t just disappear from the Internet when they cease to be useful. In fact, Embedded Mongo is still recommended by the recent Spring Boot documentation.
At a first glance it looks fantastic: you don’t need to modify your production code, you don’t even need to configure anything, just add a dependency:
testRuntimeOnly('de.flapdoodle.embed:de.flapdoodle.embed.mongo:2.2.0')
…And voilà! Your tests connect to a database started just for the time of your tests being executed.
Under the hood, Spring Boot has logic detecting the presence of this library on classpath, and modifies MongoDB connections to point at an instance started by the library. The library itself handles downloading and caching MongoDB binaries suitable for your machine, and starting/stopping the server.
Our problems with Embedded Mongo
We have been following setup procedures as described in the Spring Documentation for some time. At some point, however, developers started complaining that when they executed unit tests, their computer fans started roaring and the machine became painfully slow to use. It wasn’t just a matter of perception: we found out that during tests multiple MongoDB instances were running, reaching a peak of 8 instances for a standard build or even 15 when gradle --parallel was used. Very often, after tests finished successfully, we found that embedded MongoDB processes were still running and consuming lots of CPU. It's not fun to work if 75% of your CPU is consumed by 'zombie' MongoDBs.
We started to experience random CI build failures: a pipeline that usually took around 15 minutes timed out after 40 minutes, it looked like unit tests never finished.
Finally, we found ourselves at a dead end. Adding a dependency on AWS S3 client library broke our tests. They never finished, but not just on CI server — they never finished on any machine. There was some kind of classpath conflict, preventing us from implementing a business feature. Everything broken by adding a single dependency:
implementation('software.amazon.awssdk:netty-nio-client:2.6.5')
and one Spring bean:
@Bean fun asyncHttpClient() = NettyNioAsyncHttpClient.builder().build()
What is wrong with Embedded Mongo
At the beginning of 2020 it became clear that the library is dead. You could not configure it to run a version of MongoDB newer than 4.0.2. Hardly anything happened with the library source code. Only recently, in October 2020, something started to change, but the newly released library version conflicts with all stable releases of Spring Boot, so still you are not able to test your code with MongoDB 4.2.
Another serious issue is that the library can make your tests extremely resource-hungry by starting a horde of MongoDB instances. And it’s a consequence of library design, not a mistake in the implementation.
The library integration with Spring Boot works by starting an embedded MongoDB instance when Spring context is started. Because it would take ages to execute tests with a context started for each test, Spring offers a caching mechanism. A started context is kept between tests and re-used. However, a cached context cannot be simply used in all situations — when a test expects a context with a different configuration, a fresh context has to be started. Now, the problem is that there are lots of situations where Spring considers a fresh context is needed, and these include things you do very often when writing tests:
you use a @MockBean
you enable a profile with @ActiveProfiles
you override some properties using @TestPropertySource
You can find a more comprehensive list in the Spring Framework documentation.
All in all, there will be many opportunities in your tests to start a fresh context, each holding its own MongoDB instance. What about ‘old’ contexts? They aren’t closed, Spring keeps them in case there is a test that will need them. If you don’t touch the spring.test.context.cache.maxSize property, Spring will keep up to 32 contexts. This means that potentially you can have 32 instances of MongoDB running simultaneously when you use Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo. Moreover, each test worker is an independent JVM, so if you have 2 subprojects and run gradle --parallel you can have up to 64 MongoDB instances, or 96 instances for 3 subprojects and so on.
MongoDB with Testcontainers
Testcontainers is a Java library allowing to start different services for use in tests. It uses Docker to fetch, start and stop those services. In our experience, this approach is way more stable than the one from Flapdoodle Embed Mongo — no more zombie processes eating CPU.
The library is a generic tool rather than a plug-in that will do anything for you under the hood, as it is the case with the Flapdoodle one. You will need a bit of code to connect Spring tests and Testcontainers. Here is how we approached this:
We have a context initializer that starts a Docker container with MongoDB when the context starts and replaces the connection URL with a one pointing at the container. To avoid starting the database for each test, we cache the container in a lazy Kotlin property (following advice from Best Practices for Unit Testing in Kotlin by Philipp Hauer).
We also defined an annotation:
which we use instead of @SpringBootTest in each test class:
Testcontainers performance
Simply replacing Flapdoodle Embed Mongo with Testcontainers makes tests execute much faster. In a small test project this makes a 30% difference.
We wanted to see if we can go even faster. One optimization opportunity appears in start time. By default, even if you cache the container between test runs, the container is stopped once all tests finish. So if you execute just one test from your IDE, each time you do so, you have to wait for the container to start. In this scenario Testcontainers become slower than Flapdoodle Embed Mongo by 2 seconds. It’s painful if you run your unit tests very often as you do TDD.
The situation can be improved by enabling container reuse. This mechanism marks a container as eligible to be picked by subsequent test runs and does not stop it after a test run finishes. If you go back to the code of MongoContainerSingleton, you will see the reuse feature is enabled there. This is however not enough: you have to additionally set testcontainers.reuse.enable=true in ~/.testcontainers.properties . We encourage our developers to enable it, but keep this option disabled on CI servers.
As you can see on the graph above, it improves overall execution time a bit (results with “-r” have container reuse enabled). Startup time of a single test becomes roughly the same as with Flapdoodle Embed Mongo. If you want to learn more about container reuse, check this article by Paweł Pluta.
One challenge when enabling container reuse is parallel build with multiple subprojects. If a test from project1 runs and a test from project2 is started, it will connect to the same reuse-allowing MongoDB container project1 uses. There is a danger those two tests will simultaneously write to the same collections. We solve this by making sure each subproject gets a separate database inside the same container.
We are very happy with the improvement in build stability. After moving the tests to Testcontainers, developers no longer have zombie MongoDB instances on their machines. CI builds fail much less often (well, they still do at times when Testcontainers fail to connect to Docker breaking the build). Additionally, the CI build time is much more consistent now.
Measuring the operating system load
When deciding whether to move to Testcontainers or not, we wanted to understand the consequences of switching. Some of the team members used Linux and others used MacOS. We knew that test execution time and the subjectively perceived machine load was different from person to person. There were multiple open questions:
Is the problem with too many Mongo instances repeatable?
What if Testcontainers are faster on Linux where Docker is a ‘native’ mechanism, but slower on MacOS?
What if Testcontainers make tests execute faster but eat all CPU and memory, so developers aren’t able to do anything while executing tests?
We decided to create a test script, assuring that performance is measured in the same way on different machines. Finding out how fast a build executes is easy: you can do it using the built-in time shell command.
However, it is not trivial to compare CPU and memory usage during test execution as there are multiple processes interacting with each other. Firstly, Gradle has a separate process executed from the command line, another one running tasks (Gradle daemon) and a separate test execution worker. Then there are processes for embedded Mongo. Testcontainers run not only MongoDB Docker containers, but also a separate container called ryuk, which is responsible for cleaning. We decided to measure the load of the whole operating system to have a big picture of the impact of the changes on the build process.
Linux has a great tool for such a purpose called sar available in package sysstat. It can collect a wide range of parameters on system performance in a reliable way, without adding much overhead. You can start it in background:
sar -o sar.binary 2 15 &
Here it will measure performance every 2 seconds, 15 times, and save results to a binary file. Then, after measurement is finished, you can extract data on CPU usage:
% sar -f sar.binary -u
12:36:05 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait
12:36:07 all 0,19 0,00 0,25 0,00
12:36:09 all 70,38 0,00 3,28 0,00
12:36:11 all 85,47 0,00 4,09 0,57
or memory usage:
% sar -f sar.binary -r | awk '{print $1 "\t" $4}'
12:36:05 kbmemused
12:36:07 1587988
12:36:09 1990692
With built-in shell tools it’s easy to quickly summarize data, for example by counting min, max and average:
cat memory.dat | awk 'BEGIN { min=99999999 } { total += $2; count++; if($2<min) min=$2; if ($2>max) max=$2; } END { print "Max\t" max "\tMin\t" min "\tAverage\t" int(total/count) }'
However, it’s hard to understand the big picture looking at the numbers alone. Visualisation can be a great help. We wanted to make the whole benchmark process fully automated, without manual pasting of data to spreadsheets. A ‘good enough’ approach was to make use of the venerable gnuplot .
If you have plain text data as columns separated by whitespace (as you can see in the awk call, we used tabs), it’s easy to feed the data into gnuplot.
cat cpu.dat | gnuplot -e "set yrange [0:100]; set terminal png size 800,600; set output 'cpu.png'" base.gnuplot
To avoid repeating same gnuplot options when creating CPU graphs and memory graphs, we extracted the common part to a separate file (base.gnuplot):
set timefmt "%H:%M:%S"
set xdata time
set style data lines
plot "/dev/stdin" using 1:2 with lines notitle
Here we define time format, inform that x axis shows time , use a solid line for plotting and finally use columns 1 and 2 from the input as x and y coordinates of each point.
Unfortunately, sar makes use of Linux kernel features and is not available on MacOS. We were able to work around this by measuring memory usage by calling vm_stat command, but we think results are very inaccurate and only show general trends. We could not find a reliable way to measure global CPU usage on Mac.
Summary
Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo is a very popular library for running MongoDB for tests. While still recommended by many tutorials, it is known to cause various performance and maintainability problems. It prevents testing your code against the modern versions of MongoDB, wastes computer resources by starting too many database instances and leaving zombie processes. In some circumstances, it can block your build infinitely if you add dependencies that clash in some cryptic way with it.
Testcontainers is a new tool with a similar purpose that gains much popularity. It is actively maintained and can be used not just for MongoDB but for a wide range of systems, like different SQL and NoSQL databases and even message queues. We recommend learning it as its broad usage means it may be useful not only in your current project, but also in future ones, even if they use a different persistence mechanism. It manages test databases reliably and does not leave zombie processes.
You can check my repository comparing the performance of Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo and Testcontainers. The two projects written in Kotlin along with shell scripts automatically measuring performance are available on GitHub: https://github.com/pkubowicz/embed-vs-testcontainers.
In general, we found that Testcontainers are faster by 30% on Linux and even by 45% on MacOS. You can run tests on your own machine or see the visualization of results we had: https://pkubowicz.github.io/embed-vs-testcontainers/. | https://medium.com/nexocode/fast-and-stable-mongodb-based-tests-in-spring-cd08e1238b79 | ['Piotr Kubowicz'] | 2020-12-07 14:56:33.886000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Performance', 'Spring', 'Testing', 'Mongodb'] |
Nick Bottom | It was already past 9 in the morning. The market was about to open, and here I was- paying the price of being a good neighbor. I jabbed the doorbell impatiently. She opened the door right away as if she had been waiting there the whole time.
I handed her the milk packets. It was not the first time too! She kept forgetting to pick up her mail, her newspapers, milk packets, and it was casually left upon me to dutifully ring the bell and hand the things over to her. I got the feeling that she was ‘forgetting’ these things on purpose to try and flirt with me.
She had moved here a few months back, and I had made the mistake of asking if I had met her somewhere earlier. I thought she was a TV actor or something- she looked so familiar and yet I’d never met her before. I couldn’t place where I’d seen her. She must have taken that as a sign of flirtation from me- and now she just wouldn’t quit giggling and smiling every time we spoke.
As I handed the milk packets over, I looked up at her only to be polite and regretted it immediately. She wore a thin, pink maxi, had green goo all over her hair, and was smiling at me. I looked at her vaguely familiar face again and found myself staring, trying to think where had I seen that face.
Gosh! So obvious! So embarrassing!
“Thank you, Rosesh”, she said. It looked like she was about to say something more. Before she could get another word out, I muttered something and dashed over to the safety of my own house across the hall.
Old hag! Who was she kidding by putting all that poo on her hair? She was a hundred years old, and everyone knew that. Why couldn’t she find someone her own age!
The rest of the day was uneventful. My mom was driving me up the wall as usual.
“It’s high time, Rosesh. Get a real job!”
“Ma, trading IS a real job! Besides, if I take a real job, who will take care of you while you lie in bed screaming inane instructions into the air?”
“There are people for that. If you had a real job, you would be able to hire someone.”
“I don’t want to hire anyone. You will annoy the nurse into murdering you in your sleep.”
“If you don’t get a real job, you will never be able to marry”
“Ma! What is wrong with you? You’re obsessed. I don’t want to get married!”
“If you had children, you would know what I’m going through. But you will probably never have any since you refuse to get married.”
“All the more reason, isn’t it?”.
Ugh.
My mom suffered a fall a few years back, and since then, she was insufferable. So much so that my elder brother living in Borivali shipped her to me right after that.
“Can you please take care of Ma until Meera’s board exams are over?”
“I don’t know…. What would I have to do?”
“You will figure it out! Don’t worry, it is only for a month”
“Um. Okay. Only until the exams, right?”
“Learn to take some responsibility. She’s not only my mother! Yes. It is only for a month. It’s not like you have a full-fledged family there with you. SoBo air will do her good. I wouldn’t have said if you were married..”
“Okay! okay!!” Everyone knew the power of the M-word. Well. That was 2 years back. Meera is in university now and Ma is still here with me.
A few days later I saw her again. Not Ma. Her her!
I was entering the lift and she was just outside the elevator, wearing inappropriately tiny (for her age) yellow shorts and a summer top. She was trying to drag some giant ugly dusty chair into the lift. I silently debated taking the stairs against socializing/helping her. Stairs lost. I decided I did not want to climb 7 flights of stairs, even if it meant facing her and being super super awkward again.
“Where did you get this thing from?”, I asked looking at the chair with disdain.
“Old Jogeshwari market. Quite a bargain too! It has a beautiful history. I think things are like people too. A little love is what every one needs! Just needs a little work here and there, and it’s ready to be back in business.”
The innuendos! Is it her or am I the sicko in this scenario? I silently looked at the LED floor numbers instead of acknowledging her statement.
When we reached our floor, she went to her door and took her time opening her apartment, and I was left to get the beastly chair out of the lift. There was no going back on this unintended good Samaritan mission now. I took a deep breath and slowly moved the heavy antique into her home. I had never been inside her house, but I imagined it would resemble Ms.Havisham’s house from The Great Expectations- Old, damp, dusty, and run down.
I was utterly unprepared for what I saw. The door opened to a spacious, sunny, and airy room with polished wooden flooring. I saw lovely, well cared for green plants all over the house and a spatter of eclectic furniture, beautiful rugs, and lamps. It looked like something out of a magazine. She deposited the keys on the console next to the door and turned around with a sheepish smile as if she’s been caught red-handed with some secret. It was as if she KNEW what I was thinking. I muttered something that resembled ‘nice apartment’ and turned around when she reached out and held my hand in an impulsive gesture.
I jumped back (I may have squealed. Not sure whose voice was that!) as if I got some big shock. Deeply embarrassed, I gave a maniacal little laugh to which she said, “I’m so sorry! I just wanted to ask if you want to stay for some coffee? You helped me get the chair upstairs, this is the least I can do!”.
In any other circumstance, I would have flat refused with some excuse. But the spectacle that I had made just moments back forced me to reconsider. What kind of man would she think I am! So I nodded a yes and followed her to the sofa.
I looked around as she went about the business of making coffee in her open kitchen. There were framed-pictures of her children and grandchildren everywhere. But I did not see any pictures of her husband.
I asked her, “So you live here alone?”
“Yes. There is no husband in the picture”. I almost fell off the sofa at her choice of words.
She caught me getting all awkward on how to take the conversation ahead, and smiled genially.
“He left us when the kids were small. We eventually divorced. I brought up the kids on my own. So yeah, there is no husband in the picture.. and no husband in the pictures”. And then she laughed at her own words.
If I were not so unnerved, I would have enjoyed the pun. It was exactly my type of humor, but more than anything I was surprised at how well she read my thoughts. It made me feel … exposed and uncomfortable.
In my attempt to feel less awkward and to know more about her, I walked over to her overloaded bookshelf. It had everything from cheesy girly romance to heavy economics books, but one that caught my eye was a well-thumbed copy of “Mid Summer Night’s Dream” by Shakespeare.
Before I could stop myself, I ended up blurting, “I loved Mid Summer
Night’s Dream! We did a play at my college”.
“I know. We were in that together. I played Hermia and you were ..” She said.
“..Nick Bottom” we finished together.
“Anita?? Is that you?” I remarked incredulously!
“Yes, dummy! All this time I was living next to you, and you didn’t even recognize me!”
“How… did this even happen? Did you know? Why didn’t you say something sooner? When did you come back from the US”
“Of course. I recognized you the instant we met, but I was having too much fun watching you behave like a grumpy old man!”
“I am not old!! You are!!” .. we both broke into laughter and could not stop laughing until my insides ached.
I had a huge crush on Anita when we were in college together and would obsess about her. When we were cast in the play together, I played Nick Bottom only so I could see her laugh at my antics. When right after college she got married and moved to the US, I put her into a mental trunk at the back of my mind and got on with my life.
My life- as if I had a lot of it. I never found enough patience and courage to get married. I had a few romantic interests along the way, but none felt like home to me, and soon I crossed the tricky ‘marriageable age’.
Even after Facebook etc, I never felt the inclination to look her up. Somehow I did not want to know anything more. I was content with the memories I had. In many ways, I felt as if my life had frozen in time after college. I never grew up.
And now, meeting her after all this time I cannot describe the feeling! I felt really old and really young at the same time. A warm fuzzy feeling filled my heart to the brim. I cannot describe what took over me when I crossed the room in a few steps, walked over to her, and enveloped her into a warm bear hug.
It felt like someone had hit the play button on my life again.
I looked at her deep brown eyes, and somehow I think she knew what I was thinking. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/nick-bottom-4feb5a51625d | [] | 2021-03-18 04:36:58.377000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Friendship', 'Short Stories', 'Happy', 'Writers'] |
Inclusion: A Reciprocal Understanding of Appreciation and Acceptance | I was born in Puerto Rico; a US Commonwealth territory located in the Caribbean, and raised in Barrio Esperanza in Arecibo, a gorgeous place surrounded by beautiful mountains, rivers, and caves. I am a multiethnic descendant of Taino, the Arawak natives’ inhabitants of the Caribbean, Africans, and Spaniards. This gorgeous genetic pool, shaken with Salsa and mixed with spices, define my ethnicity as Hispanic with a proud identity as; Boricua (bôˈrēkwə) or Puerto Rican, a terminology derived from the name “Borikén” the Taino’s gave the Island, later renamed as “Porto Rico” (Puerto Rico), respectively.
Finding a place to fit in has been always a challenge for me because not everyone knows, understands, or accepts the uniqueness of an enriched ethnicity.
Moreover, the constant stereotypes and unconscious bias against our culture has led to an undervaluing of our personal mindsets, education, and ethical values. Nevertheless, life surprised me with a rich encounter when I met a Cahuilla-Cupeño Native American from the Morongo Reservation in Southern California, while attending a SACNAS conference.
I was the typical SACNAS first-timer in jeans and sneakers, carrying my poster all over the airport, trying not to abruptly knock anyone over with my plastic poster tube. While waiting for a cab, a Native American woman kindly asked, “Are you attending SACNAS?” I told her that I was, and she continued, “Would you like to share a taxicab with me?” I said yes. During our ride; the woman asked about my involvement in the organization and inquired about my vision as part of the society. She encouraged me to visit all career booths at the conference to increase my opportunities in Microbiology.
This woman was culturally and individually different than me, yet she was demonstrating a genuine interest in my career development. She showed sincere interest in supporting my advancement in STEM fields and made me feel a real sense of inclusiveness, which it is currently needed for underrepresented students in science.
That human kindness and genuine interest to assist, without stereotyping my Hispanic roots, made me feel welcome and included. At that moment, I noticed that, even though I was so far away from my family, I was feeling at home; a sense of belonging that surpasses all barriers of human possible understanding.
Upon our arrival to the hotel, I thanked her and asked her name. She responded, “I am Marigold Linton.” I replied: “Nice meeting you Marigold, I am Almaris Alonso.” That night, I was attending the opening ceremony at the dining hall, enjoying the banquet with students from different universities. An announcement was made presenting the blessing of the National Conference conducted by Native Americans. After the blessing, who took the stage, but none other than Dr. Marigold Linton, SACNAS Founding Member and renowned cognitive psychologist (as I came to learn later).
Drs. Almaris Alonso-Claudio and Marigold Linton at 2018 SACNAS — The National Diversity in STEM Conference, which was held in San Antonio, Texas.
I was speechless, seeing her again, now on the stage as a presenter. Her speech that night was breathtaking. A reminder that, one of the greatest qualities of a leader is inspiring others, and she had done that part in a quick taxi ride. The last day of SACNAS was on a Saturday and all students gathered in the dining hall to participate in the award ceremony. During the award ceremony, a board of directors’ representatives approached me and delivered a small box with a golden SACNAS Lifetime Member pin inside. I knew that I was not a Lifetime Member (I had only paid the student membership), so I politely said, “Thank you, this does not belong to me, there must be a mistake.” Dr. Marigold Linton walked towards me, apparently noticing my confusion, and said: “This is a token of my appreciation, you will do great things for this society.” I could not believe she was there again, valuing and appreciating me without fully knowing me. From that moment I felt inspired, valued, and committed to dream big.
Part of being committed to thrive and dream big is understanding that our strengths and weaknesses, preferences and cultural backgrounds are part of our individuality and differentiate us as human beings.
Therefore, to be authentic, open and honest, and to create an impact on others, is extremely valuable to bring our whole self to STEM conferences. It is easier to bring one’s whole self to STEM when colleagues show appreciation and acceptance, while empowering others despite their differences. SACNAS has been a vehicle to ensure the celebration of each individual and our cultural differences; those that make us unique and proud. I firmly believe that we must pair cultural differences with appreciation.
Once cultural differences and individual preferences are valued and respected, the human brain is programmed to flow and execute inclusiveness.
Throughout my years at SACNAS, I served the society in several capacities; for example, as part of the Board of Directors, founder of multiple SACNAS chapters in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, panelist at symposiums, and recruiter. Nevertheless, what I have valued the most from STEM individuals at SACNAS has been the exposure to all the different cultural and individual values. The day I met Dr. Linton is a day I will remember forever as one of the best multicultural and inclusive experiences of my life. It was the day this Boricua from Barrio Esperanza in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, crossed paths with a Cahuilla-Cupeño Native American from the Morongo Reservation in Southern California.
—
About the Author
Photo credit: Melody Yazdani Studios
Almaris Alonso-Claudio is a mom, a wife, a scientist, and a SACNAS Lifetime Member. She attended public schools in her hometown and finished a bachelor and master’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and completed her Postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Her work promoting equity and inclusion has been recognized with; The Woman Who Make a Difference Award (UMASS-Amherst); The SACNAS Presidential Award; and The Excellence in Equity Award, presented by the Boston Executive Board. Currently, she enjoys traveling the world with her family, mentoring students, and lives in Maryland. | https://medium.com/stem-and-culture-chronicle/inclusion-a-reciprocal-understanding-of-appreciation-and-acceptance-c3a7db1311bc | [] | 2020-12-16 05:48:04.411000+00:00 | ['Community', 'STEM', 'Inspiration', 'Special Series', 'Inclusion'] |
How to adjust brightness of an image with Python? | With the method described in this article, we can adjust brightness of an image through a simple python image-processing package: “impytool”
impytool, is an opencv based open-source python package and it is being developed for facilitates some image processing operations.
You can get detailed information from the pypi.org page of the package. | https://medium.com/@ahmetnuriyilmaz/how-to-adjust-brightness-of-an-image-with-python-80b2eb110b01 | ['Ahmet Nuri Yılmaz'] | 2020-12-23 19:42:27.599000+00:00 | ['Image Processing', 'Python Packages', 'Image Editing', 'Opencv', 'Python'] |
21 st Century Fmcg Distributor — General Trade — Way forward. | Today to reach the consumer you have the following Chanel’s 1, General Trade 2, Modern Trade 3, E-Commerce. 4, Direct to Consumer. It is important for growing and startup companies to be available in General Trade & Modern Trade and then scale up in E-Commerce & Direct to the consumer. In the below-said article let us look at General Trade Distributor.
Infrastructure &. Service.
The distributor will have the required manpower to bill goods with a computer and deliver goods to the retailer in time. He will be able to share the information to the Company regarding outlets product is available and the frequency of the outlet’s purchases as well as quantity of purchases .He takes his own risk in giving credit to the retailers to grow his business. The manpower available with him will visit the Outlets who are buying regularly and paying the money to the distributor in time and ensure they are serviced well. No opportunity sales loss. Contribution to total secondary sales from the distributor will be higher than 60% if the company is a market leader in the category if the company is not a market leader or at the lowest in terms of market share the distributor contribution to secondary sales will be less than 5% of secondary sales. You can expect the distributor to take care of potential outlets ( weightage distribution ) in the absence of the company sales force, but will not show much interest in numerical distribution ( Outlet Coverage) where the company is a category leader or not . Distributor is interested in fast buck .
Investment in the Business.
Distributor will be very clear, he will invest 30 days to 35 days of sales ( Market credit +. Paid-up stock in hand +. Any secondary claims + Market returns if any. ). The investment will be based on the last 3 months sales trend actual. He will not be interested in having dead inventory. ( Slow-moving or non-moving Skuas ). At the same time, he will keep faster-moving skuas in ample quantities. The distributor always wants to avoid secondary claims and wants the company to clear the damaged stocks to return from the market in time. ( Every 2 months claims to be cleared ). Regarding market credit, the distributor will be very clear in the creditworthiness of the existing supplied retailers and will act accordingly. In case of any new outlets, he wants to start small with the outlets and then scale up. Distributors will not be interested in the primary target achievement incentive because it is nothing but a transfer of stocks from the Cfa to the distributor godown. In case the incentive is very lucrative for him he will buy and take the incentive and will not buy in future till his paid-up investment comes down to 30 to 35 days of the last 3 months average. Companies should better focus the efforts on secondary and grow the business instead of dumping the stocks at the distributor point. If the investment is 30 to 35 days of sales, the distributor will follow the company pricing Structure, but if the investment goes overboard the distributor will overcharge the retailer. It is critical the Company has to sell as per distributor norm by keeping its total investment ( 30 to 35 days inclusive of all ) under control. If the above is done and the sales guy is achieving his target, then the sales function & marketing function is doing their job properly. Company should not gloat over primary achievement rather than celebrate secondary achievement and ensuring the inventory is not more than 10 days of sales at any given time .
Distributor ROI.
The distributor will be reviewing himself whether the money he has invested in each company he deals with is giving him the required returns or it can give shortly, if the answer is no then he will stop partnering with the company.
Salesforce relationship with the Distributors.
Companies should understand that the sales force relationship with the distributors is mutual. Distributors take up companies based on, Company as well as the confidence he has in the sales force thinking he can deliver business for him. A growing or a startup company should appoint only a growing or a startup distributor. The higher turnover distributors will not come forward to take up growing or startup companies and in case they come forward they will not able to do justice for the company. In short, what type of distributors you will get for growing or startup’s is that they will invest money ( financiers ) but revenue delivery will be the company sales force responsibility. It is extremely critical for the growing & startup companies to start small with the distributors and scale up gradually by building confidence with the distributors. When you start a small company you will lose money but it is nothing but an investment for the future. Distributors have to be profitable for a smooth flow of business and you cannot sack a distributor for your whims and fancies. The over communicative business environment will not allow you to do it. Those days are gone with the wind.
Distributor issues today .
The success rate of new product launches is 6 % and 94% is failure . Companies grow the business in the existing categories and launch new categories , any new category launch the distributor has to invest money ,ex :One Distributor territory value planned is 3 lacs and his investment will be during the launch 4.50 Lacs inclusive of credit in the market . If the launch is successful he will receive the money from the retailers if the launch is a failure it will take lot of time to receive the money from the retailers .Distributors face existing categories slow moving inventories and as well as new launches investment which affects his ROI . Companies has to be careful in new launches so that the Distributors ROI is not affected . Because of Covid issues many outlets have closed down and the Distributors outstanding money has gone for a toss . Companies are not going to compensate for the loss of money . Distributor because of the above are worried about giving more credit to new retailers . Distributors will be more prudent in giving credit to retailers because of the covid experience .In the current environment retailers buys stocks from the distributors on credit and sell it and rotate the money for priority categories .Distributors have to be careful if not they will be investing more with limited returns for them . Distributors have issues in getting regular manpower because of the opportunities available elsewhere . Companies will have to take care of the distributor to ensure consistent supplies to the retailers who in turn sell to the end consumer .Frequent changes in distributor will affect the sales in the short run as well as wrong run .Companies should know that they can progress in business by increasing the availability in outlets through the distributors and so should take care of the Distributors so that there is no frequent stoppages in the market in case of availability to the retailers .In general trade channel companies cannot go direct supply to the retailers . | https://medium.com/@rajagopalasreedharan/21-st-century-fmcg-distributor-general-trade-way-forward-11b30379582 | ['Sreedharan Rajagopala'] | 2021-09-12 08:16:46.777000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Implementation', 'Fmcg', 'Skills', 'Learning And Development'] |
MACHINE LEARNING MODELS AND BABIES: WHAT IS THE CONNECTION? | Machine Learning is one of the most advancing technical fields that is grabbing a lot of attention everywhere. From college going students, to research scholars, from small start-ups to big tech giants, all want to bring their best foot forward and make the best models and bring out the best features using ML.
More and more students and researchers are now trying to learn about Machine Learning but it is really important that one should get correct and precise information. Many people give really difficult meanings and definitions of what a machine learning model exactly is and how it works. The bookish definitions are definitely correct but is this correct easy to understand and explain? My answer is: NO.
When someone asks me what an ML model is, I simply say it’s a human child. Did you get it? No, I’ll explain.
Just like a small human child observes the people around and slowly learns from them. Along with this, there are some functions called reflexes that have already fed information in a human mind as to how to react in a situation of panic. In a very similar way, a machine learning model has some inbuilt functions and then it learns the other things from the information that is fed inside.
Let’s understand using one of the simplest ML models — linear regression. Linear regression attempts to model the relationship between two variables by setting a linear equation to the observed data.
This model uses a given set of information to get trained on it and then tries to implement the gathered information and its patterns on test data.
Taking the example in the image, the data containing images of various vehicles with a dependent value that tells if it is a car or not is given to the regression model. The model analyses this given data and then tries to give output on other images telling if they represent a car or not.
I hope that after today even you will say that an ML model is just like a baby. Hence, now you know the connections.
IMAGE REFERENCE:
https://www.futurithmic.com/2019/04/12/why-you-should-study-ai-machine-learning-how-did-it/
https://semiengineering.com/deep-learning-spreads/ | https://medium.com/@abhigya006btit19/machine-learning-models-and-babies-what-is-the-connection-35626f47a43a | ['Abhigya Verma'] | 2020-10-20 15:55:10.781000+00:00 | ['Ml Model', 'Regression', 'Machine Learning'] |
HOW TO WAKE UP AT 5 AM | HERE WE SHARE HOW TO LIVE LIFE IN MOST MEANINGFUL WAY EVEN IN THIS RESTLESS ENVIRONMENT BY APPLYING VERY VERY SIMPLE STEP. | https://medium.com/@meaningfulride/how-to-wake-up-at-5-am-683b22646eb7 | ['Meaningful Ride'] | 2020-12-22 17:42:19.847000+00:00 | ['New Year', 'Morning', 'New Year Resolution', 'Morning Routines', 'Morning Rituals'] |
Where Do We Go From Here? | Photons captured by the author on a walk in Los Gatos, CA (2020)
There has been so much life that has been lived by the universe already. This we know to be true from just our own planet’s history. It is estimated that there are currently one trillion species of life on Earth. One trillion. And yet we know so painfully little about conscious experiences scattered throughout existence in space and time. What perceptions run through the minds of dolphins and whales? Of elephants and wolves? Of owls and eagles? Of domesticated cows and pigs? Of all the other creatures that roam our world even as I write this? And what ran through the minds of ancient life that has come and gone, now evidenced only by the muck of oil, the smearing stain of coal, and the occasional stone of fossils? What runs through the minds of innumerable alien species undoubtedly peppered throughout our universe, but too remote to ever access? It is estimated that 108 billion modern Homo sapiens have lived on Earth since the dawn of our species. A hundred billion human beings. Each who possessed dreams, desires, feelings, pain, sorrow, grief, joy, love — innumerable experiences of life. Conscious conceptions of our universe, all long-since vaporized, each a part of an organic individual whose matter now circulates through all of us as part of his or her ultimate legacy. Were humanity to burn itself into oblivion we can still take solace in knowing that there is so much of life still left on Earth, and likely in the universe, and that there will continue to be so for aeons of time.
And yet, with such awareness, isn’t it an extreme form of tunnel vision for our species to hold its suffering in one miniscule year above all other suffering its members have had to endure in all the years that have passed? Or for one human family to do so? Or for one human individual to do so? Alas, there is no escape for each of us from this perspective of the one. This is our fundamental dilemma as human beings: that we are able to conceive of multitudes, and yet somehow we have to reconcile this reality with our innate limitations as individuals, as solo travelers in a vast expanse. We are each in some way an isolated eye of illuminated matter trapped briefly in spacetime, a lens of the universe through which it may gaze upon itself in partiality, struggling to visualize itself in unity. So many windows of consciousness gazing upon existence. So many perspectives, so many feelings, and so many attitudes that are so many times colored by discriminating vision, so many times limited by the conceit of a local vantage point, virtually always a sliver of the whole, never truly an apprehension of totality.
And so I come back to myself, the only perspective from which I can write assuredly. So much has been lost this year, and yet there is reason and cause for hope for all of us individually, and for all of us collectively. That language can convey a shared experience of awareness between people is a miracle unto itself. This very language is the crucial engine necessary to help us climb our way out of an existential hole that we have dug for ourselves, one that if we keep digging will lead to civilizational collapse — and perhaps much worse. That I am able to contribute to this language of shared experience, if only for a brief flash of time in a cosmic scale, is a blessing that I choose not to ignore. Rather I choose to fight for life — to persuade, to coax, to enrich my fellow human consciousnesses, if only to set us on a collective path to betterment. And so I will set about to improve my language and my thoughts, and to seek wisdom in the stillness between my thoughts in the coming year. Perhaps that is the best contribution one human being can make towards the improvement of the human condition. And perhaps that is the best resolution one individual — I — can make for a New Year, and for a new circumnavigation of life.
Photons captured by the author at Lake Tahoe, CA (2020)
(The author reserves all rights to photographs published in this article.) | https://medium.com/illumination/where-do-we-go-from-here-ea15b9512bcf | ['Santosh Pandipati'] | 2020-12-14 00:22:37.667000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Philosophy', 'Covid-19', 'Healthcare'] |
Australian women finally open up about her horrific experience at the Qatar airport | In most media reports Qatar has been named as a risky nation to visit for any reason and it turns out to be significantly more perilous for western ladies, who are generally obscure to the climate of the inlet nation.
Lately, one such episode featured the severity that individuals and explicitly ladies face in the nation. A gathering of ladies which included upwards of 13 Australian ladies was attacked by Qatari specialists making the visit their most exceedingly terrible bad dream.
One of the ladies approached and addressed a computerized stage called an hour Australia where she depicted the repulsive episode that happened to her. An attendant by calling, the one who had a place from Victoria, Australia told that regardless of whether she feels awkward sharing her story she will do it to caution individuals.
Her story started as she loaded onto her departure from a public air terminal in the Middle East. She was obscure to the way that a child of a couple of hours was found in the trash and the Qataru police made all the ladies in the air terminal remain on a platform. From that point, these Australian ladies were encircled by men holding a huge load of arms and ammo making them significantly more befuddled about the circumstance they were stuck in.
Later they were taken for actual assessment and it was as severe as one can envision. They were not advised about what was being done to them nor the specialists had their assent for the actual assessment. The individuals who have caught these ladies didn’t communicate in English creation it much harder to convey.
Top representatives and the Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison censured the dishonorable demonstration saying that Australian ladies as well as no ladies should be exposed to such training.
The ladies shared that due to the Covid pandemic, there were not a lot of departures from London, where she alongside her better half lived, back to Australia. So she booked a ticket on Qatar Airways which expected her to go to a delay at the Doha International Airport. It didn’t make a difference that a lot to the couple.
She uncovered that after the stop, they again loaded onto the flight just to have hung tight for three hours inside the plane sitting idle and trusting that the flight will take off. They unexpectedly hear a male voice asking all the female travelers to come out alongside their identifications without indicating the need and anything that would make these ladies quiet.
After consistently asking and not knowing where she was being taken, she could just observe a rescue vehicle before her. It was later when she had the opportunity to get with a female inside the emergency vehicle that ‘a child has been found in a canister and we have to confide in you.’ She was then approached to rests and remove her garments. The lady said that she didn’t comprehend what was befalling her and afterward she was in a peculiar arrangement of occurrences and requested to eliminate her underwear.
The episode has been named as a sexual offense. Someone else who is profoundly mindful of this abomination done to the Qatari ladies by the Qatari specialists was upsetting. Some even went on to the degree to call being conceived as a lady a crook.
It was excellent how the ladies made the mental fortitude to come up and share her experience even after she was frightened to reveal her story. She helped in the notice the individuals how Qatar and Qatari specialists play contrivances of hosts yet actually, they are far away from it. | https://medium.com/@blackwilliam879/australian-women-finally-open-up-about-her-horrific-experience-at-the-qatar-airport-f25430984ba8 | ['William Black'] | 2020-11-24 10:26:08.720000+00:00 | ['Middle East', 'Australian Women', 'Qatar Airport', 'Qatar'] |
What is a DAPP? | Apps vs. DAPPs
A DAPP (Decentralized Application) consists of back-end code that runs on a decentralized peer-to-peer network. A DAPP can also have a user interface, created by front end code that makes calls to the back end. DAPPs do not require a central authority to function: they allow for direct interaction between users and providers.
Characteristics of DAPPs
DAPPs often have the following characteristics:
They run on the blockchain
Their code is made open-source operates autonomously without any person or group controlling the majority of tokens
They generate DAPP tokens to provide value to their contributing nodes
Users are granted access to them in exchange for tokens
Miners are rewarded with tokens when they successfully contribute to the ecosystem
Unlike most Apps in use today, DAPPs store all their data on a blockchain and have their back end code running on a blockchain instead of with a central authority.
Types of DAPPs
Ethereum delineates three primary categories of DAPPs:
1. Money management applications: users can transact with one another on a blockchain network, using its intrinsic currency. These DAPPs usually have their own blockchains, and we often refer to them as cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin).
2. Applications that integrate money with external, real-world events: for example, a logistics company may use an RFID chip location to determine that a shipment of cargo has reached a port, and only then release the payment for the shipment. This could even be accomplished with funds on the blockchain, with no human intervention, if both the buyer and the seller enter into a smart contract.
3. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): decentralized, leaderless organizations on the blockchain. These run from conception according to programmatically defined rules about what entities can be members, how members can vote, what businesses or activities they can engage in, and how tokens, funds, or value are exchanged. Once deployed, DAPPs operate autonomously according to their rules. Their members can be geographically dispersed anywhere.
To date, DAPP startups (built on top of blockchain platforms) have constituted the majority of ICOs. Most current Category 2 and Category 3 DAPPs use the Ethereum platform.
DAPPs present a new paradigm for fintech and money management related applications.
Why DAPPs?
DAPPs essentially allow all of the back end code and data to be decentralized, and hence immutable and tamperproof. Considering the decentralized nature of these applications coupled with the mechanisms that secure blockchain data, DAPPs have the potential to unlock a diverse array of use cases.
A few benefits of creating a DAPP rather than a normal application include:
• Payment processing: no need to integrate with a fiat payment provider to accept funds from users, as users can transact directly using cryptocurrencies
• User credentials: using a system of public and private keys, users can transact and bind their user sessions and metadata easily and with varying degrees of anonymity, negating the need for lengthy sign-up or registration processes
• Trust and auditability: open-source DAPP code is accessible and understandable to savvy users. This transparency and the inherent security of the inclosed data generates confidence in the applications. A public record on the blockchain also makes transaction information easy to audit by users or third-parties
Ethereum is currently the platform of choice for DAPP developers, with several extremely promising contending platforms closing in.
Conclusion
The DAPP landscape is rapidly evolving. While Ethereum is currently the platform of choice for DAPP developers, Cardano, Lisk, QTUM and NEO are also popular for DAPP development. There are also numerous efforts underway to build other large-scale DAPP platforms.
DAPP development is in a nascent phase but the benefits that DAPPs provide (which traditional, centralized applications do not) suggest that we can expect to see impressive new functionalities and use-cases for blockchain technology in the near future. | https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-a-dapp-a455ac5f7def | ['Shaan Ray'] | 2019-12-15 06:43:48.865000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Application Development', 'Application Security', 'Application Architecture', 'Data'] |
Top Web Development Companies in USA | A website is the primary face of any business! It is natural extension of your business.
Either a business is small or large, a website plays a very important part. Having a website allows you to market your services and products online. It increases your business visibility and establishes credibility.
People make decisions about your services or products based on your website. So, it’s crucial to hire a good website development company for your business website. Your website must be informative, creative and interactive.
A well-designed website improves your brand image in digital era. It increases your brand’s visibility in search engine results. It helps you in getting prospect clients, increase sales and improve your customer experience.
Looking for the best website development services in USA?
Here, is the list of top 5 web development companies in USA that offers best website development services.
ELEKS
ELEKS provides software engineering and consultancy services in Ukraine, United States, United Kingdom and Poland. It helps businesses enhance their value through custom software development, QA, product design and consultancy services. ELEKS is dealing in multiple industries including Retail, Fintech. Logistics, Government, Healthcare, Agriculture, Media and Entertainment.
2. TARIKA TECHNOLOGIES
IKA TECHNOLOGIES is the most trusted IT company in the USA. It offers professional and effective IT solutions for businesses across the globe.
Some of the key services includes web development services, infrastructure solutions, custom eCommerce development services, digital marketing services, software development services, brand marketing services and mobile app development services. Tarika Technologies develops completely customized and cost effective solutions. It has a team of professionals which delivers high end solutions for your business.
3. DICEUS
DICEUS develops feature rich software solutions that can achieve customer’s business objectives and goals. Diceus have a team of developers that works proactively to achieve the defined business outcomes.
Experts combine proven methodologies and knowledge to deliver quality solutions. Diceus is provides multiple business solutions including Insurance, E-commerce, Healthcare, Travel and Hospitality and Constructions.
4. INNOVIFY
INNOVIFY is a London-based company which offers project management and web development services at best price.
nnovify worked on latest technologies in order to provide a complete range of digital solutions as per business requirements. With a diverse team, Innovify is the most trusted web solutions company.
5. BIGDROP INC
BIGDROP INC is a design and development company in the Unites States. It provides complete range of web solutions including brand marketing services, digital marketing services and website designing services.
BigDrop Inc creates customized solutions as per your business needs and requirements. With advanced technologies, it helps you in connecting with your potential customers.
These are the best website designing and development companies in the United States which you can hire for your business, but Tarika Technologies is the most trusted and reliable company that offers complete range of web solutions at affordable prices the United States.
Tarika Technologies creates result driven strategy by understanding your business operations, functions and objectives. Not only website designing services is also provides best digital marketing services. Here are the top 5 powerful benefits of digital marketing services for your business! | https://medium.com/@tarikatechnologies/top-web-development-companies-in-usa-4f8f41c7cf42 | ['Tarika Technologies'] | 2019-06-06 05:06:02.037000+00:00 | ['Website', 'Mobile App Development', 'Web Development', 'Web Design', 'Company'] |
What Nobody Tells You About Your Worthiness | Let’s talk about inherent worthiness for a sec.
“You are inherently worthy.”
What does that statement make you feel? Like, really feel?
For years, this statement made me feel…kind of good? (I guess). But there was always a question quick on the heels:
Then why don’t I feel like it?
The answer: Because I didn’t actually believe it.
How could I?
I’ve spent my life believing my worthiness is something to be proved through good performance. And even deeper, I had a hunch there was something inherently wrong with me — literally the opposite of inherent worthiness.
All the more reason to constantly prove my worthiness so folks won’t be tempted to pull back the curtain to see the wounded child for the wizard I made them think I was.
Someone telling me I am inherently worthy wasn’t enough to rewrite a lifetime of the opposite belief.
No matter how often I hear it and no matter how hard I try to believe their words, I never do.
Who can relate? We are legion, those of us with hearts convinced of our unworthiness.
But rest assured, this is just a chapter of the story of us coming back to our light. There’s a way to feel worthy again. It both requires nothing and everything from you.
What blocks you from experiencing your worthiness.
Whenever I sink into the feeling of my inherent unworthiness, I go to the darkest place inside of me. A dragon lives in this place and its terrifying.
Recently, though, I realized this dragon was the manifestation of my power turned inward on me because I didn’t believe it was safe to experience my power in the outer world.
Once I realized this, I got curious about it and started listening to what it had to say. My mistake, because it began asking me some very hard questions. As you read them, know the dragon inside of you is asking you the same ones:
How many more moments of your one life do you want to spend feeling unworthy?
How many more moments do you want to spend comparing yourself to others?
How many more moments do you want to spend proving your worth instead of living your life?
None. None more moments.
“So are you going to count yourself worthy, or not?” asked the dragon, its voice echoing deep into the dark caverns of my heart.
After much consideration, I replied, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
Wah-wah.
But at least I was honest.
There were too many reasons not to count myself worthy. For instance…
What about the terrible things I’ve done? If I count myself worthy despite those, isn’t that letting myself off too easy? Doesn’t that give me more precedence to do terrible things if I’m worthy no matter what?
What about that broken part of me I can never seem to fix? Don’t I need to do more work to fix that broken part? How can I be worthy and broken? Counting myself worthy seems like spiritual bypassing or living in a fantasy.
What if people don’t like who I am after I count myself worthy? What if I end up even more lonely after counting myself unconditionally worthy? If I count myself worthy, it means I don’t have to play society’s worthiness games — the games that make up the foundation of our culture. Who am I if I am not trying to prove my worth or make myself more likable and palatable to others? What if people don’t like the new me — the me after I’ve stepped out of the matrix? What if I find myself more lonely than before?
The dragon answered these rebuttals with the following:
What about the terrible things I’ve done?
A big part of your transition from surviving to thriving is forgiving yourself for what you’ve had to do in survival mode. Forgive yourself for what you’ve done when you believed you were unworthy. People who believe they are unworthy do things unworthy of their true character. Count yourself worthy, so you can break the cycle and do things that are worthy of your true character.
What about that broken part of me I can never seem to fix?
The only way to experience your wholeness is to count yourself worthy even in your imperfection. And at any rate — realizing you are already whole is what triggers your parts to begin to healing themselves. Counting yourself worthy even though you feel broken is the point: You do not have to be fixed in order to be worthy. You just have to be you.
What if people don’t like who I am after I count myself worthy?
Ah, here we are. The heart of it. You’ve been taught it isn’t okay to be you, and the more you you are, the more abandoned you’ll be. The real tragedy is that you had to believe them in order to survive, escape from crippling shame, get your needs met, and experience what sliver of love you could. It’s natural you are afraid of counting yourself worthy in a world that has told you it isn’t safe to do so. But in order to thrive, you must be brave enough to count yourself worthy, otherwise you’ll stay stuck surviving for the rest of your life. It’s a risk to count yourself worthy no matter what, but the biggest thing that blocks you from thriving is your commitment to the perceived safety of survival mode. Count yourself worthy, and thrive.
Experiencing your worthiness requires everything and nothing.
Experiencing my worthiness requires nothing from me in the sense that there is nothing I need to prove. There is nothing I need to “keep” up. I can just be my natural self in each moment.
Yet experiencing my worthiness requires everything from me in the sense that I must step out of the home I’ve made for myself in survival mode. I must take the risk to drop the armor of my defenses and learn what it means to embody my essence. I must be brave enough to count myself worthy, just because I am me, and say goodbye to everything that does not serve this truth. I must be brave enough to thrive.
How much more comforting it would be to stay in survival mode, playing the same old worthiness games, safe behind the armor of my defense mechanisms.
But we have one life to live.
How many more moments will you live in survival mode when you could count yourself worthy and thrive right now? | https://medium.com/real-1-0/what-nobody-tells-you-about-your-worthiness-4a090e923d43 | ['Jordin James'] | 2020-11-26 17:22:56.972000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Spirituality', 'Psychology', 'Mental Health', 'Advice'] |
Blockchain.com’s Sam Harrison on How Origin Enables New Possibilities | In this video, part of our ongoing testimonial series, Sam Harrison, managing partner of Blockchain.com Ventures, the venture arm of one of the largest and most venerable companies in the space, explains the new possibilities Origin enables. He does this from two perspectives, first as an investor and secondly as a user.
Sam describes his investment thesis as seeking big opportunities in large markets where there can be a fantastic financial outcome, stating that there aren’t many bigger opportunities than powering the underlying infrastructure of internet commerce, marketplaces, and the sharing economy. He stresses the importance of a strong team and the ability to build applications that don’t expose users to complicated blockchain tech, but that just work.
Learn more about Origin: | https://medium.com/originprotocol/blockchain-coms-sam-harrison-on-how-origin-enables-new-possibilities-5d551531fc0f | ['Coleman Maher'] | 2020-01-17 19:47:55.229000+00:00 | ['Sharing Economy', 'Venture Capital', 'Blockchain', 'Decentralization', 'Videos'] |
Mobile Phone Work Slow, Follow These Tips First! | Currently the smartphone is a very versatile device and most of the work is done via mobile. In this regard, everyone wants to have the best performance smartphone. The latest phones feature a Big Processor, Big Battery, Best Camera Features and a Fast Processor. However, sometimes the phone can be slow.
Yes, current users install some apps on their mobile phones, such as high-data games, third party-based apps. Along with these, social sites and messaging apps are also working on smartphone memory. In addition, the phone may be slower, if not updated properly. Apart from these reasons, the phone also slows down. However, by following certain steps, phone speed can be increased. Come forward to that.
Read more visit: techshopingguide.in | https://medium.com/@newupdates48/mobile-phone-work-slow-follow-these-tips-first-e4a02965a3fa | ['Tech Shoping Guide'] | 2020-12-25 14:39:41.392000+00:00 | ['Mobile', 'Slow', 'Techshopingguide', 'Smartphones'] |
How Can Being Conscious Help Us To Not Harm Others Along The Way? | “Kindness is more than deeds. It is an attitude, an expression, a look, a touch. It is anything that lifts another person. ~ Plato
The more we can become conscious, aware, and mindful, the less we will hurt others, or ourselves. Perhaps it is obvious, but it is important nonetheless, as we see the simple and obvious lessons are often what we miss.
It’s easy to see awareness and increased consciousness as a means to a more successful life, but a successful life that is unkind is not a reflection of a higher state of consciousness. And a means to an end is not a mark of enlightenment. Consciousness is not in what we have, but how we live. So, it is not possible to discern our quality of consciousness merely by our abundance or lack thereof. Our abundance or lack of kindness can, however, show us a lot about ourselves.
People have said it in many ways and it remains true, that pain can be caused in a heartbeat and yet can cause so much damage. It is important to think, reflect, and meditate on the way we handle life, and how this may affect others.
When we reflect on our past, we can see the times where our unconscious thoughtless actions have hurt others. We may also see how our insecurities, if not dealt with, end up causing havoc for other people. The less we deal with our problems and heal our darkness, the more we send it out into the world unconsciously by projecting it onto others. We may not mean to hurt anyone, just like we don’t when we leave a banana peel on the floor. But when someone slips on our unconscious mess it will still hurt them.
If we stop to reflect on our day, our interactions, thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, we will uncover the state of our consciousness. When we look back at the seemingly little things in the day, we can see how we could have hurt others or contributed to harmful situations. This reflection can help us improve our awareness in the future. We do ourselves and others a favor when we learn to reflect, think, feel, and sense before we speak or act. As we do this, we close the gap, and will be able to think, sense, and feel more kindly while we are acting or speaking. Our words and actions are creating reality all the time.
Our quality of awareness makes a difference in the lives of others — it can make a helpful or harmful difference. When we are more aware and conscious, we can sense the ways we can help a situation, or just not hurt a situation. But when we are unaware, it is easy to jump into unhelpful reactions, to let situations trigger our issues, and to add fuel to the fire, so to speak. Wherever we go, there we are — we cannot remove our energy from the people and situations we encounter. So, our energy needs to be cleansed and purified, if we are to keep from harming others.
Try to be mindful of your day. We can try to reflect at the end of the day on all our interactions and how we handled them. Did we get distracted by others, and how did we respond to these distractions? Could we have offended them by being rude to protect ourselves? Is there a kinder way to communicate our truth? Why do we feel like we need to protect ourselves — what are our fears that cause this? Did someone gossip to us, and how did we react? Did we encourage slander by being entertained by others’ pain, or did we show some empathy towards the story, and encourage support and love?
When we worked, were we honest? Did we promote trust by honoring our commitments? Did we apologize for our wrongs, and provide some faith in humanity’s humility? Did we thank those who have helped us by being patient with us, appreciating us, forgiving us, sharing with us, and by acknowledging us? Were we accommodating of others, or did we bulldoze our way through the day? Did we scream at the dog or the cat when he or she wanted to love us? Did we achieve our goals with others or against others?
What good did we not do when we knew we should? Did we walk past some litter unconsciously? Did we not say hello to the teller at the bank? What unconscious harm did we do without realizing it? Did we join in the mocking of someone? Did we share a disrespectful joke? Did we like a judgmental post on social media? All these little things affect the consciousness of the world because we too are the world. If we cannot help, let us not harm either. Focusing on improving our consciousness, awareness, and mindfulness — leading a spiritual life — is not a selfish endeavor or a piece of life, it affects everything, as a more enlightened person lightens the burdens of others. | https://medium.com/konsciously/how-can-being-conscious-help-us-to-not-harm-others-along-the-way-168702db6518 | [] | 2020-08-31 11:16:43.189000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Kindness', 'Consciousness', 'Understanding', 'Awareness'] |
Favorite Christmas Gift | Photo by Michael Browk on Unsplash
Usually, we spend Christmas among friends and family. This year is different. With the pandemic happening, we are spending it home alone. Just the two of us. It is actually more peaceful, and we get to have our own fun whenever we want to. We decided to start our own traditions.
This year, we decided to put up our tree on Christmas Eve. You chose the tree and brought it home. I got out the decorations and lights. We put the lights on the tree, carefully weaving them in and out of the branches so the tree glows. Next we work on the ornaments. It is always fun going through all of the ornaments and remembering our time together. We would get them on trips or find something that was significant of this year. I chose this year’s ornament. I hand you the box that it was shipped in from a crafter on Etsy.
“Babygirl, what is this?” You question while shaking the box.
“It is this year’s ornament.” I am grinning from ear to ear at this point.
“I…I didn’t know you were going to do this.”
“Please, Daddy. Open the ornament.”
You get out your pocket knife and carefully cut the tape on the box. Inside, the ornament is wrapped in red Christmas tissue paper. You carefully pull the ornament out of the box and carefully pull away the tissue paper. As the ornament reveals itself, you begin to laugh. “I love this one. It is a dumpster fire that has 2020 on it.”
“That isn’t all,” I say as I reach for the bottom of the ornament. I flick the switch and the flames light up. “It has a battery powered flickering light inside.” I say with a giggle.
“This is perfect for this year. It must be placed prominently on the tree.” You choose a spot in the front of the tree at eye level. “There, that is perfect!” You leave the room and return with a small shipping box. You hand it to me and say, “This one is for you to open.”
“But Daddy, it isn’t time to open presents yet.”
“This isn’t a present, Babygirl. This is the ornament that I ordered off of Etsy.”
“Oh dear! It looks like we had the same idea this year.” I giggle. “We both ordered our ornaments off of Etsy. Can you open the packing tape for me?” You grab your pocket knife from your jeans and open the tape for me, then hand the package back. I open the box and there is something wrapped in gold tissue paper. I unwrap it and it is a ball ornament with miniature toilet paper, face masks, Corona beer, and hand sanitizer inside. I burst out laughing. “I adore this quarantine ornament. Can we put it near the dumpster fire?”
“Absolutely, Babygirl. You can put that ornament wherever you want to.” I stand on my tippy toes and put the ornament on the tree. “That looks perfect! I think we did a great job on the tree this year!” You embrace and kiss me.
“Wait! We didn’t put the star on top.” I start to rummage through the boxes. “I know it is here somewhere.”
“Babygirl?”
“I know it is in one of these boxes. It has to be.”
“Babygirl? You left it on the coffee table.”
“Oh, thank you. I knew it was here somewhere!” I giggle and grab the star to put it on the top of the tree. I stand on my tippy toes and realize that I can’t reach. I jump a little and stretch my arm to get the star to the top of the tree. I still can’t.
“Babygirl, are you having a hard time getting the star on top of the tree? Let Daddy help you.” You come closer and kneel before me. “Get onto my back. I will lift you so you can put the star at the top of the tree.”
I step toward you and wrap my arms around your shoulders. You stand up and I can now reach the top of the tree. I wrap my legs around your waist so I can balance better. “Just a little closer, I can almost reach.” You bring us closer to the tree and lean a little so I can reach. “There. That’s perfect. Can you set me down now?”
“Hmmm. I don’t think so, Babygirl.” You carry me toward the couch and playfully drop me there. There is a devilish grin on your face when you turn around. “This is right where I want you.” You lean down and kiss me before kneeling on the floor. “This is just what Daddy wanted for Christmas. Time with you, Babygirl.”
“I have wanted this, too. We don’t have much time alone lately, with both of us working from home and all of the virtual meetings.”
“Daddy is hungry, Babygirl. Do you mind if he has you for dessert?”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“Let’s get you out of those jeans.” You unbutton and unzip my jeans. “Lift yourself for me a bit so I can slide this out of the way.” My jeans and panties are removed at the same time and tossed across the room. “I know there is a fire going, but we are going to leave those cute Christmas socks on so your feet stay warm. Now, where was I? Oh, that’s right. I was here.” You lean forward and give my clit a gentle lick and suck. I gasp at the sensations. You caress my thighs with your hands before reaching under me to grab my ass and slide me closer to you. This makes me giggle. You go back to licking and sucking my pussy. My hands grasp at my tits. I struggle to get out of my shirt then I wriggle out of my bra.
You pause for a moment. “Are you trying to tell me that your tits need more attention? I can’t let them be ignored.” You move up my body and suck on my right nipple while grabbing my left tit. Fuck. You know what that does to me. As you switch sucking my left nipple and grabbing my right tit, my breath quickens. I could almost cum from this! You kiss your way up my chest to my neck. “I need you now, Babygirl. Right here in front of the Christmas tree.” You undo your jeans and remove them then take off your sweater and toss it into the pile of discarded clothes. Your desire is growing stronger as you scoop me up and stand. I let out a gasp. You weren’t kidding when you said right in front of the Christmas tree. I wasn’t expecting you to pick me up and fuck me standing.
“I am too heavy for this. You are going to hurt yourself.”
“Ah, Babygirl. I have been working out just so I can do this. All of this just for you because I know you like the feeling of being small and me being your big, strong Daddy.” You position your cock at the entrance of my pussy. I help you to guide it in. I gasp and moan at the feeling of fullness. There is just something about being filled with your cock that makes me feel that I totally belong to you and that I am where I am supposed to be. “Babygirl, you are so wet for me. Such a good girl.”
I kiss you deeply. Truth be told, I am trying to stifle my moans. I always worry about the neighbors hearing us. We break the kiss and you laugh. I give you a puzzled look. “I know you are worried about the neighbors hearing. Don’t be. They are all asleep. I want to hear you.”
Just those words encourage a deep moan from me. “Fuck me harder. I want to cum for you.”
“There’s my good girl. I love it when you use your words and tell me what you want.” You fuck me faster and deeper than you ever had. I am so close to the edge by now. You have been teasing me for quite a while now with all of the kisses and going down on me. I need to cum but I know I can’t until you tell me to. I start panting and whimpering. “I know you are close. Cum for me. Cum for me now!”
I scream out your name while squirting all over you and the floor. I am shaking and moaning. You slide back into me. I didn’t realize I had forced you out until that moment. My pussy is still so sensitive but you are relentless. I can’t form words, I can only moan.
“I guess I teased you quite a bit, Babygirl. I need you to cum again so I can cum. Your pussy needs to be filled with my cum.” You walk carefully back to the couch and sit with yourself still inside me. I can’t believe how strong you are. “I want you to ride me. We will both cum together.” You grab my ass and give it a smack with your right hand. It makes me gasp and you let out a chuckle. I start by grinding on your cock so it is deep inside me and my clit gets a little stimulation. “I love it when you are so needy. But I am needy, too.” You grab my ass tight and stand up before turning around so I am now under you on the couch. “Give me those wrists, you aren’t going anywhere.”
Your dominant side is something that I love. With one hand you pin my wrists above my head and give my neck a little bite. Looks like I brought out the beast in you this time. You growl in my ear. “Mine.” I shiver and whimper. You know what that does to me. I start to struggle beneath you in an attempt to bring out your primal side, just to get you to fuck me harder and faster. I know this is bringing you closer to the edge, I can tell by how you are panting and how tight your muscles are now. I let out a moan. “Are you getting close? Your orgasm will make me cum. I don’t want you to be quiet.”
I moan louder. The room is filled with the sounds of us fucking echoing off the walls. If anyone was walking by outside, they would hear us and right now I don’t care. I am in the moment, racing toward that orgasm, and eventually to your orgasm. If my hands weren’t bound by you right now I would be clawing at your back. I feel your hand go between us. You reach my clit and start rubbing in a circular motion. I gasp and moan. “Fuck.” I know I am now holding that orgasm back. Holding it down. Just waiting for those 3 words.
“Babygirl, I know you are holding that orgasm. You are such a good girl, but you are going to have to hold it a little longer. Don’t whine. I know you want to cum. You will cum soon enough.” Your thrusts become more erratic. You are on the verge of going over the edge. You finally say those 3 words I have been waiting for. “Cum for me.”
My orgasm rips through me again. I am screaming in pleasure. I can’t believe that loud scream of your name is coming out of me. Being loud isn’t something I usually am, but tonight, I am for you. My pussy clenches down on your cock and I can feel you pulsing. I know you will be cumming soon. Your growl fills the air. I have never heard you so primal before. You collapse into me and release my wrists so I can embrace you. I run my fingers through your hair. You reposition yourself so we are cuddled together. I feel you reach the back of the couch and pull an afghan over us. Your cum is leaking out of me onto the couch.
Before we drift off to sleep like this, I kiss your arm and say “Merry Christmas, Daddy.”
Sleepily, you respond, “Merry Christmas, Babygirl. You are always my favorite gift.” | https://medium.com/red-curtain-erotica/favorite-christmas-gift-75cc9f12e5e9 | ['Crimson Penguin'] | 2021-01-10 22:59:30.987000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Red Curtain Erotica', 'Erotica', 'Short Story'] |
A Cautionary Tale for New Managers | It was shortly after a promotion that I had an epic #fail.
I’d been managing a small (but mighty) team for about three years when I was promoted to Senior Manager in 2019. Senior. A tiny word, but big enough to carry the weight of change. A change in title, a change in scope, and a change in expectations…or so I learned the hard way.
I knew that being a Senior Manager was different from being a Manager. But I assumed it meant doing what I’d been doing, just more of it. Like when you add guacamole at Chipotle. It’s extra, but it’s not a whole new dish.
So instead of reflecting on how my scope had changed, I took my snazzy new title and got back to work. I continued doing my best to set my direct reports up for success, to set a team vision, and to do great work myself. In fact, I invested more into doing great work myself. Extra great work, if you will.
That’s why my next performance review felt like a punch to the stomach.
Part of HubSpot’s performance review process is a one through five scale of how strongly you’re meeting expectations (or not). And I fell right off my Senior high horse when I saw my manager had given me a lower score than I’d given myself. It was the first time in our eight years of working together that we were on different pages about my performance.
I was angry, confused, and most of all, embarrassed.
How could she not think I was #crushingit? Since getting promoted, I’d been pushing myself for excellence. I thought I was serving up guac. Sure, she’d given me feedback over the past few months that I was still spending too much time on my individual work, and not enough time on building a scalable, high-performing team. But every time she said it, I’d make a note to read some more ‘manager books’ in the future and then get back to executing.
I had missed the critical memo that being a great manager isn’t about my work. When my title changed, the importance of my individual impact changed with it. Now, my team’s success was my success.
That might sound obvious to you. And I might sound silly for saying I learned it the hard way. But I didn’t internalize that shift in expectations at the time because my team was doing good work. Nothing was on fire. But that’s not the way management works — you need to invest just as much energy into your team when things are great as you do when they’re off the rails.
I should have been minimizing the time spent on my individual contributor work, and maximizing the time spent on team development. Things like hiring, passing down clarity, giving and getting feedback, opening doors to new opportunities, and creating psychological safety are hard and they don’t have a finish line. That scared me. So, I stuck to what I knew I was good at: getting shit done.
It wasn’t until that performance review that I learned why that was a mistake. My manager wasn’t saying I was failing, she was saying that I was failing my team in the long run. And she was right; I just hadn’t been hearing it. After that hard conversation (and a few glasses of wine), I saw my role through a new lens: a manager’s job is to serve their team, no matter how small or mighty.
I’d been thinking about this #fail a lot recently, trying to pinpoint why I had missed the bigger picture. Then someone spelled it out for me. I had the opportunity to do a coaching session last week with our former COO JD Sherman — who is full of good jokes and good wisdom. And when I asked him what I should keep in mind to not just be a good leader, but a great leader, he said: “You’ve earned this. And now, you need to keep earning it every day.”
I have a lot to learn about being a great manager, and about how to best serve my team. That will always be the case. But one thing I now know for sure, thanks to making mistakes, is that leaders need to earn the role every day.
And that it’s about a lot more than extra guac. | https://medium.com/@hbfleishman/a-cautionary-tale-for-new-managers-ab349ece396e | ['Hannah Fleishman'] | 2020-12-09 21:14:41.496000+00:00 | ['Career Development', 'Management'] |
Benefits Of Using Test Automation In Salesforce | Salesforce is one of the crowning Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that's popular in companies spread across diverse industries. Salesforce has received this premium status by delivering multiple CRM activities that can be well integrated with other applications. Currently, it's united with web services, service cloud, social media, apex programming, and more. Furthermore, the presence of wide-ranging cloud-based SaaS offerings is another vital aspect that escalated the value of Salesforce among the topmost global enterprises.
According to a report published by Forbes, Salesforce conquered the worldwide CRM market with an impressive 19.5% market share in 2018. Also, as per other active research updates, Salesforce has been ruling the CRM industry for the past three years; its contribution is remarkable as the global CRM market is forecasted to acquire $43.5 billion by 2024!
Although Salesforce has proven to be an advantageous CRM option for companies, ignorance towards its quality assurance has been a common scenario. Time and cost-related issues associated with manual validation of the software are common drawbacks that need a permanent solution. Such a situation ignites the need to automate Salesforce operations to benefit enterprises by improving test efficiency and the overall project cost.
It is necessary to have the correct know-how of test automation services to incorporate with Salesforce. Therefore, let us drop some light on the various benefits of test automation in Salesforce and how it ultimately supports your organization in achieving higher milestones.
Importance of Test Automation in Salesforce
The act of validating a particular software for multiple iterations is better streamlined when automated as compared to manual methods. To get rid of such discomforts, companies that are making good use of Salesforce are now actively incorporating automation testing. The amalgamation of test automation into Salesforce is a great advantage to testers who can now spare ample time for more critical tasks.
Furthermore, with test automation readily introduced in the setup, you get to run more tests in a shorter time span, thereby enhancing business value for the company. With increased test coverage, you can efficiently run test cases that require repeated execution. The software’s quality and performance also experience a major push due to the helpful combination of test automation and Salesforce.
Different Components of Salesforce Automation Testing
Early Testing in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
The involvement of testers at an early stage in the SDLC is considered a vital step. The experts get an opportunity to understand the various software requirements at the earliest and address each of the identified concerns without any trouble. Also, future risks can be hushed away by deploying testing measures from the start of the project. The QA teams can benefit by enhancing test coverage and conduct an increased number of tests.
Selection of Appropriate Testing Tool
For the correct implementation of Salesforce automation testing, you can access a variety of test automation tools. Therefore, before making the final tool selection, the teams must validate the tool’s capability during crucial scenarios. The preferred tool also needs to be checked on whether it offers the required simulators for testing the app’s functionality.
Professional QA Assistance
To conduct Salesforce automation testing, you need to have experienced teams that can handle multiple test cases. For instance, for an organization that wishes to perform load testing, you need to have experts dedicated to load & performance testing services.
Use of Classes and Controllers
During the development of Salesforce, classes and controller files across every function are useful in simplifying the code in a much organized and reusable manner. This can be seen as a supporting act to attain portability considering the test code stays in its original class & controller code.
Benefits of Incorporating Test Automation in Salesforce
Early Bug Detection
With the addition of test automation in Salesforce, testing teams can easily document all sorts of software defects. Therefore, they are capable of ensuring exact functionality covering different portions within the business as bugs are detected and fixed immediately without any delay.
Lesser Operational Cost
As you prepare the various automation testing scripts, only a few people are required to run the tests. This way, the companies hold an advantage to dodge additional expenses as test automation in Salesforce helps allocate resources effectively.
Documented Testing Stages
As every stage of testing gets completed, you receive triggered snapshots and logs of the unsuccessful output. Remember, these snapshots also hold a time record related to testing execution, which helps identify issues within seconds.
As mentioned, this comprehensive outlook associated with the integration of test automation in Salesforce clearly indicates how important this union is, especially for companies wanting a better upgrade with their CRM software. Testing analysts are hugely benefitted from test automation that allows them in simplifying tasks such as bug fixing, QA assistance, and more. You can examine the working model of any leading test automation provider to identify how they aid Salesforce operations. Connect with them to get a hold of their Salesforce automation testing expertise that can prove valuable for your enterprise as a whole. | https://medium.com/@noahjonas1234/benefits-of-using-test-automation-in-salesforce-f4666beeee2b | [] | 2020-12-21 10:37:02.299000+00:00 | ['Bug Fixes', 'Test Automation', 'Crm Software', 'Salesforce', 'Salesforce Automation'] |
Oven-Roasted Herb Lemon Chicken | To enable employers and employees to think differently about mental and physical wellbeing — at work and beyond. | https://medium.com/befitbiz/oven-roasted-herb-lemon-chicken-c48d5e754216 | ['Mitra Hooshmand'] | 2017-12-13 19:17:27.298000+00:00 | ['Healthy Recipes', 'Calories', 'Food', 'Healthy'] |
ADHD, a Note to the Educator. | ADHD, a Note to the Educator.
You’ve likely taught students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder already, given that approximately 2.2% of the general population has the disorder. Its prevalence makes it a well-known and relatively well-understood condition, and you likely know some of the symptoms already. I’m a university and college graduate with ADHD, and I’m going to explain some of the challenges that your affected students will have faced before they ever made it to your classroom.
I’m fortunate that the name of my disorder describes it so well. I don’t have a “borderline personality” or a syndrome named after the person who first categorized it, I have an attention deficit and I’m hyperactive. On the rare occasions my disorder is relevant enough to mention, “ADHD" is usually enough, and the conversations on the subject are usually short. A deficit of attention is easy to understand and explain, but not always easy to live with, particularly in academia.
My life in secondary education was often miserable. I slipped, time after time, through the cracks of the revered K-12 assembly line. The skills taught in secondary education may be reading, writing, and arithmetic - once called “The Three Rs" by people who hadn’t gotten the hang of the second one -, but what a child with ADHD learns is that the skills required for participation are staying silent, staying attentive, and staying still; we’ll call those “The Three Ss.” How well a student absorbs and retains information depends more on those three skills than on their natural intellectual capacity, and another thing students with ADHD learn is that not all educators know that.
Another unfortunate problem, for the affected as well as for the educator, is that many of the symptoms of ADHD are also the same run-of-the-mill negative personality traits often seen in poor students. I can’t help you understand the difference because I’ve never been sure of where the disorder ends and the rest of me begins. Am I by nature a lazy procrastinator who forgets information he shouldn’t forget, or can those traits be explained by the chemical imbalance in my brain? I can’t decide which possibility bothers me more. I just wanted to be like the other kids, not have my faults explained away and accommodated for, and I was ashamed of needing anything to compensate. It’s becoming an accepted fact that mental health is twinned with physical health and both are equally important, but I was ashamed of accommodations in a way I likely wouldn’t have been for using a crutch to compensate for a broken leg. I wouldn’t have had to tell anyone why I needed the crutch, and I wouldn’t have to wonder whether anyone would freely give me their opinion that broken legs don’t exist.
I’ve described ADHD as “being only 70% present,” and that’s still the best definition I can come up with. If someone explains something to me and I feel comfortable enough to be honest with them, I may have to ask them to explain it again if retaining the information is more important than avoiding embarrassment. If you’ve told me your birthday, I’ve already forgotten it, and if you tell me again I’ll probably forget it again. If I have to memorize something I’m not interested in, it’s like trying to break a brick wall with my forehead, and I live with the fear that someone will think that my forgetfulness or inattentiveness is a sign I don’t care about them. I have many people I care about, but that doesn’t mean I can easily remember individual facts about them after being told only once.
How much of my mind is wandering at any particular moment depends on how interested I am in what I’m supposed to be learning, and (throwing a bone to the people in the peanut gallery who believe ADHD isn’t real) I’m aware that, to some extent, that’s the same for everyone. The difference is that for me, trying to focus does not help, it only makes me focus on focusing, then I focus on self-recrimination for my lack of focus, and neither helps me learn.
Now I’ll explain why the presence (sort of) of students with ADHD in your classrooms is not an obstacle to be worked around or a reason to change the way you teach for the benefit of 2.2% of the population.
You will probably never see the most severe cases, the ones that can’t keep their eyes on a line long enough to read it, in your classes. When those cases slipped through the cracks in the K-12 system, few of them were able to claw their way back up. The students with ADHD you’ll see in your classrooms are the students like me, the ones whose disorder is manageable. For those students, university often ends up being a breath of fresh air and a sense of personal vindication.
I like to write. Because I like to write, it takes little effort and I do it when I don’t have to. If you give me information to assemble into an essay, I will give you a decent one, because when a student with ADHD gets to focus on something they enjoy, the disorder slips away and the educator can see what the student is capable of. If a student comes to you and explains that they find it hard to focus, it’s possible that what they need is medication or learning strategies, but it’s also possible they aren’t studying their subject. I’ve mentioned I’m a serial procrastinator who finds sitting still challenging, but because I like to write I wrote this in one sitting.
As warm and fuzzy as the notion is that there are “no disabilities, only different abilities,” I don’t believe it; no statement so general can be accurate. I’m not offended by having my mental idiosyncrasies categorized if the purpose of categorization is easy understanding. What I believe is that a student with ADHD can thrive in post-secondary education when they finally get to take the classes they want to take.
Being allowed to study what interested me was the greatest gift anyone could have given me. I barely graduated from high school, but through both college and university my grades steadily improved. ADHD is a hindrance to academic performance, professional performance, and personal relationships, but it’s a hindrance many people live with. As an educator, you will see it in your students. Don’t pity them, don’t offer accommodations they don’t ask for, but understand that many of them are giving education a second chance after an unkind twelve years in a system that seemed designed to detect and punish the traits their disorder made so prominent. | https://medium.com/@readgatoradeandtheboiledhammer/youve-likely-taught-students-with-attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-already-given-that-e51683b9056f | ['Sam', 'Shippo'] | 2021-07-06 13:49:02.439000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Adhd', 'Education'] |
8 Features That Could Leverage Most Navigation Apps | Intro
No doubt, navigation apps have changed our lives. We can hardly remember the days when we used to print maps or ask a passerby for directions. Heck, tell that to our kids, and they will think we lived in the stone age.
Navigation apps went a long way in improving their interface and features, starting from better ETA estimation, through live updates and ending with updated map data.
Now I think it’s time for navigation apps to leverage their user experience to the next level.
Moving from distance to time
Put people in an open field, and ask them, “point me to a location which is 650 meters away”. Most people would fail to estimate something even close to that. So when navigation apps display navigation messages such as “turn left in 850 meters”, it may be precise, but for most users, it’s pointless.
When the app says “turn left in 850 meters” it tries to notify the user when he needs to turn left (“after 850 meters”), and since when is the primary purpose here, it is more intuitive for the user to use a time estimation rather than a distance -> “turn left in 2 minutes (850 meters)” will be better, since people know what 2 minutes means, not 850 meters.
Base navigation orders on noticeable visual objects
When the user reaches a junction, his next step is to take the right turn to the right road. When you think of it, it’s a complicated task — he needs to match the map on his display to the streets outside, including measuring distance and all that while he is driving (!).
Most navigation apps zoom the display at this point to help the user make the right decision, but in many cases, this is not enough.
One improvement we can make is to use noticeable objects out there to generate a more human-style message.
For example, if the turn is right after a school, then the message can be “turn right in 150 meters, right after the school” or “turn left on the next exit.”
It is just like directions from a friend “Drive 2 minutes and after the kindergarten turn right”.
Integrate Car Pool to your trip
Carpool is an excellent idea since it can help reduce traffic and save costs for so many people. The way most companies implement carpool is by trying to coordinate drivers and passengers’ planned trips.
While this approach sounds logical, it has one big flaw — it creates constraints both for the driver and the passenger. The driver needs to pick the passenger in a specific time and place, and the passenger needs to be there on time; otherwise, the ride will fail, and the users will lose faith in the service.
The best thing to do is the use the fantastic data that we have on current trips, and to match them to ride requests in real-time.
When the user requests a ride to a specific place from a particular place, a message needs to sent to the relevant drivers that are registered to the carpool service, and their path pass at the user pick up point and heading to his destination.
Match a ride request to a current trip is the best way to coordinate a carpool without any constraint, and the most intuitive way to that is to integrate it right into the navigation app.
“Notify me when the traffic is lighter.”
One of the most common use cases for users is to use navigation apps to get a real-time ETA, and this is how they know when they leave their office/home.
Navigation apps can add a feature that will detect when the traffic jams are lighter in real-time, and message the user to leave. While Siri does it with planned events, it doesn’t cover use cases when the user doesn’t have an event, and he wants to leave his office when the traffic is lighter.
“Direct me to the closest parking lot.”
We were all in this situation — you reach your destination, and then you start looking for a parking lot. In many cases, parking lots status data can be accessed online, so one of the requests users want is “get me to the closest available parking lot.” This can save users tons of time searching where to park their car when they reach their destination.
Compute walking distance
Of course, the user wants to get to his destination as quickly as possible, but directing him precisely to the final destination is not always the quickest way of doing that. Sometimes the ultimate goal for that car can be 300 meters from the address, and at this point, the user should continue on foot. It depends on the traffic and road situation. Computing walking distance can be handy for users, especially in crowded areas.
Car Energy Consumption
Fuel consumption when driving at low speed in traffic jams can be different than driving on a long way on 110 km per hour. And since the app can estimate how the trip will be in terms of speed and traffic, it can also calculate the energy consumption for the car.
Sometimes we have several routes with minor changes in ETA, but with a big difference in energy consumption, so why not giving the user better advice about his path decision?
Help the app detect your car direction
The following is a small but essential feature — the way navigation apps know your direction is by the movement of your car. When you start your trip, it takes time for the app to understand your direction and sometimes even precise location (when there are multiple roads close to each other). The time wasted here can cause the app to show a wrong path and extend his trip more than expected. To overcome this frustration, the user can rotate the map and move his location before he starts the journey to help the app with the correct paths.
Summary
Some of the features exist in some of the apps, some exists in patents, and some are still in my head, but my feeling is that most of the navigation apps I know don’t make use of their significant data (both online and DB) and the great device’s technology while sticking to the traditional navigation product instead of giving us the next generation of navigation apps. | https://medium.com/@avitsadok/8-features-that-could-leverage-most-navigation-apps-aec20a721a29 | ['Avi Tsadok'] | 2020-01-24 09:04:27.299000+00:00 | ['Apps', 'Maps', 'Features', 'Navigation', 'Improvement'] |
Make Yoga Even Better | Make Yoga Even Better
Let’s Just Goat On With It…
Part of my job as a physical therapist is to keep abreast of various exercise regimes so that I can properly advise my patients. So I recently decided that it was high time I tried yoga. I have researched yoga, observed yoga, treated patients who were injured doing yoga, even written articles about yoga. But I had never tried it until now.
The experience was pretty much what I expected. The calmness. The serenity. The pain. Apparently, not everyone experiences pain during yoga, but as someone with the natural flexibility of oak, I have pain getting into a basic sitting position on my recliner. So I had to modify some of the yoga positions so that it would be possible to extract myself from them without the aid of the fire department.
After my yoga experience, I did feel a bit more flexible and lighter on my feet. But I have to say that as far as workouts go, I felt like something was missing. It wasn’t terrible, but I couldn’t help feeling that it fell just a little short. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the one thing that would have made it a perfect workout, and then it dawned on me: farm animals.
Of course! How could I not have thought of this sooner? When it finally hit me, the rest just fell into place. Goats, obviously, would be the farm animal of choice to truly complete just about any workout routine, especially yoga. It makes perfect sense. Think about a room full of people doing yoga. Now think about that same group of people doing yoga with a bunch of goats milling around stepping on people, snuggling, head butting, urinating, etc. Now that’s a workout.
My mind started racing as I imagined how I could take this idea and turn it into the latest health craze. But I knew deep down that there was no way that I was the first person to ever think of this idea, and a quick google search confirmed this hunch. It turns out that a woman named Lainey Morse, who owns a farm called “No Regrets” in Albany, Oregon, already invented goat-yoga, and teaches classes that draw thousands of customers. (1)
So I missed the boat on that one. But it occurred to me that as a healthcare professional, I am in a unique position to take advantage of the medical benefits of goats milling about, and apply them to other settings besides yoga. And what better place to start than my place of employment, a squeaky clean outpatient physical therapy clinic. The only obstacle I foresee is the Department of Health. The last time they came through our clinic, they informed us that we are no longer allowed to have cardboard boxes because, apparently, cardboard boxes have been shown to have germs on them. So it might take a little doing to get them to agree to goats. But once I clear that hurdle, it will be smooth sailing. And if goat-physical therapy takes off the way I think it will, I’ll move on to the next logical step: operating rooms. | https://medium.com/the-scene-heard/make-yoga-even-better-910e8eaa10dc | ['Mark Salamon'] | 2018-11-29 08:12:12.891000+00:00 | ['Satire', 'Health', 'Humor', 'Yoga', 'Medicine'] |
Sometimes Kids Don’t Grow Up | School is the focus of childhood, but it’s supposed to be a temporary stop in the trajectory of a long, full life. Of course, that wasn’t the case for Ana. She attended school for thirteen of her fifteen years (if you count daycare which she started at the age of two) — fully 80% of her short life.
We’d pulled Ana out of public school in the middle of first grade. She’d been struggling for months — bored, unable to sit still, a perennial window gazer who frustrated her teacher to the extent that she was always in trouble, always feeling as though she were bad.
One morning when Ana was six, she said she wished she would get run over by her bus rather than go to school. She’d been growing increasingly depressed. She’d stopped drawing, stopped singing, stopped looking forward to getting up on weekday mornings.
She’d been so filled with anxiety that she’d been writing notes to her teacher, letters of apology that said things like, “I’m sorry I was bad. I’ll try harder.”
It was December, just a few weeks before winter break, when I spoke to the Head of School at High Meadow.
“She’s smart,” I explained. “But they don’t get much time for recess. They’re not allowed to run outside or touch the snow, much less play in it. She hates sitting still for hours, filling out dittos or writing the same exact letters over and over again. She can already read and knows all her letters. She’s musical and artistic. They punish her when she doesn’t pay attention. I think she just needs more breaks, more time to play.”
“Bring her here for a day to see how she likes it,” the Head of School had said. “They get three breaks for recess. We don’t do dittos. There are no tests. She sounds bored out of her mind.”
So that’s what I did — after reading (obsessively) about progressive education and visiting the school myself. We couldn’t afford private school, not by a long shot, but we made it work somehow.
Ana started at High Meadow in January of that same year. When I told her old teacher that she wouldn’t be returning to school after the break, she’d replied, “I think that’s for the best.” | https://jacquelinedooley.medium.com/sometimes-kids-dont-grow-up-ef689e322c1d | ['Jacqueline Dooley'] | 2019-06-04 00:28:51.401000+00:00 | ['Family', 'Life', 'Grief', 'Life Lessons', 'Parenting'] |
#WeSayNoToMazepin | I wrote the piece below in August 2014 after I was assaulted. It lived on a blog I wrote when I was studying sport psychology. I thought I had moved on from the incident, but seeing the news about new F1 driver Nikita Mazepin brought it all back. It also brought back some long-buried memories of incidents when I was even younger — being surrounded and groped in a nightclub by a group of men in my first year at university when I was on the way back from the bathroom to find my friends. Realising that the kneading sensation from behind wasn’t my bag digging into me on a crowded tube train but a man having a deliberate feel. The older man who I thought was my friend who kept touching me in intimate places even when I told him not to. I don’t know a single woman that hasn’t experienced something of this nature, or worse.
I now have teenage daughters who have got into F1 this year. I had a conversation with them last week about the behaviours. They don’t know any of the stuff that happened to me — yet. At some point I’m going to have to address that.
“I was assaulted yesterday during my Friday morning run.
It was 7:20am and I was one kilometre into a planned 8–9 k run. I was going towards the park, along one of the nicest roads in the area. I noticed that there were four men on the pavement. It looked like they were waiting to be picked up to do a day’s work on a building site. They were all casually dressed in dark blue clothing: hoodies, sweatshirts and combat/manual labour-type trousers. They were laughing and joking around. I knew I’d probably get a bit of ‘chat’ from them as I ran past.
I subconsciously picked up my pace as I got nearer to them. As I went to run past, one of the men crouched down and grabbed (gripped — I couldn’t wriggle free) my hips from behind. Then I felt a sharp crack across my backside as he slapped me forcefully. The other three men were laughing.
My instinct was to keep moving. I knew I shouldn’t stop. I found my voice and yelled: “YOU FUCKING WANKERS! HOW DARE YOU! YOU WANKERS!” back at them as loud as I could as I ran away as fast as I could. They were standing outside a building that had a downward slope and large bins in front of it. I had to get away in case they tried to drag me down there and do something even worse.
At this point my brain presented me with two options:
1. Carry on, complete my run, put the incident to the back of my mind and keep it to myself
2. Get help. Tell as many people as I could.
Then I asked myself a question: was that a sexual assault? I realised that I didn’t quite understand the definition of that term in that moment. I knew it was an assault, but was it actually sexual? I ran along the road a bit further, round a bend so that the men couldn’t see me, stopped and rang 999.
I was asked which service I needed. Police. The operator asked how she could help. I said, without thinking, ‘I’ve been sexually assaulted’. She stayed on the line talking to me and I started crying. A police car appeared a few minutes later and I thanked the operator for looking after me.
The police were great. They were very calm. They asked me for descriptions of the four men and of the man that grabbed me in particular and I simply couldn’t remember a distinguishing thing about any of them. The policewoman asked me if would be able to pick him out of the four and said that I couldn’t. We drove back past the place where the incident happened and then men had gone. Apparently there isn’t CCTV on that part of the road and without a meaningful description they can’t arrest.
The policeman asked me a few questions about my running routines: did I vary my routes? Yes. Would they have known I was coming? Unlikely. He advised me to knee an attacker in the nuts next time. I asked if this would result in me getting arrested. He said he didn’t think a single police officer in the country wouldn’t be on my side in that situation.
I didn’t want to be alone so I asked my husband to forego work to be with me. I didn’t feel comfortable when he was out of my sight and I’m still feeling vulnerable on my own so he stayed at home today as well. I can still feel where the man touched me. There is no physical evidence so it must be psychosomatic. At the moment I don’t like being approached from behind”.
I managed to go out for a run 48 hours after the incident. I was extremely anxious but I got through it. I started doing Bootcamp and Boxing classes to make myself physically and mentally stronger. The police recorded the incident so that they could see if there was a pattern. It happened about 50 metres from a secondary school (empty; it was the school holidays) and I couldn’t bear the thought of them doing something similar to a child. Victim support phoned me and offered counselling but the woman I spoke to was oddly rude so I said no.
I told everyone I could about the incident, both online and in real life. 95% of people were wonderfully supportive. An egg profile on twitter told me I’d made it up. Someone on a local parents’ group on Facebook said I should run in the gym instead to keep myself safe, implying I’d deliberately put myself in danger.
I didn’t run down the road where the incident happened for 15 months. I used to wake up in the night with a start, sweating, for no reason. I have carried on running. Since then I have run half-marathons, marathons and an ultramarathon. I cross the road to avoid groups of more than two men when I’m out running. I still jump and yelp with fright if my husband (the gentlest, kindest person I’ve ever met) enters the room I’m in without making a noise. In 2016 I had a breakdown, work-related, but I’m fairly sure the incident I’ve described fed into the deterioration of my mental health.
I’m going to end this piece with the final paragraph of the post I wrote in 2014:
“We must not let them win. There are more of us and we are stronger and better than them. We must stand up to them and report incidents of this nature whenever and wherever they occur. This behaviour must be challenged and eradicated”. | https://medium.com/@jfwwritesstuff/wesaynotomazepin-e7b2e2f910ef | [] | 2020-12-18 11:52:25.881000+00:00 | ['Sexual Assault', 'Wesaynotomazepin', 'Running', 'F1'] |
How I built a goal-oriented mindset to level up my life | Hello there! It’s been a while since I wrote my last post. And that’s because I have been keeping busy. Really really busy. Along with my busy but fun full-time job, I started producing music (a bit more seriously), established a product+innovation community within my company and also restarting the one in Tokyo, and also joined an amazing social startup as a part-time volunteer.
But one thing I’m really excited about right now is that I also just released a new app that I worked on with my friends as a side project.
It's called Encore, and we just hit 500+ downloads within a week! (More on that later in the post)
I wanted to take this time to write down a small reflection about how COVID and lockdown forced us to change our daily behaviour as humans.
Lockdown was tough on a lot of us, and personally, it completely broke down my usual routine. Time and energy saved from not commuting to work or attending social gatherings started slipping into overworking or taking extra naps on lesser busy days. And the guilt started setting in that I am not using this time effectively. I am sure that most others felt this way as well.
At this time, it is extremely important to understand what makes you feel peaceful and satisfied. For some people, it is to take a step back and use this time effectively to recharge, and for some, it would be to try and use this newfound time to pursue things they didn’t have time for earlier. Both are equally useful in order to have a healthy mindset, and I ended up starting out as the first and then after I felt I was well-rested, I wanted to jump into the second mindset.
It took me months to find a new rhythm, and over a period of time, I was able to slowly streamline my life (as much of it as is in my hands), to reach closer to achieving my short term goals and build towards my long term ones. This has allowed me to continue doing all these cool projects without reaching burnout.
I thought this would be a good time to share an interesting concept that really helped me overcome procrastination as well as allowed me to really push myself, into the second mindset from the first.
My personal philosophy about being productive and achieving my goals stems from something very simple. Taking the first step towards the goal. Many times the first step is all that’s needed to start a chain reaction where your surroundings start enabling you to take all the next steps required.
For a long time, I always considered my goals as a whole and got overwhelmed by them, leading to procrastination. But I used to see one of my good friend, Igor, being very disciplined and motivated and being able to juggle his side projects along with a good social and professional life. I asked him about how he is able to do this, and he told me about this concept called a Personal Hackathon (PH).
It’s derived from a tech-based hackathon, but for our personal lives.
To put it very simply said it just means you and your friends taking out a day or some hours of your time a week to completely immerse yourself into finishing all the pending tasks you want/need to do, in a systematic manner. These tasks are usually to be done individually, but you do it in the same room as your friends so that you can keep each other accountable as well as have fun and stay motivated. I tried it a few times with him, and I could immediately see what he was talking about.
It is intense, but it’s really effective. The pre-created schedules are easy and straightforward to follow and have been designed with a lot of research and psychological backing. I have personally seen a great boost in killing my entire backlog doing this. It has overall made me more focused on my daily life as well, and it gave me a specific time to take all the first steps as well as the subsequent ones that followed due to those first steps.
You can read about it in more detail over here
It got us thinking, how could we make PH more accessible as well as easy to do even when one is alone? And so Encore was born.
Encore is an experience designed to improve your productivity and build a goal-oriented mindset.
It achieves this by creating custom time-based schedules inspired by PH and helps you track your goals while you do these sessions. And there are cute characters that motivate you throughout the session.
Here is how you can effectively use Encore to really push forward and transition into a more goal-oriented mindset.
We provide different ‘Encore Sessions’ for different time requirements. These sessions are easy and straightforward and designed with ample breaks and activities We ask you to write down your goals before starting the session so that your mind is always focused on what you SHOULD do, rather than overwhelmed by all the different things COULD do. It seems simple, but it makes a huge difference in the work ethic. Momo guides you through the schedules and motivates you at all stages so that you never feel alone while doing this. And well, I can’t lie, Momo is really cute and supportive, and I would not want to let Momo down!
Funnily enough, we used our own methods while building this app and were able to finish the MVP within a month due to the focus and determination to push it out there.
I will write a separate article about how we conceptualized and developed Encore and what type of UX, product and design principles we used to create the Encore experience as well.
But if it seems like something you would be interested to try, definitely check out our app on your iPhone or iPad. Give us feedback and your thoughts. It’s only the start and we hope to keep improving this experience for everyone.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/encore-personal-growth/id1548470945
But for now, I would leave you with all these thoughts. My next article will be focused specifically on how I leverage some great technology, apps and services to make my life easier from a productivity point of view so that I am able to focus on things important to me.
Thanks for reading and have a great day! | https://medium.com/@tanmaygoel3/how-i-built-a-goal-oriented-mindset-to-level-up-my-life-79416ddea128 | ['Tanmay Goel'] | 2021-05-11 07:10:30.694000+00:00 | ['Habit Building', 'Productivity Apps', 'Goal Setting', 'Focus', 'Productivity'] |
How I Radically Changed My Lifestyle with CrossFit | How I Radically Changed My Lifestyle with CrossFit
Thank you CrossFit Vienna :)
Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash
I thought I knew a thing or two about keeping yourself fit and going to the gym, but when I started feeling out of breath walking a flight of stairs, I was a little concerned. I had previously expressed my unhappiness with my gym routine to my colleague. When I go to the gym, the exercises are mostly monotonous, and I was alone. Coupling that with me breathless because of climbing made me try to find an alternative.
My colleague had recommended CrossFit, and the only thing I knew of it was that it was hard. I knew beforehand that it had become a global phenomenon now, with many people grouping to commit to a fitness goal, which helps with sticking to them quickly and motivates you. I just was not fully versed with the vernacular, such as Olympic lift, WOD, etc.
Since I started doing CrossFit, I have seen how much of a different person I have become. Not only do I have new friendships introduced to me by this new workout regimen, but it also keeps me physically fit without having to brace the awkward loneliness, a typical gym does.
What is CrossFit?
Because it got the sensational hype because of media and social media, I too only knew that CrossF it was a series of “constantly varied, functional movements” which are “executed at high intensity.” But in its true essence, CrossFit means a lot more than these generic definitions. Over time, I have experienced that CrossFit takes the best aspects of both fitness and sports and smashes them into one bowl.
The CrossFit movements seldom repeat, so you get a new workout every day. It keeps things exciting and non-monotonous — something I was looking for in an activity. The trainers are cordial and very generous with teaching the movements correctly. They also train people to strengthen the activities we would typically do to do daily life tasks, e.g., picking up something from the ground or putting something overhead to engage the same muscle sets.
Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash
My First Box
When I went to my first CrossFit trial, I was knocked out after the session. It was incredibly intense and dynamic. We were a group of 3 people with a trainer who showed us the exercises. If one of us did the exercises wrong, he would show in detail how to do it correctly.
Throughout my first CrossFit workout, I performed a combination of activities that our trainer told us fell in Monostructural, Gymnastics, and Weightlifting categories. Monostructural exercises or movements were very similar to regular cardio, e.g., running, rowing, jumping rope, etc. Gymnastics exercises included push-ups, handstands, muscle-ups, etc. In the Weightlifting category, we would use aided weights to push targeted muscles to exhaustion.
With these three categories in a mix, I can see how CrossFit aims to equip us with a jack of all trades approach, rather than mastering a particular skill, and it comes out to be worth it, at least for me.
Photo by CrossFit-Vienna on Eversport
Basic Vernacular
It is fascinating to know that CrossFitters have a different language for their regimen, and it gives you a sense of inclusion if you know some or all of it. I learned that a CrossFit gym is called a “box.” A box may seem like a basic gym to some, but for a CrossFitter, it cannot be any less than heaven.
I also learned some other terminologies such as WOD, which means “workout of the day,” AMRAP, which means “as many reps/rounds as possible,” and Score, which means the total number reps completed during a given workout.
Common CrossFit Movement Exercises
For beginners, it is better to start with smaller weights and gradually increase the exertion levels. You can also choose the severity of your power fitness level based on the following common movements:
Plyometric jumping
Olympic weightlifting
Kettlebell exercises
Explosive Bodyweight Movements
While many different boxes might have different variations, I have performed a variety of exercises that include running 400 meters, kettlebell swings, pull-ups, rowing for 1000 meters, thrusters, wall balls, sumo deadlifts, box jumps, push press, etc.
Cost
CrossFit is an expensive affair. I paid €140 per month — which is $171– and it is costlier than my gym membership, which only cost me €20 a month ($25). I often think about if this expensive switch was worth it or not, and over time, I have realized that it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I feel that I am mentally as well as physically at the top of my fitness levels. I feel energetic throughout the day, and my productivity levels are higher than usual. Even after a single session, I would feel my creative juices flowing, and I would be ready to focus on my work.
Even though CrossFit is expensive, if you see a difference in your life, I would suggest that you give it a try as well.
Benefits of CrossFit
Over the months that I did CrossFit almost religiously, I felt great health benefits that made my life completely different. Some of them are as follows:
You Get Stronger
Spoiler alert: doing CrossFit makes you stronger. Lifting weights, resistance training, and gymnastic movements combined to make anyone physically stronger and fit. Since we do compound movements in CrossFit, it involves nearly all the muscles of our body, and thus, we are strengthening muscles from head to toe as a result. It comes in the form of a simple squat or a deadlift.
A 2017 study found that multi-joint (compound) exercises are more useful for strength increase than single-joint exercises, e.g., bicep curls, calf raises, etc.
Improves Aerobic Fitness
CrossFit exercises often get broadly categorized as high-intensity power training or commonly referred to as HIPT exercises. This training increases the maximum amount of oxygen a person can consume during a heavy intensity activity.
Some researchers stress that CrossFit improves overall aerobic fitness because these exercises directly impact your breathing intake over time. Some researchers disagree, however, so there is a further need to clarify the point.
Ideal for Weight Loss
Many people struggle with weight loss, and since CrossFit manages to incorporate a variety of body movements that need higher doses of muscle ATP, people choose CrossFit for serious calorie-burnout. The research was done on the University of Wisconsin’s La Crosse team found that the players who did CrossFit consumed 12 or more calories per minute than their teammates.
The compound exercises use a great deal of energy, forcing our bodies to utilize fats for life, leading to weight loss. CrossFit’s plus point is that you do not only have to lift weights to gain the benefits of compound moves; simple bodyweight CrossFit exercises can serve the same results.
Positive Effects on Metabolism
During CrossFit, I noticed that I gained muscle mass. When you gain muscle mass, it means your metabolism rate becomes much faster. A faster metabolism rate means that you burn more calories per day, all day long. The more intense the exercise you do, the more oxygen your body consumes after finishing a session, triggering the “afterburn effect.” This post-exercise effect results in five to fifteen percent of the calories burnt during exercise, which is an impressive feature.
Improves Agility, Balance, and Flexibility
CrossFit exercises often include exercises that involve movements that we do every day. These movements are called functional movements, and they help improve body agility, balance, and flexibility. These movements also reduce the risk of injuries and improve the quality of life as we age.
Photo by Thandy Yung on Unsplash
Is CrossFit Safe?
I was worried about getting injured because of the high-paced, heavy intensity exercises, and one quick Google search made me almost give up my newfound fitness craze. However, my trainer assured me that if I perform the activities with a proper form, did my movements carefully and with moderate speed, and lifted what I could in a session, I was good to go.
If you are pregnant and already practice CrossFit, it is fine to continue, but it is better to contact your doctor. If you are injured, you should stay away from CrossFit until you fully recover. You might also need to work with a physical therapist first to overcome your muscle degeneration or bone loss.
Trainers often tell people over the age of 65 not to pursue CrossFit as it may not be safe for them. If someone is physically fit, they can start CrossFit after their physical trainers and doctors’ approval.
If you do not want to be physically present in a box due to the current world conditions, you can be safe in your home’s comfort because a lot of exercises do not need any equipment. For me, I was always looking forward to human contact with my fellow CrossFit members. CrossFit Vienna, where I used to go, is one of the best places to go for physical fitness in Vienna, Austria. If you want to know more about them, you can visit https://www.crossfitvienna.at/. Now that I am starting my new life in Bali, Indonesia, I will continue my CrossFit journey there, for I have seen how my life has changed for the best. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/how-i-radically-changed-my-lifestyle-with-crossfit-10cee6d17da6 | ['Changwon C.'] | 2020-12-22 15:14:32.705000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Weight Loss', 'Gym', 'Health', 'CrossFit'] |
How Does CBD Work To Alleviate Anxiety? | There is evidence to suggest that CBD can help treat anxiety. Unfortunately, we don’t really know exactly how the cannabinoid does this. Like many other things related to CBD and cannabis, more research is required. However, we do have a few ideas. CBD could work on anxiety by:
Acting As An Agonist To 5-HT1A Receptors.
These are a subtype of serotonin receptor. Serotonin plays an important role in regulating mood. SSRI stands for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor,” and SSRIs like Prozac and Zoloft are frequently used to treat anxiety and depression by stopping the neurotransmitter serotonin from being reabsorbed. This keeps more serotonin floating around in your brain, which can reduce anxiety and increase happiness. CBD may work in a similar way by boosting the strength of the signals that serotonin receptors send. One study (on animal subjects) found that CBD might work on serotonin balance issues more quickly than SSRIs.
Promoting Neurogenesis In The Hippocampus.
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that is responsible for cognition and the formation of memories. Brain scans of anxiety sufferers show that these individuals often have a smaller hippocampus, and successful treatment results in neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons) in the hippocampus. One study (again, on animal subjects) indicated that regular use of CBD may help promote neurogenesis in the hippocampus.
Increasing The Availability Of Endocannabinoids.
CBD works as an antagonist to CB receptors found throughout the endocannabinoid system. This means that CBD can bind to the receptors, but doesn’t trigger them. As a result, endocannabinoids that would normally bind to those receptors are left to float around in the body and brain. Mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. It seems plausible that CBD’s ability to increase the availability of endocannabinoids might help by correcting a deficit of those compounds. This would explain why the previously mentioned 2017 study found that CBD had no effect on healthy individuals’ anxiety levels; of course, we won’t know for sure until this theory (and the others) has been thoroughly tested. | https://medium.com/@info.calmcollectiv/how-does-cbd-work-to-alleviate-anxiety-d431cc6ea63d | ['Philip Mccraken'] | 2020-01-03 05:53:46.541000+00:00 | ['Marijuana', 'Cannabis Medical', 'Cannabis'] |
no. 30 — Pure Heroine by Lorde. I tried so hard to dislike Lorde when… | I tried so hard to dislike Lorde when “Royals” first hit the radio. I was still in the middle of my pretentious distain for anything popular; that internalized misogyny wherein one assumes anything teenage girls enjoy must be tedious, lame, and overrated. There’s a lot of artists I wrote off because of this belief, and I lament that now. I rolled my eyes instead of letting myself earnestly enjoy something. Pop music is popular for a reason- it’s full of catchy, easily relatable lyrics. It’s fun, it can be light or serious, and frankly I’m tired of policing my opinions in order to fit into some weird mold that doesn’t serve me.
This is to say that I cried freely when I saw Lorde in concert. There were a lot of teenage girls sitting behind me, and I’m not going to lie they were infuriating. We were in the absolute nosebleeds, and they insisted on screaming at Lorde to play certain songs, even though there was no way she would ever hear them. I was annoyed for a large part of the show, and then Lorde played “Liability” and I just started bawling[1].
Lorde’s music captures the banal, overarching ache that defines being a teenager. Common occurrences, like buying someone orange juice becomes romantic, even enviable. Her music feels exactly like the lens through which I saw my life as a young adult. I would go on long, dramatic drives, wandering my town alone, pulling over every few miles to scribble down what I thought were revelations[2] in a tiny journal I kept in the glove compartment. I felt like everything in the whole world was only happening to me, that I was the only one who understood my place in life, that I was simultaneously part of the group and an outlier.
Of course, in some cases I was, and still am, the outlier. In my friend group at home, I am the only person who isn’t cis[3]. Though I didn’t identify that way until I was 20, the symptoms of gender dysphoria still plagued me, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to define it. But for the most part, my life is commonplace. I am on the same path as most of my peers even while I crave a rocket towards something “better.” This desire to be better than the people around me is one of the reasons I scorned Lorde for so long. And let me tell you, it’s dumb. You can’t elevate yourself by putting down other people. That’s not how it works.
Because I was in New Zealand, I decided I had to start loving Lorde. She was the only artist from NZ I knew of at the time. I used to watch the “Royals” music video over and over in secret. The song was stuck in my head constantly, but I felt ashamed to admit I liked it. Now that I was on her home turf, I decided to let that shame go and fully embrace her music. Once I did, I realized that she’s revered for a reason. She’s an incredible songwriter, one with a unique ability to capture that period of time when you’re not really an adult but not really a kid. Maybe she captures it so well because she was in that stage at the time of writing these albums, but it takes a special talent to be able to write so clearly and eloquently about something that is still occurring.
Listen again if you haven’t in a while, and let yourself revert to your teenage self. Let yourself be an idealist and a pessimist at the same time. And maybe let yourself enjoy something, because if something is a guilty pleasure, it can’t be fully enjoyed. | https://medium.com/@jennasylvester/no-30-pure-heroine-by-lorde-e91ce448bc97 | ['Jenna Sylvester'] | 2020-12-22 01:29:53.405000+00:00 | ['Non Binary', 'Album Review', 'Music', 'Lorde', 'Personal Essay'] |
My Top 50 Albums of 2020 | Now with my gushing over that album out of the way, we can take things back to the here and now; the end of 2020. The fact that I went from a year where I was able to place all of the records I’ve reviewed together in one article, to a year where even picking 50 good albums was no easy task, should speak volumes of how much I’ve grown as a writer, as well as how much of a phenomenal year (at least musically) it has been.
To save this article from being one that swamps the reader, I hope to address the albums in more and more detail as I progress.
I should also mention some disclaimers;
. I have only allowed one record per artist. But if an artist is on a collaborative project alongside another, it can still be permitted
. I decided to allow both albums and mixtapes that I’ve reviewed (If you want to take a look at my favourite EPs, you can do so here)
. Some albums from my Last Minute Reviews Week article have been included
. There are a few December releases that didn’t make it in time to be considered (namely Kid Cudi’s newest album)
.There is one album on the list that I had reviewed via Indie Top 39 and not Medium
.While I would’ve most certainly considered Backxwash’s God Has Nothing To Do With This Please Leave Him Out Of It, the album has since been taken down from various platforms, so I wasn’t sure if it would be right to have include it on the list.
. I obviously haven’t reviewed every single album that’s been released this year, so there is a chance that I might’ve missed a favourite of yours | https://medium.com/geouwehoer/my-top-50-albums-of-2020-25595cb499fb | ['Joe Boothby'] | 2021-02-06 09:33:11.362000+00:00 | ['Album Review', 'Albums Of The Year', 'Best Music', '2020 Music', 'Music'] |
Transactional Coverage — a Functional Approach to Detecting Test Gaps | Transactional Coverage — a Functional Approach to Detecting Test Gaps
This is the second post in a two-part series about the importance of measuring efficient functional tests in platform engineering and in complex products. Baubak Gandomi is a Test Architect with Adobe Customer Journey Management.
Code Coverage has been a buzz work in the industry as a means to detect holes in our certainty regarding the testing of our products.
This is actually a very good measure since it helps us find lines in the code that are not tested. We also think it is quite misleading if used on its own to represent test gaps, and that the efforts in it could be misplaced. We have covered these problems in more detail in a separate article “Problems with Code Coverage when Assessing Functional Tests”.
Instead, we propose “Transactional Coverage” as a new approach to code coverage, which is simpler in its implementation, and which better maps to the business. It will also help you better prepare a harness for an application to which you are new.
The main focus of this article is functional testing. We will often use the term “line-level” coverage to designate coverage reports that point to a line of code. This includes among other things, line- and branch coverage.
Laying up the Background
Imagine you have a multi-tier web application with multiple technologies. It uses a framework where the different modules are interwoven using XML or JSON.
We also have tests. Tests on all levels such as unit, integration, functional and Manual tests.
Unless you have the super coverage application the general process is:
You generate coverage for the unit tests. You create a build of your product generating coverage data. And run tests against it. You merge the results.
This sounds quite simple, and it seems so to those who do not implement this. We think that this approach has a lot of problems related to it.
Although we think line level coverage is very well adapted to low deployment tests such as unit and some component tests, we think they also have a number of important drawbacks.
Figure 1: General problems with line-level coverage
For more details on these problems please refer to the article “Problems with Code Coverage when Assessing Functional Tests”. We think that transactional coverage could address many of these issues.
Transactional Coverage
We originally started out to introduce a light-weight solution to line-level coverage due to the problems described above.
The approach we propose is to measure all the triggered transactions by our tests against all the possible transactions that could happen in your product.
By transactions, we identify “any action that can be initiated by an end-user, and that leads to access or manipulation of application data”.
The calculation is :
An example of a simple 3-tier web application would be the submission of a web form, that leads to an entry in the attached database.
The approach is definitely not completely new, but it is rarely requested in KPI’s. Yet in the industry, we have similar approaches in the concepts such as function points IFPUG. Similar approaches are used to measure metrics in some static code analyzers such as CAST.
Our experience shows that, where line level coverage gaps are covered by unit tests, transactional coverage gaps are more intuitively covered using functional and integration tests.
When identifying transaction coverage, we identify two dimensions of coverage:
Breadth
Depth
The Breadth of transactions is coverage all possible paths. We look at all the possible entry points into the system and ensure that they are tested.
Example REST: In Rest API this would mean testing all API and their associated verbs
The Depth of transactions involves covering a certain depth regarding the data being passed to the backend. The challenge in-depth coverage is to define an achievable boundary. The complexity of calculating this grows very fast depending on the size of the payloads and their nested depths.
Example Rest API: We ensure that we pass all the fields in a payload, and do not rely on the default values.
Note: In this document, we will focus mostly on breadth transactions as it is easier to define an intuitive perimeter for a finite goal. There are many strategies for creating boundaries for depth transactional coverage, but we feel that they probably deserve a separate article.
Advantages of Transactional Coverage
We have identified the following advantages of using transactional coverage:
Very close to an estimation for functional coverage.
The metric is easily mapped to business logic and functionality. Hole in this coverage metric map to functional gaps in testing.
Transactional coverage can be easily applied to the usage by clients.
Questions such as framework logic, and what technologies lie behind the code are of much less importance
Approach
As in all coverage approaches, we need to identify an approach that allows us to embed it in a software life cycle. This requires some level of preparation. We identify the following steps to prepare for this:
Identify the transactions (and defining the perimeter) Tracking the transactions Generating a Report Creating a backlog
1. Identifying the Transactions & Abstraction
Identifying the transactions involves the detection of our target coverage. With this information, we can calculate what 100% transactional coverage is.
If we followed the definition of “transaction” then one would need to trace all paths from the user interface to the application storage mechanism. We think that we need to go further and identify what is called the “attack surface”. By this, we identify all methods by which a user can initiate a transaction. In this abstraction, we assume all access to the product interface will lead to a transaction.
Examples of the non-UI interface are REST and SOAP API.
In the remainder of this article, we will also use the wording “API” to designate the transactions.
The approach here is to look at the application model in order to identify the API. This requires model analysis, which is done by identifying the forms and the transaction.
We identify the following challenges and risks here:
Does the application allow us to deduce transactions?
Can we create an attainable perimeter of what is to be tested?
We have discovered that making a distinction between UI accessible transaction is very useful when we need to prioritize the gaps we find. We will cover other methods of prioritizations later in the chapter on creating a backlog.
Figure 2: Examples of transactions in a 3-tier application
In the example above, the attack service consists of the endpoints A, B, C, D, and E. We can also see that A, B, and C are the transactions that an end-user will be more likely to trigger. We can also see that where E is not called by the UI it can be called, and where it needs to be tested, whereas chances are that B is a source of dead code.
2. Tracking the transactions
Tracking transactions allows you to measure which transactions you are executing during your tests. This allows you to also identify the gap.
This is done by analyzing the test and application logs. The challenge is usually accessing and parsing the logs. Log collectors such as Splunk could be very useful here, since not only will you have a centralized location where you can access them, but can also monitor the transactions triggered by your clients. This allows you to better track the usage of your applications.
Figure 3: Attack surface of tests
Once you have tracked the transactions, you can calculate the coverage. In the example above you have 2 tests, and you have a total of 4 API. One tests the UI, the other directly accesses the API. In this example, the coverage is 50%.
3. Generating a Report
We need to be able to communicate our findings to all levels of the company. This is vital because it helps to get insights from the different stakeholders.
Hi-Level Coverage Overview (Management)
We need a very concise report that allows readers to see the state of the transactional coverage at a glance. Simply, the number of transactions that are tested, and the number of transactions that need to be tested.
Cube Reports
We also use a cube report that allows us to perform fault searches. This is a .csv report that contains the following data:
All of the transactions
The transactions that are accessed by the UI
The transactions triggered during the testing phase
The transactions that are directly accessed by a test
4. Creating a Backlog
Once you have the list of non-covered transactions, you need to create a backlog. Although this step is essential to track the evolution of the transactional coverage, it is really up to each organization how they manage their tasks.
Prioritization
We have discovered a few methods for prioritizing the backlog. Where the obvious choice is to consult the product experts there are methods that also help assess the priorities.
We think that by analyzing production logs we can get a good picture of the transactions fired by your clients, this also helps to prioritize the testing gaps. One would assume that a transaction that is often executed by your clients would be the best candidate for testing.
If that is possible, as mentioned earlier looking at the API that is called most by the UI is a good approach. We can assume that our clients would have more opportunities to execute those transactions.
Conclusions
I would like to reiterate that we are not suggesting a replacement for line-level coverage, which we think is great for unit tests. We suggest that the transactional coverage addresses issues that line coverage really is not meant for.
As we all know there are few silver bullets. Most possibly using this approach is more decisive in complex and heterogeneous systems. It also allows you to better assess functional coverage not only by your tests but also client usage.
A small micro-service application would probably not need such an approach, and Line Level Coverage should be quite sufficient.
With transactional coverage, we discovered that it was much easier to show information, that involved both the business side and the engineering. It is also very close to the measurement for functional coverage. As such it deserves its place as a standard KPIs to the leadership.
Follow the Adobe Tech Blog for more developer stories and resources, and check out Adobe Developers on Twitter for the latest news and developer products. Sign up here for future Adobe Experience Platform Meetups. | https://medium.com/adobetech/transactional-coverage-a-functional-approach-to-detecting-test-gaps-92306e41efc7 | ['Jaemi Bremner'] | 2020-12-10 14:08:00.088000+00:00 | ['Platform', 'Functional Testing', 'QA', 'Adobe Experience Platform', 'DevOps'] |
The 12 Cocktails of Christmas | The taxi had dropped us off a good hundred yards from our actual destination, but we couldn’t blame the driver. The place we were seeking wasn’t exactly easy to find.
So we walked along a massive Bangkok thoroughfare called Asok Montri as cars whizzed by us. We walked past the old Siam Society, where Ted’s father had been a life member since the late 1950s, and we kept going until we stopped just short of the water-taxi canal that runs along Petchaburi Road— one of the last big canals remaining in a city once full of them.
Turning down a tiny side street, we scanned our surroundings in search of an unmarked door that led to a tiny, hidden bar called Q&A.
At that moment, the place — appropriately — held more questions for us than answers. But it would soon become a catalyst for the learning experience that has us sharing these recipes with you today.
That night, we stepped up to a heavy, unmarked wooden door and — really hoping we’d guessed right — we pushed it open. Inside, we found a Southeast Asian version of some impossibly stylish place where Don Draper might go after work for one perfect drink (or, let’s be honest, several).
We made our way through the empty foyer and stepped deeper into the narrow space. The walls were encased in a caramel-colored hardwood polished to a crystalline sheen, and they curved inward as they met the room’s low ceiling. It was as if we’d suddenly boarded a perfectly chic, midcentury-modern train car bound for somewhere spectacular.
Evil Man Blues, Bangkok, 2017. Photo ©Ted Anthony, 2017.
We slipped into two leather seats at the bar and began talking with the bartender. At Q&A, There’s always plenty of time to talk with the bartender— in fact, that’s part of the point. Flanked by rows of flavored syrups and homemade bitters and creatively infused liquors, these bartenders don’t have any interest in cranking out basic cocktails.
They’ve dreamed up a menu of drinks that are complex and remarkable, yet somehow not pretentious. But their real talent is creating something just for you. They want to know what base liquors you like and what kinds of tastes — what foods, what flowers — speak to your heart and mind.
Over the course of three-plus years visiting this bar and others — Vesper, Evil Man Blues, the now-defunct but truly wonderful, railroad-themed Track 17, Iron Fairies and its sister (brother?) bar Iron Balls, and the curiously named, Edwardian pharmacy-inspired Sugar Ray You’ve Just Been Poisoned — we became students of craft cocktails. | https://medium.com/breadcrumbs-your-story-now-and-forever/the-12-cocktails-of-christmas-375628297ba4 | ['Melissa Rayworth'] | 2020-08-10 15:22:37.795000+00:00 | ['Holidays', 'Drinks', 'Drink Recipes', 'Cocktails', 'Christmas'] |
Moving On from Medium | I just looked at Medium for the first time in a couple years and, yeah, I’m no longer feeling it anymore.
If you’re interested in following my writing in the future (it appears I now have 46 followers!), I just revived my old WordPress blog and renamed it Charioteer for any and all future posts. Even though 2020 was a complete mess, here’s to hoping 2021 shows some kind of improvement…
While I won’t be updating this site anymore, I’m planning to keep it available as a record of my old writings. Aside from that, I hope to see many of you over at WordPress and that everyone has a happy holidays and a less-stressful New Year. | https://medium.com/ars-nihil/moving-on-from-medium-22b201a22b23 | ['Alex Bemish'] | 2020-12-19 22:18:58.708000+00:00 | ['Ｍedium', 'Moving On', 'Blog'] |
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